skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't blanket censorship, period. Every single user that currently voices their stance, values or opinions can continue to do the exact same thing on any other platform they choose. Just not TikTok, because they are a business owned by an adversarial government that deliberately uses their soapbox to manipulate democratic audiences: https://kyivinsider.com/russia-and-china-just-rigged-romania...

Also don't forget - TikTok has remediation options where they continue to operate in America as an American business instead. They are the ones that refused that and chose censorship. America just forced the choice between eating the cake and having it.

Edit: Correct, it is not. The part that is censorship on China's behalf is the enforcement of the Great Firewall and enaction of laws prohibiting citizens from owning or consuming foreign news or entertainment. China's ban on foreign apps could just as well be explained by a desire for better domestic software markets - the same cannot be said for the Firewall.

Edit 2: Yes, secession would settle this. China has proven that they cannot be trusted to disseminate information through a state-owned apparatus. If the owner continues to be a government entity, then continuing to let them do "business" is like letting the Trojans wheel in their horse so the citizens can marvel at it.
The same way it works in Android phones, that enable side-loading and alternative app stores. The same way it works on Windows PCs, that let you install apps not through the MS store. The same way it works on linux, that lets you install anything not in the official repositories. There are countless examples, the Apple case is the exception (for now), not the norm, so your confusion baffles me.
That’s an unfair comparison because these are two unrelated concepts. In many languages, pointers are abstracted away anyway. Something more analogous would be map vs a range loop.
To illustrate how crazy good Games Workshop are at what they do. Mattel has 10x the revenue of Games Workshop but both companies pull in the same net income.

They're both plastic companies at their core, but GW have margins that Mattel could only dream of.
> aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?

I disagree with this interpretation. It's creating a sort of false dichotomy -- voters can still be individual agents AND ALSO they can be manipulated by propaganda. And the key is that propaganda doesn't have to be wildly successful in order to impact a democratic process. It just has to convince enough people to sway an election. That is, and always has been, one of the trade-offs of democracy. That's why we say "democracy needs an informed electorate to survive" -- because an informed individual is less likely to be easily manipulated.
Please don't put words in my mouth, I did not comment on who bears the most responsibility for the ban. It is undeniable that Trump laid the groundwork for it though:

July 7, 2020 - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo considers banning TikTok: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53319955

July 31, 2020 - Donald Trump wants to ban TikTok and will not allow ByteDance to sell the platform to an American tech company: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/31/tech/tiktok-trump-bytedan...

August 3, 2020 - Donald Trump backpedals and allows ByteDance to sell the platform to an American tech company: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/03/tiktok-ro...

August 6, 2020 - Donald Trump declares a national emergency based on the information TikTok collects: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...
Or Chechnya, or Afghanistan, or Russian-Polish war (with WW2 and Ukraine it covers most of the post-WWI period, especially if one adds things like the China-Soviet conflict in 1929 when USSR was defending its colonial holdings). It isn't "exceptions". Russia, be it Grand Duchy of Moscow, Russian Empire, USSR or the current Russia has always been an aggressive state. You don't become such a large empire like Russian Empire or USSR without military aggression :)
Biden could have easily deferred the penalty phase by 30-90 days. He did not, even after the blowback this past week.
As long as this is the only place the fascist upraising happens… better than being forced out of your job, making all other political parties illegal, being beaten by mobs patrolling the streets while the police looks the other way, canceling elections ad vitam eternam on national security grounds, I mean stuff that proper fascists used to do back in the days.

In the mean time, if I wanted 30 seconds clips of cat videos I’m sure I could use a VPN. Let’s ban it. Teach people censorship is utter BS like every Chinese person knows by now. Sadly my attention span is slightly longer than 30s so I’m not even gonna bother
At some point you have to wonder if they're just not allowed to exist to allow plausible deniability...

Either way it's clearly not going in the right direction when you have a guy selling cans of fucking beans from the oval office and launching crypto rug pulls
I will check and post my product too. Thank You!
(1962) is shockingy relevant. I have to read more dystopian sci fi from that era just to keep up with current event
I think it is largely about this.

American companies (Google and Apple primarily) have been told by the government that they cannot distribute binaries running certain code to Americans. That seems like the real 1st amendment issue to me and I was quite surprised to learn that ByteDance only claimed that their own 1st amendment rights were being infringed on (which personally I find to be flimsier).

EDIT: Tornado cash was taken down from GitHub though, so you don't have a point here
He wasn’t running for public office at the time.

And maybe we should have a law that punishes politicians for paying money to cover up affairs. But we don't have that. Trump's prosecution was, instead, a triple bank shot combining three different vaguely written laws in a combination that makes the Double Irish with Dutch Sandwich look straightforward.[1]

As CNN's head legal analyst Elie Honig explained: "The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
Show HN: AI check-in app for people living alone
I made https://AssureOkay.com the smart check-in app that gives solo dwellers peace of mind.

