skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it.

Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30 years.

The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because it has tiered decentralized controls - sending server, relays (when they were a thing), receiving servers and the client each have an opportunity to accept, reject or drop a message.

Mastodon has a great chance of succeeding. All it needs is an easy-to-use client,decent discovery and giving users control of what they see. It does not have to be a constellation of mini-Twitters.
If you don't have any control over the devices, you're fighting an uphill battle to control the students.

There are more students than teachers, and students are more likely to take cues from other students rather than teachers.

Leaving students to their own devices and hoping they make the right decisions would be an exercise in futility for class sizes over 15ish students.
From what I've seen I've come to the conclusion the Taiwanese will not fight.

You talk about defending yourself, but you can just keep still and do nothing. As I expect you will.

A nuclear war is a certainty when there's a confrontation between nuclear armed powers. If we lose, we use nukes. If they lose, they'll use nukes. Ergo: it's inevitable there will be an all-out nuclear exchange.
Yes, across all instances that your instance federates with.

If your instance dislikes the policy of the other instance, e.g. because the other instance hasn't cancelled the right people, they might refuse to federate with it (and the other way around), and then you won't see those toots.

Also, some instances will defederate any instance that itself federates with the "wrong" instances, sometimes forcing an instance to choose between letting others dictate its federation policy or having their users lose access to others they're following.
Sumerian culture and specifically the Gilgamesh epic, origami, fishing
Here's a video contrasting the ArmA/DayZ Cherno map versus drone footage of the real place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLhCNEpcPO4

I'm completely lost without driving directions these days. But after accruing a few hundred hours in ArmA and DayZ, if you dropped me in or north of Usti nad Labem, I could get around no problem.
Are you kidding? If you were asked in a coding interview to write a binary search, and you wrote the broken version in the post on a whiteboard, you'd be in the top 5% of applicants. Most applicants can barely write a for loop on the board.
Like most everyone else on here I think there is no way Mastodon could possibly take over for Twitter (or anything else). It will never appeal to anyone outside of certain tech circles or very specific niche areas. What I am curious about is Dorsey's new project, Bluesky. Does that have potential to bring a wholesale change to social media? Will it fix ownership of data issues while also leading to easy to use, popular and appealing platforms? It feels promising (based on the marketing and buzz amongst tech circles) but it is still early days.
You should read "The Invention of Science", by David Wootton, which touches on these issues (and many others).

https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Science-History-Scientific-...
Crypto is trying to solve this in a different way. Namely projects like lens protocol.

The idea is that the blockchain is a shared, decentralized database and you store simple messages on the blockchain and larger files on something like ipfs. This forms a social graph that a frontend ui can then import and provide a view into (a lens if you will).

It's nice because users just need one account (a wallet) and they have access to the whole social graph if they want, or they can configure their apps to only show certain things. The downside is that it's all public and once you lose your keys you're locked out of your account. Also, you can't really prevent anyone from posting things but you can choose which types of posts you allow on your feed.

It's a different set of tradeoffs that's interesting to explore.
Put the phones away and find activities which you both enjoy?
You have to understand a lot of people own Tesla's and Tesla stock and they feel attacked personally seeing anything succeed that might affect their stock or opinions of Musk. By seeing other people be successful that might take away from Musk's success, they feel like it will affect their potential to get richer.
There's nothing comical about it. They went to two different Russian firms to partner with before it was even called SpaceX and were turned down because Elon kept running his mouth on subjects he didn't understand and they lost all confidence in the project.
I am sure that there are plenty more! Working on top of customeditable is hell, but it is the price to pay if you want to implement a custom editing experience. Of the issues you listed, the triple-click is a good one, and easy to solve with a custom handler (even if there is no tripleclick event, the detail property of the event object holds the number of consecutive clicks). I am pretty sure that ProseMirror does something similar, because it uses [contenteditable="false"] decorations without interfering with the triple-click selection. For mobile devices and Firefox I would surrender, and gracefully degrade the editing experience.

Why not use ProseMirror? It doesn't fix this issue, does it? At least in the demos on their website you cannot insert text at the beginning of a styled element. You cannot do it even in a native application (at least on macOS) without a custom handling of the selection.
> many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is

Media consumption is just a replacement for social interaction. And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work. Our society is geared towards extracting maximum profits from people. It does not permit them to have any excess energy left at the end of the workday.
Uhhh…

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/mastodon-twitter-altern...

https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/audio/audio-147719.html
> If I called you a Nazi right now (I’m not, it’s rhetorical)

> it’s rhetorical
For someone who claims to work extremely hard he seems to spend a lot of time antagonising people on Twitter.
Tom Mueller (recruited by Mike Griffin) also deserves credit. SpaceX hasn't built a reliable rocket engine since Tom left.

