uncomputation

Smells like a cheap shot of desperation given recent events and Apple’s rumored AR/VR/MR entry. If anything, Whatsapp’s competitor is Signal and Telegram, not iMessage, since they are cross platform and fulfill the same niche internationally.

Although of course trying to compete with Signal on privacy grounds would be a fool’s errand.

> because at least we can hold them responsible when they don't deliver it

This is a common but I believe overstated, even naive, ideal. What exactly does "holding them responsible" even truly mean? If a company is greenwashing and they are still emitting carbon, what really is the difference between the company who never claimed to care at all? The carbon is emitted all the same. "Oh, the stock price would fall because investors would lose trust." But greenwashing is a dime a dozen these days and I think the investors/upper class know that greenwashing is just marketing and don’t truly expect/care about the cause.

Regarding this, how does anyone hold Parler accountable for making a platform of "free speech"? Either you sign up or you don’t. If you sign up and complain they aren’t extreme enough, they don’t care or at least they don’t have any material reason to care. If you don’t, where else are you going to go? Twitter? But the whole demographic is people who didn’t like Twitter in the first place and want to be with their kind. So how do you "hold them accountable" without say, legislation, regulation, and government oversight, something today’s "free" speech advocates are opposed to?

Faster data rates, lower network congestion, more efficient spectrum allocation, and private commercial networks for IoT. There are many benefits. Although, perhaps marketing has oversold those benefits that will be passed into consumers. Largely, 5G will benefit network operators, carriers, and industry.

5G has not appreciably made “flying more unsafe.” If anything, this is a good push to start updating altimeters to spec (installing bandpass filters, better testing) which actually will make flying more safe because currently these altimeters are susceptible to out of band frequencies.

Yes, that’s exactly what OP proposed. /s

> open identity standards and open payment standards

Ah, but that won’t line Elon Musk’s pockets.

This is conflating two very different issues around social media regulation in my opinion. I won’t claim to know “HN’s” opinion because it will likely be as varied as its users, but there are two main camps in this area:

1. Regulate data privacy and tracking

2. Regulate porn/liability risks

The first camp generally opposes Facebook for its huge collection of personal information and tracking across the web. By “regulation,” they mean make this kind of behavior illegal so I don’t have to run Facebook Container and try to cover my tracks to have privacy online. I don’t really believe these sorts of people have issues with porn online, unless their porn habits/opinions are used to profile them perhaps.

The second camp is the likes of Nicholas Kristof and FOSTA-SESTA, who believe that unregulated social media will lead to sex trafficking and prostitution. I’m not gonna get into the validity of these concerns, but generally these people are not concerned about data privacy and in fact want companies to be able to identify people by name and stop any crimes facilitated via their site.

You also have another curious mention of regulation for kids which I interpret as a reference to Instagram Kids. The backlash here was, from my memory, much broader than the likes of either the EFF or the porn crusaders alone and had a lot to do with the recent press about Facebook being harmful to teenage girls in particular and children in general. So, a lot of parents were upset at the idea of an entire app dedicated just to Instagram for kids. Of course, I am sure there were also people concerned that Facebook was further cementing a digital “pipeline” from childhood to adulthood where your Facebook account follows you the whole way and makes data collection and surveillance even more powerful.

I also disagree with the notion that “no company wants to be the most lax company in the space.” If anything, from this post and also from sites such as OnlyFans, I think many sites “want” to host adult content in the sense of “want” meaning don’t want to turn away potential users. The issue is, as this post touches on, being associated with adult or illicit content can result in payment processors blocking your accounts and advertisers souring. You can see a milder example of this on YouTube with unsavory videos being demonetized because advertisers don’t want their ads played over a video about serial killers or racism. It’s not that YouTube is cowering at some journalist penning them as a public menace, it’s that they want advertisers’ dollars and advertisers don’t like adult content because it’s a threat to their public image.

Regardless, this “race to the bottom” theory doesn’t really hold water when you consider that only Tumblr has banned adult content. Twitter and Reddit still allow it and there are even whole sites dedicated to distribution of it (OnlyFans and its clones) which have never existed before on this scale. Then again, you have things like PornHub taking down “unverified” videos after threat from Mastercard, so it’s not really clear either way.

