SiVal

Then there are others of us who have been saying no to Node and legacy JS for years. We have no such legacy to maintain and no intention of ever creating any. But some of us (at least I) would reconsider platforms built from scratch on a new TypeScript foundation rather than layered on a pre-ES6 foundation. That would include a Deno-based Electron. You might have more luck converting people who don't use Node than getting Node users to abandon their legacy.

The state of cross-platform desktop apps is terrible. All attention is on mobile, and desktop OS makers have almost zero interest in supporting cross-platform desktop apps. (MS cares a little more than zero, Apple less than zero and barely tolerates their own Mac-only developers.) Only something browser/Chromium based seems realistic for the next few years.

On the server, there are a lot of alternatives to Node that are considered better by (and very popular with) large segments of the market. Deno will be one of them, I think. But for cross-platform desktop apps, Electron would be rejected completely if the alternatives weren't so bad and unlikely to get better. A better Electron, despite its inherent problems, could end up more popular than server-side Deno. Just a thought.

Of course it is if Google is one of the sources of propaganda rather than an objective source of truth. In that case "misinformation" is not a neutral question of factual correctness.

When the judge and prosecutor are the same person, the judge considers most of the prosecutor's arguments to be true and the defense to be an unreliable "source of lies" that needs to be kept in line.

Do a search for `American inventors`, and see for yourself. Google will show you that the majority of American inventors throughout history have been African-American. You may be skeptical of Google's claim (disguised as search results), but the next generation, working on their school reports, will see the world as Google wants them to see it. Now imagine how much of what we learn about the reality of current events is coming from the same source with the same agenda and policies regarding narrative vs. reality.

But in case you are thinking of contradicting Google's claims, remember: that's what their campaign against "misinformation" is intended to silence. They are indeed serious about misinformation.

A couple of years ago, when they were testifying to Congress that they did not deliberately distort search results. At the same time, someone else in the organization explained why they deliberately bias results. Oops. I can only guess that it was some underling who, in a sea of leftists back in the office (and probably a few non-leftists who know what would happen if they were outed) took for granted that biasing search results for political objectives was something to be proud of. They didn't realize what their execs knew, that if you're going to distort the truth for a higher objective, you don't admit doing so.

On a Google web page that I can no longer find, they publicly explained (it was public, not an internal page) that search results that improved society were sometimes more important than simply reporting the facts. That must have sounded good to an internal audience, but apparently it had to be reworked into externally calling it a fight against misinformation.

I can create my own question in a way that a specific answer will immediately come to mind if I'm ever asked in the future, without any need to look anything up, and that cannot be answered by googling me. How about if you let me choose the question? "No, we are security experts who have given you three excellent options to choose from. Choose one."

Then you move to another timezone and have to learn the meaning of 3am all over again.

Lots of pain, no net gain.

1) They don't. 94% of rich people surveyed say they hate endurance sports. Or, 2) Because they love all sports. Rich people have time and money for sports. Poor people don't. And endurance sports are sports. Or, 3) They don't. We asked rich people to rank their favorite sports. Endurance sports were scattered randomly in the ranking. Or, 4) They don't. We define how much rich people like each sport by the average income of its participants and found that sailboat racing was most liked by rich people and playing tag on a playground was least liked. Or, 4) We define what rich people like this way: we surveyed one rich group and one poor group and ranked each sport by the percentage difference in participation by rich and poor. We find that the sports rich people like most (surprisingly, more than tennis or golf) are polo, yachting, and big game hunting.

To create the best possible life for humans offworld, we'll need VERY close contact with Earth for a long time. I mean Amazon Prime delivery close. Coming down for family Thanksgiving close. Lots of sharing and experimenting as easily and cheaply as possible. We don't want to have to adapt to the random features of some other natural body that's far away and not very good. We should learn how to build an artificial body that has exactly the features we love and then, when we've learned how to make a great place for humans to live in space, replicate them, which will be easier if the whole thing was man-made to begin with.

My point is the irony of feeling bad and learning a lesson about being completely honest when caught by a master famed for "reality distortion". Reality distortion is almost literally truth stretching. No doubt the master of doing it was a master at detecting it, but that didn't mean he was deeply committed to the truth himself. He was deeply committed to and famously skilled at manipulating but not being manipulated, which is not at all the same thing.

