skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who to listen to, where? Out on the street? You do. On someone else's platform? Also you.

You choosing to listen to something doesn't mean you also get to force whatever platforms you want, to carry whatever you choose to listen to.

I find it hard to believe that there is someone you want to listen to, who you currently aren't able to, because twitter deplatformed them.
According to this article, it seems that China may be trying to do through AI and gadgetry what the US have done for many decades using soft power, influence, diplomacy, spooks, wars, brands, money power, etc.: softening the hearts and souls of its target audiences before engaging them.

How come human kind always manage to chose scum for top leadership positions?
Web 1.5 is fine too :) I can live with some minor XHTML and few optional lines of JS.
Wait, either I'm missing something huge or this analogy is fatally flawed.

Are you claiming that the _government_ is censoring Twitter?
Do they? In my experience they don't - e.g. the lab leak hypothesis.

If you hypothesise about it, that's A OK, if you claim that it's 100% verified, that's not, because it's not been proven one way or the other.
This is 100% true - but giving algos & bots the ability to spread disinformation on your network at low-cost and gaming networks to make it seem legit is what is dangerous.

From a Twitter / YouTube / Facebook standpoint - it's easier to just block bad content than fix the above problem.
100%... I lived and worked in many countries around the world and the amount of free speech we enjoy here is not common. This is why people like my parents escaped their motherland. It's surreal to me, as an immigrant, that we are trying self-limit free speech here. If you don't like what others say, then tune out, you have no right to silence other even if you abhor their ideas.
> Regarding bulk restore, a big customer doesn't care if you can restore all of your customers' data, they care if you can restore _their_ data, and fast, hence the question of "can you restore data for a single customer?"

This outage should convince them to care. The problem isn't that Atlassian can't restore a single customer—there are people reporting that they've been restored. [1] It's that Atlassian can't restore 400 customers efficiently. So unless the RfP also has a question "will I be first on the list?" and the answer is yes, single customer restore is the wrong scenario.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31023163 says "I was down, my instance is fully restored right now. ... Not sure what to tell you other than they are fixing life saving companies first, then the rest. That is what they have told us."
It seems to me that you are actually the one who doesn't understand how extreme concentration of wealth has the potential to steer and disrupt societies.
Oh for sure, but I think you and Mill might not be too far off:

“The example Mill uses is in reference to corn dealers: he suggests that it is acceptable to claim that corn dealers starve the poor if such a view is expressed in print. It is not acceptable to make such statements to an angry mob, ready to explode, that has gathered outside the house of the corn dealer. The difference between the two is that the latter is an expression “such as to constitute…a positive instigation to some mischievous act,” namely, to place the rights, and possibly the life, of the corn dealer in danger.”

I just don’t think philosophers back then realized our society was going to become so polarized, with global reach. His views do presuppose a progressive society to be able to host this speech, so it’s possible we’re no longer a progressive society. (re: more and more “opinion” speech winding up being harmful to others, both left wing overzealousness, and right wing opinions inciting harm)
Twitter is not a forum though. I understand the need to moderate a forum, since it’s equivalent to a public place with a limited number of rooms.

Twitter, on the other hand doesn’t map to that model. If me and my friends want to tweet things to our group, no one is being forced to follow or read that content. I don’t see any justification to moderate that, beyond content that’s actually illegal like child porn, terrorism, etc.
That’s why democracy and actual meaningful exchange of ideas is important.

When you allow human discourse to be reduced to Id driven animal urges, democracy doesn’t function well.
> The quality of everything is going up, but everything is shit now.

I think this is wrong. The average quality of everything is plummeting. Markets across the board are being flooded with shit.

But there are some strongholds out there resisting this race to the bottom, and there are soulful indie projects that weren't possible before.

If you were capable of producing something that wasn't shit, it's generally easier. But it's also easier for everyone to flood the market with shit.

The rough is expanding faster than the diamonds.
> About once a month I get a flurry of alerts from my uptime monitoring tool.

Me too! Glad to know it's not just me.

Am thinking of putting my Netlify site behind a cache or something to avoid this (Cloudfront or Cloudflare I guess) - any tutorials on this would be appreciated.
Feels like a massive increase. The spiritual end of "free shipping".
Is XFCE really any faster or lighter than the Chromium OS desktop environment (IIUC, basically Chromium without an intervening display server like Xorg or a Wayland compositor)? My guess is that, since one basically has to run a web browser anyway, it's probably not.
Also agree. However, I do yearn to relive the days where one can load up a web page and start reading content, without being jarred by pop-ups and ads that inadvertently move the content post load (which of course happens 3 seconds later..).
Never heard of 8chan. Quick Google search indicates it is shutdown.
The existence of spam is an immutable fact of any platform, the only question is how sophisticated they need to be to clear whatever hurdles are placed in front of them. Smarter filtering of spam will only lead to more sophisticated spammers.
But some forums like Twitter (and HN, for that matter) are pretty unique, IMO.
> What is worse, government censorship or digital censorship through big tech?

