Hacker News Reader

A_COMPUTERon A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

Periscope is pretty awesome, I watch livestreams of protests, get realtime info on events. What's funny is how often you see something as it's happening, then later when "witnesses" are interviewed about it, how often they straight up lie. I'll take the video.

A_COMPUTERon A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

It's pretty simple, we moved left too fast for even many on the American left, and there was a backlash. Most people want to do the right thing, and the left's brand is "nice for people" but past a certain point people need to have some social, political and economic stability and the changes just came too fast and hard for that.

I was a straight-up supporter of Occupy Wall Street. I know a lot of people who were. We all changed.

A_COMPUTERon A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

The alt-right is as much a reaction to a complacent, consistently-losing right wing establishment as it is to the rapid leftward shift of american politics in the last 13 or so years.

A_COMPUTERon A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

By the way, many campus sexual assault protests are very political, the ones that demand removing presumption of innocence, both at the university policy and even at the legal level. That is just about as political as you can get.

A_COMPUTERon A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

>this has been a conservative talking point for a long time.

It was addressing the exact ideology and behavior that is coming into fruition now, and we should have listened. In the early 90s people watched as the fringe slowly leaked out into the mainstream, and now it's fully into the mainstream. Example: the only acceptable feminist in public discourse is now the radfem (google the term if you think I'm using an epithet)--if you deny patriarchy as an omnipresent and nearly omnipotent, incorporeal force, you don't have a seat at the table. Another example: privilege theory, the "invisible knapsack" is a concept invented in the 90's, and while it has an academic basis, and functions as a motte-and-bailey argument in almost every use.

The ratio of college campus hate hoaxes to actual hate has got to be sky high. Yes some are real, but they almost never pan out, and the university silently drops agitating about it.

I don't see how you can even say this stuff. This is like the opposite of people who believe in bigfoot and UFOs. We all have cellphones with cameras on them. And so Youtube is filled with insane campus protests, assaults, bizarre seminars and speeches, and yet people deny they exist or have any power.

A_COMPUTERon A short critique of Stallmanism

I think they're working out how they're going to justify what they're going to do with his movement after he's no longer in charge of it. In the last year about three different times I have seen people making the same argument, that free software needs to be understood as part of a broader left wing ideology. It's bullshit and I hope those people lose hard.

A_COMPUTERon An Open Letter to My Boss, IBM CEO Ms. Ginni Rometty

Do none of these people have an adult in their life to tell them doing this is a terrible idea

A_COMPUTERon Why I don't like smartcards, HSMs, YubiKeys, etc.

Did it get easier recently? I tried getting into this about six years or so ago and found it really hard to get started. Finding appropriate applets (MUSCLE applet I guess was the common crypto one), incompatible cards and readers, etc.

A_COMPUTERon We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

>So, if you start thinking down that line, if someone threatened murder, you’d probably take that off the platform. If someone threatened assault, you’d take that off. But if a presidential candidate threatens to imprison an entire religious minority[...]

It's easy to see what he's referring to here, and thus, he demonstrates that he's captured by fake news as well, and doesn't even recognize it. Half-truths or intentional misreading of things Trump has said are bread and butter of the left wing's fake news organizations.

As a side note, he succinctly explains with what is wrong with a coincident push by the same people, banning of certain viewpoints off Twitter. Oh well it's a private company, and they can run it how they want! Your free speech is not being violated. But as he just admits, these private entities are extremely powerful brokers of speech, and what they decide stays and goes has a very large impact on society. But, consistency is not the strong suit of these people. It is entirely whatever argument works at the time.

A_COMPUTERon We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

He is doing the same thing to NPR, and by extension NPR's listeners, what he was doing to low-info right-wingers: telling them what they wanted to hear, whether or not it's true. He's good at it.

He wants you to believe that he tried, but he just couldn't get the left wing to fall for it. But anybody who has used Facebook as seen how popular AddictingInfo-org is, and it is an overtly left wing fake news site. It's not remotely the only one.

The fake news reporting is itself filled with fake news. And it's easy to find marks because after the election, many people need to find a scapegoat so they are turning off their critical faculties. The current complaining about fake news is a mirror image of the right's disrespect of the "mainstream" media. For instance all the reporting on the Trump-Russia covert email server communication matches the formula for fake news, it took a nugget of truth, twisted it, and tried to ride the lie long enough that by the time it was exposed as nothing, the election would be over and the "damage" done. But it wasn't fake news I guess because the outlet has to be small and the target and victim were reversed. Anybody looking at that should reasonably be upset about "fake news" but it's categorically ignored by the left. You are not inhumanly wise and immune to the effects of incentivized bias.

A_COMPUTERon We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

An observation on the right is that any organization that is not explicitly right wing will over time drift into being left wing. I think it's correct.

A_COMPUTERon Linus Torvalds still wants Linux to take over the desktop

Almost all the constant complaints I see fall into a couple categories:

1. forced reduced-functionality or questionable UI choices on a project 2. imported the buggy, unexpected behavior of previous Windows releases into the Linux world.

I also think it is a conflict inside a changing culture surrounding Linux.

A_COMPUTERon As Japan's population shrinks, bears and boars roam among schools and shrines

Exclusive homosexuality analogous to human homosexual relationships is rare in nature. There are animals that are extremely promiscuous and have sex with anything else regardless of its sex, and there are animals that form homosexual relationships in the absence of enough sexual partners, and revert to heterosexual behavior when partners become available.

A_COMPUTERon Top White House Economist Dismisses the Idea of a Universal Basic Income

Mincome is not compatible with businesses and political parties that rely on an endless stream of low-skilled immigration.

