Wouldn't be the first time HN/automoderation/mods have removed 'critical to YC business interests'. Happened to me with the Thalmic Myo, when I open source forced them to open their platform. HackADay also notes that HN autohid my article.
Dang has usually responded with noncommital responses like they never do that. But further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears.
edit: and -1'ed. Is this because "my content sucks"? Is it because of 'offtopic'? Or is it a mod?
Considering karma here determines rights, rate limiting, mod-down, flagging, and more - these points do matter here. And of course the larger issue here is lack of transparency. In fact, with removal of mod scores, the site has gone down in transparency.
I feel like if someone is still upset about a case like this 6 years later, we should probably try to figure out why and see what we can do to settle the matter. But HN has had 15M posts since then and I have zero memory of it. Actually I probably have zero memory of HN from 2 days ago. Can you link to the relevant post(s)?
I looked at that hackaday.com page. It says this: "Quick aside, but if you want to see how nearly every form of media is crooked, try submitting this to Hacker News and look at the Thalmic investors. Edit: don’t bother, we’re blacklisted or something."...but is also linkless. Usually when people make dudgeonly claims but conspicuously omit links, it's because what actually happened doesn't match what they say.
Re "dang has usually responded with noncommital responses": I try to be commital. There is little to be gained by not, since we try not to do things that aren't defensible to the community in the first place. If you have any tips to offer for increased commitalness, I'd like to hear them.
Edit: I just noticed this bit: "further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears". When? That doesn't sound like us.
Network topological discovery is the hard pill to swallow with p2p based tech. You're paying for it in much higher network bandwidth, cpu, battery, and more.
Eventually the tradeoffs will be so minuscule that they will be a rounding error. But right now, that's not true.
Pirate Bay is all magnet links now. Internet Archive serves most items as torrents while acting as a store of last resort. SciHub and LibGen are functional and available.
There are tradeoffs, but it will happen, even if it's TXT records for a domain that point to IPFS links (namecoin aside). The future will make it easier, but it works today.
Pirate Bay, SciHub and Libgen are used mainly on desktop computers with an unlimited broadband connection. They are niche communities for enthusiasts (whether the dwindling pool of torrent users, or academics/bookish people). The general public now consumes its content on mobile, and as the GP mentioned there are significant bandwidth and battery costs to trying to provide distributed content over the mobile devices we have today.
I don't buy that NAT is a huge roadblock. A VPS is $5/mo, or dynamic DNS plus port forwarding is free. Either way, an ISP can apply the same reasoning and cut off access. Centralization due to using DNS (or raw IPs) for naming is the problem. Censorship resistance comes from there being a swarm that as a whole cannot be taken down, while members come and go. This requires a decentralized namespace for referencing content.
Now, what happens when that expands to 1/10 of citizens due to lack of food, people getting evicted, no work, and more? Covid-19 is only accelerating the road we're currently on, in a very quick fashion.
And there's a reason why police departments were buying military surplus. They view us citizens as the enemy. There's nary a reason why you need APCs with 50cal's mounted for the local police force, or armed with a variety of grenades, or microwave cannons, or acoustic weapons.
Whatever it is that's forming and coming to a head, it doesn't look peaceful. At. All.
Yeah I ran across some scaremongers on Twitter 6 months ago who were going on about vaccines (??) And 5G. I had and still have no clue about that.
As a real aside, networking everything does definitely have upsides and downsides.
Upsides: seamless monitoring, remote control via api, integration across a house/car/phone, remote presence (never worry that door was open, or coffee pot is on, or garage door up).
Downsides: DRM at every level, unupdated devices, non-service things are now shorehorned into a service model, you no longer own your possessions, hacking, pay for a plan per device?
There's also spectrum discussions with 10-100x devices chattering. That's going to raise noise floors even higher.
-----------------------
Relevant edit of where I see IoT going towards:
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
Networking things makes sense when remote interaction is useful.
There is very little you can do with a toaster, microwave, or coffee machine while you are not physically present. You can't send toast, coffee, or leftovers over a network. The 'internet of things' isn't useful in and of itself. There has to first be a practical use-case that justifies it.
I haven't had to worry about the coffee pot being on for decades. My $20 coffee pot has a positive temperature coefficient heating element, thermal fuse, and automatic shutoff.
> There has to first be a practical use-case that justifies it.
The use case is additional revenue streams for appliance makers from selling surveillance derived data. Every smart tv is a revenue stream for the manufacturer. That's why you can't buy dumb tvs anymore.
Soon your coffee maker, your toothbrush, your car, your refrigerator, and everything else that plugs in or has a battery will be "smart" in the same way.
Here's the Vizio exec explaining why they would have to charge a premium for "dumb" tvs:
That works works out for TVs because of a few specific things:
1. The consumer wants to hook their TV up to the internet to get content
2. TVs ads have a well established market of buyers who will pay for that data
3. TVs are expensive and consumers often buy primarily on price
By comparison, there is no market for the data from my coffee pot, and little to no incentive for a consumer to choose a model that collects data over one that doesn't.
> 1. The consumer wants to hook their TV up to the internet to get content
As the cost of 5G iot chips fall it won't matter what the consumer wants.
> 2. TVs ads have a well established market of buyers who will pay for that data
The data collected from Smart TVs is much more than ads. They track and report everything you watch, including dvds and blurays, with media fingerprinting techniques.