Our AI assistant calls you daily for a quick chat to confirm you're safe, and automatically alerts your emergency contacts if needed.

Help with independent living while keeping your loved ones worry-free. Simple, non-intrusive, and reliable - because everyone deserves to feel secure living alone.
bảo
You can build better than the code allows would be the point. Code cares about minimum levels of safety, not planned obsolescence or market segmentation. E.g. why not build homes out of concrete instead of wood? Why not use better roofing material than asphalt shingles? Etc.
The only thing I would have respected Trump for was the TikTok ban and now I don't have any. Trump loves fake news and brain rot, I was naive to think he would keep TikTok banned.
By the same token, the Chinese ban on US apps is not censorship, correct?

So if you accept to cede control we will leave you alone. Blackmail, in other words, exactly like China does it.
> It just seems like a slow boil into subscriptions for a company whose entire value prop is prosumer networking without the contracts.

On the other side... look at the status quo in access control systems. If you never did, be happy you never had to because the status quo is shit because the entire ecosystem is suffering from a severe lack of money - for physical locks, most people buy the cheapest shit they can get at Home Depot or whatnot, and for "fancy" stuff involving smartphones they do just the same, or order right from Alibaba. And that is a damn horror show.

Ubiquiti, for all I dislike the trend for recurring revenue everywhere, at least makes high quality and secure stuff - but with anything interconnected, keeping updates available costs recurring expenses. So it's either "the product is cheap ass and will likely have multiple bypasses in a year or two", "the product is extremely expensive but you will get updates for a reasonable time" or "the product is affordable, but costs recurring money".
But that effectively takes Postel's ill-conceived law to a ridiculous degree.

Programs should precisely define what their inputs are and loudly reject all else.

Moreover, for this misfeature, you have to use a cloud API, where your syntax is analyzed by some massive cluster, using scads of processing and memory resources.

We could have a natural language command line for FFMpeg requiring at most megabytes (probably just kilobytes) that would work on an air-gapped machine.

In the early 70's, the SHRDLU project achieved amazing chat interaction with symbolic processing, on the hardware available then. It was a way more impressive hack than LLM. Not just because it required relatively low resources, but also because its author could actually explain its responses, and point to the responsible pieces of code behind them, which he designed.
My favourite part of TIFF is what they do about y-ordering.

See, sometimes people think images start at the top, so the first data at y=0 is at the top of the image, other people think they start at the bottom like a graph you draw in maths, were y=0 is clearly at the bottom of the image.

So TIFF says: That should be a parameter of the image.

Why? Well, TIFF came into existence because of scanners, when scanners were first invented each scanner would have its own data format - you're not going to store all this data because that's expensive - who owns that much tape? But when it's scanned clearly the bits you get have some sort of arrangement, maybe a bright white area is 1 and black is 0, maybe the opposite. That's kind of annoying, lets agree a standard.

OK, so as Scanner Maker A my proposed standard is: Exactly what my popular A9 Scanner does

No! As scanner maker B, clearly the standard should be what our BZ-20 model does

No! Everybody at scanner maker C knows the obvious thing to do is derive the standard from the behaviour of our popular C5 and C10 scanners!

Result: The TIFF standard says all of the above are OK, just add header data explaining what's going on. Since some scanners would scan a page from the top, those say y=0 is at the top, those vendors whose scanner works the other way say y=0 is at the bottom!
So the person who’s not currently president saved a service turning off that didn’t need to be turned off… sounds like marketing more than anything.
Also it isn't one axis reality, so projecting all those onto a line leads to skewed comparisons. That said, what parties elsewhere in the world make the modern GOP look center-right? Also, in countries with even larger gaps in ideology between parties, how do they avoid the civil unrest the US is seeing?
I don't think that holds water. We've had functional programming for longer than oracle or java have existed, and for far longer than oracle has owned java. Haskell itself has been around for longer than java or oracle-owned java.

Functional programming just seems harder for people to get into. Perhaps it's bad for everyone that people don't make that effort, but it doesn't seem like a conspiracy
Ad-funded social media platforms make money by measurably altering people's opinions and behavior. It's literally their only job—everything else is in service to that goal.

Given that this is what they do day in and day out and that the successful ones are by all metrics very good at it, it seems totally reasonable to assume that one could trivially be turned from manipulating people into buying stuff to manipulating people to voting a certain way or holding certain opinions.

