skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That might make policy sense in a world where those same adversaries couldn't just pay a western social media company to exert the same control. But since they can, it smells much more like protecting a monopoly than anything to do with preventing control.
Spoiler this is not shocking.
> made them vote together across party lines

Ha, is that uniparty vote supposed to be something meaningful? If the government had true concerns, they could 1) be aired to the public and 2) other senators like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul would not be speaking against the ban.

People can change their views and minds. It's only a problem when you lie and pretend you didn't. Pres Biden signed the law and could suspend it now if he wanted, but he chose not to do it as it'd be contradictory to his own signing. And of course soon-to-be President Trump will get the credit for reverting it. Nobody cares about the details beyond those invested into politik.
Imagine saying this if the government shut down, say, a newspaper publishing things they didn’t like. “Freedom of speech isn’t freedom of a platform; the reporters can write elsewhere.”
Because TikTok is owned and controlled by hostile foreign country of communist totalitarians. That country would rather TikTok die than be sold to an operator they don’t control.

The operator doesn’t necessarily have to be American. A European operator would be sufficient. But it can’t be an overtly hostile nation.

All of these arguments have been made ad nauseum.

All social media companies controlled by the CCP will be banned in the US. And since all tech companies in China are controlled by the CCP that means all Chinese social media products will be banned in the US.

It’s not all that complicated. It’s not even that controversial.
"Why would an adult not hit someone when that someone hits them?"

Some people believe that not retaliating stops cycles and systems. Some of us have principles beyond the very childlike, "well, they did it first".

If you believe state censorship is bad, you should oppose it when it is deployed, even if it's deployed against someone you think is also bad.

Like, I think using slurs is bad. I oppose using slurs, even against people I loathe. I have a principal, and I do not violate that principle even if it would hurt people I would consider my opponents.

Same here. My commitment to my principal that "state censorship is bad" far outweighs any feelings about China.
What prevents JohnSavesEnergy from posting content on any other platform?
except for like i2psnark or something
I don't know about ffslice, but you can get frame-perfect slicing with minimal reencoding via LosslessCut's experimental "smart cut" feature[2] or Smart Media Cutter's[3] smartcut[4].

[1] https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

[2] https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126

[3] https://smartmediacutter.com/

[4] https://github.com/skeskinen/smartcut
Xerox PC Type Right

https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/pdf/PC_World_8711_November_... page 237 has a review (big PDF warning)
https://miniflux.app
I haven't seen anyone argue that TikTok provides zero value.
> The US has nothing similar

this reminds me another brilliant comment:

> China bans US businesses because it has an autocratic, ethnocratic government. The US is banning a Chinese business for obvious national security reasons.

In the 1950s, China forced private enterprises to sell half of their shares to the state In the 1990s, it required foreign companies to establish joint ventures and share intellectual property as a condition for entering the Chinese market.

Congrats, you just walked in the primary stage of socialism
There is still no proof that the powers that be have come up with, to the contrary, it was proven that one of the governing parties (PNL) was paying money for the online campaign of mr. Georgescu (supposedly the “extremist” candidate who had made use of TikTok). It is all a farce and it has helped kill democracy (or what had been left of it, anyway) in this country.
You're looking at the wrong market. Games Workshop are not a "battlefield simulation" company. They're a miniature company or if you want to look at it more broadly, they're a company selling molded plastic.

The battlefield simulation is only a means to an end of convincing consumers to buy high margin plastic.
I'm sure those who have firm understanding on how things work will relentlessly correct those who want to score political points.
> According to Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Service survey released Friday

Rasmussen consistently gets ranked as one of the least reliable major pollsters, and has a heavy conservative bias. I would take that with a whole salt crystal.
Nice they seem to work really well! The idea of relative movements makes a lot more sense than fixed button locations on touch screens.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-world...
I think what I will miss most about TikTok is its ability to teach me things that I would otherwise never have interest in. I've discovered so many musicians, writers, historians and niche curators it's such a shame that this is going away. I'm still surprised somehow no other company has been able to compete with how well TikTok has done discovery.
Each and every time I open youtube I think "there surely must be other stuff on here", but yt has me so doggedly pigeonholed they won't let me ever see anything outside of what I've watches in the last two days. The algorithm is so ridiculously over fitted.
Wasn't the concern of data being siphoned off to China? Even India has banned it. Where does freedom come into picture here?
I don't remember any era of sourceforge where it had good UI.

I also don't remember anyone ever calling it a "software forge".
None of this is strong enough to justify banning speech to me. Do you think something like the Communist Manifesto should be banned in the US? Do you think someone professing the virtues of communism on a street corner should be forced to stop?
In Māori culture in NZ, tribal elders (kaumātua) function much the same, they are the keepers of knowledge, history and cultural practices for their group(s).