This was a very long reply I realize, but I had a lot to say I suppose.

Perhaps but Library Genesis worked long before it started using IPFS as well.

Yeah, I read about Ramon and his wiener dog ramps when this was first submitted to HN months ago and I said the same thing then as I am now. It’s bullshit. If Ramon wants to sell wiener dog ramps, then the system to do that should be “buy adspace when people search for wiener dog,” advertise on wiener dog enthusiast forums, sponsor videos/meetups, etc. Not “create an all knowing digital surveillance system tying together user profiles across devices and networks and embedding tracking pixels in websites.”

So Ramon wants to sell a niche product and that means I have to be tracked across the internet so companies can sell a digital profile of me? Get real.

> But it crushed FB, Snap, and 1000s of small businesses in the process.

Ironically, this is far more of a narrative than this guy’s idea of Apple’s “narrative.” The idea that banning user tracking hurts small businesses was FB’s narrative to try and get backlash against Apple for its tracking crackdown. That genuinely is a narrative because from Apple’s decision we have seen that consumers (1) prefer not to be tracked (go figure!) but also (2) are spending more than ever.

What he calls Apple’s “narrative” is actually their substantiated history of privacy-protecting technologies. Not just tracking, but iCloud Private Relay, Hide my Email, iMessage E2E encryption, keeping many things on-device only. Even the example he gave as a gotcha - personalized ads - has an opt out button right there! Try opting out of FB’s tracking and ads network and see the difference.

> With this update, you’ll see more results with unique, authentic information, so you’re more likely to read something you haven't seen before.

This phrasing sets off a little alarm in the back of my brain. Overall, I agree with the intent of the update and I think Google is maybe internally realizing that their questionable search quality combined with legitimate and privacy-focused competitors (DDG, Neeva [1]) could turn into a serious and existential threat to them.

That said, this is not quite the issue a lot of people have with Google search results. For me, when I search a movie for reviews, it’s not that I want new reviews to show up from smaller sites. It’s that I don’t want the whole screen filled with Google’s own little special sideshow for movie reviews. I can easily see this becoming even more frustrating actually if I search for “x reviews” and rather than get the usual Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, newspaper reviews, I get RandomGuy.com. If I want RandomGuy.com, that is actually what a social media-esque site like Rotten Tomatoes or Letterboxd is for, not a search engine.

Hopefully this will be what we want it to be and not, for example, the TikTok-ization of Google search results, constantly and algorithmically showing you something “new.”

[1]: <rant> That said, the game is still very much for the taking and no one is still able to easily answer one of my most common queries for work: “python regex.” Seriously, it feels like a battle to get a simple example showing how to use groups/named groups to extract specific information. I don’t want a reference guide to common RegEx wildcards, I already know about \d and +! I don’t want a toy example showing how to use RegEx for seeing if “rain” is in “The cat is in the rain” (that’s using a hammer to kill a fly - you would just use “if rain in string” for example). I want a helpful and succinct guide on the specifics of Python’s RegEx so I can stop fiddling with it ASAP! </rant>

Yes, Signal’s phone number requirement is bad. But, given that, the fact that they don’t store any messages on their side and everything is client side is still a huge benefit over a lot of other apps and still a huge step forward for privacy! Criticism is definitely important but I just wanted to put that out there that all things considered, Signal is still very much a good thing.

I think this is the wrong question actually. Say I wanted to learn machine learning. It might be counterproductive to Google “what language/toolkit is used for ML” because then I would just be an expert in Python/SciKit/etc. It might be more helpful to narrow down the area first - neural networks, ML ops, voice assistant, etc. - and the language/tools will naturally follow.

Per your actual question, you can’t go wrong with enterprise Java systems in web dev (backend/ops). I would caution against Rust for web dev at this moment because the trendier stuff will have very few offerings compared to legacy stuff, just by nature. Once you can consider a technology “boring,” it will probably be stable enough to be the default stack in a lot of shops.

That’s not a compromise at all to me. That’s total capitulation. Once any party has the right to sanction or ban and CEX comply with government orders, what is the point?

This is kind of a misconception a lot of people have about law. Especially in crypto, you’ll hear people gape “oh what, the government is going to ban random numbers? oh, the government is gonna ban something they can’t shut down?” I guess they imagine something more dramatic like secret police doing sting operations against every crypto user out there. In reality, they’re making a new stick i.e. once they have already decided to prosecute you for something, if they can show you used a mixer, this will be just a new charge to throw at you or a multiplier on your sentence.