But Mike probably was #1 reason for SpaceX success.
I'd feel the same way, and that's because I was raised in the Western environment of single-family nuclear households.
> But none of this has anything to do with Quillette's racist agenda.

So why bring it up?
Why tax payer money? Where did that part come from.
What happened with Boring Company?

https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1588685426088628225

I honestly don't know much about those ventures at all. Seems they just started testing though?
Hey phil, I would love to chat with you.
So you're arguing that lots of people use Mastodon?

Even on Hacker News no one is talking about it

Mastodon: 536 results

Facebook: 276071 results

Twitter: 371583 results
Ok, but how is it dishonest? That seems really out of whack with the rest of your post and kind of ranty.
it works to a certain degree but what's your plan for sleep? what about if an organized group is trying to get to your supplies?

so guns work to prevent simple attempts, in the early stages. when you are in the anything goes stage you need a community and a way to be protected and protect others.
As a VERY technical user. I STILL have these same problems.

I've tried to join Mastodon at least a dozen times in the past few years, and every time I get stuck at step one (which server should I choose). Every server has a vibe of its own and joining one feels like an endorsement of it, and because the server name is part of your handle that endorsement follows you all over the fediverse.

If I feel this confused. I can't imagine what a non-technical user would feel. It's a fatal flaw and I don't know how they overcome it.

That said, I finally joined today at https://c.im

I chose it because it's short and that means I get a short @c.im handle. We'll see how this plays out (most likely with me not even using it tbh)
Very interesting. From the article, 220km is the shortest between the two oceans in today's Mexico region, and two thirds of it were done along the river Coatzacoalcos, the rest overland.
I do have a pet theory that between GPT-3, various parsers, bots, 4chan influx we saw tendencies that eventually took slashdot and other forums down. I personally try to keep HN spirit alive, but I will admit it has gotten harder lately.

It would be sad news for me, because I see HN as last bastion of real conversation online.
> paying smart people and expecting them to work hard - why isn't literally everyone else doing the same?

is that a real question that expects an answer , or one of those 'SV-Wisdom from-on-high' sentences?

Here's an easy practical answer that will fit 95% of the responses : I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.
Can anyone recommend a mastodon server for technically-minded folks?
Do you think it's possible some of his early representational work that is hailed as "traditionally sound" could have been completed by his father? I often see it claimed that he had achieved absolute mastery as a teenager, but only a handful of works are ever presented to support this claim. To a layman they're impressive, but if you compare them to student work from current ateliers like GCA they're pretty middle of the road.

>never stopped being a classicist

I'm totally lost on this bit, please elaborate
Countdown to Real ID Enforcement
> And the reason it hasn't been "fixed" is that compilers can optimize code better if they can assume that signed addition won't overflow.

Everyone says that and they have no proof.
The problem is the bid/ask spread. Ultimately everyone would prefer cheaper education with the exception of college administrators.

The last 40 years has seen interest rates steadily fall, allowing students to pay the cost of education further in the future. This in turn allowed students to bid more for education that they otherwise would have paid less for.

If interest rates and inflation reverse their long term course, then there is no reason to believe that students will be able to afford their previous rates.
Musk talks about his employees and how critical they were/are constantly. This whole notion that "Musk didnt do it all" is such a clown argument because theres no other form of attack from people who simply dont like him and his politics.
To that first list you could add Kagi, who also runs their own index

EDIT: Tough crowd, did Kagi get cancelled or something while I wasn't looking?
I'm not new here, and.. well ... It's always been a mix of both, but that mix seems to have shifted in % and tone in the last couple years especially. Maybe reflecting broader culture wars issues.

But there used to be a much broader consensus in the industry among nerds about responses to this kind of thing.

Empathy to fellow software engineers in our tech industry is one thing I would expect re: the twitter layoffs. I worry about apathy about license violations for the license that literally made Linux (and therefore huge swathes of the modern tech infrastructure) possible. Again, not recognizable to me is the dismissive sneer about new possibilities in social networks and tech.

And yeah, perhaps Mastodon is annoying/frustrating to these people precisely because it isn't a monetized money making scheme.