I got to see him behind closed doors in meetings when he was at NeXT. If you want to see Steve Jobs in a private meeting, watch the scene in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin tells the salesmen that they are losers because the Baldwin character drives a more expensive car. Steve literally did that in one meeting, answering a question about why he didn't do such-and-such with a "I drive a Porsche and you drive a General Motors car" as his argument for why his superior wisdom must not be questioned by losers.

I don't mind services that cut price dramatically in exchange for only supporting some (not all) use cases. That can be a very attractive offer, but does Backblaze explicitly position B2 for non-interactive use cases?

"...who's flagging those articles. How do you know that it's Big Tech employees?"

It doesn't matter whether they are employees or not. I'm talking about the subculture of people who dominate the Big Tech companies. When seen from China or India or Middle America, the subculture dominating Big Tech is just as culturally distinct from the rest of humanity as the equally self-reinforcing, compliance-demanding subcultures that dominate Japanese Big Auto makers or the Southern Megachurch industry.

The difference is that Japanese auto makers can only enforce their cultural preferences on their own employees, not on all car drivers. Imagine if Megachurches made so much money that they ended up owning almost all TV & radio, which they then extended to all entertainment: streaming, Hollywood, the news, and used their cultural agenda for "codes of conduct" and "terms of service". Fundamentalist Christians wouldn't have to actually be employees of a Megachurch to participate in the anti-"hate speech" enforcement.

If there were reports of what the Megachurches did in secret, it wouldn't matter whether the Christians who flagged such reports to get them hidden were church employees or not. They would simply be members of the same subculture using the unprecedented powers uniquely available to their group to silence their critics.

If this were a Japanese-language forum for discussion of the auto industry, I would expect it to include an atypically high percentage of people who were members of the salariman subculture. Likewise, if it were God Talk, we would expect an unusually high percentage of people who would flag and treat as flamebait all criticism of megachurches. But it's Hacker News, so it is heavily weighted with people who are fully on board with the Big Tech companies' enforcement and information hiding policies. They are of the same subculture and will cooperate in whatever ways they can.

HN being a worldwide forum thankfully means it is less dominated by that subculture than Big Tech itself, but there is still so much overlap that Big Tech will have as many allies flagging and flaming here (whether employees or not doesn't matter at all) as Big Church would have on a God Talk forum. But unlike other world subcultures, the one that dominates Big Tech has enormous power to promote their social agenda and silence opponents.

So, I think that here on HN, reports that Big Tech would want to hide ought to be regularly in full view and difficult for their allies to constrain.

Many of them and people like them are using the powers of trillion-dollar corporations, Hollywood, mainstream media, agencies like the CIA, universities that are gatekeepers of employment, etc. to aggressively employ the unprecedented powers at their disposal to suppress information that they want to keep hidden. Every time they justify why they do so, "Surely you can't expect us to allow opinions that people like us label as 'misinformation'", they admit that they do so.

And the ultimate irony is that they insist that this biasing of information is necessary because they speak for the voiceless who don't have power. If they are correct, it is the critics of the most powerful organizations in history whose voices actually need to be amplified. If they are incorrect, all voices should be allowed with none allowed to be silenced.

They, not you, will flag any attempt to report on the things they want to hide until your algorithm silences it for them. And they will flame as much as necessary until you learn to treat anything they want to silence as "flamebait". They have endless techniques for limiting the distribution of information that doesn't support them.

I'm just hoping that your policies will not be such that they can silence criticism here, as everywhere else, by flagging and flaming as necessary until your reasonable-sounding "substantive" and "new information" and "no flamebait" and so on are properly trained to self-censor what they don't want people to hear.

If it's not obvious on its own (de)merits, imagine if it had been information that potentially damaging to Trump. Would it have been "written off" at the first suggestion that it might be disinformation or shouted from the rooftops 24/7 every day until the election? That's the difference between reporting it or not based on "disinformation" or not vs. reporting it or not based on whether it would help or hurt the candidate you are campaigning for.

What they intend to get people to think, the means they employ, and the extent to which they do it are fundamental to understanding tech in society. How ironic is it then that every time a report of details and extent of their censorship and hiding is submitted to HN, the same people doing the censoring are allowed to flag the article out of existence on HN, censoring and hiding information about their censoring and hiding of information?

And if the argument is that reports of what Big Tech is doing to bias discussion will "ignite flamewars", well they know that means they can further bias discussion by threatening to rage until potential critics submit and self-censor. Certainly trillion-dollar tech corporations working to control society don't impose upon themselves any need to provide "new information". On the contrary, they repeat claims over and over that would not stand up to evidence, confident that any reports of the evidence can be severely limited and quickly swept from view.

