Hacker News Reader

gambleron Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

People who consider this an issue either wouldn't work for Google to begin with or end up butting heads with management and leave the company. The benefits of self-selection.

There is also a lot of internal corporate training and team-building designed to redefine "ethics" to make this sort of stuff acceptable.

gambleron Using the “Z” symbol could lead to prosecution in two German states

And not just in two German states:

https://multipolarista.com/2022/03/03/crime-support-russia-u...

"It’s a jailable crime to support Russia’s Ukraine war in EU members Slovakia and Czech Republic"

The title actually makes it sound less drastic than it is. Czech Republic, Slovakia and Latvia actively investigate people "supporting" or "accepting" the invasion. There are official statements from government representatives, there are hot lines to snitch on your fellow citizens, and yes, there have been arrests.

gambleron The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world

"A web for everyone" turned out to be a lie.

The web architecture made it trivial to manipulate information and cancel people. Nothing in the protocols deals with archiving or true redundancy. Nothing deals with DDoS or bypassing censorship. The architecture itself encourages centralization. Moreover, the protocols are currently being manipulated to encourage even more central control.

We're way past the point where expressing sentiments like "this is for everyone" is aspirational. Right now it's merely out of touch and tone-deaf.

gambleron Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

I don't need someone gaslighting me about an article that I've just read. Here is what it says:

"The Times also errs by utterly failing to grapple with the problem that “cancelling” represents free speech and free association."

It's a strawman conundrum that White constructs all on his own. It might seem very clever to people who think freedom of speech is some kind of mechanistic rule to puzzle over. Not clever at all when one considers the reason why it became a value for modern societies.

Not only White conflates the two behaviors I mentioned in my post above, he reinforces the confusion by equivocating a riot at Berkley with ridiculing someone.

gambleron Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

A) Criticizing an idea so that others understand how it is flawed.

B) "Criticizing" an idea to get it expunged from various media to manipulate what ideas people are exposed to.

If you even pretend that there is no difference between A and B, you're not worth intellectually engaging with.

gambleron CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

I am sure after learning this all Americans will take to the streets and after a massive protest the government will defund CIA and prosecute everyone responsible for the related crimes. Right?

And if that doesn't happen, European companies will cancel American accounts, IKEA will close shop here, GOG will refuse to sell games in US, etc, etc. Right?

Because, as I've learned on HN in the last two weeks, all citizens are responsible for what their government is doing, regardless of their knowledge or level of support for the practice.

gambleron Mapping and Seizing the Oligarchs' Assets

Reframing mass doxing as crowd sourcing doesn't change the basic dynamics of what's going on.

gambleron Mapping and Seizing the Oligarchs' Assets

A lot of these "oligarchs" have citizenships of European countries. (Which, in my opinion, they shouldn't have been given in the first place, but that's an entirely different conversation.) So in many cases people are effectively cheering for extra-judicial property seizure of European citizens. The consequences of setting such precedent will go way beyond the scope of the current conflict.

gambleron Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

If you need to change your platform's rules for literally every major event (elections, Covid, this war) there is something profoundly wrong both with your rules and your platform.

There is tremendous value in having actual principles. So many people either forgotten it or never understood that to begin with.

gambleron Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook

>Sow doubt, maintain deniability, gaslight, deflect, and project.

"Russian restaurant owners in the U.S. say they face harassment over Ukraine war"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-russia-restaurants-puti...

"Russian businesses in U.S. face threats, vandalism over invasion"

https://www.axios.com/russian-businesses-us-vandalism-threat...

Social media plays a role here.

gambleron DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

You know, I am beginning to see that all that talk about mass psychosis caused by social isolation due to Covid and lockdowns was onto something. It explains a lot of what is happening right now. People are hyper-focused on only one thing and pay zero attention to long-term and larger-context consequences of their actions. And proud of it.

gambleron China's state media buys Meta ads pushing Russia's line on war

The article you're linking to is partisan propaganda [1] and doesn't address the question I've raised.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/16/no-white-...

gambleron China's state media buys Meta ads pushing Russia's line on war

Threat Reduction Program? Wow, that sounds familiar.

"Of the $41.91 million, $37.61 million was awarded to EcoHealth Alliance by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which describes its mission as “to protect the United States and its allies by enabling the DoD and international partners to detect, deter, and defeat WMD and threat networks.”"

https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/pentagon-gave-millions-to-ecoh...

