skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most policies aren't the sort of thing that is going to attract broad popular support (or opposition.) Did you look at the opposition numbers? Who are the "shadowy powers?" Lawmakers say that China is the shadowy partner here doing bad things with Tiktok. I don't necessarily trust the US government on this issue, but I was speaking to a Chinese national last year, they asked me why the US was banning Tiktok. When I said "because China is using it to spy on Americans" they replied "Of course they are!" and laughed.

I think there are probably some people who are pushing this for self-interested reasons (American social media apps) but also I think the stated reason for the ban is probably the truthful motivation, and I'm ambivalent about trusting the US government and US corporations not to spy on me, but I tend to trust the US government when they say they are trying to stop China from spying on me. And if zero people spying on me is not an option, well, fewer people would probably be an improvement.
Services become expensive when the servicepeople have better/more productive things to do, because you need to pay them more to keep them in the industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
That is not enough to satisfy all 3 certification requirements as required by this law.
PNG and JPEG both have ICC color profiles, which complicates things.

Even most Windows programs (including Windows Explorer thumbnails) don't display images correctly, which is infuriating.
>supreme court says that tiktok might be a threat to national security

>yeah, let's just ignore that. Dance videos on tiktok are more important than security

That's so f-in absurd. I can't even wrap my head around why anyone would literally protest against the ban. I just hope that germany, or rather europe, will have such a ban, too, and that it get enforced properly.
Many issues have bipartisan support, especially foreign policy. I suspect the other main reason they wanted to ban TT is that they wanted to control the narrative on certain issues, on the them being Gaza.

https://newrepublic.com/post/181327/mitt-romney-congress-ban...
Apple lists all apps it removed alongside TikTok in the U.S.
“Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates. Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries — including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and others — will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store for users in the United States starting January 19, 2025,” the company said.

Google and Apple face a $5000 fine for each user downloading the app.

This could mean multiple hundred billion dollar fines.
13 more years to go until the 2038 problem.

Surely we'll have everything patched up by then..
> Hunter Thompson copying every word of every Hemingway novel isn't copyright infringement

I make a high-res photo of a banknote. I can print that out at home. The bad stuff starts at the step after that...
The ACLU tends to take pretty hard line civil liberty positions, including defending hateful folks if their civil liberties are impinged. They’re not strictly a progressive organization.
Discouraging business is bad. Obviously Britain is not doing well if you see many towns
>Everybody loses.

Huh? Trump singlehandedly bringing TikTok back for tens of millions of malleable voters. Sounds like a pretty huge victory for him!
It's not just US citizens, but per the supreme court "foreign organizations operating abroad possess no rights under the U. S. Constitution". In USAID v. Alliance for Open Society International specifically with regards to the first amendment.

---

However TikTok US here is a domestic organization operating domestically merely controlled by a foreign organization operating abroad, which complicates matters. It has rights.
Somebody invested $6 billion in Trump’s meme coin. There should be an investigation.
Or ... maybe we should take a step back and stop trying to shove everything into phones - like drivers license or all forms of payment.
> what counts as knowledge (epistemology), and how AI represents reality (ontology) also shape value creation.

As a skeptic with only a few drums to beat, my quasi-philosophical complaint about LLMs: we have a rampant problem where humans confuse a character they perceive out of a text-document with a real-world author.

In all these hyped-products, you are actually being given the "and then Mr. Robot said" lines from a kind of theater-script. This document grows as your contribution is inserted as "Mr. User says", plus whatever the LLM author calculates "fits next."

So all these excited articles about how SomethingAI has learned deceit or self-interest? Nah, they're really probing how well it assembles text (learned from ones we make) where we humans can perceive a fictional character which exhibits those qualities. That can including qualities we absolutely know the real-world LLM does not have.

It's extremely impressive compared to where we used to be, but not the same.
"Could be interpreted" could be interpreted to mean anything at all.

The question asked was not about scanning, and a reasonable person would not answer it as if it had.
What does the ACLU not understand..

The law does not ban TikTok.. it requires divestment from a foreign adversary..

Said foreign adversary refuses to divest, thus the company is shutting itself down
Try billions. Pelosy alone is worth around half a billion.
I vote democrat, but then I'm a rich, educated, knowledge worker coastal urban elite so I'm supposed to right?

I think the hard answer is - the Dems need to actually do things that dissatisfy people like me if they want to actually win the masses - working class, blue collar, etc voter back.

Currently they are focussed on everything other than class. Identity politics. Race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, etc. None of this is particularly threatening to people like me and is a moral good, but it should be secondary to actually helping the poor regardless of how they identify.