I suspect you'd find the same in many cultures that didn't have writing to transmit knowledge.

(There's also the aspect of "mana", a very hard word to translate, "face", "influence", "power" or "really respected" are good approximations.

A kaumātua with mana accords your group (iwi/tribe or hapu/sub-tribe) with their mana.

So, say your Granddad was a renowned warrior or diplomat, even though he's in his 80s, the respect his opponents developed for him still persists, and flows onto you.)
There's a lot of overlap and it takes time and resources to determine the status of content.

eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_and_Dorothy

via bitTorrent or eDonkey from MVGROUP: https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Herb_and_Dorothy

on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnYcPLLiGFk

Is that a copyright violation on youtube? Do we care enough to find out and or report it?
I wouldn't really call it a fork. I'd say WhatsApp started with ejabberd and ended up reimplementing it over time.

ejabberd is a good place to start an xmpp chat service. Facebook messenger was built on it, WhatsApp was built on it, Riot Games chat was built on it. I'm sure there's others.

If you attract enough users, you might end up needing to modify it for your needs, but that's a nice problem to have. There's a fair amount of presentations at tech events with bits and pieces of infra knowledge from FB, WA, and I think Riot Games. Although some of that is fairly obsolete... You don't need to work as hard to scale Erlang today, the BEAM is a lot more scalable out of the box in 2025 than it was in 2011, and you can also have a single host with a lot more ram and compute today too.
This is such an interesting thing of generational difference, since I remember sourceforge fondly before the crazy era of so many ads.
A pretty good one is https://fakeupdate.net

I once pranked a coworker/friend with a Windows installation screen after lunch break. He was … astounded. The thing is, we were all using Debian in this company.
If it's for the mental health of the US citizens then banning TikTok alone is not going to address it. But may be the first step.
China doesn't allow foreign corporations to operate within their borders. why should we?

there is no First Amendment right for Chinese companies to operate within our market. there is no First Amendment right for RT to be carried on US cable networks.

if TikTok were a website, it'd be different. it'd be one thing if the US were blackholing tiktok.com. but TikTok is an app that sells ads, and they're not entitled to sell ads to US businesses or publish on US app stores.
The US has banned foreign leadership of tv and newspapers since the 30s. At no point had the US ever really allowed foreign governments unfettered control over our media.
Did you miss the part where China is a foreign adversary? They don't play nice. If you try to play nice with someone who wants to kill you then you get killed.
PHP History Project
> "JavaScript mixed together" and "Strict separation of concerns" is just comparing apples with oranges

I feel this this comparison reveals how deeply framework thinking has shaped our understanding of web development and how thoroughly we've accepted JavaScript monoliths as normal.

Why have we normalized a world where marketing pages need a JavaScript monolith with mixed content? Why do we consider utility classes more "maintainable" than systematic design? Why must every solution flow through JavaScript when browsers provide these capabilities natively?

I have tremendous troubles explaining these things to engineers, who constantly turn the discussion into technical, low-level details instead of looking at the bigger picture. Any suggestions how I should approach this? Thanks in advance!
The “we are at war with China” propaganda, among other things.
It's obvious the app is being banned because for once we had unbiased news about Israel/Palestine and the ongoing genocide.

A media outlet not easy to censor is unacceptable to the Israeli lobby, and therefore unacceptable to our politicians.
It may be that hire paying fields attract men who want to be able to attract mates. That women prefer men who make more than them is pretty established in research, as is is the lack of interest in what a woman makes as income. (On average in psych studies). Why wouldn’t we expect results and society to reflect this?
Obviously because Tree-of-Life didn't survive on Earth, so we could never achieve our final form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector
> In terms of content moderation, posts related to child sexual abuse or terrorism are best handled by professionals trained to help keep millions or billions safe.

Does that mean bluesky will somehow centrally moderate posts "related to terrorism"?
Those arguments have nothing to do with why TikTok was banned. The banning is purely a geopolitical move. TikTok is the only major social network that is (hugely!) popular in Europe and North America that is not controlled by the USA - and even worse for US geopolitical ambitions, it has major ties with China.

This is not some conspiracy theory: this is 100% of the official reason that Congress voted on this. They fear that China has influence through TikTok into the US public, and could use this to sway public opinion [unsaid: just as the US does with Facebook or Twitter]. They also fear that China could surreptitiously spy on high-value targets through the TikTok app - which is why it was forbidden two years ago already from any device used in doing business with the US Government, including the business phones or BYOD phones of all federal employees and contractors.

Interestingly, part of the fear of influence ties back to Gaza. Here is a quote from Mitt Romney about this [0]:

> SENATOR ROMNEY: A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard.

