skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I said that ByteDance expects that paying Trump will make everything go away. From his comment on an executive order, it seems clear he’s willing to go over a law passed by the Congress.
Nonetheless this is an issue that's still not fixed in bsky.

I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to see America politics because I don't care about the nothingburger posts that surrounds Trump.

There's a setting to blacklist certain words or topics. It does not work. I hope they fix it at some point, because I don't spend much time on there, and I'd like to.
And it’s back. Thank trump. I guess it’s time to binge on TikTok for another 90days.
is there any way i could get a “real adult” pass or something like it so those in charge can treat me like an actually intelligent human being?

“we should restrict the information environment because the masses can’t handle it and it causes chaos and instability” is the exact same argument that well-educated Chinese use for why their country can’t be a democracy.
You completely missed the point. The point is that there appear to be foreign actors encouraging divisions in the American population. The point was definitely not, this side is naughty and that other side is wholesome, or vice-versa, or they're equal, and let's debate. Nope, let's not debate that please.
You shouldn’t. Lest we forget, China has banned all American social media companies and quite a few other tech companies. Why shouldn’t the US do the same? Red Note should probably be banned too. The condition to lift the ban? Allow google, facebook, snap, etc in China. Until that day, I don’t understand why this is even a question.
The NHL[0] and NBA[1] have already done officially-sanctioned cartoonified simulcasts.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCupuTnNmQ0

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE68Q4oPcPs
That’s not the point.

Where does it stop? Should my company by eyeing a switch to Oracle services because SAP is German?
> But you don't need a license to put something on the internet. And Americans don't want everything on the Internet to be regulated and censored the way TV and radio are.

Whether you _should_ need a license to distribute a media app in the US under certain conditions, and whether “Americans” (which ones?) really do want no limits on who controls their media, is the correct debate to be having. The person I was responding to believed the issue to be “US demands local ownership of TikTok just because it's successful and valuable” which is clearly wrong.
Maybe, but it’s back now. It was performative.
In every single action he’s taken with respect to the incoming administration over the last several weeks.
Yes. I was recently in Indonesia and shocked at how many high-profile sites are blocked at the DNS-level there, e.g. Reddit.

Is Reddit a great place? Eh. Is it critical to daily life in Indonesia? Of course not. But what I witnessed was censorship, full-stop.

I understand that the U.S. is not blocking TikTok at the DNS level. And that there are valid concerns over sharing user data and government influence over TikTok. But in my view, this is still censorship. Instead of allowing individuals decide whether or not to use TikTok, my government decided to ban it.

The whole argument over selling TikTok to a U.S.-based company is bullshit, imo. What kind of precedent is that? I use online services from all over the world, and in doing so decide to allow my usage to fall (to some extent) under the jurisdiction of that country.
When I do a search on Google I give Google information. When Google gives me the results I get information. This data exchange or information barter involves “value” but no money is exchanged. Thus no taxes. This happens billions of times daily across all social media platforms. The analogy above is that data is gold is not far from reality and the data economy is mostly untaxed.
TikTok Being Restored
Okay, so you're fine with the nazi party feeding your kids antisemitism through their funny dancing video app, that clears things up.
> but that is what you get when the US is your suzerain.

Hopefully the next 4 years help change that.
Not really, because backwards compatibility with the most basic terminals has been maintained throughout it all. Instead of fragmentation, what we have is a very inconsistent soup.
Me included, BTW. BASIC was the first language I learned (second if we count programming a TI-55 calculator as first).
i agree that this is the logical conclusion of the Democrat’s handwringing about foreign interference in the election, but I think the notion that Russian interference actually decided the 2016 election is absurd and there has never been any evidence that it did so
Whatever you think of the ban, it looks like the Republicans played the politics game very successfully here.

1. Get the ban to come in a day before Trump enters office. While the opposition is in power.
2. Get them to announce to all their market that trump will save the app.
3. Swoop in and save the day.

I think the young generation will remember Trump as the man who rescued tiktok.
Given that Elon Musk is supporting neo-Nazis in Germany,[0] banning Twitter/X is not a bad idea.

0. The neo-Nazis in question are the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD has many high-ranking members with neo-Nazi pasts, such as the leader of the party in the state of Thüringen, Björn Höcke, who used to write for a neo-Nazi publication under a pseudonym, "Landolf Ladig" (remind you of any other name?). This guy now runs the AfD in the state of Thüringen, the state where the AfD performs the best, electorally (33%, making them the largest party in the state). There are many other high-ranking AfD members with similar neo-Nazi pasts and affiliations. Then there are those who merely go on and on about immigrants, foreigners, minorities, but who are smart enough not to have explicitly associated themselves with open neo-Nazis. Needless to say, the fact that this sort of party is reaching 33% in some parts of the country is hugely concerning in Germany.
Aside from tech, though: practically none of the non-tech people I followed on Twitter moved to Mastodon. Almost all of them went to Bluesky. I follow a mix of people, so I ended up mostly on Bluesky.