Left wing parties elsewhere push for more redistributive policies than the Dems ever dream of here. Instead they do hand-outs to constituencies that aren't in dire need, and already vote Dem anyway. Student loan forgiveness, EV tax credits, etc.

Meanwhile in UK & EU, even the vaguely upper end of middle class pay marginal tax rates that would make $1M/year US earners cry. This is where the revenue comes for the depth & breadth of their social programs.

Should the US go that far? Absolutely not. It would stifle innovation, growth, and what makes the US far more successful than our rich peers. But Dems need to break free of the thinking that if we just tax a few billionaires, all our problems will be solved.
The US government is modeled after Cromwell's parliament, almost exactly. The prominent difference is that instead of lords there are senators elected by states. The design has existed for a very, very long time, and evolved organically in England during and after the civil war. It might not seem like it is a good idea, but the US has been wildly successful. The design works.

There are a lot of powers the president has now that the office didn't have a long time ago, and the power of the executive has steadily creeped into everything and grown significantly. If the president were limited only to his powers articulated in the constitution it would be less consequential who the president was. Really, what makes it such a big change is all the executive departments that have regulatory and therefore de facto legislative authority.
He's making tens of millions of Americans (especially including those who may not have otherwise been political) quite fond of him, bringing back a platform that has definitely been a net positive for him overall, undoing one of his predecessors 'achievements', and so on.

He came out against a ban on TikTok long ago (after initially being in support) and made it clear he'd work to reverse it the second the ban bill started gaining momentum.
comparing twitter to TCP/IP, SMTP and HTTP is dumb beyond belief, regardless of how much money the person made betting on the right horse for the wrong reasons
The problem with CBOR is that once people relate it to IPFS their will be massive push-back, because IPFS is seen as too complex. I know this is true because I saw it happen. To these kids even XML is deemed "too complex", thus their love affair with JSON instead.

The reason Social Media protocols need to be kept simple is precisely for this reason. Getting developers to all agree on things is next to impossible. So the way to combat that is by removing all those "things", and go with the simplest design that's workable. It's almost like politics in that it's "The Art of the Possible". And to be "possible" in this context means universal acceptance.
Between this and the Gaza ceasefire the outgoing administration is laying up political wins for Trump before he even takes office. An embarrassment for an administration that has completely failed to play the political game properly for years. And Biden was such a savvy operator before.
Lately (the last couple decades), power has been concentrating in the president because Congress is increasingly dysfunctional.

We can measure this. The single most basic responsibility of Congress is to pass the budget. Well, how are they doing? When was the last time they were able to pass a normal, annual budget, like they used to do year after year, reliable as clockwork?

If they can't do job 1, they're broken.

So the president rules by executive order, because Congress can't pass bills any more.
Yes, a venture capitalist in the software space in san francisco made a call about such a company while it was in a bull run.

On the other hand, the post is 100% wrong, it's not a protocol and to the extent it is, it was not innovative (How is it fundamentally different than facebook?)

I know this was written 15 years ago, but that's what's interesting about it, it's a remnant from a previous era and it shows what the hype was.
Do You Really Think We'll Have Genders in the Future?
She already doesn’t trust politicians, and knew that. We think he changed his mind because he was flattered by the girls lip syncing to his funny quips.

But it remains the first time in her life that a politician listened to a concern she had, and acted on it promptly to fix the problem.
The US constitution does not apply to citizens - it applies to the government.

Citizens in the US are implicitly allowed to do whatever they like, subject to laws that the government enacts. The constitution describes those areas where the government is allowed to pass laws. All other areas are off limits to the government, and left for the people to do as they like. To emphasize the point, the amendments specify certain areas that the government is extra-especially-not-allowed to create any laws about, like speech.

The extent to which this is observed today is quite dubious. There are lots of laws that the US government passes which have little to do with anything the constitution allows them to do - but they kinda hand-wave around that and gesture toward something, like the "commerce clause" or whatnot as justification.

But in theory - for any law passed - it is unconstitutional unless you can say exactly where in the constitution it is explicitly allowed.

* Having written all that, I will add that "government" above means the US Federal government, not all the other ones. State, local, have a lot of latitude to make whatever laws they want, unless a federal law specifically prohibits it.
It seems like tiktok crowd is uniquely deranged however. The Palestine nonsense woke a lot of us up to TikTok brain
Chinese laws are whatever Xi says they are, so that's where Trump negotiating a deal for himself / his rich buddies comes into play..
I agree that one of the first steps would be to take someone from the previous facility out for a meal, which I can probably arrange fairly easily. I don't exactly know why it failed, it was run by the biggest local ISP. I can speculate about why they failed (DSL speeds are severely limited in our town, so really Xfinity was it, they tried providing fiber in some locations, but found it hard to keep up with fiber locate calls). The Colocation side of the business was never very big, but it's not clear if that is because there's not demand or that they just never really pushed it.