Government, no question about it. Twitter doesn't throw you in jail.
Twitter is trash and I'm happy when any chaotic nonsense is happening to it.
Thank you for saying that. We will have to band together and fight against Google. I think we should have a separate category on HN to expose Google's evil doings.
I think they're saying that private companies aren't forced to actually rent you out a server, in which they aren't, but that's simply those companies' own free speech at work allowing them to choose who to associate with. The same freedom to not rent out servers to some racist/twitter canceled person gives them the freedom to not associate with people who want to host vile and disgusting porn on their servers.
If they are responsible for the comments they'll censor more.
I disagree. The first point is saying we shouldn't go backwards, which I agree with. The second is hoping for forward progress, the exact thing that he was arguing for with the first point.
If I was an investor in Tesla or SpaceX I'd be extremely opposed to this. Calling the shots at three important companies is basically a disaster waiting to happen, especially if you spend a lot of time posting memes on Twitter.
Does this include removing the layer below this layer of the filtering/censoring of what content can reach the masses to begin with? Is it a double standard and/or hypocritical and/or virtue signalling otherwise? "These individual companies aren't capable of doing this for the betterment of society but we are"?
Yes, technically it's your garden and you can optimize it to whatever superficial pleasure it gives you. Just don't confuse that with a love or appreciation for nature as it's mostly about loving yourself.

The very idea extends to pet owners. You domesticate an animal so far that it is basically an extension of yourself. Or, you take a wild animal (bird, fish, turtle, rabbit, etc.) and constrain it for life. You imprison it, prevent it from performing any remotely natural behavior, block it from reproducing...all so that for at best a few minutes per day you can look at it and tell yourself...I really love animals.

You apply all this needless suffering to animals for mere personal entertainment, it serves not a single evolutionary purpose.

And then you turn around to complain about the "suffering" induced by parasites, and that parasites show bad behavior. There's no such thing as bad behavior in nature, it's a man-made concept. A parasite is a parasite evolved to survive and reproduce that way. It just IS. It feeds at the expense of others and it gets preyed on itself by robber flies and birds.

But I bet you love birds. Fun creatures to see. Cheerful. Also mass murderers that kill hundreds of insects, nymphs ("babies") included on any given day, without a care in the world.

Human morality plays no role in this. All of these things are connected and normal. Not just that, they are needed if you don't want plague-like imbalances. Insects are not supposed to have a high success rate.

Your selective shopping in behavior is not only delusional, it's not even consistent. You "tolerate" spiders over parasites. Spiders paralyze their prey, wrap it, then suck out the liquids whilst still alive.

Again, I get it. You want to see "nature" in a way that makes you feel comfortable. It's about you. Not about nature. It's not nature's purpose or problem to make you feel comfortable based on random fabrications in your mind.
I don't. I agree approximately 60-85%. The reality is that big media companies can shape information. This has been going on for years and arguably had a role in getting us into the war in Iraq.

Either way, we are shaping the landscape of free speech, when that's how the vast majority of communication, discussion and organizing happens.

That said, I don't know how someone looks at the history of reddit and still wants uncheck free speech.
License to Use JSLint for Evil
This is just opinion-me, but I think he might be undervaluing the shares in the long-term. It's hard for me to square the price he's offering with the promises he's making about Twitter's potential profitability.

I guess for cashing out though it doesn't matter, since the shareholders won't need to care about what Twitter's stock does in the future. So, maybe you're right.

Easy to verify, we'll just have to wait and see if he succeeds.
Okay, but how is the situation worse than it was before FB and twitter existed?

The amount of eyeballs available today for even small sites is far greater than it used to be pre-facebook.
Agreed, if you can’t read enough of the temporally sorted timeline the answer right now is unfollows not the algo timeline.

I would totally use something to sort and filter my feed so I could proceed it quicker and follow more insightful people. It just needs to be external to Twitter, transparent, and under my control, and have financial incentives aligned with my goals.

I actually like the idea of a marketplace for both human curated and algorithmic “edit streams” (h/t Neal Stephenson) as views over Twitter and other social/internet data that are transparent about what they filtered out or boosted and why, and could be provided by FOSS and collaborative communities as well as companies with a variety of business models.
People have to understand that by accepting the concept of "platforming," they're joining the anti-free speech camp. The whole idea of "platforming" is that there should be no obligation to allow opinions with which the "platform" disagrees. Disagreement occurs whenever the least tolerant, most militant group of employees says so.