I wonder why when the pandemic hit, there was literally zero useful info coming out of all these threat reduction programs?

gambleron Study findings do not support the use of ivermectin for patients with Covid-19

> Japan is not using Ivermectin.

https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOFD31A0C0R30C22A1000000/

2022/1/31

興和（名古屋市）は31日、寄生虫病薬「イベルメクチン」が新型コロナウイルスの変異型「オミクロン型」の治療薬として効果があることを確認したと発表した。北里大学との非臨床試験をもとに、抗ウイルス効果があるとした

Bing translation:

"Kowa (Nagoya City) announced today that it has confirmed that the parasitic drug "Ivermectin" is effective as a treatment for the mutant "Omicron type" of the novel coronavirus. Based on the non-clinical trial with Kitasato University, it was said that it had an antiviral effect."

gambleron Happy 15th birthday Hacker News

I disagree. HN is definitely less insane than Reddit these days, but it's not representative of what Web 1.0 was like and felt like.

Everyone here would do well to read and understand this essay by Jaron Lanier:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...

I also recommend people revisit archives of some high-quality web forums and websites like Geocities. There is a lot of revisionism going on in tech sector right now. Conveniently, it's nearly impossible to challenge in a space where a handful of people can disappear your posts by downvoting and a conversation stays "relevant" only for a few hours.

gambleron Reddit can't build a better search engine

Here is a simple one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ontario/comments/se7t5p/i_saw_the_t...

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/secvqz/i_stood_...

A subreddit with 480K users manages to upvote the topic 1.3K times with 78% up ratio. A subreddit with 1.7 million users upvotes a similarly themed topic (expressing a different opinion) only to get it 555 points with 91% up ratio. Ten times the difference in engagement.

This is the norm. Reddit bans the fuck out of people with opinions that don't align with the hivemind. You can search HN for "reddit banned" and see a limitless supply of stories. At one point they deleted two thousand subreddits in one go.

I'm not going into certain topics magically not appearing anywhere on Reddit, because it would require a significantly more detailed examples, but it's a thing as well. It is the Truman Show for public opinion.

gambleron Reddit can't build a better search engine

> Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about.

It's a source of information for what Reddit and Twitter owners want you to see. Both websites are heavily manipulated in a myriad of ways. (The simplest one is via massive amounts of accounts banned for wrongthink.) This is blatantly obvious if instead of passively absorbing news you deep-dive into a specific issue and then look up the discussions and trends, especially on Reddit. Sometimes discussions for major events just aren't there, which is nigh impossible organically on a website with tens of millions of users.

gambleron DuckDuckGo \u202E

> I could say that if you’re handling multilingual text, then you should damn well know how multilingual text works, that it’s not peripheral to your problem.

Trouble is, anyone using Unicode and accepting user inputs is effectively handling multilingual text, unless they explicitly filter it out. Which includes the vast majority of websites and even web-based user interfaces for standalone hardware.

> As far as I know, this is not solvable.

I am sure it is solvable in the sense that it is possible to make the behaviors less surprising and complicated without sacrificing people's ability to use right-to-left languages. There would have to be a discussion about underlying assumptions and real-life usage to achieve that, however.

Generally, though, I don't see legitimate use for ever reversing left-to-right languages when displayed to user. That's not what anyone would expect, not even the writers of right-to-left languages. And the myriad of malicious uses are kind of obvious. And the long-term effect of people abusing these will be websites banning more control characters, which will affect users of Arabic and Hebrew.

Also, with the way Unicode is being developed it is increasingly unclear what "plain text" even means these days. AFAIK, there isn't even a formal definition of that term. Maybe that's where the discussion should really start. What capabilities separate "plain text" from other things?

gambleron DuckDuckGo \u202E

> Except by telling every speaker of Arabic and Hebrew saying they want some of that delicious “plain text” action to go screw themselves

The problem is not with Arabic or Hebrew. The problem is that this modifier affects other languages and characters in a way the vast majority of people clearly wouldn't expect (otherwise the story wouldn't make it to the front page).

> Specify the dominant direction of your user-input-containing elements, people, and/or enclose the input in U+2068 FSI ... U+2069 PDI (after balancing outstanding bidi controls inside).

The level of arrogance packed in this sentence is just mind-boggling.

There are many other "Easter eggs" in various basic technologies. I can assure you that no matter how high of an opinion you have about yourself, if you write any production code at all, you are guaranteed to be using something that contains other Easter egg design decisions. You're not aware of them, you're not mitigating them and therefore whether they will explode on you is mostly just a matter of luck.