I would have been happy on Mastodon too, and I don't know why it didn't catch on with non-tech people, but it just hasn't. So Bluesky is our main opportunity for an open social web, at this time.
Too bad they're just replacing it with Little Red Book. Funny how Obama legalized propagandizing the nation and China does it better and moves faster than our lazy, corrupt politicians.
Exactly. You can see this in all sorts of things. Sure an clean sheet design of a adjustable wrench or semi trailer coupling generic roller chain or whatever other 100yo item might net a few % improvement in some areas by no longer having to design to the manufacturing tech and material costs of 100 years ago but often times the ecosystem that standardization enables is worth more than a couple percent of improvement somewhere.
Now you have to explain how 2024 China relates to the Nazis, though.

Nazism is an 100% western creation, had many supporters in the west and in the USA, and Hitler himself was inspired by the segregation laws in the United States for his reich.
Well it is the whole point for OP

Not sure reactions to every claim others make as some attempt to normalized opinion is useful. Kind of vain of you to think they were obliging you to feel so much given a banal personal expression. Go take a cortisol stabilizer and jerk off for 8 hours to waifus
TikTok says it is restoring service in US
I am the only who wonders if Microsoft marketing people also rename their children once they reach a couple of years old?
Maybe the comparison is even more meaningless because Project Euler is not a competition.

Solving 300 problems is impressive, even if the solutions are posted online, not in the least part because copying solutions you found isn’t solving the problems.

All this means is that seeing a number on someone’s profile isn’t a reliable signal that they solved those problems, which I guess is a fine thing to take issue with.
You're looking at this in a binary way but there's a spectrum of addictiveness. Some things are a little bit addictive, some things are more addictive, and some things are intentionally designed to be addictive.

Sure, there's some individual out there who spends 8 hours a day on HN and is completely addicted to it. But there are a much larger porportion of users on other platforms that are at that high level of addiction, because those platforms are designed to be addictive.

Scrolling apps don't want you to leave. Ever. In contrast, HN stops you from commenting if you keep doing it too fast.

Quick-access video and audio is particularly psycologically impactful.
We are, but if foreign actors are adding fuel to the fire then should the government act. That's the topic.
The weird thing is that labeling tobacco as addictive did actually seem to produce a decline in use. Labeling social media apps as addictive has, from what I’ve seen, given a lot of people an excuse to keep using it. The narrative has shifted toward “It’s not my fault I use it so much, it’s the company’s fault for making it addictive!”.

Something about moving the locus of control to a 3rd party opens the door for people to forgive themselves for using it so much.

Obligatory “not everyone”, of course, but I can’t believe how many conversations about social media use will immediately shift all blame to the company and downplay any individual choices.
They're only arbiters of the letter. The spirit doesn't have a place in the courtroom.
For Show HNs you need to link to a project that people can actually try out, as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Do you want to come back and share your work when it reaches that stage? You'd certainly be welcome to!

(btw I'm an admin here)
> It’s offensive to the notion of free speech as Americans profess to respect.

The issue has absolutely nothing to do with free speech. China's CCP spying and conducting psyops is not free speech, and forcing China to sell it's controlling position on TikTok has nothing to do with free speech.

That's, amusing enough, the propaganda that's being pushed onto you, which even forces you to criticize a policy that you failed to even be informed about it's rationale and main points. You're fooled into believing that eliminating one of China's attack vectors is somehow an attack on free speech.
"no one is being forced to use this stuff."

No one is forced to use heroin either.
Those criteria seem pretty good. All those companies should be broken up and required to make certain divestitures until they no longer to-big-to-fail, oligarchical, anti-competitive etc.
https://archive.ph/vHFrh
We ban chemicals that are designed to be addictive to humans. The exception are substances that are addictive but also have high medical utility. Those are carefully controlled (sometimes less carefully of course — see OxyContin).

It doesn’t seem impossible to make similar value judgments about social media apps, but clearly it’s even harder than with chemicals.