Contrary to this, we should have a free speech culture where the norm is that people can say what they want. Moderation is necessary but it should always be an exception.

> Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.

Moderation on HN is based on tone and quality, not content. This distinguishes it from almost everywhere else on the internet.
> Because in my view, it's a cesspool of self-promoters, hate, corporate marketing and superficial populism.

Isn't this all social media?
Ad blockers are so good that I nearly forgot about this experience.
There's the ideal and ethic of free speech which isn't "provided" by the government. It's ok to be annoyed or disagree with private censorship.

Good or bad Musk wants to open the platform up. Whether that will just change the speech to what he likes or actually broaden it we'll see.
For what its worth I have used the open source Tinc VPN [1] for mesh multihop routing for ages. It is nowhere near as fast as Wireguard but I could envision Tinc incorporating support for Wireguard if the author were so inclined. Like you mentioned Tinc does not mesh directly with other VPN's AFAIK. I've had to use route statements to join it with Strongswan and other VPN networks.

[1] - https://tinc-vpn.org/
Web 1.0 had search engines, message boards and instant messaging. Most of what you are describing is things that dominated before the web.
I thought i recognised your username, you must work for my networking team.
While freedom from goverent censorship of speech is one battle that has been (mostly) won in the USA, some want to take the concept of free speech even further. Some want to see corporations choose to uphold the value of "free speech". This is seperate from any goveremt regulation of speech.
At some point I stopped investing in companies and started investing in people. There's a small group of businessmen out there that have the Midas touch.
I've never actually done this, but the process of flashing the firmware prompts you to back up the original firmware and I'm pretty sure you can just put it back on
This is already an option under GRPR.
> If I just sit around and say everything is "important", does that mean I get to have it my way all the time?

It means you're being manipulative dishonest. Which I hope we can agree is not a strong foundation for a relationship.
Keep in mind, Merriam-Webster changed the definition of 'anti-vax' to include being against vaccine mandates [0]. So if you are against mandatory COVID vaccines for 5 year olds, you are technically an 'antivaxer'.

I don't know how many people have gotten banned over this (though I'd guess nonzero) but it shows just how easy it is to fall under the new draconian speech policies enacted by the majority of social media.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer
I understand hostility isn't a term-of-art or something special, but in business parlance the sources I've read seem to point at hostility being the practical term for "without board/director/management approval"

The board determines management, and it appears the offer is only to the board at this time. Hostility depends on the board's lack of approval and continuation of the offer.

Maybe I've missed some news, but I only see Musk making a request to the board at this time. Although everything else seems to fit the normal fact-pattern of hostility (wanting change, not being satisfied with current power, escalation, etc.), technically I don't think we are there yet.
I agree with this perspective. For me the turning point was when "influencers" started to make their own coinage.
Two things.

One, I'm not responding to you. Do you know how the internet works?

If I reply to someone else's comment, it's not to you. I'm actually on your side, it turns out. Take your hands off your hips. I'm pro-nuclear. Solar has never worked, and it never will. Germany dumped $1.7 trillion into Energiewende, and failed. Their carbon went up, their power went down, their prices went up, and they drove industry to higher carbon grids. All it did was make the situation worse.

Now take a look at my comment. Who am I actually responding to? What were they saying?

Was it you? Was it pro solar? No?

Then why are you here demanding that I spend my time proving you wrong?

.

Two, "Feel free to show me in what way my comment was false"

Can you please get this out of your body for the rest of your life? You sound like a crank.

It's ANTIVAXXERS who say this "feel free to show me" stuff. Like what, you thought I was on the internet just waiting for your permission?

Do you realize how you sound? "Hey, I'm right until you prove me wrong?"

That's ridiculous. Even though you're right, your ostentatious delivery of an entitled nonsensical position is /still/ setting you back.

I'm on your side, and you've still left me feeling like your position is not defended by any skill or knowledge. If someone who doubted nuclear interacted with you, it seems almost certain that your lack of ability to display your own position, combined with your attempt to make it someone else's responsibility, would actually backfire and cause them to support nuclear less.

This will never do any good. You will never convince anyone this way. You sound confused. This isn't a fight, and you aren't a fighter. You shouldn't be attempting to defeat people this way, and you haven't risen to the standard you're attempting to demand from strangers, when the actual responsibility is yours, not theirs.

Every time you demand someone else prove you wrong, you have immediately and automatically lost.

If you say "2+2 is 4, prove me wrong," everyone watching you thinks you're wearing a Charlie Kirk mask, and arithmetic will try to rewrite itself to distance itself from you.

Please don't sit here like "do work for me because I permit it and deign it good, to amuse me and make me very happy for being wrong."

