formalsystems

Adding to zamadatix's excellent points - it falls under the HIPAA Conduit Exception, which includes encrypted email and the US Postal Service, through which a healthcare provider can send PII with a reasonable expectation that the messages won't be intercepted in transit.

Thank you! Agree 100% on bittorrent - in all honesty I am new to these kinds of projects, and the wonderful people of the Internet like yourself have been really helpful in showing me the standard way to go about things. Should be a torrent link on there by tomorrow!

Thank you for this feedback. I didn't realize I was taking the same tone as all the partisan journalism I read on a daily basis until I actually tried my hand at writing something myself. Your succinct criticism is greatly appreciated and has helped me tremendously in improving my writing ability.

Hey, author here - thank you so much for this pointed criticism. I honestly realized I had not researched or taken as open of a viewpoint as I had previously thought. I appreciate you taking the time to read what I wrote and write this clear feedback as it has helped me tremendously in developing a more objective perspective and neutral tone as a writer.

Just wanted to let you know that your keystrokes did make an impact on the writer, who sincerely appreciates your honest thoughts.

I believe HN is unique in this regard. I myself have been both scolded and graciously questioned by HN users on my writing, and it is always done in such a concise and well-written way. I am honestly completely new to writing anything online, and consider myself fortunate that there is a community of highly intellectual people willing to take the time to give my writing succinct criticism, without feeling the need to attack me personally.

It has also made me aware of how well-researched many HN user's opinions are on both sides. My opinions have largely been formed in conversations with young people of the liberal city I live in. They will cheer at anything that attacks whoever they see as their opponents, regardless of the research quality or partisan tone behind them. I have received a far greater range of perspective from brilliant HN users on both sides, which has prompted me to take a step back and re-evaluate how I am writing about this incendiary topic.

This is valuable insight which anecdotally I agree with completely. Plenty of people got onto Parler from time-to-time and tried to throw in some reason and facts. They were silenced/ignored as quickly as those trying to throw lies/misinformation into Twitter discourse.

I'm taking a step back to think deeper on this before throwing out an impulsive personal opinion one way or another on this. I'd like to do some deep NLP analysis on comment threads to automate processing/understanding of the discourse.

Thank you for your insight on this.

The tremendous collective insight of the HN community has led me to realize I need to do far more research before inserting my opinions into these writings (or simply not insert them at all), and I am rewriting all my analysis in Python with ready-to-download datasets so any claim is reproducible and verifiable by anyone. I truly did not expect this level of attention and take the responsibility to put out correct information seriously.

I appreciate what you are saying here. What started as concern for my personal safety morphed into a realization that an Internet mob is looking to lynch any Parler user who said anything even remotely questionable. I also believe these people need compassion and dialog from the other side, as they will retreat even further if the people they consider elitists start publishing names.

Thank you for this valuable feedback. I have added a disclaimer as I believe I have not answered the questions you listed well enough, and I need to ensure whatever statements I make can be reproduced by others.

The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and was never expecting this level of attention. I'm taking a step back from writing to ensure that whatever work I put out there can be reproduced/verified/criticized by others (ideally by more experienced/knowledgeable data scientists) and that uses the complete scraped archive of Parler, however long the wait for that may be. I will also be reworking the visuals to use a non-proprietary language.

Lastly, I believe one point you mentioned about explicitly calling for violence is important - even someone who talks about hanging a politician may have simply reiterated a hashtag they saw elsewhere, without explicitly stating their own malicious intent. I am now using AWS Comprehend and plan to share this data in a more engaging way.

Thank you again for taking the time to help me think critically about this.

Hello, after further research and contacting an academic source about this, I believe I made a mistake in making a definitive statement about the gallows- it was pointed out to me that gallows as a protest symbol are not tied to any specific group, and I was given enough examples of their use in other protests that it cannot be definitely stated as the original commenter mentioned.

I've updated my writing to clarify it as an opinion, and I'm taking a step back to improve my research and tone of writing. The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and the constructive criticism of HN users has helped me tremendously. I want to make neutral statements/analysis of facts and rarely if ever provide my personal opinion.

Thank you both for taking the time to provide your feedback.

Thank you for your valuable insight as I rewrite this to be less incendiary and better researched. I feel I have been too careless with my pseudonymous writing (see rubyist5eva’s valid criticism).

I am taking a step back to read deeper and improve the statistics/reproducibility side of my write-ups first.

Thank you for this insight. I am re-writing the article and taking a step back in my writing to assume a more neutral tone.

Hey Daniel - really sorry for breaking the rules. I'm going to take a step back from posting on HN as some other commenters made excellent points about my partisan tone. I need to spend more time researching and get more critical eyes on my work before posting it here.

This is a very good point. I will be rewriting this entire thing and I appreciate the specific feedback.

Thank you so much for providing this honest feedback. I am realizing now that I am trying to write these way too fast, and I'm not doing my research well enough or taking my personal opinions out of it.

I'm going to take a step back and ensure I am meeting the standards of HN before posting again. The truth of the matter is I am not a writer and am new to posting anything online. The questions you asked made me realize how little I critically analyzed my own writing. As I mentioned in a comment above, I'd like to make these neutral and lose the incendiary tone.

