Live data from Hacker News

The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

ghostbin.com

241–250 of 348 posts

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad, old memory: "Every transaction must have a line written to the printer" Tracking down "why is the antique system suddenly slow". Power went out, system came back up fine, everything but the one ancient but vital app is fine. Dig, dig dig, there's this old dot matrix printer in another room (because it used to be loud and annoying) that no on has fed or looked at in years. It finally died with that outage, and it…

Holy cow how old was this system, circa 1975 or something?

I want to say it was probably installed in '85 and I saw it in '94; but i wouldn't swear to those dates.

I'm pretty sure it was the only dot matrix printer with a serial port i ever saw. Even daisy wheels were parallel port by the time this went in; but they had a like 50ft cable to move it to the other room. Someone worked hard and paid large to set that up originally.

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#242
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite a feminine guy and I was always called various homophobic slurs at school. Even though I wasn't gay I didn't understand why it would matter if I was so I would just say "ok". Even when the insults could be considered objectively offensive I'm still generally okay with it. I've been called names quite a bit in the workplace over the years and I'm okay with it if makes them happy. Being autistic I don't reall…

I adore you but doubt your judgement about those being high EQ individuals. By the way in the middle school we used a derogatory for gay every day without even having any idea of what did it mean, all we knew was that was the worst word we knew. When others bullied me (always (or I just never cared and don't remember the verbal) physically, way harder to endure) I occasionally went mad and called them this word repea…

This is neither here nor there, but I learned from watching Louie that "faggot", the derogatory term for homosexuals, has the same origins as the word "fascism" – a bundle of sticks. The idea is that in the dark days of witch trials, one would, apparently, not only burn supposed witches, but also homosexuals. However, since homosexuals were thought of as less than witches, while a witch got the stake, the homosexuals were thrown in with the bundles of firewood. The now archaic word for a bundle of sticks was faggot, or fire-faggot in the case of firewood. The part about different forms of herecy receiving different treatment at the stake might be artistic license, the rest is true though.

https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/67623#eid46436...

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#243
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We used to call this the "Scunthorpe problem" Fwiw, it's well-known as such, after relatively high-profile incidents involving people with that address: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Is that just well-known in the UK though? I've mentioned this to people outside the UK and only occasionally have they known it.

I’ve seen it called the clbuttic problem

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to be taught that "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me". I'm not so sure that has ever been true. Emotional bullying was always a thing, and it did hurt. I'm glad that we're now taking that more seriously. But it's also true that my emotions are my responsibility, and my emotional reaction to words is unique to me. I cannot force everyone else to be responsible for how I feel abo…

I thought it was something along the lines of "sticks and stones may break my bones but words can break hearts" Basically, the pen is stronger than the sword, kind of morale.

I've never heard that one, but it might be a regional variant. I always heard the other one.

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#245
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I suspect that this balance is what we call "good manners" or "politeness". Or "empathy". And I think on an interpersonal level this is easy. You can't force anyone else to be responsible for how you feel about their words, that is true. But if you say to a colleague or a friend that "when you call me X, that makes me feel bad, could you call me Y instead?". Depending on the friend they might want to understand why…

> But on a collective level we aren't yet (if we'll ever be) as developed a civilization to have empathy on that level. I agree. Which is why we have rules around politeness and manners, which roughly conform to same actions as actual empathy. Which makes sense - people don't always have the same level of empathy, there are lots of neurodivergent people who will never understand empathy but who can learn a set of rul…

> I feel like this respect for being nice to each other so we can all get along is on the wane.

I think this is depending on how you see it. The modern landscape with social media makes activists very effective in creating information campaigns that raises awareness of how to be polite in a modern world. Eg. nowadays personal pronouns are complicated business but finding out and respecting individuals chosen pronouns are considered polite. A successful change of culture that increases empathy and respect of fellow humans in general. But the downside is that the opinions of the people who don't want to be polite in this way are also amplified and they may want to resist and pushback that triggers them to be contrary and act with less empathy and politeness to make their point. The thing is, positive changes in culture usually last and backwards reactionary people die so that makes me kinda hopeful.

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should just be taught (I would consider this is an essential skill which should be put in basic school curriculum to psychologically prepare people for the life, many support/sales professionals learn it quickly but the rest of the people don't) words are just words and they don't have to take them seriously. No word is rude until you consider it rude. No word can actually harm you directly. It's you who is in…

What s rude is the shared imagery not the words. If I call myself MyDirtyDickInYourDogBringsMeToOrgasm, imagining this scene is disgusting enough to ask me to change it. Words are not just symbols on paper, they are image triggers in your brain.

If someone attempts to degrade someone's emotional or mental state, that's something that should be stigmatized. But, that doesn't mean that the individual is not completely responsible for his own mental state, in the sense meant by Stoics. It's not about things, but our thoughts about things, which are ultimately under our control. We may play the victim, but we'd only be fooling ourselves.

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the guy that streamed a talking banana on Twitch Of all the ways I expected a talking banana to backfire, I didn't expect this one. Thanks for sharing

Wait, now I’m extremely curious what failure modes one would expect from a talking banana.

I assume the other failure modes are pornographic in nature.

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#248

Why is all of this implemented in SQL? Wouldn't it be better to do it in code with dedicated methods to filter stuff out? IMO logic inside of SQL queries just adds unnecessary complexity, implementing this in code would've been maintainable and testable.

It is FUNCTIONS so it is code like any other. Even SQL is code (declarative).

The reason is: This can be updated very easily and out-of-band of other deploys of the main application code.

To make this work it has to be super agile to update. Probably this version we are looking at is an old version that happened to be put in git. The functions in prod probably have several additions since.

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#249
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything exposed to the open internet devolves into porn or racism or both unless active effort is made to prevent it. I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

quite curious as to how Instagram managed to avoid this, despite launching with no moderation, (just Mike and Kevin), yet all you needed was an email to use the service...

They certainly have moderation now, and it's a constant exercise in boundary-pushing. I'd be interested in a "history of Instagram moderation", that would be a great piece of anthropology.

Was the no-links policy there from the start? I think that would have helped a lot. As it is, you're allowed basically one outbound link from your profile, so there are link-expander services which people use to link to more things.

Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch

#250

We used to call this the "Scunthorpe problem" - how do you filter for obviously rude names while still allowing people to have their actual names? Bearing in mind that some people's names are actually rude. I worked on the application form processing for the Nectar card launch in the UK back in the early 2000's, and we had several cases. Luckily we had human data-entry clerks in the loop, so all we had to do was flag…

Random story I remember my ICT teacher telling us in school along the same lines as Scunthorpe. They installed some nonsense web blocking thing that schools like to have and a lot of teachers complained because it blocked weightwatchers.com
Post reply on HN