Minimizing "Easter egg" design decisions is the only long-term viable way to get complexity in our already complex environment under control.

gambleron DuckDuckGo \u202E

Problem is, this behavior is so outside of the range of common expectations, it's really hard to say if it's harmless or not and what are the worst cases for (ab)using it.

gambleron DuckDuckGo \u202E

Extremely bad design. This kind of complexity should have been moved to some kind of post-processing spec rather than core Unicode. It's already causing issues and will cause more. The more universal something is, the more effort should be applied to keeping it simple.

gambleron Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

The cause that raised 9 million dollars in a few days is a "a tiny minority of truckers [...] making a huge fuss over really very little"... because someone somewhere claims that they've seen a data dump of hacked donation data... and their "analysis" demonstrates that the movement has wide international support. Reddit logic at its finest.

gambleron Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

A fringe minority wouldn't be greeted by people lining highways and overpasses in freezing cold. [1] It wouldn't raise over nine million dollars in crowd funding, twice. [2] At the very least we're talking about a very large minority. It could even be the (previously silent) majority. And the issue is not just border crossing mandates, but all the rules (often absurd and arbitrary) that piled up over the last two years in Canada. Like curfews and prohibitions on shopping in Quebec. The border requirements were just the last straw that catalyzed a particular group of people to express the growing public discontent.

1 - https://youtu.be/pcGsqLRyKo0?t=67

2 - https://givesendgo.com/FreedomConvoy2022

If you can't even describe the situation accurately, why should anyone care about your take on it?

gambleron Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology

Absolutely. Like I said, we are on social media right now.

gambleron Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology

Funny. I was literally recording a podcast about this very subject today and yesterday. No, it's not published anywhere at this point.

gambleron Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology

I define "social media" as anything that manipulates content visibility based on metrics that aren't related to the content itself or user's direct inputs. Because of deliberately deceptive terminology in play this definition will inevitably sound kooky.

Yes, BBSes/forums, chats, NTP news groups and mailing lists are not "social media" in my book. It's important to note that the word "social" in social media was always a kind of marketing ploy.

gambleron Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology

I hate the gaslighers who try to downplay this by putting into some BS "context". The situation with tech is abysmal right now. I do think it's fixable, though.

> What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?

We have to use extreme lateral thinking and build systems that support themselves and over time outcompete garbage like social media and "crypto". Neither are long-term stable anyway.

One of the problems, though, is that this needs to be worked on over time. People who see the problem need places to cooperate. Social media is clearly not the place to do that, because pretty much by definition it is ran and inhabited by people who aren't interested in solving these kind of problems. (In fact, they are interesting in the opposite.)

One of my biggest regrets right now is that I spent too much time on my normal work in tech, while spending not enough time and effort on cultivating independent communities of people who actually think about stuff like this. It was easy to find interesting and interested people to cooperate with in late 90s and early 00s. Today it's really hard. Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now.

Another problem is that we have no good conceptual vocabulary or an analytical framework to precisely talk about these problems. Everyone just repeats terms like "misinformation" and "censorship". Public conversations about this spin in place, going nowhere good. I understand (at least I think I understand) what you're talking about because I've already independently reaches the same conclusions. That's not enough to conceptually advance anywhere.

gambleron Could we please get back the master-branch on this repository?

Language evolves via gradual changes in common usage, not by decree from a fringe minority that captured some institution. Anyone who says that this nonsense is an example of normal process of language evolution is a gaslighting liar.

gambleron Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?

Best practices in civil engineering are connected to outcomes. You know that something is a good practice if not doing it causes things to collapse or catch on fire.

"Best practices" in software engineering are usually about internal development processes and don't have any verifiable connection to outcomes.

In other words, we have two entirely different things labeled with the same name. People who commonly use the phrase "best practices" for software are literally trying to confuse you and generally are not worth listening to.

That said, some things in software are worth analyzing to have a better process, but those things need to be examined within a specific context. If someone claims that you need to, say, create an interface for every class, they should be able to explain why and how it is relevant to your work. If people make claims they cannot explain by connecting them to meaningful outcomes, those people are, again, not worth listening to. They might be mindlessly parroting something they have heard without having any clue as to the meaning of the practice. Unfortunately, our field is full of "professionals" that do exactly that.

Software is a pretty messed up domain that is frequently a self-licking ice-cream cone. (You write code to solve problems created by other code.) Because of that, it's often socially mediated, just like non-engineering fields. To establish anything for real in this self-referential environment you need to be able to have conversations about costs, tradeoffs and outcomes - within a specific context.

gambleron Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?

>Pretty much. IT as a field is a toddler.

It's exactly as old as nuclear engineering.

If it's a toddler, it's because of the mentality of the people involved, not because there was no time to figure things out.