Orou

HNers: Are you anticipating any sort of 'pendulum effect' where we over-correct for our present situation in the new Democratic executive and legislature, specifically in the area of surveillance and privacy?

What changes do you expect to have happen in the next year or two in this area? Are you taking any steps regarding your own privacy based on your predictions?

That's true, but it had nothing to do with violence.

I see these reddit bans referenced every now and then as evidence that censorship works. I think it's important to emphasize these bans are not evidence they shutting down communities changed participants' minds about anything. Further, the paper states that "The empirical work in this paper suggests that when narrowly applied to small, specific groups, banning deviant hate groups can work to reduce and contain the behavior." Trump supporters are not a small group of people and they don't have a single 'meeting point' on the internet that can be banned to break them up.

Let's just be careful about comparing strategies used to target niche internet hate groups with tens of millions of Trump supporters.

I'm a relative newcomer to the world of DIY computing. I had always been a Windows user growing up, didn't know how to program, and didn't know what open source was. It wasn't until 2016 when I watched Snowden that I became extremely conscious about taking control of my own devices, but it required a lot of time and effort to even know where to start.

I installed Arch Linux and had to learn everything from scratch. I didn't know anything about UNIX, security, config files, environmental variables, compiling code, git, terminals, window managers, ssh, bash scripting, user groups, access control, boot options, or anything else. I wouldn't trade the time I've invested in learning how to operate and customize an open system, but the amount of upfront effort is very intimidating. I can say with confidence that if I hadn't simultaneously developed an obsession with programming that I would have very quickly given up.

> The system came with a reasonable set of defaults and when or if they grew more proficient and wanted to change something about their daily working environment, they had the option to do so.

This is the root of the issue in my mind, what are the 'sane defaults' for a UNIX system to someone completely uninitiated in how software works? There's so much 'don't know what you don't know' for people that only knew Windows and Mac growing up. I can't imagine anyone that doesn't work with computers professionally or as a hobbyist ever thinking that spending years learning open systems is worth the opportunity cost of the other things they could be doing with their lives.

Over what time frame? A year? Sure. But three years? Five? Ten? It's simply not sustainable for 95% of people. And it's unrealistic to hold everyone else to the standard of that 5% who are 1) naturally hyper-productive or 2) have little else going on in their lives.

The cynic in me wonders if the attempt to turn overwork into a virtue is just to keep people busy enough that they don't stop to wonder what it's all for in the end. Somehow everyone seems to have forgotten that the economy should exist to serve people, not people serving the economy.

> you have resigned to believe the corporate/government spin on everything

The point of not reading regular news is for it to filter out what you hear about, not the specifics of those things. It's hard to put a spin on basic facts like "there was a shooting" or "there was a plane crash". If it's important enough for me to hear about it, I can then decide if it's important enough to warrant actually researching the details of independently.

There are some more niche topics that I maintain an active interest in. Outside of that, I don't see the point in trying to be "informed" about every last thing on the face of the earth.

How something functions is more important that how it is implemented.

I'll take a stateful app that doesn't break history over a stateless app that does any day of the week.

Agreed, it's a neat little app but having URL parameters work like this is very anti-user.

Data is not meaningful in and of itself. What matters is what that data signifies, i.e. how it changes the reader's understanding of the world.

It doesn't matter if the data is made up if what it signifies is complete nonsense anyway. If their goal was to commit fraud they would obfuscate their deceit, not make it a google search away from clearly being a hoax. Your definition of fraud is so broad that it removes any responsibility of due diligence from the reader, which is the entire point of having a peer review process in the first place.

Software has an increasingly large impact on people's lives - including their safety. Consider [ransom attacks on hospitals](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/hamst...) as just one example. Even ignoring bad actors, people have made billion-dollar mistakes in Excel (there was even a recent article about how contact-tracing data being handled in Excel was lost. That can lead to real deaths, too).

No-code is great when it improves someone's ability to complete a task. Excel is still a great program, and learning VBA was my first introduction to programming. What isn't great is when companies lean on low/no-code solutions because they want to be cheap rather than do things properly.

For clarity, the printing press was for books. Newspapers did not come along until much later.

Interestingly, the Catholic church was very concerned about the ability to mass produce literature and wanted to have control over what could be published. They didn't want just anyone to be able to publish a book. Imagine giving people a platform to speak out against the Church!

> We also have the recent opioids crisis. It didn't work out very well.