Location is fairly good, as far as data centers go. It's got relatively good network connectivity, I believe, but I don't have specifics about entrances and diversity. It is close to one of the big fiber rings around the city, I believe the ring is pulled into the facility. I don't know if they had telco fiber in, or backhauled it via the fiber ring.

Power is probably good, but not great -- I'd doubt it's fed from multiple substations. There was, at one point, some generator bays.

While I could use data center space in town, it'd be hard to convince my work to move, partly as we just signed a 3 year agreement for hosting 60 miles away, partly just because of the cost of a move. It probably should remain a pipe dream.
Robotics is a very hard topic. If on top of that you add ROS which almost everyone is using you will end up very disappointed and without much enthusiasm to do robotics at all. My major criticism to ROS is that because robotics is already hard, ROS does not make it a single bit enjoyable or easy, all the opposite as a matter of fact.
To be fair they're all inside trading and most of them are corrupt. Time to wake up America
Through this law, Trump will consolidate control over social media.

Facebook and Instagram, via Mark Zuckerberg, and X/Twitter via Elon Musk, are already in Trump's camp and are helping him.

This law gives Trump leverage over TikTok - their access to the US market will likely depend on serving Trump's interests. Like X and Meta (and other SV companies) operating in other countries, they will comply with local oppression. It's incredible that the Democrats keep handing victory after victory to their opponents.

(Trump also is gaining extreme influence over professional news media, including Fox News and the WSJ, of course, but also ABC News, possibly CBS News, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, the LA Times, and many more. It may be time to stop the lazy criticism of the NY Times and start taking them seriously; they could be the only island left in the storm, and will be subject to extreme attacks.)
straight answer: facebook and linkedin. they were so good that they killed the independent, decentralized 1990s web. why bother setting up your own shop and communicating via protocol when you can just make a fb or lnkd page.

theres no dismantling it. every time we offer decentralized vs centralized solutions, the centralized wins because of convenience, funding, faster progress, take your pick (lmao look at bluesky/atproto, bitcoin/coinbase). It's not even primarily because of VC or Silicon Valley ethos. this is just raw human nature at work. you want this to change, propose whatever alternative you have to the normie in middle america and watch their blank stares.
How? US propaganda, propaganda from big techs from US oligopolies will continue unchallenged and strenghtned, as they blocked a source that they apparently do not control.
I have experienced child services from the inside, including talking to quite a few kids caught, because caught is the correct word, in "that world". There was not a SINGLE example of one that appreciated the change, and one killed himself. All were essentially locked up. All were aggressive and for every last one the fault was the governments, in 2 cases teachers actively involved in sending students to "that world". Needless to say, these teachers, one who was caught red handed (by the press, no police involvement obviously), were entirely free, and the victims were locked up. ALL of these children had stories of police officers involved in "that world", none of whom had seen any punishment.

I also can absolutely guarantee you: child services CANNOT protect a child from drugs. Child services CANNOT protect a child from prostitution or sex. Child services CANNOT protect a child from violence, whether they are violent themselves or victim. For the same reason the sea cannot protect fish from water. Sex, drugs and violence are pervasive in even the youngest groups in child services, with people either pretending they're not seeing it or in bad cases participating.

There is not a doubt in my mind that had the police instead done nothing at all the outcome for all those children would have been better off, not worse. Every last one.

Oh and not because their situation was great and didn't damage them or any bullshit like that. They would have been better off because child services was orders of magnitude worse, didn't help, and DID fuck up any chance at a future they had (a few, including me, went normally to school. Went, past tense, as in child services made that utterly impossible. Often kid were sent to "idiot-schools" because that got the institution more money, almost always the school or someone at school was the one positive influence in their lives and child services ... just ... doesn't ... care, about such things, brutally and violently changing the school. The kid that later committed suicide beat up the guard of BOTH the idiot school AND hit the "guard" at his previous school and after that got the principal to accept him back, by essentially staying, and sleeping, in the waiting chairs at his office for 3 straight days until he was allowed to talk, then biking to school for 3 hours every day)
Plenty of chatter about this topic on HN reflect the same viewpoint as the octogenarians in Congress. Outlaw something on allegations and not evidence or trial, when said allegations apply to local alternatives as well.
Why not monitor it? Create thousands of read-only accounts that "prefer" content with all kinds of ideological viewpoints and statistically analyze whether the algorithm is being biased to promote certain viewpoints. I'm not smart enough to implement something like that but it sounds like a solvable problem to me.
Dr. T's reversal was at least partly due to the influence of David Yass, who owns a chunk of ByteDance and saved the TruthSocial IPO, making Trump's holding actually worth something. So he owes Yass bigly.

