finite_jest

Except that "Read Across America" is Dr. Seuss's birthday, and "Dr. Seuss Day" is the other common name for it? And, what about the rest of the events?

I think you are merely trolling, and not really arguing in good faith. In that case, I'm done replying to you here. Wish you a happy new year, and have no scruples: we all gonna end up loving the Big Brother anyway :-)

That's a fair point. I guess you could try to correct for that by giving more weight to references by non-Christian authors.

However, I believe with almost any reasonable measure you choose, the KJV Bible has a very high literary value. Even Richard Dawkins would acknowledge that. [1] And for what it's worth, I am not a Christian, so I don't think I am biased by religious zeal or something.

[1]: https://archive.fo/DckMc#selection-2193.0-2201.435

> British coloquialisms that are not taught abroad

What are some examples of those?

For that, as an alternative solution, there is [1] by @jermaustin1, and [2] by @dangrossman.

[1]: https://hnnotify.xyz/

[2]: https://www.hnreplies.com/

You do have a point. But one could certainly also argue that "Impropriety is the soul of wit." :-)

As a non-native English speaker myself, I totally understand and sympathize.

Not really, they most likely did it for ideological/virtue-signalling reasons. You are right in that they probably did it in a way that would hurt their profits the least.

Their statement [1] explicitly says they are doing it after consulting a "panel of experts, including educators". A few days earlier, a school district in Virginia had decided to stop reading Seuss’s books on Dr. Seuss Day. [2] Some school boards in Canada outright banned his books. [3] I think some people lost their jobs because of protesting these in off-color Facebook posts. After the prices for used copies of the books skyrocketed, eBay delisted them. [4] Biden avoided using the author's name in his Dr. Seuss Day statement [5]. Don't you find all of these a tad suspiciously Orwellian?

Also, FYI, I don't really appreciate your personal attack there.

[1]: https://archive.fo/23ZUN

[2]: CP24 (Republished from CNN): "Publisher to stop printing six Dr. Seuss books because they perpeturate racial stereotypes" https://archive.ph/HOhAw

[3]: CBC: "Hamilton Public Library not removing Dr. Seuss books, but local school boards are" https://archive.fo/j1OiJ#selection-795.0-795.156

[4]: https://www.cbr.com/dr-seuss-banned-books-delisted-ebay/

[5]: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-erases-dr-seuss-read-...

I know that it was killed by Reagan's FCC, but I really don't have a good understanding of their motivation.

The Wikipedia article quotes someone in the Kennedy administration as saying: "Our massive strategy [in the early 1960s] was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."

So it kinda seems that weaponization of complaints was part of the issue.

Do you happen to have any pointers or comments on Reagan administrations reasoning, and the efforts by liberals to restore the doctrine?

To test that hypothesis, we can also try to estimate the size of the vocabulary of the users based on their comments. Vocabulary size is probably roughly correlated with intelligence. It is kinda biased against users who don't live in the Anglosphere though.

Although HN is awesome generally, it really could use a redesign :-)

The experience on phones with a smaller screen is far from ideal, and there are some weird display issues with the Algolia search. Some essential functionality like optional notification for replies, muting politics/news, account deletion [1], and better text/code formatting is missing. The API has also been on v0 for a while, and could use some improvements.

[1]: I think this might be required under GDPR.

There is that. But there's also the "forever redesign" problem.

It goes roughly like this: the designers would always advocate for a redesign, as it is more exciting, and also because it creates more new tasks/jobs for them.

But improving things is hard, and entropy is not on our side. So, it is quite possible that the new grand redesign will be less functional than the battle-tested old one.

If we are lucky, the new design might be at least more aesthetically pleasing. [1]

[1]: Perhaps in part just because aesthetics are a function of fashion, and the new design can be up-to-date with the current trends.

You may not need scraping. HN has a rudimentary but functioning API [1], and there is dump on BigQuery [2].

[1]: https://github.com/HackerNews/API

[2]: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combi...

If we are being fair, I think it is quite clear (as far as humanities go) that overall the Bible's literary value is much higher than the book in question. If we do a PageRank-like ordering of all books based on quotes and cross-references, quite likely the Bible will come on top.

I don't think censorship really has much to do with copyright. A book can certainly be in public domain, and still be censored.

It is mostly about infringing the restricting the ability of individuals to choose what they would like to read, hear, and watch; and also infringing their right to free expression.

:-) On the topic of the book by he-who-must-not-be-named, I beg to differ. The intention is quite clear, copyright is just the means to achieve it.

Here is a Gedankenexperiment: assume that there is a jurisdiction in which the state, instead of the estate [1], automatically becomes the copyright holder after the author of a work passes away. [2] If the state starts making rules on which books by dead authors cannot be published, wouldn't you call it censorship?

[1]: Sorry for the a-maize-ingly corny and unfunny dad joke, couldn't resist.

[2]: This is not too far fetched, apparently this is roughly what has happened with you-know-what in Bavaria.

I simply think Amazon should not censor books, and people who are against censorship should try pressuring them into not doing that.