FWIW I am one of those "software engineers" you mention and did my decade in a FAANG. But I only got that title because of the time I spent as a hacker-nerd in my teens.

I'm trying not to paint too much of a straw-man here, but it feels like a trend to me, a worrisome one.
Well if you want to do that, I’m sure they’ll appreciate your inputs. I would if I could.

I’m sure this new influx of users will bring many UX designers into the space, and the improvements will be tangible.
Great explanation!

> It's a much more fun and human experience than machine-fed algorithmic crap.

What happens when the bots show up?
Get a sleep consultant as soon as your baby is ready for it. Many parents suffer from lack of structure the baby needs, which leads to bad sleep habits and trickles down to parents.

Also newborns pretty much need to sleep and eat. As parents we want to play with them. But that’s a recipe for crying baby and then they can’t go to sleep upset. Vicious circle.

Watch out for iron deficiencies at around six month mark.

Look into baby lead weaning for solids introduction.
now we need to workout? booooo /s
100K Subscriber YouTube Award turned into a guitar
Presumably your comment is directed at me, but I think we probably have overlapping wants and disagree on how to get those results.

I think you're wrong about Musk, but that aside - I want us to escape the ad-driven model we're trapped in. I want users to have actual control over their computing. I want hackers back.

I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail.

It's not a disagreement about the goals - it's a disagreement about the focus and the tactics to get the goal we want. I want more than some system that serves a handful of highly technical niche users (arguably poorly) in a mostly centralized fashion. I want a path to actually achieving the goals the cypherpunks of the 90s web originally set out to achieve.
> people are centralized on a handful of providers

Still better than a closed protocol. The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check. There are no real network effects for one company to take advantage of, unlike it is the case with closed protocol systems like WhatsApp.
Thank's for your response.. what an immensely interesting [1] topic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
> Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience.

I don’t understand this point. I’m on a tiny server, but read the federated feed most of the time. What’s the problem?
If anyone seriously thinks Mastodon is going to become a replacement for Twitter they're deluded. The whole convoluted nature of it will put off average users. Nobody gives a crap that its decentralised yet they insist on shoving it down everyones throat as they jump through hoops trying to work out how to follow someone.
Things we are currently seeing going on is social debt, not technical debt. Therefore another technical solution won't fix the issue. It will just relay the social issues to a new platform which will start over again very soon.

You can't fix people by giving them new software.
I bitterly miss the freedoms I had before children. Doing anything I wanted, any time.

I miss the partner I married before children made her tired, stressed and irritable. We’re still together, still married, but our relationship has really suffered.

Life started getting better when my first kid turned 2… but we just had another baby, so now we’re back at square one with an even more frustrating and exhausting situation than we had with the first baby. Two kids means four times the hassle. Everything we do (or rather don’t do.. most of the time) has to fit around both kids now.

I don’t want to dwell entirely on the negatives though. Having kids is rejuvenating in many ways.

I love seeing the world through younger eyes. It’s freshened my perspective on life and made me less stuck in my ways. I think more about the future now.

It’s sweet seeing my own mum be maternal again (my dad couldn’t care less though, lol!)

And I look forward to having a family around me as I grow old.
In twitter you're allowed to unfollow people that don't behave well
Means the same in the US afaik, but maybe it's regional. That's the first thing I thought when I heard it.
Everyone's reasons are their own. For me personally there are some reasons that are more utilitarian in nature... and some reasons that are value driven.

I removed Tesla because it entered the S&P 500 after a huge run up. I own the car (and love it)... def the future. But I think the stock has been overhyped. There are more diverse ways to invest in EVs being the future vs "just buy Tesla".

On the other side... I removed FB because honestly I just didn't like the company (so a values reason). This was well before the whistleblower, etc. Was not looking at that one through a performance lens. Just wanted nothing to do with the company.

Most of my edits are removing companies that I already have too much direct exposure to.
> Regardless of the probability, there is a problem with choosing that risk for someone else without their consent.

Every action we take imposes risks on other people.

Economic models are one of our best tools to use in weighing these risks against each other and the costs of mitigating them.

(OTOH: China's cost to mitigate most of these risks would be, generally, pretty small... It's a cost of being in the space game, IMO.)
https://archive.ph/2022.11.06-204436/https://twitter.com/joe...

It’s verified. Interesting how many hours this has been up. I guess Elon really has gutted the entire moderation team.
Tldr

> You don't need to log into other instances because your instance already knows how to show you content from another.

