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rdancer

881 karma · joined April 23, 2013

rdancer+hn@rdancer.org
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rdancer··on Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
There is only one society, and its members ought to have freedom of speech and assembly amongst themselves. Facebook, just like the Internet, is a platform, and it should allow free speech, even if products that are built on top of that platform themselves don't. It seems to be in the nature of networks to be a monopoly; if Facebook or Internet weren't a monopoly, perhaps competing networks could provide free speech and Facebook and Internet could be fully censored. But as it is, censorship and bans diminish the freedoms of speech & assembly of the users.
rdancer··on Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
That would apply if there were honest, inevitable biases, and the journalists and editors were striving for integrity. However, in a situation where they are at best not very good, and at worst they are trying to manipulate the public opinion en masse, how can you use that kind of data? Isn't it garbage in, garbage out, no matter what your process of synthesis may be?

In the good old days of the Soviet Union, we could "read between the lines", because the censorship system was not very effective, and the journalists were pissed off. But we still failed horribly at understanding what the world looked like west of the border, and imagined capitalism was some lesser form of paradise, and were quite surprised when we had to start living it.

Personally, I am weary of reading people who I know try to manipulate me. I always suspect if they try hard enough and long enough, they may succeed. What is your method, and does it work?

rdancer··on Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
The whole media ecosystem in the USA is out of whack. The lefties crap on Fox, righties crap on MSDNC, but both could better be thought of as news organs of the same establishment, with emphasis on opinion shaping, and de-emphasis on truth. Each target a different population segment. Facebook targets yet another segment, and the question is, will it become annexed to the same establishment?
rdancer··on Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
It's the other way 'round. Someone has a pragmatic stance on something, and the SJWs label it as political, and ban it. They also ban or not ban people because of their politics. It's one thing to ban all politics, another banning just those you oppose (and bonus if it's just an excuse and the real reason is money or connections).

You don't have to look further than Twitter for examples of all of the above.

rdancer··on Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
My bad; I've edited my comment above accordingly.

> Trump's claim was analyzed. Independent experts were consulted. It's obvious why the ruling went against him.

> I don't think distinguishing between hyperbole and lies is Politifact's problem. It's simply calling a lie a lie.

When I was growing up in the Eastern Bloc, we looked up to the U.S. for their people's ability to think critically and to have their own informed political opinions. I am horrified at your implying that you outsource your thinking. We used to say, "experts were consulted", "it's obvious", "the ruling went against him". That's totalitarian language, describing a totalitarian concept. Why would you throw away your freedom of thought, willingly to boot?

Let me invite you to analyse that statement by Mr Trump and its analysis by Politfact and my comment above. What is your opinion? Can you give good arguments for it, and anticipate counter-arguments against it?

rdancer··on Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
If that were so, would liberal arguments need to turn to unsourced verisimilitudes?
rdancer··on Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
I never imagined there would be any regulation for cable networks content, but apparently the FCC has come up with a host[1]. The equal opportunities rule [47 CFR 76.205] and what is left of the fairness doctrine seem to would have been violated, were Facebook regulated as cable.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/media/program-content-regulations [47 CFR 76.205] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/76.205

rdancer··on Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
Politifact's parent organization, Tampa Bay Times, is part of the MSM, and not a third-party watchdog. It is incredible that they have brought fact-checking into the mainstream, but their ability to have done that is at least in part thanks to their being a part of it. Anyway, they don't provide stats grouped by people (EDIT: they do, my bad!).

Fact-checking cannot provide the kind of metric you talk about for rhetorical devices that are not drily descriptive, such as irony, hyperbole, allusion, etc. It helps that the readers have a way to look up the facts if they don't know them, but the analyses need to be read critically, same as the original statements. It's no good if you distrust one set of people and uncritically trust another. On what basis? You don't trust the politician, that's good. You don't trust some media, that's also good. But whoever in the media you choose, don't trust them blindly, they are just normal people, not superheroes.

