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Comment by KnuthIsGod | Hacker News Reader

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KnuthIsGod

How long before they come for Hacker News ?

Folks, it is now time to delete anything you posted here that might be construed as remotely critical of ICE or Trump.

A court order will not help you if ICE have already shot you dead.

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Or, adjust your priorities and resist more. Authoritarians win when people let them.

Plus in Nov or 2026, get out and vote, no matter how hard it is to get to the polls. This happened because people sat on their behinds and did nothing in Nov 2024,

Nah. People who sit on social media would rather stand on street corners and yell at people.

If someone is motivated enough to attend protests, they're motivated enough to go vote.

Many of the people who go to protests have lost their right to vote.

Not sure what that means. Mostly ordinary citizens go to protests. Not aware of any group paying felons to protest. Speaking of, is Trump allowed to vote?

Attending public (peaceful) protest is valuable. It shows that people with that view point (whatever it is) are not alone. It encourages more people to get involved.

Won't matter. Donny put the epstein files out, redacted, to remind every single influential person in the blast radius that unless he keeps holding the redaction pen, all their lives will be over.

One thing to consider: it’s clear he was very widely connected in American elite circles. It’s likely that almost all prominent people (in finance, business, the arts, science, government, etc) all came across him. We know he worked pretty hard to get intertwined with everyone he could.

And yet, although the list of his connections is large, it’s very far from most of these people. It seems plenty of people saw him for who he was and steered clear.

And, try to talk to people who don't agree with you. Have an open mind, listen, avoid being judgmental and critical. It's not easy, but you can change minds.

Indeed. We're not too far from "I am Spartacus."

I think it's prudent to both resist and to protect yourself.

Let ‘em come. Even if I could delete my posts (you can’t, BTW), I’m not deleting shit. And I’m sure not obeying in advance.

I don’t think we should preemptively surrender our free speech to the authoritarians.

I hope that this is hyperbolic satire and not a genuine viewpoint because it is incredibly unrealistic to the point of being almost fantastical. The US government aren't going to "go after" or interfere with Hacker News at any time in the future unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism (which it shouldn't become anyway).

unless it suddenly, inexplicably becomes a popular hotbed of political activism

That's the thing about AI and scale. You don't have to only target the big fish. You can cast a wide net and scoop up data on people in every nook and cranny of the internet.

The concentration camps were loaded with people who thought their town was too small for the Nazis to bother with.

You don’t even need AI, just data brokers. And no warrant needed, only cash.

Why do you think these folks operate in a rational and proportional manner?

All it takes is one "wrong" thing to go viral and anybody goes in the retribution list.

Wrong. They are kidnapping American citizens and exiling them. They’re imprisoning people that criticize the government.

It’s a totalitarian regime. With enough time, will come after all dissenters.

> popular hotbed of political activism

First, it is unbelievably illegal for the government to do this.

Second, pain is their objective. Republicans have had no principles since they elected Trump in 2016. Their only objective is to hurt whomever they consider the enemy.

And everyone that isn’t screaming “I love the orange dictator!” is an enemy.

It is highly illegal - unconstitutional - for them to go after HN, even if it becomes a popular hotbed of political activism.

/me waves hands around wildly

This admin is constantly doing illegal things and when challenged in court has over a 70% loss rate.

I want the government to know how i feel. I want them to see my posts and comments. If this anonymous surveilance without warrants is the only way to be acknowledged then thats a form of protest to me and it has made me want to be more outspoken knowing we are all being watched. Fuck ice.

To all the replies herein:

Dang - I haven't read that kind of hacker attitude anywhere, even here, in a long time ya'll. I ain't kiddin', I got a little weepy.

I don't know what the rally cry of hackers would be, but Atari 800, assembly code, and solder smoke for all!

This is known as a "chilling effect".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

I swear many years ago you could delete old posts but not any longer. About all you can do now is do something so egregious that they delete your account.

Even if you could delete comments, in this day and age it's not a real deletion. They'd just put a "deleted" flag on the comment in the DB.

And there's a bunch of full scrapes of HN around anyway.

There's likely many iterations of HN comment datasets out there from "show hn: I scraped everyone's comments for my comp sci/big data class" over the years.

You can do it just you have to email dang directly about it. Pretty stupid system.

Pretty sure they only change the username to something anonymous though, and remove any PII in comments you've written, right? They won't delete the comments themselves AFAIK.

Archive.org probably already has it anyway.

That’s actually how I got my Facebook deleted in 2015, and it appears I am still banned. I posted a picture, from behind, of a cowboy wearing only chaps. I tried to join again around 2022 to sell some stuff and they rejected me.

Probably the best move I made for my mental health tbh.

You've always been able to delete for 2 hours and then the post becomes effectively permanent, modulo emailing dang to get it deleted by an admin.

Have they stated the justification for this anywhere? You'd think a site that brands itself as being for hackers would value its users having control over their comments/privacy.

There's value in editing for clarity within a window of a live discussion. After the live discussion is less active, it's important to be able to reference things or see a coherent view of the discussion and what people were responding to.

Yes, it's because the comments create a discussion thread that then becomes impossible to follow (or worse, misleading) if certain comments within it are either deleted or edited to say something different. The idea is that what you write becomes communal property once it's been responded to, because it's part of a community discussion that loses meaning if people start deleting individual comments.

I believe that, even within that two hour window, you cannot delete if anyone has replied to it.

You can still edit it to say "[deleted]" or something, though.

The HN email address takes personal requests for comment deletion.

Let them come for us. If it comes to that, trolling social media to arrest american citizens en masse, people are going to be forming militias and I'll join up the local outfit. I don't care anymore. I'm ready to take a stand if it comes to it and take back our country and I'm sure I'm not alone on that either.

I feel like this is the inevitable end result. Ironic that we’ll finally get well-regulated militias.

ICE and CBP are building a lot of concentration camps. Clearly, they are planning to fill them.

They have a limited amount of power to suppress opinion even with their powerful tools and thugs. Their method is to go after big platforms and prominent individuals. If you keep speaking up anyway, it will overwhelm them.

Okay you go ahead and give in I'm gonna not though

The HN owners have virtually unlimited funds to pay tribute to dear leader and zero morals, so this is not a real possibility.

> Folks, it is now time to delete anything you posted here

It's too late. Multiple copies of all the posts exist already.

Man, they can fucking blow me.

If you start censoring yourself because of potential consequences, you’re complicit.

Sooner a dead lion than some kind of shabby boot-donkey.

Fearing the consequences doesn't make you a complicit but a victim. Sure there will be people who will take a more brave/difficult stance, but can't blame others for not doing so, we don't know they'd put at stake.

You can be both complicit and a victim.

For the record: FUCK ICE, bunch of pseudo-fascist thugs, or paid off mercenaries. Wankers, the lot of em.

You can't delete comments here. It's why I've only ever made anonymous throwaway posts or comments.

But in this specific case I do not agree with complying with this bullshit in advance.

If Trump's going to throw me in his El Salvador gulag for being a deep state Soros-backed neoliberal globalist shill on HN, I'm going to make sure somebody in his regime at least has to read my bullshit first.

Preach comrade. And I want them to reflect on how they're protecting the Epstein Class while going after free speech.

Sorry. No. I'm not going to get pushed around by a bunch of bootlickers.

One day redhat is going to grease Trump's pole with enough cash, and King Donald is going to send a member of his tribal-tattooed, part-time MAGA influencer burgerwaffen to pull-up the black van and take you under cover of night for posting wrongthink about wayland & systemd.

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