Big Tech has vast power to limit what people find out about in almost every venue. I would love for HN to be an exception where the details that they try to hide are always in full view.

I may be wrong, but I suspect you have that backwards. My guess is that at least older HNers were slower to shift from powerful but complex creation tools (computers) to easy consumption toys (smartphones) designed for consumers who found computers with files and folders just too darned complicated to use. Until good, portable mapping and good-enough cameras came along, I had no use for the "smart" features of a phone that were vastly inferior to the smart features of a real computer. For a long time, all I needed from a phone was the phone, which a small flip phone handled just fine. For anything "smart", I used the laptop & real camera in my backpack.

Whether you choose to avail yourself of such policies or not (including even getting the contract in writing) has no relevance to the legal question of whether a contract was breached.

Having such a limited commenting syntax is like assuming one permanent type of footware and debating which one would be best. I'd much rather have a smarter commenting system.

I'm not talking about supplementary docs stashed elsewhere to gather dust. I'd like to have expandable comments right where they are needed but usable differently for a glance at familiar code or puzzling through unfamiliar code. Something very brief that doesn't clutter the code, a couple of words or no words at all, with an expansion arrow to something more detailed, expanding to something fully documented with links to everything.

And comments with scope (this comment applies to this line, this one to the function, this to a group of functions...) that actively use the scope. By active I mean that if you make any edits to code in the scope of a comment, that comment changes color or some other mechanism similar to a Git merge conflict: You changed the code without changing the comment, so check and make sure the comment says what you want and click OK. You don't have to fix the comments immediately for each edit. Make a few changes, test, make sure it's working, but when it is, you can see at a glance which comments need to be checked.

The general idea is instead of debating The Best Way to Comment, consider ways to improve the commenting system itself.

It may or may not be a crime depending on intent, but a transaction is not the issue. It is breach of contract. Laws obviously vary around the world, but the US Uniform Commercial Code is probably typical. The restaurant has made an offer. The customer has accepted it. There is agreed-to "consideration" (value) to be provided by both sides. If the restaurant does what they said they would do you, having accepted the "offer" by making an order, are bound to do what you said you would do (pay the price that you knew was the price when you accepted the offer.)

Just increase the dollar amounts by a large enough factor, and you'll see it. A company sells widgets. I order a million dollars worth, items that can't simply be put back in stock and resold to others. They make them, but I don't pick them up. I'm not arguing that they didn't do their part by making defective items. I'm (probably) not required to pick them up, but I am required to pay what I agreed. You are saying "no transaction occurred", but that's not at issue. The company will (rightly) sue me for breach of contract.

It's the same for fast food except that the static friction of legal costs vastly overpowers the scale of recovery from the breach of contract for each instance of no-show. But if a single order for $10,000 (catering a company picnic) is not picked up, you get past the friction, and the restaurant will sue for breach of contract.

Fashionable urban types dress up to attend gallery showings at which a bored-looking hipster photographer is displaying his framed images of grainy, empty street scenes of nothing in particular taken from odd angles. Each photo of nothing is a deeply meaningful expression of nihilistic enlightenment or a tour-de-force denunciation of capitalism or materialism or whatever, and if you're sophisticated enough, you can buy one for $10,000.

Hilariously, these captcha images that are just random shots in random directions look just like deliberate dreary, sophisticated, urban expressions of nihilism. But only if you are accustomed to assuming that photos "mean" something, so a photo of nothing must be expressing something: nihilism.

But if you walked down the street and saw most of those scenes, you wouldn't think about it at all. Equivalent, meaningless scenes are around you most of the time, indoors and out. And if you don't unconsciously assume that an image is trying to say something, an image of nothing won't feel depressing at all.

So now a hacker can just claim to have forgotten my password, google for the town I grew up in or mother's maiden name or try a list of the top 100 pet names, and not have to deal with my billion-year clever password at all. So they allow you to harden the front door's security as much as you like but require you to pick one of their six easy-access window designs for the side of the house just in case you (or anyone else) are unable to get through the front door.

I can improve security by providing the wrong answer, but then I'll have to record it and won't remember it if surprised by a challenge (on the phone for example). What I always want is the option to create my own security question, because I can design one that only makes sense to me but that I can reliably answer from memory.