> By comparison, there is no market for the data from my coffee pot
Oh but there will be. Soon some data scientist at your health insurer will notice that people who drink more than 3.5 cups of Folgers a day are 5% more likely to suffer heatstroke or whatever. Then they can adjust premiums and deny claims more effectively. Not allowed to use this information due to regulations? Apply parallel construction and use it to focus limited investigation resources.
I really hope you're right and this doesn't happen.
> As the cost of 5G iot chips fall it won't matter what the consumer wants.
If the consumer doesn't want that connectivity as a feature, you'll need to find a buyer for the data who is willing to subsidize >= 100% of the price of the additional hardware and service to have a viable product. Alternative data from other sources is probably still going to be a lot cheaper for most things... because a lot of competing data sources have way less overhead, approaching zero in some cases.
> The data collected from Smart TVs is much more than ads. They track and report everything you watch, including dvds and blurays, with media fingerprinting techniques.
I was referring to the purchasers of the data, not the subject of the data.
> Soon some data scientist at your health insurer will notice that people who drink more than 3.5 cups of Folgers a day are 5% more likely to suffer heatstroke or whatever. Then they can adjust premiums and deny claims more effectively.
If they wanted to do this, they could have done it any time over the past 20+ years ago by purchasing transaction data. But insurers have already found better ways to collect even better quality data: Just ask for it directly and offer a discount.
Playing devil's advocate, but I can see how people would appreciate a network connected coffee maker. My wife likes to stay in bed and scroll through her newsfeeds in the morning. If she could start the coffee maker from her phone, it would probably get her out of bed a lot faster.
Some people like to use their Cuisinart Grind & Brew instead of an alarm clock. The grinder will wake you up at the programmed time, and if you get up, you are rewarded with freshly ground coffee.
You can get a pretty dumb coffee maker that has a delayed brew setting. You'd have to put the grounds and water in anyway, so the extra effort is pressing a couple buttons on the machine right after you do that, rather than a couple buttons on your phone in the morning.
Having it made at a specific time is a totally different dynamic than having it made on demand with a press of a button. We don't use alarm clocks, so our wakeup times are different every day.
But regardless, if the coffee made itself at 8am sharp, I would feel pressure to get out of bed immediately, ruining the chillness of the morning. I want to be able to lounge around, scroll the feeds, and then tap the button to make the coffee when Im feeling somewhat ready to make the step out of bed, but need a bit of extra motivation.
Well of course not but if you're an enthusiast you'll probably spend more for one that grinds, too. Or not use a machine, so the whole issue of brew-by-wire is moot. Point is this is a pretty common feature even on cheap machines, with no Internet connectivity required, and the effort required to use it is about the same.
While this sounds absolutely lovely on paper, here's the thing: I do not trust the free market to deliver on that. What will happen is just a bunch of silos where things sorta work together as long as you stick to a single vendor, but half of the things are garbage, as there's no point in making them good when the users are already captive due to buying into the one expensive thing that's best-in-class.
Yep. Thats only because Graylog requires it. We don't put any real data in Mongo. That'd just be silly.
I'd put SNMP telemetry data in Mongo, only for the fact that recording that can be somewhat lossy. Plainly, I just don't trust Mongo with consistency, availability, or partition tolerance.
And because Mongo's backup facilities suck (requires taking the DB into readonly, or accepting no time consistency egads), the only good way to do a backup is to put the DB on LVM, and making a LVM snapshot.
NodeRed or Apache NiFi can help a great deal with that.
Both are great at posting and reposting (on and off Reddit, or between FB, Reddit, Twitter, etc), along with controlling botfarms.
edit: Seriously, why the downvotes? We had a NiFi post a week ago. And those of us who do OSINT and investigative work also use deanonymizing techniques. We automate our defenses as well using similar.
Probably because it kind of ignored my point. For example, r/pics has thirty-six moderators. Some of them are undoubtedly inactive, but it's still obvious that moderating a single massive subreddit is an order of magnitude more work than can be done by one person and therefore giving one person moderator rights over multiple does not increase the amount or quality of moderation. One person cannot use that power to do more good for the site, so the question is what are they using that power for and why do they deserve it?
I sait on another comment on this article that being a mod allows you to strongly astroturf and control the narrative. From there, and having loads of bots, allows you to manufacture consent or dissent. And the moderation power allows you to remove what you wish not to address.
It's sheer power. It's not about the money, per se... But those with power get money, and those with money seek power.
It has nothing to do with good, in most cases.
(And yes, I'm a moderator of small groups. I just remove spam and malware.)
Karma is a social proof for being able to astroturf and control the narrative. And depending on what group you're a mod in, can provide a great deal of influence and control.
> Buying keys in a region with low regional pricing then reselling them in a higher region
Notice that companies can do that with labor and buildings and tax evasion, and it's 'situation normal'... But when real humans try to, its bad and illegal and horrible.
I would think the closest analogy would be to the death penalty in the USA surrounding lethal injections.
Every company that is knowingly being used for the cocktail to kill someone has made the supply gone. They refuse to supply to any state that diverts to executions. Sure, the executions are 'legal' (removing jurors who are ethically against death penalty is a whole different issue).... But the companies manufacturing these chemicals don't want anything to do.
I wonder how Zoom is going to handle this in the future? Even though they obviously had 0 input for Singapore executing a citizen, the article makes it sound like Zoom was somehow, peripherally complicit with state sanctioned murder.
"I'm sorry you're an idiot."
Not an apology, an insult, and feigning to be apologizing about you (which is doubly insulting).