Take, for example, this statement: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may/... There is no clear-cut right or wrong. Same-day voter registration puts a pressure on the bureaucracy to be more forgiving and less thorough; that's a fact. But is that driven by the political elements who benefit from illegals voting, and do people on either side actually believe that it has an effect? That's not a factual question, that's a question for a political debate. Mr Trump's hyperbole captures this with a surprising pith.

rdancer··on Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
Facebook is, as an institution, proud to have ignited national revolutions and shaped policy debates. I doubt Mr Zuckerberg doesn't do that.
rdancer··on Requiem for the American Dream – Noam Chomsky
Mr Chomsky didn't have any editorial or executive control[0]. What does this documentary add in substance or form that is not a rehash of his previous interviews and writing?

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3270538/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_w...

rdancer··on Requiem for the American Dream – Noam Chomsky
It's a shit documentary, and that YouTube user doesn't have the copyright license to distribute it on their channel.
rdancer··on Introducing unlimited private repositories
Have you considered that if you self-hosted on a repurposed desktop machine running off solar panels, with unpaid interns doing maintenance, you could cap it at $0, and save on the heating bill during winter?
rdancer··on Introducing unlimited private repositories
There are dedicated discrete HSMs that can be installed. That's what I would do. Or, rather, wouldn't. I agree with you that it would be very impractical, unless the platform has a first-class API:

Chrome OS uses TPM heavily[1], and iOS has the Security Enclave. The standard TPM API is PKCS#11, so any hardware that speaks it can be used with any software that speaks it.

Problem with TPM is that the whole hardware and software stack needs to be secure, which in practice means it needs to be designed top-down with awareness of the TPM, and audited. The secrets must not be cached, written to file system, kept in memory, leaked over network. There are implementations such as Trousers[2], but it's more or less just a proof of concept; it may provide additional security, but most likely you're just using a very complex lock, and leaving the key under the mat.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/tpm-usa... [2] http://trousers.sourceforge.net/man/tpmtoken_setpasswd.1.htm...

rdancer··on Introducing unlimited private repositories
TPM.

It's just one role, but multiple users.

rdancer··on Introducing unlimited private repositories
Or... else?
rdancer··on Introducing unlimited private repositories
> Saying you shouldn't store it in git seems rather like saying you shouldn't store it in btrfs.

Best practice is to avoid storing secrets in plaintext, or sharing secrets between users/roles. Yours isn't an argument in favour of git, it is an argument against btrfs.

(I don't have any problem with storing passwords in that way, I'm just pointing out why it's not the best practice.)

rdancer··on Introducing unlimited private repositories
At those price points you don't have a sales rep and individual pricing?
rdancer··on Introducing unlimited private repositories
This is an awful pricing model.

⇒ One-size-fits-all never fits all. Getting rid of tiers is naïve and misguided. Even if just for anchoring and the illusion of choice in face of terrible choices, tiers are a necessity. Sales will suffer, customer satisfaction will suffer.

⇒ I don't care if existing private customers pay the same or less. The price points should have been retained, and customers let to switch to a lower tier if they wished. Capturing consumer surplus leads to increased revenue. Github needs that money; the more money they throw away foolishly, the closer they are to bankruptcy.

⇒ "Starting today"?! At least current developer plans have been grandfathered in, with a 12-month notice period. Still, if an org has been in the process of planning a move to Github, they will have to re-evaluate.

Github has been such a great platform. A major stumble like this, I'm worried they may not be with us for much longer.

rdancer··on Senator Seeks Answers from Facebook on Political Censoring Allegations
People's political views are not cookie-cutter copies. Maybe you think public policy should be guided primarily by what is just, and consequently your hope is that the censors' idea of justice is the same as yours. Or maybe you subscribe to the notion that politics ultimately is the competition of divergent private interests and shifting alliances, and in that case you should hope is that the censors have your best interest at heart (perhaps by virtue of being your employees). Even the former is exceedingly improbable if you go into the minute details of your personal politics. You are much more likely to be manipulated away from than reinforced in your current views.
rdancer··on Senator Seeks Answers from Facebook on Political Censoring Allegations
The criteria for allowing a source are not objective — and how could they be, when all sources are more or less bad? I understand that on the same story you will allow sheer propaganda from the BBC, but don't allow a factual report from The Intercept. The latter is unlikely to be a comfortable read, and may lead to some users quitting.