A_COMPUTERon Top White House Economist Dismisses the Idea of a Universal Basic Income

That didn't sound like a Sarah Palin speech, not even remotely. What it sounded to me like was Richard Nixon, who proposed a similar thing for similar reasons, but couldn't get the proposal past the Senate:

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-richard-nixon-almost-gav...

Why didn't it happen, in the words of Canadian Professor Eveyln Forget (of the University of Manitoba, Canada) “The political right is afraid people will stop working and the left doesn't trust them to make their own choices.”

A_COMPUTERon Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

Honeywell stated a couple things that clearly violate consent, and could reasonably be described as rising to the level of legally actionable. I was very critical of some of the weak discounting of the possibility of JTRIG-style character attacks, but when notable, reputable people in the community come forward with specific relevant first-person claims, I believe it's important to take it more seriously.

A_COMPUTERon Tor Project Statement on Jacob Appelbaum

https://motherboard.vice.com/blog/jacob-appelbaum-utopia-int...

>in the US, I’m fairly certain I’ve had a black bag job on my apartment, my mother was arrested and jailed supposedly for unrelated charges, and – at at least two points – interrogated about my role in WikiLeaks. I’m fairly certain that my partner woke up with night vision goggles pointed at her by unknown parties outside her house. And here in Berlin I’m certain there’s a similar amount of spying, but I don’t feel it in the same way. It’s the ability even for a moment to imagine that I’m not basically treated like an enemy of the state or a dissident of some kind; I couldn’t really pretend that in the United States.

http://www.dw.com/en/snowden-ally-appelbaum-claims-his-berli...

Here he talks about it explicitly in testimony to the European Parliament. Maybe you should watch this whole thing where he talks about what he knows about his own surveillance because of mistaken lack of redactions in government documents:

https://youtu.be/SdLKje1IydQ?t=1667

You say that the vast majority of security people are not being targeted severely by the government, so it's statistically very unlikely that a sex abuse claim against Appelbaum, along with a coordinated PR attack by "the victims" (which is an explicitly documented method used to discredit people, per the Snowden leaks) is a government operation to discredit him. I say the statistics do not matter, because there is sufficient evidence that HE SPECIFICALLY IS TARGETED. Therefore you CANNOT simply wave off the possibility.

A_COMPUTERon Tor Project Statement on Jacob Appelbaum

I just read your comment again, and you're lying. "Tricked by an obvious parody article." That's compatible with "stupid" but not with "uninformed". You were also being a smartass about it, which is rude.

A_COMPUTERon Tor Project Statement on Jacob Appelbaum

How many of those people left the country permanently because of constant harassment by government agents? How many lost their girlfriend when she got freaked out because a guy with night vision goggles was spying into their apartment in the middle of the night? You're writing this off like it's a simple statistical unlikelyhood without making any consideration into specifically what has happened to Appelbaum before.

I'm not even defending him, I just think you're doing a crap job of dismissing the concern.

A_COMPUTERon Tor Project Statement on Jacob Appelbaum

Why don't you just openly call him stupid since that's what you're implying, or just not post at all if you can't refrain from doing so.

A_COMPUTERon Ex-Reddit exec launches 'Imzy,' a warmer, fuzzier Reddit

I'm legitimately sorry for singling you out, in isolation it's not that big of a deal at all, sites can try different things and that's great. My complaint is more that this seems to be happening a lot lately, and there is already a pervasive criticism that "safe spaces" (which in principle I approve of) are infantilizing people (I think they often do.) If it's just a fun theme, that's cool.

A_COMPUTERon Nazi Propaganda: Out of the Cage

Generally nobody has to be reminded that many on the right aren't fans of free speech. But people have to be constantly reminded that there are people on the left that aren't fans of free speech.

A_COMPUTERon Nazi Propaganda: Out of the Cage

You're not wrong, but you've got a political blind spot if you don't think there are people on the left that do the same thing re. repackaging and resubmitting ideas, or if you don't see the contingent of the left that is against free speech.

A_COMPUTERon Ex-Reddit exec launches 'Imzy,' a warmer, fuzzier Reddit

I don't know how to phrase this in an HN-approved positive way, but I think it needs to be said: the graphics are disturbingly infantilizing if this site is supposed to be for anyone over the age of 9.

A_COMPUTERon A phony STEM shortage and the scandal of engineering visas

Why do you discriminate against other kids by only feeding your kids

A_COMPUTERon Facebook Begins Campaign to Purge Europe of Xenophobic, Extremist Posts

I don't believe that restricting free flow of ideas is compatible with an ostensibly democratic government. So it is more like, I consider it an unfortunate side-effect of freedom that people can say things I find of negative value.

A_COMPUTERon Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

This story reminds me of many interactions I had with Japanese as a lost and confused foreigner in Japanese cities big and small.

A_COMPUTERon Amiga OS Kickstart and Workbench source coded leaked

I personally saw an Amiga still in use in a public access studio in 2005. It was being used to show announcements. The function of it today could be trivially replaced with a raspberry pi and a bit of custom software, but I can say that the reason it was still in operation in 2005 was because it was set up by an employee in 1990's who had since moved on and there was no longer anyone with sufficient knowledge/motivation to replace it.

A_COMPUTERon Men’s Locker Room Designers Take Pity on Naked Millennials

The article didn't mention that this is also being done to short-circuit the overwhelming opposition (using nakedness as a wedge) to trans-people in locker rooms of their identified gender.

A_COMPUTERon French PM rules out ban on public Wi-Fi and Tor

If only crypto users were as vocal and organized as gun owners. We could call our organization the National Rijndael Association.