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Here's one example, directly from the current HN frontpage:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26306020

In that instance, the canceled person was one of the United States' top reporters on the COVID pandemic.

China has forcibly implemented strict birth control policy for decades. They're also forcibly sterilizing ethnic minority populations, Uyghurs in particular:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/china-xin...

> The real problem isn't technology or even adoption, it's that people who work at giant companies suck at making games.

Many companies besides Facebook have developed games for the Quest. I guess you could say Facebook sucks at working with game developers, but I’m not sure if that’s true either. Unreal and Unity have well-developed integrations with Oculus [0].

I think where Facebook really falls down is tying customers’ FB account to their Oculus Store purchases (and ability to use the Quest at all). They’re applying a social media platform’s aggressive algorithms to suspend or ban accounts which violate their expansive TOS, which is wrong in consumer product and digital marketplace space. For that reason, mixed with personal experience at the hands of Facebook's algorithms, I have no interest in developing for Oculus.

[0] https://developer.oculus.com/get-started/

Having owned every Oculus headset since the Kickstarter, I think the Quest is the first truly consumer-ready VR headset. At $300 it’s competitively priced against gaming consoles, without requiring a gaming PC or separate tracking sensors. It has a healthy library of games, 6DOF position tracking, and hand-tracking controllers with excellent haptics.

I was tremendously excited about it, to include messing around with VR development in my spare time, until the Facebook account debacle dropped my enthusiasm to zero. I’ve used my Quest maybe twice since my account got caught up in all that. I have no plans to develop any software for such a closed platform with arbitrary gatekeeping.

In a similar vein, George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate - today privately owned and operated as a living history museum - has an excellent series of exhibits which puts names and stories to the Washington family’s enslaved servants and laborers:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/groundbreaking-exhibi...

The re-enactors are all fantastic and very knowledgeable. It’s unsettling talking to a black re-enactor who’s firmly in-character as a slave, which I suppose is the point:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MVFdsqQby9o

One of many reasons I’ve stuck with the default “Mail” app on iOS. Labeling, attachments, search, etc. all work fine. I manage my filters (an infrequent task) through the desktop web interface. The Mail app UI hasn’t changed much in the last ten years.

If Google ever breaks plain old IMAP support, I’ll complete my migration to Fastmail.

>Our privacy is eroding. [...] The war is not lost, however.

Steven Rambam would probably disagree. He's a private investigator who's given many excellent talks on privacy at Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHwl6AyL6js&t=10m20s

He goes into exquisite detail on the ways in which private info is shared, sold, amalgamated, and analyzed by private and public entities, and how law enforcement uses (and abuses) these resources. That particular talk is from 2016, so things are probably even worse now.

Sad but not surprising that Amazon let Goodreads moulder. They did the exact same thing with Shelfari [0], formerly Goodread's main competitor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelfari#Amazon_and_shutdown

Apologies for pedantry - here is the dictionary definition of "crime":

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crime

>1: an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government

And from the Code of Laws of the United States of America, linked previously:

>Any alien (including an alien crewman) in and admitted to the United States shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed if the alien is within one or more of the following classes of deportable aliens:

>(1) Inadmissible at time of entry or of adjustment of status or violates status [...]

To reside in the U.S. illegally is prohibited by law, and the government shall punish you with removal to your country of origin. In other words, residing in the U.S. illegally is a crime.

EDIT: Downvotes because I'm mistaken, or because you don't like the U.S. Code? If the above analysis is wrong, please correct it.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952

https://www.uscis.gov/laws-and-policy/legislation/immigratio...

Specifically:

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:8%20section:1...

See language regarding “adjustment of status” and “present in violation of law.” As enforced via:

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

Despite the downvotes you’ve received, you are correct. The under-reporting of crime among illegal immigrant communities for the reason you identify has been studied and documented:

https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/10306/silence-of-the-inn...

Since most victims of violent crime know their attacker [0], this may imply an under-reporting of crime committed by members of the undocumented community as well.

[0] https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2016/08/06/americans-most...

Indeed, this effect has been studied and documented:

https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/10306/silence-of-the-inn...

Per the study, crime among an illegal immigrant population fell post-amnesty in repose to increased crime reporting. Conversely, this implies that when members of a community report crime less often as a result of their immigration status - which the study finds to be the case - crime in those communities is higher than it would be otherwise.

The statement

>But at least two independent studies suggest Secure Communities didn’t have any effect on crime rates, according to Light, despite deporting more than 200,000 people in its first four years.

>“If the plan was to make communities safer, to reduce the likelihood of, say, a felony violent assault in these communities through deportation, it did not deliver on that promise,” Light says

would seem to contradict

>“They have a tremendous incentive to avoid criminal wrongdoing. The greatest fear among undocumented immigrants is getting in legal trouble that leads to deportation,” says Light

That incentive exists because the law is enforced. If the law were not enforced, the incentive would disappear and crime would increase. QED the Secure Communities program prevents crime.

Am I missing something?

I tend to agree with the selected Cory Doctorow quote. “Put a tag on it” is the semantic web version of IoT’s “put a chip in it” - technically feasible, yes, but to what end all that time and expense? The author here is fuzzy on applications. Feels like a solution looking for a problem.

When it comes to augmenting digital assistants like Alexa or OK Google, standalone semantic knowledge bases like Wikidata [0] seem good enough. And as natural language understanding code gets better at interpreting user queries, so too does it get better at ingesting unstructured knowledge, such as raw Wikipedia articles, without need to resort to structured meta-tags.