I’m finding it a little difficult to put into words succinctly but as an example, they’re still going to after e.g. Coinbase: the big guys. They’re not gonna track down every party interacting with any mixer and prosecute because that’s hugely resource intensive. But now when they go after e.g. Coinbase, they have a new tool in their belt. (IMO IANAL.)

> a lot easier for someone to create a new mixer

As in, deploy contract, yes. As in, have enough liquidity to both “mix” (aka launder) money and provide sufficient anonymity, no, that’s a network effect which is largely winner-take-all. The largest mixers will be the safest and most effective but then also the biggest targets. As you go down the list, they get less likely to be sanctioned but more likely to be unsafe/honeypots/ineffective.

Not really following their reasoning why this is specifically crypto related and not the hot market of Covid economics in general e.g. asset valuation spikes, housing "bubble", meme stocks, etc.

Because there still exists informational asymmetry where the platform/exchange owners (and all employees privy to that information) still have material advantage over their customers but can now manipulate them easier than they can in traditional systems. With traditional systems, you have to purchase shares with your real name and thus regulators are able to detect patterns easier. In DeFi, these guys just spun up new anonymous wallets each time and if they were slightly better at it, they likely never would’ve been caught. Getting to parity of current insider trading detection in DeFi would require massive data analysis constantly keeping track of which wallets make suspiciously timed trades, leading to the same financial surveillance and de-anonymity DeFi wants to solve. One good tweet is not enough to validate the whole system.

But what can law enforcement do against decentralized networks with anonymous hosters? With torrents for example, the ISPs go after peers using their service but the content itself will stay up until all peers stop seeding.

Great example of how most of the fluff around decentralized finance being more fair just because it is public and “open” is naive at best and a wolf in sheep’s clothing at worst. They claim that regulated banks are a moral evil and “wouldn’t you want something neutral and open and transparent,” conveniently forgetting that this will always favor those with money to market, attract, and sell to potential “buyers” (scam victims, really). Especially with the use of bots and crypto’s rather insular and hype-driven community, it becomes dangerously easy to get tons of dumb money, almost entirely from people who are desperate enough to believe it.

Brilliantly said.

It’s not so much they were “real” problems, as they were acute problems. Acute problems - bad guy with gun - are easier to portray on screen than chronic problems. Anyone who thinks we don’t have real problems anymore and this is the end of history has their head in the sand. But it’s more difficult to visualize. How do you make a war flick out of climate change? How do you make an action thriller from wealth inequality? Even Covid, I mean I don’t know of any influential movies inspired by the Spanish Flu.

Some “dark and gritty” does suffer from a true lack of maturity on the point of the screenwriter - Zac Snyder does not have the writing talent to support his darkness without it seeming cheesy and silly - but a lot of it - Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight - very much does touch on the real suffering of the modern era: terrorism, surveillance, class divisions.

I agree with some other commenters; this is a lot of cherry picking. You could just as easily compare Nosferatu (1922) with Blade (1998) with Twilight (2008) and ask why culture gets happier and less serious as time goes on, “aren’t we all becoming like Brave New World???” Comparing Adam West’s Batman with today’s Batman is just lazy. They’re apples and oranges at this point: different genres, different climates (today the more “fun” stuff is Marvel), different film technology. And if we want to get into it, it’s not “depression” that’s trendy; it’s realism. 60’s Batman dealt with all the same “dark” themes as current Batman: mafia, crime, trauma and grief, etc. But the visual portrayal was different because it was a “comic book” before comic books adaptations were commonplace blockbusters. That doesn’t mean all of 1960s cinema is somehow a comic book movie. Hello: Psycho (1960), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966).

> Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots

I am very tired of non-Americans comments about America. We don’t “pretend” that racism is racism, racism is racism in America and attempts to skirt around it with the Marxism-lite “actually everything is classism” are unhelpful.

Yes, Black people have largely been kept in the lower classes from slavery to sharecropping to Jim Crow to now, but even those who managed to become “middle class” financially still found themselves unable to get mortgages, loans, or jobs at the same rate as white people. Just using a Black-sounding name on paper will lower your odds of all of these.