As for government intervention, at least for the case of Amazon banning books, it seems practically infeasible to me. Large and vociferous factions of the ruling class do want censorship, and Amazon et al are doing it in part to appease them.

For social media censorship, there might be a better chance of effective regulation, as probably more people care about it than banned books.

On (1), that quote is quite irrelevant to the current discussion, and I don't want to get into that. I'm glad that we all agree that burning books should be condemned.

On (2) and (3), neither of these are true in reality, and most don't think they should be true either.

Even if you are an extremely principled libertarian, I am sure that you don't think that every single thing a "private" entity does is inherently good. We, the "private" citizens, certainly can (and should) criticize their actions.

On (4), as I said in my comment, I very much disagree with the prudish/ideological banning of the book from school libraries, so I guess we agree on that?

That's one of most amusing conspiracy theories I've heard in a while :-)

There is a counterargument to that: Craig Wright. He openly claims to be Satoshi (almost certainly fraudulently), and he seems to be doing kinda OK. [1]

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/06/miami-jury-rules-in-favor-of...

As per LinuxBender's comment [1], ExoneraTor [2] tells us it hasn't been a TOR relay in 2009 either.

I think Szabo is the most likely Satoshi candidate. He seems to have disappeared from public view since March, despite being a prolific Twitter [2]. I hope he is doing well, chilling on a beach in a Caribbean island.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29729498

[2]: https://metrics.torproject.org/exonerator.html?ip=68.164.57....

[3]: https://twitter.com/nickszabo4

Interestingly, Szabo seems to have disappeared since March of this year, though he used to a prolific twitter [1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/nickszabo4

They certainly have the legal right, but I think it is still censorship. See my other comment for other examples of censorship by copyright: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29729059

I do not know much about the case of Salinger's book, but it seems a bit different as apparently he withdrew the story before publication, it was done by the author himself, and the intention does not seem to be ideological. [1][2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Ocean_Full_of...

[2]: I think the ideological intention does kinda matter, e.g. curation of the books in the school libraries is inevitable (unless we abolish copyright and make them all a portal to libgen :-)) and is not censorship. But it _is_ censorship when it is driven by ideology.

I think we should bring back a version of fairness doctrine [1] or right of reply [2] targeted at platforms.

There are other ways of pressuring them at different levels as well: demanding moderation transparency, regulating them as we do for utilities, supporting competitive alternatives which respect free expression, etc.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply

I am not sure that I follow. I think "using copyright" does imply that it is done by the copyright holders. I disagree that it being done by the copyright holders makes it a non-issue.

There are other examples of using copyright for censorship. The infamous book by the mustache man was prevented from being reprinted in Germany until 2016 by the copyright holder (Bavaria's state government) [1]. Use of DMCA notices by corporations to suppress disparaging news about security vulnerabilities is another example.

Do you believe these are not instances of censorship?

[1]: https://archive.is/6EMYF#selection-3131.0-3143.129

I think you are correct in implying that the current wave of censorship is mostly non-governmental, but that doesn't make it look any better in my eyes. This is a discussion about culture, not who has the legal right to do what. Banning "inappropriate" books from school is most likely legal in the US [1], but that doesn't automatically make puritanism and prudishness good.

I disagree, I think book restrictions are Orwellian, but that's another discussion.

[1]: https://www.findlaw.com/education/student-rights/banning-boo...

You mean extremes like literally burning books [1], or banning a broad category of books from the largest bookstore in the world for ideological reasons [2], or using copyright to censor the most popular American children's author [3]?

I'm against censorship, and I think banning books from school libraries is ridiculous [4]. But a single school district in Texas banning a book is not really comparable with the scale and significance of the corporate/woke censorship.

[1]: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario...

[2]: WSJ: "Amazon Won’t Sell Books Framing LGBTQ+ Identities as Mental Illnesses" https://archive.fo/v5rWn

[3]: Guardian: "It's a moral decision': Dr Seuss books are being 'recalled' not cancelled, expert says" https://archive.fo/SPBMh

[4]: A school library has limited space, and obviously can't hold all the books in the world, so the librarian have to make a choice. But selection should be based on things like what the students would like to read, exposure to a broad diversity of views, etc. instead of ideology.

I am not the OP, but yes, I certainly do want to put pressure on the censors. It is a very reasonable thing to do.

The "complaint" is on point. Most of the major US mainstream media outlets are indeed biased in a particular direction. See for yourself: find a list of major news outlets [2] and check their political leanings [3][4]. Fox is mostly an outlier.

You could perhaps argue that they are more "woke" than "progressive".

[1]: And many other institutions, see https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-libe...

[2] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=News_media_in_the...

[3]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

[4]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings

Spam detection is quite distinct from content moderation. Your email provider most likely does have some form of spam detection, but probably not much content moderation.

Also, I think most of us are not that puritan, and don't think that platforms should ban all porn.

One could also see this as them using this as an opportunity to advertise their allegiance to the ideology of the ruling class.

So that the whole organization can sustain in the long run. Universities generally do the same, they have endowments and they invest them for profit. For example, Harvard's endowment was valued at $53.2 billion as of June 2021. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harvard_Universit...