HN ranks fairly low on the "designed to be addictive" scale, and fairly high on the utility scale. With TikTok, it's obvious that it's off the charts on the former while the latter is a very complicated value judgment.
Pretty much exactly that, yeah.
I'm not comparing China to it, it's just an extreme example. If you are such a free speech absolutist that you think all foreign-controlled media should be allowed (and encouraged to do business in your country), does that include the nazis? And if not, where do you draw the line?
TikTok is back after executive order stalling ban
maybe we should have a system where you let the government know and it bans it for you.

but frankly, i’m sorry you struggle with addiction to this, i get healthy use out of it - and i would prefer not to be punished for your lack of self control
Counter-point: it's only "doom" if one configures it that way with their interaction. My FYP had a lot of positivity, pro-mental health, art, technology, and creativity type content on it. I actively filtered politics and other draining topics from my feed until I never saw it.
Software development and continuous maintenance costs money and not every company has any business trying to run a software development department.

Every company should be focused on data analytics though

Especially writing a bespoke data entry system.

You can find plenty of cheap good enough consulting companies that can make modifications to any of the third party SaaS products.
Eraserhead – Trailer
It wasn't ready in time for the product it was primarily intended to support, the Apple Newton, which was itself a flop in the market. If it had finished in time and the Newton hadn't been a flop, it could have been like Objective-C's move in the market with iOS (and earlier with NeXT and OS X but that was still pretty small compared to what iOS did to the language's popularity). A language buoyed by a popular platform. But that didn't happen.
TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users
We didn’t pay for this, coordinate with this, or have any idea it was coming out.
I am fine with the US doing protectionism, it's their choice. But they should own it. Not always play the kings of freedom, with freedom being systematically defined as "whatever is best for the US".
Instead of the holocaust, yes.

Now, that's not what's happening on tik tok, that's what's happening in your mind, as a thought experiment I would accept nazitok and tell my kids to not use it, instead of the holocaust and having no power to stop it in any meaningful way.

Wouldn't you?

Would you really reproduce the holocaust, just so you don't have to educate your children and explain them the right from the wrong?

that clears things up.
Found a thread about a recent one: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1c6ch2w/i_gene...
We’ve arguably been a better society with TikTok than with any other large-scale American platform. The moderation policies on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or any media outlet have been egregious, and more detrimental to the cultural health of the United States.

At the same time, we’re still not equipped to fully understand the complex and often hidden ways that information can influence people online. Some critics go as far as attributing mind-control capabilities to TikTok, yet everyone’s “For You” page is different—driven largely by a user-led algorithm rather than top-down editorial control.

So we've stripped back a genuine outlet for the masses. And now must accept prescription/participation for any similar digital experience or large-scale information sharing in our country.
That's effectively the same thing in the context of this law.

It's illegal to distribute to minors, but the Internet has made it extremely easy for distributors to turn a blind eye.

Again, if it were a physical store, the shopkeeper would be obligated to kick out anyone under 18.

But on websites, there's just a pinky promise button and that's it.
> people don't lose fundamental rights by virtue of creating a corporation to exercise those rights

No. That is even more manipulative way to put it. No one was "loosing fundamental rights", that part is a lie. What ruling did was to make corruption legal, if you create a corporation by virtue of corporate personhood.
Let's back up a bit. Ancestor comments are saying "I wouldn't put it past Trump to take money to bring TikTok back." That's what's being discussed here. I'm not sure why you're on some personal crusade to make Trump seem unjustly persecuted. It's a bit strange, even, since that wasn't even the main contention here.
Who said anything about Russia. He broke election laws.

Again, it's not the job of any court anywhere in the world to present evidence
What about it is confusing? I just wish they didn't exist. Even if I threw my entire phone away, it wouldn't change that so much time is collectively being wasted. Not to even touch on how its changed social gatherings. The minute something isn't "happening" the phones come out.
It is well established that teams with more representation make better decisions, likely because of their diversity of viewpoints. It is worthwhile both to companies and to society to have higher quality decision-making in fields like finance and in roles like chief executives.
I think TikTok was the cleanest of it, in that the social aspect was non existent (other than sharing links to friends as modern equivalent of small talk).

The most toxic combo is having fomo as a Hook (social for fb/Instagram, laboral for LinkedIn, etc) pushing you to check frequently and then being hit with the unending feed once inside.

At the very least I think we should separate the scroll apps and the social networks by law.
> If you are such a free speech absolutist that you think all foreign-controlled

You said all, I never said all, I just said instead of the holocaust I prefer tik tok.

You are the one that prefers the holocaust to tik tok and has to live with it.

> where do you draw the line?

I'll gladly answer: I draw the line where illegal or seriously dangerous stuff is happening.

For example I would have banned any social network that promoted the so called "challenges".

But the tik tok case has nothing to do with that, it has to do with the fact that if the US cannot control the narrative, they do not want Americans to use it.

Which is the exact same thing the nazi did, back then.

They did not trust their people to make the right choices.
Email is DM and that's decentralised (despite best efforts of Microsoft and Google).