If it takes 9 paragraphs to explain this concept, I can see why Mastodon is so confusing for so many people.
You seemed to have entirely ignored my comment?

The fact is that this shady site was linked as a source, and it's in fact the first external link in a decently long article.
I’m very impressed by the use of ‘cruelty’.
You can consume all the meat you want. I’m not talking about imposing limits.

I’m talking about everyone acknowledging making choices that they know are awful for the planet today because it’s something they personally like doing or feel like they must do.

We all do it. Nobody’s innocent here. It’s a key reason why the looming climate crisis is completely unavoidable.
I didn't believe your point about Gmail, expecting many companies to still host their own mail servers or use other services, so I went looking for some data. Found [1], which says that Gmail has 34% market share and Microsoft Exchange 33%. GoDaddy is third with 15% and all others are < 2.5%. Contrary to my expectations, this does confirm that Google and Microsoft are quite close to a duopoly; I'd expected there to be many more providers still.

Still, if Twitter would use ActivityPub I'd consider that a huge improvement. I can send a mail from my @outlook.com to your @gmail.com account, and I can send a text message from my Verizon phone number to your AT&T one; while apps like Twitter, Whatsapp, Messenger are all closed off. If Twitter would adopt an open protocol, IMO that would be a huge improvement, preventing lock-in, allowing users to choose between different UIs, having instances with slightly different features competing.

(Also, regarding your last point, remember when Digg did a major redesign? Change can happen ;-) )

[1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23
I think you clicked the wrong link, it sounds like you wanted to answer some crypto-currency speculation thread.
A lot of people on Hacker News are unfortunately very focused on money so they don't see the value of things that aren't.
It annoys me to no end that TESS links aren't sharable. But if you click the "TSDR" button, it will take you to an equivalent TSDR page for which the link is sharable:

(It seems Twitter actually has the "tweet"® trademark in two different classes, so I'm not sure which one you were originally linking too)

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85116717&caseType=SERIAL_...

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=77715815&caseType=SERIAL_...
Where on earth are you melvins getting this stuff? I work at NSA with tptacek.

Edit: this is a reply to a comment that got sneak edited. It said:

Yes, but he's also a co-founder of Y Combinator and the creator of Hacker News, so you're unlikely to make much headway arguing with him.
I know the evil foreigners angle is associated with racism and ignorance nowadays but separate societies have different priorities and agendas right? A society should view its natural resources being sold externally as less beneficial than being used internally, unless in some kind of universally beneficial exchange. If a society doesn't exist to enrich its members then what is even the point of it?
I’m always amazed how low supposedly smart people’s opinion of animal consciousness is.
>we have thirty years of failure to prove it

There is a comparison to be made between the IP protocol and ActivityPub.

When we all first went online we hopefully had more than one ISP to pick from, because they could federate data between each other using the IP protocol.

I believe that the same type of evolution is going to happen in social media. Whether it will be with ActivityPub, ATP or whatever else I don't know but it must happen. Because having just one ISP, one social media platform, one online shopping platform is not a healthy system.
So, what are the 1024 companies Musk poured lots of money in to get 2 or 3 massive hits since it's all just a game of numbers and chance?
USB-C Powered Capacitive Discharge Spot Welder
Good thing 2 year associates and vocational training is a thing. Is the OP complaining that bachelors are not those?
Ask HN: Did your company provide the computer you work on?
I’m sure you’ve come across her by now, but just in case you haven’t, check out Cecilia Blomdahl’s YouTube channel. The videos are way too long because she’s aiming for something ethereal and padding for YouTube ad revenue, but it’s very charming.
And flat (with edge-wrapping)? For light to go 'around' the world--it travels in a straight line.
Replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496458

Email is an example of a federated system failure.
Almost every server except mastodon.social exposes local and federated timelines.

The local timeline is the real time feed of all activity exclusively on your instance.

Federated timeline shows the local timeline plus the public feeds of any account that someone on your instance is following.

With enough users on an instance, the federated feed shows you a good chunk of the entire fediverse traffic. It's one of the best ways to find new and interesting accounts to follow
I only learned it when I got married and had to hand in a copy of my entry in the birth registry.

Missed leet time by one minute though...

In our working group (astrophysics) leet o clock is the traditional time for cake.
The simplest fix is obviously to use 64 bit ints and call it a day.
https://github.com/martanne/vis
You're correct 100%. I just think the entire idea of building a userbase for free isn't so great.