Hey author here - I mean it sincerely when I say thank you for the feedback, I agree with you completely that by making partisan jokes like that I am alienating my audience. I also meant the "dark cave" as more a metaphor to bats/coronavirus and I should not have tried to make cheap jokes if I'm trying to make a serious point. I realized after reading your comment how a lot of what I wrote could be interpreted another way. I'm going through the article now and changing the tone.

I'm actually new to writing anything online, I've just lurked the Internet for years and read so much good writing on HN. I'm going to take a step back, re-evaluate and get more eyes on what I'm writing before I carelessly post something again. I love this community more than any other, and I want to meet the standard.

Plus if I am stoking partisan fire as you are suggesting, I am accomplishing the opposite of what I hope to actually do as a pseudonymous writer. I really do appreciate you taking the time to read and provide this honest feedback.

Edit: I finished revising based on your suggestions and will look at it with a fresh eye tomorrow. Thanks again for explaining your perspective to me so succinctly.

I just started posting on the Internet this year after many years of lurking, and I truly don't understand why a handful of people take such a negative tone without even reading what I wrote. Is there something specific you don't agree with?

Hey lawyers of HN - would greatly appreciate if you could fact check this and tell me if there is a campaign finance violation here.

They would display numbers less than 1000 as-is, and only start adding the "k" and "m" prefix after the 4-digit and 7-digit threshold was crossed.

Nice that makes sense. I was unaware and found it strange when I plugged it into JavaScript's Date constructor and got an "Invalid Date" error.

I got the sense while crawling data from their API that the engineering quality is poor at Parler. Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps, certain fields were duplicated for no reason (e.g. every object would have an identical "id" and "_id" key), counts of impressions/comments/etc would be the display strings rather than raw numbers (so "2k" or "5m"), and various moderation flags were in place like a boolean "sensitive" which was always false, even for posts that had been downvoted significantly.

I personally spent many hours on Parler reading the discourse. The Turner Diaries were openly discussed and gave rise to various gallow-related hashtags which proliferated on it.

I don't presume to predict anything as was correctly pointed out. I could not and did not imagine the events that transpired.

I was searching crunchbase for a Pakistani company named OBL founded in Peshawar, when I finally caught the bin Laden reference.

Really cool project! Could you add a metric for tracking weight? Right now there isn't an easy way to enter large numbers, the scales are all 1-5.

I agree with the sentiment of working for oneself, some people are just wired with that kind of independence. However I wouldn't go so far as to say startup founders are just at another level of motivation - the successful ones that I know and have worked for are at another level of maturity in their thinking and approach to product development.

Ask an engineer to build something and they will think of the twenty features which will make a compelling product, and the great ones will work day and night to deliver them. A great startup CEO will identify the three features that get the first customer, then roadmap the remaining features in conjunction with sales, marketing, and hiring.

Great CEOs know how to build teams and solve hard problems, usually from years of experience and failures. It's hardly ever as simple as reading a book or overcoming some mental hurdles.

This paper is based in delusion and fantasy. There is clearly documented evolution of the Sars-COV-2 virus within captured bats in Wuhan well before the outbreak. The theory that panspermia triggered a global pandemic has zero real evidence supporting it, and this paper does nothing to advance the theory.

This argument fails when you consider Google pushing AMP on news organizations. It is akin to a news stand telling newspaper publishers "if you print your paper using my font and paper, I'll put you front and center, otherwise enjoy your paper's new placement on the back shelves".

> We're just starting to understand the implications.

Thirty years after the invention of the printing press, one of the most popular printed books was the Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise on witchcraft which triggered a witch-hunting hysteria that lasted centuries. The corrosive effect of disinformation has been clear for centuries and the medium by which it is disseminated is, in my opinion, hardly the concern. My concern is that until very recently, the controllers of these mediums (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) insisted that all ideas deserve a level playing field, rather than accept that some ideas are simply better than others.

> Before the 19th century, invention and innovation emerged primarily from craft traditions among people who were not scientists and who were typically unaware of pertinent scientific developments.

I think for every pre-19th century innovation that occurred in an "information bubble" there were many more that depended on the Renaissance attitudes toward science and discovery that were themselves predicated on earlier discoveries. If I had to give a realistic estimate as to when innovation truly happened without knowledge of pertinent scientific developments, I would look back to pre-Galilean times.

The 1 million laptop shortage in California was reported by the Sacramento Bee after polling school districts. I worked with school boards and school districts in California for 3 years selling education software, and I have to say that the people in administration are the most unaware of what the district's technology needs really are. For every heartwarming story of a school setting up a maker lab for its students, there is another school which was allocated funding for a hackerspace, bought all the necessary equipment, and then stuck it in a closet until the right person came along to set it up. I have seen brand new 3D printers grow obsolete sitting in a public school's storage room and shelves stocked with brand new Chromebooks as a "strategic reserve".

The other thing about public school administration in California is the attitude that parents and rich benefactors will make up for any budget/equipment shortfall that a school faces. Administrators have an incentive to underreport their school's technology assets, since their requests are filled one way or another.

If you consider the Bloomberg article on SuperMicro, they repeatedly claim expert/insider sources corroborate their version of the story, and have issued no retraction after their story was thoroughly debunked. While this certainly reflects poorly on Bloomberg, it reflects most on the journalistic standards of the article's authors. I don't think we will ever have a world where authoritative sources exist, since there can always be elements within the source of authority willing to bend the truth for more clicks.