So is Matrix.
As a user, I'm mostly fine with making an account with Google or Meta and using that as my identity root. I know there are a lot of problems with that, for example you can lose your account, but you have all the same problems with a different party that registers domains. Besides, the domain model is more complicated and I've had domains lapse, had problems with transferring, and so on.

What I'd want is:

1. register with some trustworthy third party (be it Google, Bluesky, or whoever), get an identity (can be a domain, but an entry in a database is fine)

2. have the option to craft an identity from thin air (by generating a key pair on my laptop)

3. have the option to move between 1. and 2. or between multiple instances of 1. (identity takeout)

4. (bonus) have the option to create sub-identities: I can register a completely new pseudonymous account, but have some (cryptographic) proof that this identity has certain properties: it is tied to a Google employee, to a woman, to someone with > 10.000 Stackexchange score ... without anybody being able to link that account to the person.

I think 1 and 2 are solved, 3 is quite tricky from a UX perspective, and 4 is going to be really hard (but would enable a lot of cool scenarios).
I wonder how much TikTok will have to personally pay Trump to get reinstated. What would that be worth? Is it a one time fee, or could it repeat over time. Bad situation to be in for TikTok.
Nation states saw this, laughed, and proceeded to colonize the Internet almost immediately. The US is notable for (until recently) being the most open, but China basically never allowed unrestricted international network traffic. In fact, I honestly think China shouldn't have been allowed onto the global Internet on the basis of "no free speech for censors".
Why only to the Congress, does not the American people have a right to know? Why be tight-lipped about it, certainly it's not some military or nuclear technology matter.
The levels of McCarthyism and apparent Sinophobia in this thread astounds me.

“The kids are watching communist propaganda from the CCP!”

Americans on TikTok watch content from other Americans. I know a big complaint the government had was the overflow of support for the Palestinian people compared to Israel.

Are you guys sure you’ve even used the app before? I used it some time ago and it was just other Americans doing dumb stuff or making political videos.

People really just believe the first thing their government tells them and believes it so strictly? “They said it is a national security concern so I believe them and must spread their message!”

Seems to me that TikTok had Americans on there sharing anti-Israel and anti-America content on there with other Americans. Didn’t Ted Cruz bring that up specifically to the CEO of TikTok as a problem?
The Chinese government does not have the right to free speech in this country. And since they are the ones controlling the algorithm that controls what people see on the app, then it's China speaking not the people who are posting.

The black box algorithms that are at the heart of TikTok and Instagram are very powerful and have the potential to be very dangerous mind control weapons, quite literally. It should all be blown up, but keeping that weapon from China is good.
They haven't banned the Huawei smartphones, have they?
As I read more and more comments like GP’s
In this thread, I keep getting this vision of a man in France in 1940 welcoming nazi tanks to his town because “well, we have a military too, how is this any different, they’re just a geopolitical adversary” and “well, we had a corrupt politician once last year so our government is just as bad”.
Even that is not entirely relevant. I think the criteria here are likely actual addiction combined with harm from that addiction combined with scale of that harm. So even if we showed that HN was addictive, the harm and scale are so low that banning it shouldn't even be a conversation. Under the same framework, we have TikTok, which combines an algorithm designed for addiction, actual or imminent harm from a foreign power, and probably the most massive scale possible. So it seems within the realm of possibility that banning TikTok should be a discussion.
Maybe! Hard to tell. Personally I don't think big tech should own this space, I'd love to see a variety of companies and lots of startups. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if I'm astroturfing.
It is and EU started doing this more than a decade ago and has come fairly far. GDPR and other privacy focused regulation made great strides in restricting what US platforms are allowed to do in EU, and for government institutions there has been some movement away from US owned cloud services as a matter of national security and data protection. So far the reaction for US companies has been mostly to setup EU-only versions, or policies where data remains on EU located servers, but there was also a lot of "threats" about Facebook leaving EU or other sites blocking EU users as a response to those regulations.

The next round of regulations, NIS2 for example, is starting to get up steam. This year we also have the Digital Services Act. Time will tell if US media platforms continue to develop EU-versions, and in what forms, or if they give up.

In term of national security I would be a bit more afraid of Microsoft 365 than Meta.
Your referring to the ID registry (PLC) which is intended to be moved to a separate org.
According to: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038...

"FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by— (A) any of— (i) ByteDance, Ltd.; (ii) TikTok;…"

How is that not a Bill of Attainder? Although it does not explicitly say that these companies are guilty of a crime, since when is it legal to make a law against a specific person, group of persons, or a specific company? That cannot possibly be Constitutional.
TikTok has now announced a reversal and is turning it back on.
i think this is a fun tack but personally i should be allowed to read and watch whatever i want even if China is a bad actor