Presumably other wealthy friends stand to win. Steve Mnuchin wanted to buy it.
Being real, I don't think there's as big a difference as you think. Read "The New Jim Crow", or look at anything BLM was mad about, policing in the US is extremely racialized.
Thank you for your detailed response. This is what I suspected.
Try importing it in photoshop and report your findings back.
DEM looks bad now bc they just lost power. DEM did not solve it earlier bc an unpopular party can't do hard/unpopular things. GOP may have a shot, if they will be as popular as they looked in November. End of day it's about popularity and power.
> What makes you think Trump will require anything meaningful of TikTok?

I'm not sure I follow as I didn't say Trump will require anything and I don't know what "meaningful" means in this sentence.

> What’s important is what TikTok can do for him, not anything related to national security or ownership concerns.

You're neglecting what the _sale_ of TikTok can do for him, which is to curry an immense amount of favor with Big Tech, Wall Street and the intelligence community, and possibly one or several unnamed players in this negotiation.
Behold: GitHub is becoming Jira!
Same. Frankly this is the only thing keeping me buying thinkpads. I must be in the minority…?
Agreed - the authors are the top fuzzing experts.
The alleged national security implications of Tiktok are not based on spreading propaganda, but on gaining access to information about Americans. A privacy law would address that issue, as well as protected Americans' privacy from other companies, regardless of where they are based.
> What's that saying? The best way to get a promotion is to cause a problem and then fix it?

There's too much effort and uncertainty involved in actually creating a problem and then actually fixing it.

It's much easier and more reliable to create the perception of a problem by promulgating lots of FUD, then engage in performative theatrics to nullify the FUD and proclaim the problem fixed.
Yeah, we're well aware of OPFS, and perhaps in the long term future it will be the best way to persist data in a browser.

Although we're super impressed with all of the active research and work going on in this realm, we're trying to build a bulletproof product and therefore need "boring and stable", not "new and shiny". Trying to save ourselves serious headaches.

We're keeping a close eye on Zero.

Also, almost all of these projects are relatively storage-agnostic. So it should be trivial to write adapters for OPFS, or indeed FS in iOS/Android contexts, etc. Most can work with any get/set API.
The free speech argument is ridiculous to me. The content wasn’t at issue; the ownership of the platform was.

You can legally the same content anywhere else, and Tik Tok would not be under fire if it were not owned by one of a handful of countries.
This just seems trivially obviously not true to me.
The real tragedy is the omission of top TrackPad buttons.

Middle-click paste is widely used in Linux, and while I tried mouse emulators with limited success, it sure is good to have a physical button at your thumb. With a tiling window manager, you can copy (by visual select depending on the application) and paste (middle-click) without ever leaving your home row across multiple windows. This is a serious work flow tool in REPL.

Moreover the new haptic feedback they got on button-less TrackPads have motors etc which are not as reliable as million-click-tested ThinkPads' physical buttons.

Laptops are the tools of our trade, and unfortunately, we cannot make too many compromises, especially for the sake of trendy aesthetics. If ThinkPads want to be MacBooks, then we might as well buy MacBooks; indeed, many of us already do. Almost a decade ago, Lenovo already made a similar mistake with 2nd generation Carbon X1 (and some T series) and they had to revert back. Having a diversity in the market place is important, and I surely hope Lenovo keeps ThinkPads as uniquely performant as they have been since the IBM days.
What's wrong with requiring an account to view some content?

Does everything need to be 100% public?

What if I want to post somewhat private thoughts or images and restrict the content in some manner?
Can you tell more about the Japan thing? It's the first I've heard of it. What kind of content? I can't think of anything political about Japan that's super hard to handle.
> after the democratic party decided that their winning strategy would be to villainize tech and emerging west coast values.

Trump proposed the TikTok ban and even tried to enforce it via executive action during his first term. He also said he would put Zuckerberg in prison and attacked big tech companies for almost a decade at this point. The reason Silicon Valley is aligning themselves with Trump’s administration is for strategic reasons. If there are any ideological reasons I doubt these would stand the test of pendulum shifts.

Republican speaker Johnson also still wants to enforce the ban and only considers Trump’s interference as a delay to have TikTok sold to a US entity (which the bill explicitly allows as an alternative): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-johnson-2-...