identity-haver

They probably don't want to publicize their methods, and they might not have to due to parallel construction -- we may never know what they've stopped. There's not a lot of oversight here: they're also spying on Congress and civil servants and every time a terrorist attack or mass shooting happens, they get more money and more power whether they've stopped any other attacks or not.

In the unlikely event that someone told them to stop because the 4th amendment was violated, they would just have someone in an intelligence-sharing agreement like Five Eyes get the same data and send it over.

It's from a healthcare startup that provides "proactive fertility" at-home tests and analyzes them combined with blood tests and other medical factors. It costs $159. Use case would be like if you're a 28-year old woman, to know the status of your fertility. You may decide that you need to try to become pregnant earlier than planned if your fertility markers are lower than average, for example.

I was pretty stunned that "in the majority of IVF cases, a woman cannot have a baby using her own eggs". Apparently 89% of women are also not aware of this. Does anyone know more about this? Here [1] it shows that at age 35-37, 30% of nondonor IVF cycles result in live birth. How does this square with the above fact? Is it because they would only try IVF in the first place if they thought the nondonor eggs were viable?

[1] https://www.advancedfertility.com/ivf-age.htm

One part of me hopes that governments keep doing this every time there's as much as a bad mugging, so that people will stop relying on the ability of their government-controlled ISP and a US-controlled cloud platform to communicate with each other and maybe try some new P2P technology, or possibly just talk to each other in person instead.

Then again, this is wishful thinking. The only reason the Sri Lankan government has to resort to such a drastic and ham-fisted measure is that they don't yet have the clout or connection to call their friends at Google, Facebook, & Twitter and say "immediately shadowban this set of keywords" like the US and EU can.

If preventing "stochastic terrorism" was the reason they turned off social media, shouldn't they have done it before the bombs exploded, possibly even before any of the terrorists used it, and not afterwards?

This might work even if women don't check in, as long as they are on the app. Besides, single guys mobbing an easily accessible bar where there are a lot of single women and scaring them all away within a couple weeks happens all the time already, sans app. This is what bouncers / face-control / cover are for.

Sadly, this may be true if the answer to "how are they going to make any money with this?" is anything but "make all the guys pay $5 or so a month".

I am kind of playing devil's advocate. I don't think any of that is a good idea. You're basically gulaging people at that point, which would be a good comparison -- did those guys get their money back? There was a thing on HN about how people in England with Norman names are still wealthier than those with Anglo-Saxon names about a millennium later. Now that was a conquest.

edit: they claimed to control for "skill" and inheritance (which should cover some of the genetic component) but I don't know how well as the paper is paywalled

Their conclusion is that the recovery is "the result of elite networks acting as an invisible safety-net". As a thought experiment, how could this have been avoided? One columnist [1] suggests that the core action is "the children of the rich [forming] strong social bonds with the children of the poor". But this is hard to do if the rich have their own schools and neighborhoods and what not - so using the Fair Housing Act to further integrate neighborhoods is suggested. But who knows their neighbors these days? If you can pay for private schools, you basically never even have to talk to poor people. The costs of this would land squarely on the middle and upper-middle class, while the wealthiest could still buy their separation.

Ultimately, if something similar happened today (immediate removal of 50% of rich people's so-called property or some other major wealth shock), avoiding a similar recovery couldn't be done without banning private schools and removing all children from their parents for long periods of time, along with forcibly relocating the previous property owners and not letting them network with each other.

[1] https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/redistribution-won-t-end-wealth-...

About 2-3 months ago they basically nuked Youtube's search and recommendation. This was associated with some bad press about those features coming up with "harmful content" like unapproved radical politics & conspiracy theories. Now you basically see mostly curated front-page stuff plus some user stuff that had probably never come up in search before (e.g. a fairly common search term will come up with videos that are a decade old and only have 5k views). Maybe changes in Google search are related?

The Norse of old would agree with you, where if you die a "straw death" outside of battle you don't get to go to Valhalla. But apparently if you stabbed yourself on your deathbed you still got to go to Valhalla?

The term has existed, but was popularized and brought into the common discourse immediately after the 2016 election: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...

If the current president couldn't pass a bill for his signature campaign issue (a $30B wall) when both chambers of the legislature were held by his party, Yang is probably not going to pass a $3T+ per year UBI bill when likely just one (the House) would be held by his party. But it would make for interesting discussion on the campaign trail.

Whoever's left after several generations of this consumer technology will look at apps like this and the associated lifestyle the way humans look at snakes, open sores, and other dangerous, reproductive-fitness harming things today. This may be counterintuitive, but since birth control there is an inverse relationship between the number of sexual partners and the number of children.

There was a claim [1] that the G+ terms of service might legally prohibit them from doing this after the service is shut down. I haven't verified it.

However, it's clear that for an archiving effort this big, people at Google are explicitly allowing it. The user agents and fetch patterns of the Archive Team crawler were clearly distinct enough to get caught by an automated tool, and someone knew someone at Google in order to get it unblocked.

Unfortunately, any archival effort that requires the "Warrior" crawler (and not just a guy with a 4TB disk) is at the mercy of the website's remaining staff and management. Just ask Soundcloud. Archive Team started to archive their stuff when it looked like they were going to go under, but Soundcloud shut them down.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19410050

I don't think this is correct. They seem to be saying that they allow posting about nationalism and separatism, and white nationalism content was allowed under this umbrella, but now they specifically disallow white nationalism and separatism.