The opioid crisis has been terrible, but it didn't happen as a result of drug laws becoming more lax. If anything, existing laws made the crisis much worse because people who became addicted to prescription opioids had no way to get a fix, so they were forced to purchase illegally off the street. If an American doctor knowingly gave an addict a prescription opioid for relief, they could be arrested as a "dealer".

The countries that have had the most success in fighting hard drug use, such as Portugal, did exactly the opposite of the punitive approach people in the U.S. consistently advocate for. Instead, they decriminalized drugs and put the resources from police enforcement and imprisonment into rehabilitation instead. Instead of arresting doctors, safe injection sites allowed for individuals to safely manage their habit while they work toward improving their lives.

If the U.S. spent even a fraction of its war on drugs budget on rehabilitation we would have far fewer addicts, not more. I don't think the "if it's legal, there will be more addicts" argument holds any water.

I'm familiar with the Stamp Act - which I think reinforces my point because it was about direct taxation on the colonies. Even indirect taxation, e.g. on paper, tea, and glass through the Townshend Acts led to violent confrontation, infamously the Boston Massacre.

The point I am making is that the primary instigator for the war was not "we can't legally trade with the Dutch/French/whomever", which is the monopolistic cornerstone of mercantilism. I'm curious if you consider taxation to be a mercantilist policy.

> This is largely what prompted the American Revolution

The American Revolution was much more about representation and the rights that British Parliament held (or, from the American perspective, didn't hold) over the colonies. The primary effect of mercantilism is exclusive trading agreements with the ruling empire, which was not being argued against by the colonials. It even says as much in the paragraph you linked:

"However, the colonists took pains to argue that they did not oppose British regulation of their external trade; they only opposed legislation which affected them internally."

It's not an equal comparison to China and the Opium Wars.

Most people drink coffee blends rather than single-origin. And in the U.S. at least dark roast coffee is very popular. Once the beans have been roasted that much the subtler coffee flavors are going to mostly disappear and it won't matter what sort of coffee it is.

How coffee is prepared generally has a much greater impact on flavor than the varietal - when very lightly roasted it has a flavor profile closer to a tea than what we generally think of as coffee.

Most people are unfamiliar with existing diversity of coffees from around the world. A lot of that is due to the economics of the coffee industry and the desire for consistency in flavor. Sure, maybe we could add more genetic diversity, but it's unlikely to change how the coffee you'd buy at the supermarket or a cafe chain will taste.

Where did they say something was wrong with Sweden's approach?

> These were interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people

> there is really an underlying snobbery about it

These contrast very interestingly, but I think it's missing an important point. The early internet was characterized by complete freedom of association. You could talk about whatever, with whomever. If enough people shared an interest, a community could form.

The problem with the modern internet isn't that the filthy plebs are using it - it's that all of the content suggestion algorithms, clickbait articles, and advertising are designed for maximum engagement. It's no longer what groups of "interesting, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and passionate people" collectively put forward, without an ulterior financial incentive, that determines what content people see. I think that's the ultimate issue - it's not that low quality content proliferates, it's that there are few if any ways of finding high-quality content among all the crap.

It's one of the main reasons I read Hacker News - it's an excellent content filter.

I'm curious at what point an organism is considered to be capable of thought. From a mechanistic standpoint, it seems like the goal-seeking behavior of a simple organism could be modeled as a gradient ascent toward a local optima. But even complex organisms are still seeking certain conditions to maximize their ability to survive and reproduce. Is the existence of a brain enough for a creature to be considered capable of thought? How complex does an organism have to be before we no longer think of it as being a biological "machine"?

Or do we simply fall into the trap the GP described, where once something is complex enough that we don't understand what is going on from a purely mechanical perspective we consider it close enough to human to empathize with it?

The article states that the Republican Party is pro-nuclear and anti-government, and the Democratic Party was anti-nuclear and pro-government.

While it seems from the headline that both parties are now pro-nuclear, it is unclear how that will play out at a policy level. Based on the quoted stance of being "technologically-neutral", it may well be the case that Democrats still won't support nuclear power, not because they are against it as a rule but because they see solar and wind as being superior alternatives.

It's probably a combination of hopeful optimism and financial desperation. It's too early to know for sure, but I bet a lot of small, private colleges are hurting and need to do everything they can to have students on campus. Students not paying for housing, meal plans, etc. is a big deal.

> The argument I would make is not about censorship but preventing people from spreading lies.

Limiting speech is by definition censorship. There's no value judgement required as to the quality or veracity of that speech to determine whether or not restricting it counts as censorship.