Even the very site we are on now has a less than proportionate (in America) Black audience because the software/computing industry has a less than proportionate Black makeup. This cannot be explained by simple “classism.”

An Ivy League educated, middle class Black man even became president and was still subject to attacks from all classes of white America, not because he was middle class, but because he was Black. This includes lower class white people too, who are some of the most discriminatory against other races in America.

Even the phrase you used “white trash” was originated by Black slaves against white servants, not upper class white people like you claim.

America is not Europe or Asia. The white colonizers to America that arrived, yes, were mostly lower classes in Europe but in the “New” World of Native Americans, that was not the biggest distinguishing factor any longer.

How is this different from Auth0?

The issue many "folks like us" have with crypto is not that it "will never work" but precisely that it works all too well facilitating scams, asset bubbles, risky lending practices, financial hacks, ransomware, and various kinds of illicit financial activity (wash trading, money laundering, etc.). With say, I don't know, quantum computing, there is an understanding that it has its own issues but that these are improving and we will eventually find good use cases for this technology. People are upfront about the costs, the risks, and the very fact that it is developing still. In the current market froth, this is not the case with cryptocurrency which - despite several major hacks in the multimillion range, rug pulling, questionable stablecoin pegs/reserves, not to mention the rather serious technical challenges - people are insisting already is the future. People are not so pessimistic about quantum computing and other developing technologies because those are not inherently harmful as cryptocurrency has proved to be.

I have found decrying SF as a “tragedy” or constantly criticizing it to be an excellent litmus test for the technocratic right who insists they used to be liberals but now simply have no choice but to be conservative because the liberals have “moved left” or other back bending attempts to rationalize their conservatism as being anything other than 100% profit motivated and a weird sense of personal betrayal at the rise of homelessness and drug use in SF. cf Peter Thiel, “San Fransicko,” Balaji Srinivasan, Marc Andreessen

> messages that can optionally include payments

This is a weird way to put it. Transactions include state transitions which modify the state of the global blockchain permanently. Miners (in the case of bitcoin) validate these transitions and publish the block to the chain. If there is a reversal, it must come from the merchant’s account, because only they can produce a valid state transition to “return” (ie send back) your money.

> Speed

Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions per second, on average. VISA can handle 1,700.

> Security

Your bank account is secured with a password. If compromised, you can prove your identity in person at a bank with government documents and obviously physical appearance. Bitcoin has one method of authentication, the signing key, and once you lose it, you have lost your account.

> Privacy

Every transaction you make as well as your balance is public on a blockchain. Your bank account is private only to you and the bank itself.

> Trust

This one is more subjective and I won’t really comment if I trust Chase or Coinbase more, but I will say this is somewhat ironic on a post about how Coinbase is selling IP data to ICE.

> Reversing charges is a different point, which could be accomplished pretty simply with 2-of-3 sigs if there's market demand for it.

You can’t reverse transactions. Once validated and included in a block, the transactions are forever, which is of course one of the main appeals of cryptocurrency in the first place. You would have to get the fraudster to send the money back (potentially covering gas fees) or else there is literally no other way without their signing key (also one of the key appeals of cryptocurrency).

> It boggles my mind that we've had public key cryptography for fifty years and we're still not using it for payments. Never mind blockchains, just upgrading the banking system to use public keys would be a huge improvement.

This ignores the number one lesson of PGP - key management is hard, up there with naming things and cache invalidation. I honestly don’t see how public keys, which are vastly more complicated to use and store than passwords, would be an improvement for the general, non-technical public when getting them to use long, unique passwords is already a challenge. You have to copy over or update your public key with each new computer you get, assuming the account owner even has a permanent computer. What about accessing your account on someone else’s computer in a quick pinch, or on your phone? Coupled with the fact that keypairs would be unable to be force reset (assuming you want to use them to their full potential) unlike passwords, and it would be a disaster.

I will say that minimizing the sensitive information sent for payment with crypto is a huge plus, as the merchant no longer needs to handle the card information to send to the payment processor, but can just accept the transaction hash (with some sort of signature of course).

This also doesn’t really address the issue that Coinbase will still send your info to ICE, of course. Not that banks are any better. But cash is!