But don't pretend there is some objective measure of "unbiased" that for example The Guardian or BBC pass and other outlets don't. That is the same mindset any gatekeeper has: to bring the best news to the readers, where "best" is of course subjective. Be it with an algorithm or directly, Facebook editorializes — heavily, it would appear.

rdancer··on Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
You don't? The Founders did, vehemently[0].

[0] http://www.theunion.com/opinion/7699648-113/democracy-majori...

rdancer··on Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
(1) is just straight-up speech. I find Mozilla's firing of Eich a disgusting example of political discrimination and stifling of free speech, and encourage everybody to boycott their products. — See, it's just speech.
rdancer··on Noam Chomsky: American Power Under Challenge
A republic is a government of laws, and not of men. The US, most decidedly, isn't. John Adams argues the semantics much better than I ever could:

They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men. If this definition be just, the British constitution is nothing more nor less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate. This office being hereditary, and being possessed of such ample and splendid prerogatives, is no objection to the government’s being a republic, as long as it is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend. An empire is a despotism, and an emperor a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy. -- Novanglus, February 6, 1775

The opposite of republic is not monarchy, it is tyranny. The only way out of tyranny for the U.S. is, by definition, to restore the rule of law, which the GP seems to clamour for.

rdancer··on Noam Chomsky: American Power Under Challenge
What GP means is that US is no longer a republic. Unifying aspect of the Obama, Sanders, and Trump campaigns is tapping the desire of the American public to make it one again.
rdancer··on Offshore finance: more than £12T siphoned out of emerging countries
But that's not what the rhetoric is. It is important to understand how the world economy works, but this uncouth hatred for confidentiality, anonymity, and ownership is very old and very predictable. There are still places people can keep private property — bah humbug!
rdancer··on Offshore finance: more than £12T siphoned out of emerging countries
Is it possible that these people and orgs want to keep some of their money as savings — and who cares where they are, since they're just supposed to sit in a vault anyway? Of course, the more enterprising governments cannot have that, and your savings are never truly savings (or yours, for that matter). Having savings in a foreign economy, in a different jurisdiction is the equivalent of an offsite offline backup — it's just good practice.

The commies at Guarniad of course don't rely on savings for their retirement, so they don't see it that way.

rdancer··on Code Page 437 Refuses to Die

    codepoint -> encoding in UTF-8

    U+022F    -> C8 AF  
    U+042F    -> D0 AF  
    U+062F    -> D8 AF
Remember, UTF-8 is self-synchronising: when you pick up at a random point within a stream, there is no ambiguity as to whether you are in the middle of a sequence or not. Valid lower codepoints appearing in the encoding of higher codepoints would violate this property.
rdancer··on Romanian hacker who claims he breached Clinton server says he spoke with FBI
> “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure.”

This is not the smoking gun; there are innocuous readings of that instruction. They were likely using secure channel to transmit nonclasified information — which is something she should be praised for, given how little of what she was up to can be described as good practice.

The thread in the printout you link is about "TPs" (presumably Talking Points?). Unlikely to be classified.

rdancer··on The Power Of A Picture
I have just enough experience with marketing to be able to avoid images that are shit. All their loser images are shit. The author of the article is on the right path, faces full of emotions and cultural relatability is important. The best teasers (and snapshots are just the most minimalist teasers) make a promise to (1) tell a story that is (2) relevant to me and (3) fits my mood.

The problem with video snapshots is that everybody is so freaking good. We're spoiled by every random tube site doing image recognition and automatically A/B testing frames from videos and serving the most popular. Big budgets are spent on promoting movies and TV. So a lay analysis like this cannot possibly begin to scratch the surface.

rdancer··on Romanian hacker who claims he breached Clinton server says he spoke with FBI
Judging by your being downvoted, apparently they don't.
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