The amateur nuclear fanboy community really needs to stop taking discussion tips from Youtube flat earth channels. This is not how competence works.
> Now it's more common to try to get 'bad' platforms dehosted altogether (e.g. Parler/Gab)

Well, no company can be forced to host antisemitism, holocaust denial and similar content [1] - most companies don't even want to host such content, simply because of how despised (or, in the case of Europe, illegal) it is.

[1] https://fortune.com/2020/11/13/parler-extremism-hate-conspir...
No but it adds significant credence against the cosmic ray hypothesis. Particularly since this Mozilla blog post has lots of speculation without any actual data to support the claim.

FF is running on even lower cost commodity components without strict controls on the operating environment (eg environmental heat isn’t controlled like it is in data centers, power supplies can be borderline vs carefully species Google machines, etc).
I might be bringing my own biases but I don't think speed is the primary feature of this. Rather, not being connected to Google's data collection/surveillance capitalism system is the feature.
TL;DR: 0.2% theoretical savings. I was not suprised.

It came with the exact recommendation AWS gives, to replace one instance with a reserved instance & save about 240$ anually. And that instance happens to be a temporary one we needed to get rid off anyway.

So for me, it is not much better then the existing tooling offered by AWS when looking just at the savings. That being said, I do spend some time on checking the utilization & coverage of reservations every few months. This tool is so much more usable, gives immediate insight AND a 'buy now' button (approve).

Since it only takes me a few minutes every few months to go through all services we use, it ain't worth it for me. If you have a much larger organization and people spawning instances left and right and a highly variable load over longer periods, it could be nice I guess?

One big ommission in my view is that this tool does not look at RDS/ElastiCache/etc at all. This is where 40% of our running costs come from & 90% of our prepaid reservations are. Most of our EC2 spend is on spot instances, so nothing to be gained there anyway.

And with that, the value of this tool comes down to nearly zero in my case. It would save us about 0.2% if that instance had not been temporary. However, had it not been, we would already have a reservation for it anyway :)
It is, but I would argue that was one of the reasons for the establishment of free speech. Back when we were conceiving of free speech as a right, it was in direct response to a monopoly on information. In that case, it was the government backing up their monopoly on information with their monopoly on force. Now, it's companies backing up their oligarchy on information with their resources.

I think the problem is the monopoly on information, not its source. I understand some people disagree.

> So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views. You might not get a platform, but that doesn't mean you're being persecuted.

I agree with this. It's just important to still let those extreme places exist.
I think that's what we're doing in Sweden and many parts of Europe. I have 1-2 ms to Cloudflare within Stockholm, had 5-6ms 340km away, I highly doubt my traffic goes though inspection steps on the way.

We're also apparently building out train infrastructure quite extensively in Europe, and when you lay down train tracks you lay every other piece of infra down with it.

I'm all for private actors and all that, but not when the actors are allowed to pay politicians to not regulate them.
Talk to any general contractor who does high-end home remodeling work. Some customers literally do come in with extensive weekly change requests, sometimes even more extreme than moving an interior wall or adding a skylight. This isn't necessarily a problem; it's a hassle but gives the contractor an opportunity to charge a lot more than the original price quote.
Ask HN: Which features are you looking for a small e-commerce?
As a programming language, Go is really powerful. Small, fast and with the possibility of creating a single binary to deploy in whatever machine you like, I'd like to develop a project only for taking advantages from Go and starting to get confidence with it. I was thinking about an e-commerce system with a minimal User Experience (that recalls the simplicity of Web 1.0). Which features would you look for if you were a small business?
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1503420660869214213?...

End of story.
No. No. Do not want. Why is he going to ruin something good? I hope the shareholders reject this.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Discourse on HN is a breath of fresh air compared to reddit, where everything is a knockdown, dragout deathmatch.
Google, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter are all private entities. Let's say they don't like the Democratic party. They can single handedly cause a media block out and be able to unfairly influence the elections, view of the world etc. You won't be able to find a single search result or a speech or tweet.

In this context we can't afford to treat these companies as private entities. They should not be able to block/ban whoever they want just because they feel threatened and challenged by their views.
Literally all social media platforms could cease to exist in a second and the world would continue to still function 100% fine.
> You can "choose moderation" by not viewing Twitter accounts and conversations you don't care about and muting words you dislike.

In that case however I would also like the possibility to turn off any algorithms that recommend stuff to me. I want to see only things i put on my whitelist, otherwise i will have to constantly moderate and it will take up loads of my time.

As long as that doesn't happen I am more than happy to let others do the moderation based on some frameworks that I agreed on (ToS in Twitters case).
Call me when something "finally makes it unnecessary" to update browser or throw away perfectly usable devices.
Tables work with IE6 and NetFront, so they rule. :P