> the freedom of speech in the US is strongly correlated with conspiracy theories

...and water is highly correlated with drowning. We don't say 'water bad, less water'. Just because one thing is a prerequisite for something else doesn't mean it is responsible for that other thing. We have to look to, like you point out, the political climate, as well as the lack of trust in institutions, the education system, and many other factors. Taking a complex issue around how information is shared at an unprecedented speed and scale and saying "just ban it" is, I think, a shallow assessment.

You'd think given the amount of time he's spent working on Coronavirus that he might see the distinction between treating the symptoms and treating the cause, so to speak.

I've yet to see anyone provide any kind of evidence that suggests censorship changes people's minds about conspiracies - if anything it seems to be doing exactly the opposite.

It depends whether or not they are sued in a state where SLAPP suits are legal. If Apple isn't forced to provide compelling evidence that they have an actual case up front, they can tie up their opposition in expensive legal battles long enough that it won't matter whether or not they win the case. Their opposition may be victorious legally, but made bankrupt in the process.

Of all the things the U.S. legal system got wrong, I think not following the English rule of attorneys' fees was one of the biggest mistakes. If plaintiffs had to pay for the defendant's legal fees, and vice versa, should the opposing party win their case, large corporations might think twice about making spurious legal claims.

I actually liked Hipchat. It did what it was supposed to do - provide instant chat with colleagues - without the overhead and frills of Slack. It was simple and reliable. I'm not sure why it was so disliked.

This is a joke, right?

This logic only follows if we assume censorship is applied to everyone, equally, all the time.

Someone saying "hey, look there are a lot of instances of people being censored over there, we should be concerned about it because it could affect us" cannot be refuted on the basis that the speaker isn't being censored.

It's like refuting someone saying that a bunch of people are ill on the basis that the speaker isn't ill themselves. Illness is something that occurs to individuals, not to society. Same with censorship. It isn't some absolute where people are totally censored or totally free to speak their mind. It's distributed unevenly across society. When understood as a distribution rather than something binary, it becomes obvious that instances of free speech about censorship doesn't disprove the existence of censorship, nor does it say anything about whether or not we are becoming a more censorious society.

I'm not sure that's a compelling argument.

In both these cases, individuals are talking about broader societal trends. It's not a contradiction if they aren't talking about their own specific experience (i.e. "I'm silenced, therefore I can't talk, listen to me talk about how silenced I am"). An 18th-century writer discussing sex may contribute to the counter-argument that by virtue of their writing about sex, it isn't as taboo a subject as they imply. But in and of itself, it isn't proof that such a trend does not exist.

>You can see how shaming has helped the cause of open source, black lives matter, pollution...

I think there's a stronger argument to be made that shaming has hurt each of these causes more than it has ever helped. If you want to make people antagonistic towards you, belittling or demonizing them for not holding ${belief} is a great strategy. Public shaming is a threat-by-example to the broader community that certain behaviors and beliefs are forbidden. It doesn't encourage individuals to seek the truth, whatever it is, but to conform to safe beliefs (and if you're playing the status game, evangelizing those beliefs is a great fast-track to power).

Semmelweis may well have succeeded if he hadn't shamed people with an air of absolute certainty (an attitude which seems to be increasingly in-vogue for any kind of popular issue today) but had acknowledged the complexities of the problem and focused on ascertaining the truth.

It depends on which "left" you're talking about - it's not quite so simple. Clinton's 90's administration is frequently (and I would say accurately) described as neoliberal. The democratic party has become much more business and corporate friendly over the past 40 years. I think you'd be right in describing modern-day progressives as the "left" that you are defining here in opposition to neoliberalism. Does that make neoliberalism itself right-wing? Are establishment democrats right-wing if they have adopted neoliberal policies, as many have? Is Clinton now considered to have been a right-wing president by that definition?

I think these are interesting questions to ask now as the left, broadly speaking, doesn't have a strong political identity, with many progressives further left of the democratic party and other disaffected voters leaning libertarian.

The "participatory economy" seems like a gross gamification of online social interaction. It's important that people have aspects of there lives that aren't driven by financial incentives. I would argue that online communities, especially more niche, subscription-based ones, are driven and should be driven primarily by interest. Why do participants need to be "compensated" for their engagement?

> What if instead the community took a portion of the fee stream and distributed it to the members who most positively impacted the community?

I think it's arrogant to think we can develop a reward system that can both accurately match reward to real-world impact (how do you even quantify that?) and also avoid the trap of influencing users' behavior toward optimizing their virtual rewards (participatory income?) over engaging with their community authentically.

Subscription-based online platforms like Twitch and Patreon already work, what is the great improvement that a "participatory economy" brings?