This is exactly the sort of issue that the US fears: losing control of the public narrative, especially in the USA, but more broadly as well.

[0] https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-mccain-i...
Thanks kernel_lover!
I don't think he did, he is a very civil person, by any standards. I get flagged occasionally, when talking about topics similar to that of this article, but don't think that Dang has anything to do with it.

(on the other hand, I got less involved with Hacker News, probably because I don't have much to say about AI/LLM and because of that discernible bias in middle east politics over here)
Okay champ.
NexusAI
Hey everyone, I'm a junior in high school who recently launched an app called "NexusAI."

NexusAI is an "all-in-one" platform that I designed that uses AI to empower student learning. Some features include an AI tutor (which works similarly to GPT), AI-powered note generation/study guides, and a mind map feature.

Although there have been many educational platforms that leverage AI, I had yet to come across one that allowed you to not only store the courses you're taking but also organize conversations, notes, and study guides related to particular topics.

I launched it back in October 2024 but have made small tweaks along the way. As a prospective CS student in college, I wanted to gain some feedback on how my app could be improved.

The link to the demo can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gQdyrmIHa8

The link to the app can be found here (and the URL):
https://usenexusai.vercel.app
Yes, the tool snaps to I-frames when slicing. The `-c copy` flag ensures no re-encoding, and inherently limits cuts to keyframes.

TBH it's an unfortunate side-effect sometimes as you cannot cut video or audio exactly where you want.
why it's about Russia? are Russians a part of this too?
Was it? What was the real concern? And can you prove it?
I'm quite worried about both, but at least I can (in theory) vote on my US overlords, at least.
I for one am just exhausted from the torrent of confusing random changes.
I wouldn’t mind my data being siphoned off to China. It’s not even clear that if China had all of our data then it would meaningfully change world events.

Freedom means freedom from censorship. I can’t think of an equivalent event that’s happened in my lifetime in the US. "India did it too" isn’t exactly a strong rallying cry.

That said, we’ll live. Hopefully our blind trust that there were security concerns ends up being worth something.
The question is: what prevents creators like JohnSavesEnergy from emerging on other platforms.
People will downvote you for revealing this, but it's the truth. I saw it on TikTok, after all.
Newly-appointed Apple CFO denies 75% App Store profit claim in UK trial
I generally care about good and bad arguments even if I agree or disagree with the direction of the argument itself.

But in terms of TikTok, I don't care. Burn it down. If Trump uses his first 100 days to pressure his 3 vote majority in the House to vote to overturn something they passed overwhelmingly it's a pretty startling indication of his priorities and loyalties in his second term. His crypto-scam this weekend is only the prologue.
Note that this preface was not allowed to be published together with the book, it was censored last minute by the publishers. The public narrative about Animal Farm is almost exclusively that it is an allegory for the USSR, an attack on the false equality that they professed. The preface explaining that it's very much intended to attack the UK and more generally European and US governments' tendencies is even today not included in the vast majority of printings of Animal Farm.
Arguably China has won the day with the massive migration to RedNote.
Normies don't pirate using BitTorrent, especially for live-events streaming (which BitTorrent doesn't support): they'll find some dodgy website offering a proxy'd (and downsampled) video stream for free (with ads overlayed) or for a modest one-time fee via PayPal or a cryptocoin, especially when some big event has an extortionate pay-per-view fee.

Music piracy was killed-off by Spotify.

For movies/TV, they'll turn to publicly-shared Plex libraries - I only found out about this a few weeks ago: so in 2025, with more-and-more people having high-upload-bandwidth Internet connections it turns out that now you don't need a distributed DHT-based swarm of chunks of files with hundreds of seeders: all you need is a couple generous individuals running an open Plex box that's served-up behind a cheap offshore VPN provider, using the official Plex App from the Samsung TV app-store.

...I've no idea how long that's going to last: running behind a VPN means the MPAA (et al.) can't do much against those sharing their collections publicly like they did with BitTorrent (c.f. PeerGuardian), and Plex has somehow survived this-far given it does have legitimate uses, and the apps don't violate any app-store policy I'm aware-of, so I'm concerned the MPAA is going to lobby for some laws outright prohibiting apps/software/technology that facilitates piracy for nontechnical users somehow.

(Or they could follow GabeN's advice and start offering a superior service and convenience to the user with a cooperative consolidation of all rightsholders under a single branded tent, but we all know that's not going to happen)
Good luck if you ever have daughters.
I think you did - define foreign adversary and check if you are typing on something that aids and abets this enemy.
You use these words like they are axiomatically evil.

Like, "it's a foreign project"... so is my Nintendo. Are you afraid or worried about foreign things? A lot of the world does a lot of things better than the U.S.