[0] https://wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

Pepe emotes on Twitch are omnipresent, and have no political connotation.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-mea...

edit: Downvotes, really? I'm not wrong. Read the link, or use Twitch chat for yourself, as I do on a semi-daily basis.

While there are concerning similarities, Google backed off from their “real names” policy years ago. Facebook continues to enforce such a policy despite its much-noted dangers and disparities [0], while also more aggressively (compared to Google) banning users for having multiple accounts, making posts Facebook doesn’t like, or not behaving like a “real user” according to their entirely opaque algorithms.

In my direct personal experience as an Oculus/Facebook/Google account-holder, Facebook’s polices have had a much larger negative impact on consumers. I’m glad they are the (first) target of this probe.

[0] https://boingboing.net/tag/real-names

> It can still be used with the link cable to a computer

Can it? Doesn’t Oculus Link only work via the Oculus desktop application, which also requires sign-in?

Sounds like the slamhound from William Gibson's "Count Zero."

https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Slamhound

How is r/wallstreetbets toxic? As someone who doesn’t day-trade, I still subscribe for the memes and self-aware jokes. It’s one of the few remaining large subreddits with tons of creative energy and no drama or politics.

And as someone who doesn’t day-trade, the “loss porn” regularly posted to r/wallstreetbets has firmly convinced me to stick with index funds.

What are some good alternatives for native, cross-platform GUI applications? Qt used to be my preferred solution.

Continuation of the Oculus/Facebook account linking saga:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030454

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776748

One comment on the OP describes buying multiple Quests to give as gifts, creating authentic accounts for the intended recipients with their consent and real information, and watching 2 of the 3 accounts get banned within days:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/k8fjii/the_ocu...

Similar story two years back involving Senator Feinstein:

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/08/01/details-chinese...

>Another flaw of our thinking is conservatism — an insufficient ability to change our common views and beliefs with the new data, new evidence. This is understandable — changing basis views leads to a reconsideration of all related knowledge. An enormous amount of rebuilding is required. Our biological brains just can’t do that in a short time, also it’s much harder with age. Because of this, we give much more weight to old knowledge rather than new evidence, thus making a conservatism bias.

Painting conservatism as purely a human flaw is poor thinking in itself. The positive side of conservative thinking was neatly summarized by G.K. Chesterton: "Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place."

There may be things you don't know, or which have never been known, which the conservative solution to a problem addresses either by accident or design. For examples, see traditional methods of food preparation. Indigenous peoples in South America have passed down numerous traditional recipes for the cassava plant. Every recipe involves a process to remove cyanogenic glycosides [0], which are present in all parts of the cassava plant and lethal if ingested. These recipes were developed without any modern understanding of chemistry or toxicology. Deviation from the old recipes without this knowledge, e.g. to apply a new time-saving cooking technique, could have disastrous consequences. Old knowledge often runs deep.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/jun/22/cassava...

I was also very cautious when given opioids after my wisdom teeth extraction. As it turned out they gave me painful, uncontrollable hiccups that persisted for days and days. The experience was extremely unpleasant, but also a bit of a relief, as I knew there was no chance I'd keep taking those pills post-recovery. I learned later that opioid-induced hiccups are rare, but not totally unheard of:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10202603/

I wouldn’t say _complete_ absence. Greek Hoplites are thought to have fought semi-nude with e.g. linen or leather cuirasses, and were depicted as fighting fully nude in the art of their day.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/10260/is-it-true...

I had thought it was Tim Chevalier, who was indeed fired in connection to events surrounding the Damore memo, but a quick Google shows I have a faulty memory. Apparently he was fired for anti-Damore social media posts rather than leaking the memo in the first place. I have amended my original comment.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/22/lawsuit-...

I was reminded of their continued existence earlier this year when, in a strange reversal of fate, a Pinkerton shot and killed a pro-law enforcement protestor:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/15/matthew-dol...

False positives could lead to wrongful arrests.

Damore kept his memo internal and did not circulate it widely. (It was leaked to the public in a calculated attempt to pressure Google into firing Damore.)

As recently as last week, while she was still a Google employee, Gebru publicly accused her “privileged White men” bosses of racial bias:

>Nothing like a bunch of privileged White men trying to squash research by marginalized communities for marginalized communities by ordering them to STOP with ZERO conversation. The amount of disrespect is incredible. Every time I think about it my blood starts boiling again.

https://mobile.twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/13317576299961...

>But they are doing exactly the job of squashing marginalized people's voices which is their job. I at least hope no one tries to talk DEI and other things

https://mobile.twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/13317729006936...

“Opinions my own” in her Twitter bio or not, as a manager, she should know better than to publicly accuse coworkers of bias against members of a protected class, particularly if she’s unwilling to make those same accusations in court. Public statements like that can lead to serious legal consequences for the company, not to mention repetutational damage for the accused, and should not be made lightly or without evidence.

>In the first phase of the project, which was announced internally to a small group in October, engineers said they had changed the company’s systems to deprioritize policing contemptuous comments about “Whites,” “men” and “Americans.” Facebook still considers such attacks to be hate speech, and users can still report it to the company. However, the company’s technology now treats them as “low-sensitivity” — or less likely to be harmful — so that they are no longer automatically deleted by the company’s algorithms.

If you want to destroy a multi-racial democracy, alienating and scapegoating its largest, poorest (in absolute population terms [0][1][2]), and most well-armed ethnicity during a period of economic instability seems like a great approach.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+impoverished+black+...

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+impoverished+hispan...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+impoverished+whites...