One person one vote is the guiding principle of democracy and, yes, it assumes that no person is able to actively hijack someone else's vote for their own gain. We have systems in place to prevent voter fraud, and I think that we should have systems in place to prevent systematic individual targeting of individuals for algorithmic manipulation as well.

What we don't need is a law that specifically targets foreign companies doing it. Our homegrown manipulators are just as dangerous in their own ways.
I remember using the "TrackPoint" back when I had Toshiba laptops in the 90's. I especially liked them while using the laptop on my lap, where using a mouse was impractical. Later, laptops started offering a "TouchPad" (which the ThinkPads also have). To me, this MMI is far superior to the TrackPoint. I'm typing this on a ThinkPad that I've had for just over a year, and I don't think I've ever used the TrackPoint on this one. It's a distinctive feature of ThinkPads, but it may have outlived its time.
From China's perspective, I wonder if there's a workaround to sell 50% of TikTok to a US public company, and then through a few intermediaries purchase a large enough holding in _that_ company to give them a board seat or two.
And the fox said: "These grapes are sour".
And the reason we didn't have universal suffrage.
FWIW, I can't recall seeing Elon except as retweets. The downsides are the bots, the exodus, and the stupid renaming, but it's been almost entirely improvement to me.

I was pretty tired of Mastodon and thus happy to return when Elon bought it.

ETA: I use a preferred subset of my follows for my main feed, a few subject-delineated lists for particular research, and occasionally my "following" feed to branch out.
Excellent question. The behaviors of a couple of laptops I used is that if you hold down the touchpad button and your finger reaches the edge of the touchpad, then the computer will give you a small pre-defined constant velocity in that direction (e.g. if your finger is at the right edge then there will be a cursor velocity to the right) until either your finger is no longer on an edge of the touchpad or you lift the touchpad button. It's a reasonable solution but feels hacky compared to TrackPoint (infinite range) or trackball (infinite range) or mouse (can lift the mouse (not the button) and do more strokes).
I'm curious to know how all of those pearl clutchers who got super mad about Twitter removing dick pics of Hunter Biden are doing.
You bring up valid point. Did the legislators lie en masse to us about national security to remove a competitive app from the American ecosystem or not. If the national security issues exist, where is the outrage from our elected officials? If not, our government is for sale.
If TikTok was concerned that Biden’s statement wouldn’t be honored, they wouldn’t have turned service back on today while Biden is still president. They’ve had months to work out some sort of deal with Trump, this whole show they’ve put on the past couple days is propaganda.
> I never understood why "foreign influence" was supposed to be a bad thing

Because people are not capable of being informed on every topic in the world.

Especially in a world that is increasingly more complex and nuanced.

And this ignorance has been demonstrated to be exploitable in order to tear apart societies.
I’m curious what the security of these NFC lock systems looks like. (I’m talking about the commercial building systems mentioned like Brivo and Unifi, not home systems.)

In particular, I know unifi cards rotate keys. So you can’t simply clone them with a Flipper, and this also means third party cards don’t work. By default, this is true, but you can’t simply clone turn it off, as mentioned in the article.

Does this mean that the other systems’ cards are easily cloned? This seems very insecure, if so.
> We do email only deals, we do LinkedIn message only deals and we have a self-serve funnel.

That's awesome. And, I think that's what a lot of people here are talking about: options.

If your customers largely wants sales calls and sales engineers, that's great. But don't ignore the (smaller) population that does prefer no-calls.
Trump wins, everyone loses.

Get used to it.
Huh? It's up as a public archive on tornadocash/tornado-core as we speak.

> American companies (Google and Apple primarily) have been told by the government that they cannot distribute binaries running certain code to Americans.

Yes, in the same way that American companies and individuals are routinely prohibited by the government from distributing other binaries to Americans, most notably anything that circumvents DRMs as regulated by the DMCA.

I really don't think the people that drafted the First Amendment had apps in mind when they thought of "speech", and would probably consider them something more like machinery (a printing press, a radio (not a radio station!) etc.) Interpreting Tiktok as a type of newspaper (which are widely protected even in democracies without an equivalent to the First Amendment) is much less of a leap of faith compared to considering an iOS executable speech.
> By saying China's using Tik Tok to subvert "democracy," aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?

Did you already forgot about the episode about Haitians eating everyone's pets? Based on that episode alone, what's you observation?

> I sometimes cannot believe it's those who so loudly cry about threats to "democracy" that simultaneously take such a cynical view of the democratic process.

You should take a minute to think about the underlying issue.

Propaganda is a massive threat against democracy and freedom in general. If a bad actor invests enough resources pushing lies and false promises that manages to convince enough people to vote on their agent, do you expect to be represented and see your best interests defended by your elected representatives?