"It's a communist party project"... first of all, plenty of great communist projects out there, and the Chinese communist party is really only a very very narrow slice of communism so your brush is absolutely over broad. But second, so what? What do you own that didn't pass through China in some capacity?

"It's a psyop"... it's an app with funny videos on it. I think you need to set that tinfoil hat down and pause a bit. Does it have a different cultural root used to moderate it? Sure! Are they making moderation decisions I would make? No. Does that make it psyop? Of course not. Don't be absurd.
I find that ufw is a pretty simple firewall interface for linux.
PoE2 on the other hand is some of the worst map generation iv'e ever seen. Like a copy and paste of the same exact thing hundreds of times to give you a large lifeless drudge of a map.
The blue sky app is open source, it shouldn't be too hard to fork it and add a short video tab.

I want open source everything.

Open Source social media.

If you and 5000 like minded people don't like Blue sky you can effectively spin up your own server and exclude others.

Open Source games. I want a billionaire to fund an open source fornite with the same idea.

Which reminds me, Tencent owns major stakes in (100%) Riot and Epic Games ( 40%). Are they next ?
People are already calling 911 about it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i4puyg/pov_tiktok_...
TikTok was banned in India years ago. There was some noise initially but eventually everyone moved to Instagram Reels/YT Shorts. A few homegrown apps tried to capture the space but couldn't compete against Meta and Alphabet's entrenched network effect and superior platforms. TikTok wasn't as big in India back then as it is in the US right now but it was gaining traction and then lost it all. The same alternatives already exist in the US as well, people will move on in no time.
Name no do job good; is this post just to practice your vocabulary? Do you really find difficulty understanding why one finds ire with muddying identifiers?
Nice, another beek!

I have had a hive where I had queens that lived quite fine together. Weirdest hive as one of them was a caucasia and the other a cordovan. Never did get stung with those ladies.

Mine was by accident, but I hear that some beeks do it since cannot get the genetic combination, they just do it as a mechanical combo, to get preferred traits. Like buckfast and russian to help with swarming and defensiveness.
It's meaningful because it's one of the few things congress could actually pass. You can count on one hand the number of bills that passed this year with that kind of support that wasn't something like a budget bill.
To those with knowledge in security, what exactly were the concerns? Here are the four I can think of.

- Users tend to use the same passwords across apps. It would be trivial for TikTok to provide an email + password combo to CCP.

- Until 2020, the tiktok iOS app was accessing the system clipboard at all times that TikTok was running (even in the background) https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/26/21304228/tiktok-security-...

- A sort of vague concern that because CCP can easily compel Chinese companies, it could easily compel TikTok to show / not-show various content to American users. (this could stir political tensions, misinformation etc).

- TikTok (and by extension CPP) could access any content/messages that the app has access to. E.g. Phone contacts (if permission given), private messages sent on TikTok app (possibly even if just typed but not sent).

What else?
Also seems very likely to cause a financial crisis that the rest of America will end up paying for anyway. If you don't pay out enough to rebuild that particular lot, then the likely outcome will be an empty lot with a burned out husk on it. In most cases, this is worth considerably less than the remaining value of the mortgage. The homeowner then walks away from the mortgage, leaving the bank holding the bag. The bank has socialized this risk by selling the mortgage as an MBS that is sitting in somebody's money-market account. Cue 2008.
I wanted to generate a procedural dungeon for a rogue like aspect of my game using WFC. It was a misunderstanding of what this very simplistic algo can do.

- it's great to fill areas with kinda non repetitive patterns which feels random-ish

- it's useless to build anything structured.
Eg. You can't guarantee that a path exists from the entrance of the dungeon and the exit/goal.

I ended up doing it fully with traditional Procgen techniques, I'm easily at 100+ hours of work and it's still only half of it.

Discussions about "the problem of proc gen" in games are missing the point. Procgen is a non-gameplay feature, and it's very time consuming to get it right and controlled. The legend that you "gain" time is hilarious when you know how complicated things become with "random generation".

Proc gen is a fantastic tool to bring diversity to non-interesting zones.

The game is in the point of interests, they host goals, challenges, (storyline), progression. All of that is directed by logic.
This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms

I don’t know where you got that. It seems perfectly plausible that the stingers evolved in the superorganism, and that the selective pressure was something like “drones protect the hive via stingers which kill them” versus “drones can’t sting at all”.
Why isn’t the latter the situation right now?
Trump says he will 'most likely' give TikTok 90-day reprieve from ban
Do we need a "robots must respect robots.txt" law?
Need to see this in action. The example videos overuse the fuzzy search for commands in my opinion. Makes it hard to concentrate what the actual action/information is when a huge part of the screen changes. Not to say I don’t like fuzzy searchable command prompts. But it can be clearer to either just type out a command or have a menu system. As I said I need to check this out in action for myself.