Hacker News Reader

tarakaton New Zealand ends funding for school Shakespeare festival: ‘canon of imperialism’

British colonisers used Shakespeare’s works as an example of how people should act, Hyland said. “It would be a massive, awesome act of decolonisation if we discovered our own stories first and discovered Shakespeare afterwards.

While Hyland may be part Maori, New Zealand is majority of European descent [1]. To them, Shakespeare is "their own stories". Should they abandon their own history and culture because they changed locale?

[1] As at the 2018 census, the majority of New Zealand's population is of European descent (70 percent) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Demographics

tarakaton A gentler, better way to change minds

> economic justice* has to come first

So shall we put the ongoing ecological and climate catastrophes on hold while we take 200 years to reach an egalitarian utopia? On the other hand, we're told that these catastrophes affect the poorest countries the most. From that point of view, environmentalism is "economic justice".

*Interesting term. Does that mean the economically better off have committed a crime, and must be punished?

tarakaton A TV studio audience will vote on destroying a Hitler painting

Where they burn books, they will too in the end burn people.

But these are paintings, not books, so no worries.

tarakaton Deterring Scraping by Protecting Facebook Identifiers

> we recently shared an update on how our External Data Misuse (EDM) team works to safeguard people against clone sites

Is this what they're calling interoperable competitors now?

tarakaton Swiss evoting system – IsProbablePrime is incorrect for input 19

Your examples are all less scalable and easier to detect that hacking.

> That is a great step forward, compared to the closed black boxes, e-voting systems I have heard of before.

It's still a black box. You have only their word to go that the published source is what is actually running on the machine in front of you in the voting booth. And they have only the word of their computers.

So yes, it's a great step forward, in the same way that going up a flight of stairs is a great step towards reaching orbit.

tarakaton Swiss evoting system – IsProbablePrime is incorrect for input 19

How many nation-states burned their best zero-days on this public intrusion test?

tarakaton Ask HN: Options for Android phone no longer getting security updates?

A related question: How secure is an Android phone that does receive security updates from its vendor? I vaguely recall hearing that it can take months before a security patch makes it from mainline Android to consumer devices.

tarakaton Why Infrastructure Providers Should Stay Out of Content Policing (EFF)

> is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them

Moving past how KiwiFarms hadn't actually broken any laws, let's say for the sake of argument that they had. And that this motel chain owned 40% of rentable rooms across the globe, and a handful of their friends owned the remaining 59%, with 1% belonging to small independent moteliers.

If you leave enforcement to them, then you've effectively privatized policing. Do you want a private police force? Wouldn't that represent a union of state and corporate power, i.e. fascism?

tarakaton “Women are wonderful” effect

Try applying this to any other group. Truth is no defense for "bias".

tarakaton Google Removes the OG App from the Play Store After Apple

Having corporations directly enforce each-other's terms & conditions is so much more efficient than the slow process of going through the courts.

tarakaton Private Prisons Are Behind the Push for Homeless Criminalization

> for 75 years

A sure sign of corruption. An honest lease would be short, so that it can simply not be renewed if problems arise.

tarakaton A solar gravitational lens will be humanity's most powerful telescope

Conduct the observations at night? ;)

tarakaton Private Prisons Are Behind the Push for Homeless Criminalization

A common argument is that, because only a small fraction of US prisons are private [1], it means private prison lobbying is a negligible problem. But this is a fallacy! The fraction doesn't matter, only the absolute amount of funds flowing through private prisons, that are available for lobbying. That, and the political connections of prison owners that make lobbying more effective.

[1] Twenty-six states and the federal government incarcerated 99,754 people in private prisons in 2020, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population. - https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

tarakaton [dead]

Even taking the cherry-picked history [1] and denial of Uyghur genocide at face value, this is simply yet another in a long line of articles that boil down to:

Your history is evil, therefore you do not have a right to self-defense [2].

[1] The author never asks himself how a country the size of China came to be 91.6% Han-Chinese, nor does he mention the Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest civil war in history at 20 million dead, that overshadows the Opium Wars and cannot be blamed on the West.

[2] Against e.g. Chinese soft power/influence and economic exploitation of various forms.

tarakaton UN says gamers leverage “toxic masculinity” to disguise extremism

> free speech is meant to protect you from government censorship to ensure the balance of powers

That's the 1st amendment of the US constitution, not "free speech". Since this is a United Nations report, the context is wider than just the US.

> Not everyone deserves a voice, but even if you do we don't have to listen.

Ah the old "we". Only in practice it's not "we" or "I" deciding not to listen, but some other entity deciding on our behalf what we're allowed to hear. Sometimes a government, but most often a multinational corporation. For most of the world, a foreign corporation.

tarakaton Trauma from the Holodomor genocide continues down through generations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Causes

regions with higher Ukrainian population shares were struck harder with centrally planned policies corresponding to famine, and Ukrainian populated areas were given lower amounts of tractors which were correlated to a reduction in famine mortality, ultimately concluding that 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine alone along with 77% of famine deaths in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus combined can be explained by systematic bias against Ukrainians

[..]