Honestly though, posting about any serious separatist movement has a good chance of violating their "terrorism" community standard: "Any non-governmental organization that engages in premeditated acts of violence against persons or property ... in order to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim"

You can't tell me with a straight face that if Facebook existed 50 years ago, Sinn Fein would be allowed to post on Facebook, because they were not the IRA.

There's a lesson about political organizing in here, which is that whoever cares the most about controlling discussions is going to end up doing it, even if it costs them money. Whether it's being a government official or NGO executive who can pressure tech companies, going on a moderation career track inside a big tech company that might not be the most remunerative, or just starting your own online community, actually acquiring said power will beat appealing to principles every time.

I've heard that even if you flip the "algorithmic timeline" switch off, you still don't see a linear feed of everyone you're following. It's still filtered and manipulated, just closer to linear.

Speaking of design decisions, here's a bit [1] about how the "quote tweet" encourages the behavior of "dunking", a usage I have only ever heard in regards to Twitter. Basically, if anyone with a Twitter account says something you think is stupid, you quote tweet them and "dunk" on them about how stupid it is and they are. Then everybody piles in and retweets the "dunk", perhaps adding their own riposte. And the original poster is only a click away in the quote, so you can then go to their profile and find other things to dunk on, send mean DMs, etc.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2017/12/dunking-is-delicious-an...

Oh I know what it is, I just think it’s completely wrong to apply to Europe pre WWI. How a culture that explored and conquered almost the entire world had a “slave morality” because of the beatitudes or something was always baffling. What would be interesting is applying it to today’s secular Europe.

I'm not really sure where to start here. There was more "excellence" in the Roman Republic and prior times than the following 2000 years of European history?

This is a familiar critique that seems to conflate the modern self-esteem craze, communism, and the utopian "equality of outcome" with the traditional religiously based idea of equality, which is that every soul is made in the image of and has equal responsibility before God and that's it. The Lockean idea of human rights is cladistically derived from this.

For one, your ability to defend your self and your family has been partially abrogated. Now it depends more on physical strength and the wealth to live in a safe area with other defenses.

Second, your ability to access the internet has been shown to be arbitrarily limitable, kind of like China's great firewall.

Third, your ability to speak and communicate about political issues has been tamped. Today it's possessing somebody else's anti-Muslim manifesto that gets you 10 years, tomorrow it's an anti-party manifesto. Let me take a look through all your private messages and documents, and believe me, I will find something that I can "class as objectionable".

For anyone reading this site, the standardized testing regime in Texas is going to be a bureaucratic formality for the teachers and an afterthought for the students, where kids spend 2-4 days per year wasting time taking an easy test about stuff they already know, then dozing off for the rest of the time.

The sad reality is that Texas-style standardized tests measure basic material that students anywhere should be expected to know (take a look at the tests if you're not sure: this is not even the SAT we're dealing with). The primary purpose of them is to identify and remediate the many dysfunctional schools. If a school can't teach their kids this material and have 50% of them pass the test, they have a serious problem.

My plan would be to send my kids to dual language programs. If you're a somewhat native Spanish speaker, you can claim to be Hispanic with a clear conscience. "Hispanic" is, legally speaking (for now), an "ethnicity", not a race, which means it is independent of blood (but apparently race is a "socio-political construct" according to the US Census). People are already doing this, plus the people with one Mexican grandparent or something.

This farcical system can't go on forever as is. Either racial preferences in hiring will be banned under the 14th amendment, or the US will adopt a Brazil-style racial preference system, where they will actually test your blood and have technicians measure the tone of your skin and the shape of your face in order to fit you into a category.

True, but that's a lot better than your CPU running a non-stop Java webserver / rootkit.

For one it would be really nice to be able to have a computer without a highly insecure and backdoorable management engine inside its CPU, basically all x86 computers sold since 2010.

Can you point us in a direction on this? I have never read a lucid attempt to describe the "anatomy of the psyche" on "psychonaut" websites, just a lot of people who may have had some personal experience of enlightenment but don't describe it super well. The closest thing I can think of is Jung whose description of the psyche was heavily influenced by mystical experiences he had, sans drugs.

Most discussion here is about how gun rights in the US aren't primarily viewed as being about hunting. That being said, there are legitimate reasons to use a semi-automatic weapon with a >10 magazine capacity for hunting. For example, feral hogs and coyotes frequently travel in packs. If a dozen hogs are causing havoc on your land, you might need more than a bolt action, especially once they start running.

So we should just ignore the terrorist's clearly stated strategy, and then go right along with it?

Is a "military-style" gun kind of like a "sports-style" car? Snark aside, this is some pretty weak reporting. Was their parliament or whatever involved at all? The article makes it sound like their prime minister can just arbitrarily ban guns, creating crimes, but I doubt that's really the case. Also the term "buyback" is a really bad term, since it usually implies a voluntary nature. This is really a "forced buyback" or confiscation.

Someone at Facebook is going to have to train an "is streamer committing a mass murder" neural net now, kind of like the "is dude whipping out his genitals" ones that are already around.