Also, you should pay attention to the actual problem. Propaganda isn't something that affects the left end of the bell curve. Propaganda determines which information you have access to. You make your decisions based on the information you have, regardless of being facts or fiction. If you are faced with a relentless barrage of bullshit, how can you make an educated decision or even guess on what's the best outcome? You cannot. The one that controls the information you can access will also control to a great degree your decision process. That's the power of disinformation and propaganda, and the risk that China's control of TikTok poses to the US in particular but the free world in general.
Allegedly, the biggest concern this time around was the economy. Millions of people complaining about inflation and the cost of goods voted for a guy promising to raise tariffs, and a party that historically caters to big business. The same big business that has moved a lot of jobs overseas, and has lobbied to relax restrictions on visas to hire more foreign workers for onshore jobs.

To me, this looks a lot like people voting against their own interests. I think that when people vote against their own interests, it's usually because they don't understand what they're voting for, i.e. it's an education issue. And it's not surprising that other people would be perplexed and frustrated by this.

But maybe I've just been misled by the wrong propaganda. I guess we'll find out.
I don't think that's a full-stack framework?
What about your time, which is now more valued by others, and probably (hopefully) is extremely valuable to you?

Personally, I wouldn't do it because I don't even want to spend the time subscribing (and then unsubscribing, and dealing with whatever other issues come up), much less watching.
The reason the more direct ways are more bloody is why we want to stick with democracy. Democracy is supposed to be based on an exchange of ideas in an open discourse. This is why it’s important to not let any one party have too much control over the discourse. That is also why freedom of speech exists. Somewhat paradoXically, banning a foreign-controlled platform can serve the same purpose as defending freedom of speech.
In founding of the United States lies tariff stories. The United States does not reject government and nations as entities at all. It just asserts rights for its citizens which doesn't include everyone on the planet.
> As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused it?

41, in retrospect I'd say this change happened around 2000-2010, why being not-invented-here-syndrome as Web 2.0 became a thing with some corporations publishing free-to-integrate XML-based APIs (technically also JSON, but I never saw them until much later); every API was different, so the only part which could be seen as a "protocol" were the meta-level of "how to define any API" e.g. XML, JSON.
I use middle-click paste VERY heavily in day-to-use of my laptop. It's getting hard to find a laptop that still has a middle button at ALL. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when they finally remove it. (The constant march toward design minimalism means this is a matter of WHEN not IF.)

Also, F Dell for not putting power/sleep lights on their laptops anymore. It was the only reliable of way of knowing whether its safe for me to put my laptop in the bag without cooking itself to death.
Read some books. 1984 would be a good start.
Couldn’t find recent info but back in 2014, Michael McCaul’s net worth was in the hundreds of millions. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in meta stock doesn’t seem like much for someone worth 1000 times that amount over a decade ago…

Markeayne Mullin’s net worth was ~$50 million a few years ago. $50k is 1/1000th of that networth also…

That’s not to say congress shouldn’t be banned from trading stocks like every other profession that might potentially have insider info. They absolutely should.
There is, but others were more mismanaged or had more legal troubles which took lot of wind out of them. You need to consistently keep producing something to keep old players and pull enough new ones. Also GW managed to get good enough presence over others.
Had a recent conversation with nephew about his robotics study, and it seems he’s overwhelmed with ROS, OpenCV, Python, AI transformers tutorial hell.

Told him we should go together to industrial expo - starting from 3d printing, molding, material science and robotics and spend some time together to hack into hard core C++ SDKs used by big tech like Nvidia and Co, and look how to developed linear algebra and statistic on real life examples.

His dream is to automate small mid business manufacturing, and become a Steve Job like figure one day.

What’s the good information and resources to follow and educate about real life robotics?

Any tips or even sarcastic comments are welcome. Please help to be a cool uncle ;)
If this stands, it certainly is. It’s a mockery of the whole of the system. Congress better act on overturning it post haste or enforcing it post haste.
It's a framework.

* it's a loosely coupled messaging framework (so you can have 5 daemons that talk to each other to accomplish control at multiple levels)

* it's got robotics libraries with difficult robotics algorithms (PID tuning, forward and reverse kinematics, a way to run control loops very fast, ...)

* it's got sensor libraries (algorithms) and drivers

* it's got a simulator

* it's a linux distro specialized for robotics

You can keep going for a while with this.
Is it necessary that this be an 'AI' app?
> The Act exempts a foreign adversary controlled applica- tion from the prohibitions if the application undergoes a “qualified divestiture.” §2(c)(1). A “qualified divestiture” is one that the President determines will result in the appli- cation “no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.” §2(g)(6)(A).

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf
My concern is non-technical users sideloading backdoored versions from hackers.

How is a supply chain attack mitigated by the mechanisms you suggest?