Under the collectivism policy, for example, farmers were not only deprived of their properties but a large swath of these were also exiled in Siberia with no means of survival. Those who were left behind and attempted to escape the zones of famine were ordered to be shot.

It's also worth pointing out that your statement is "downplaying" the Holodomor. If applied to the Holocaust instead (e.g. "many died from typhus"), such a statement may be illegal in Canada:

https://www.thestar.com/politics/2022/04/08/holocaust-denial... (I assume the law, part of a budget bill, was passed, but could not find a source to confirm)

tarakaton Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance

One difference is intent. The computer logging was somewhat incidental (but not entirely benign, so we shouldn't give it a pass without thinking), while the heat sensors are there very deliberately.

The other difference is territoriality. The students very acutely (and accurately) perceived the sensors as intruders in their space. This may be a crude animal instinct, but it's there for a reason. Permit one intrusion, and more will follow.

tarakaton Google censors autocomplete. Try it out yourself

That can't be it - Google's autocomplete works fine for Putin.

tarakaton “Don't spy on a privacy lab” (career advice for university provosts)

> "They are proposing that grad students share desks, taking turns with a scheduling web-app, so administrators can take over some of the space currently used by grad students."

Give them an inch, and they take a mile - administration is so proficient at growth, they are now literally pushing students out of their desks to make room for more administration.

From 1970 to 2012, school administration has grown by 138%, and student enrollment by 8% [1]. And don't let the slight 2011-2012 drop fool you - the trend endures, e.g. Yale grew its administrative staff by 45% from 2003 to 2019 (while students grew by only 11%) [2].

[1] https://www.heritage.org/education/report/how-escalating-edu...

[2] https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-...

tarakaton Getting Under Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin

> Here he goes after the "interventionistas" (foreign policy theorists with no "skin in the game,") who have repeatedly urged us to intervene in foreign countries -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria -- whose governments did not meet the interventionistas abstract standards for political acceptability.

That's being extremely generous in taking the interventionistas at their word, that they are not driven by ulterior motives. Or acting as useful idiots for others with ulterior motives.

tarakaton RIAA Thwarts Yout’s Attempt to Declare YouTube-Ripping Legal

A brilliant way to let off some steam, while making it impossible to build any sort of business around circumvention (and hence funneling enough resources into circumvention to make it viable and widespread), because there's a ~50% chance every 3 years that your business is made illegal.

tarakaton RIAA Thwarts Yout’s Attempt to Declare YouTube-Ripping Legal

The anti-circumvention provision is one of the worst laws out there. It elevates manufacturers into law-makers. Anything that was legal can be made illegal by virtue of a lock. Even a lock placed on our own property by someone else.

How long until we are forced back to the stone age if we want to keep our rights?

tarakaton Space billboards could cost $65M and still turn a profit

I think we can all agree that they should be de-orbited onto whoever commissioned them.

tarakaton SAT score distributions in Michigan

Is "divisive" really the most specific term, when only one group is targeted this way?

tarakaton SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

> You made a site complaining about the subpoena [..] I'm guessing you haven't seen a subpoena before - they are all like this

If everyone kept their mouths shut as you suggest, we wouldn't know about how rotten the legal system is until it was our turn at the gallows.

tarakaton Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The parallel is to all outcomes, not just health.

tarakaton Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the Covid-19 Pandemic

It's sad to see how the medical system fails Republicans. What can we do to address this discriminatory disparity and increase equity in medicine?

Or is this one of those times when it's okay to blame behavior?

tarakaton Head of election worker management company arrested for theft of personal data

Reading that statement by Konnech, I am struck how brazen the NYT was. Given two opposing statements, they simply decided which one debunks the other, and passed it off as fact.

I wonder how many other instances of this there are in their other reporting, where reasonable accusations or suspicions are "debunked" simply by the accused stating "nu-uh".

tarakaton Rekieta Law Removed from YouTube

His twitter [0] was also banned, but rumble [1] and odysee [2] channels are still up. That said, this is the first time I'm hearing of this channel/user. Why is he notable, and any speculation on why he was banned?

[0] https://twitter.com/@RekietaLaw

[1] https://rumble.com/RekietaLaw

[2] https://odysee.com/@RekietaLaw:a

tarakaton Spotify is ramping up its efforts to find misinformation in podcasts

> it uses data from the internet and human experts to figure out if certain claims are harmful. (It even claims to be able to spot dog whistles, seemingly innocuous phrases that actually refer to something with a darker meaning.)

How quickly it expands from misinformation, to all "harmful" content. No word on whether harmful content that is truthful will be allowed, or if beneficial content that is false will be censored.

And we all agree on what is harmful or beneficial, so I foresee no problems there.