71–80 of 84 posts
Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law....Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures. There are lots of really interesting and…
Similar to the HN penalty, reddit also seems to have some Snowden countermeasures in effect. It was a very popular IAmA, but the Android AMA app, displayed only 2 answers for it, and the 3 people who wanted to answer, Laura Poitras, Ed Snowden and Glen Greenwald, were limited to about one answer per 10 minutes, so for the whole hour they could answer about 10 questions. This limits usability and civil interactions a…
I would be more curious to know the number of down votes the AMA has gotten, I could have sworn the number has gone down
Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law....Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures. There are lots of really interesting and…
I find the rest of that specific comment particularly amazing: > How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent. > How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governmen…
What's worse, truly not giving a shit, or giving a shit but giving up because there isn't enough outward validation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we ever want to, or even think that way. The higher up on Hacker News an article is, the more awareness will typically be allocated to the story. If a story drops from the front page, significantly less attention will be allocated to it. While the penalties might not have been intended to minimize awareness of these stories in the greater scheme of…
It's not exactly difficult to move past the first page or to use the search bar, and any comments about those stories are going to appear on /newcomments anyway. If there is an effect of 'minimizing awareness' at work, I don't think the effect is very large.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The discussions got very redundant, but I don't recall many duplicate articles. Early on, there was a ton of information being released every few days, and of course a lot of drama with Snowden himself. I don't see how a blanket penalty works better than manually removing the small number of genuinely pointless articles.
This depends on how you define "duplicate". I said "copycat", meaning the plethora of follow-up stories that invariably appear when something big happens that don't include any new information, but either report on what has already been reported or are garden-variety commentary. Obviously, HN's front page doesn't have room for all of those. If you think that there aren't many of them, we must be working with differen…
The moderation, hidden bans, all very childish.
Grow up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa, really? What cable provider?
its one of the two local dominant ones but I'm not sure which. I'll try to find out tomorrow. I'd say the city but this topic is already terrifying enough considering the nature of the "adversary", haha, oh man. if you email me I'll tell you city. I'm hoping to see reports from others. I find it hard to believe it would just be one person, one device. surely whoever/whatever did this would do an entire region/provide…
Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law....Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures. There are lots of really interesting and…
I find the rest of that specific comment particularly amazing: > How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent. > How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governmen…
I think the point he is making is that you can act as an individual, you do not have to, nor should you, depend on politicians or corporations to make this right for you. Even one individual like Snowden can have a significant effect on the world given the right leverage.
Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law....Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures. There are lots of really interesting and…
I find the rest of that specific comment particularly amazing: > How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent. > How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governmen…
Question: Mr Snowden, do you feel that your worst fear is being realized, that most people don't care about their privacy
Answer: To answer the question, I don't. Poll after poll is confirming that, contrary to what we tend to think, people not only care, they care a lot. The problem is we feel disempowered. We feel like we can't do anything about it, so we may as well not try.
The full answer is worth reading: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s...
>Much like physics post-Manhattan project, an entire field of research that was broadly apolitical realized that work intended to improve the human condition could also be subverted to degrade it. [1] What an incredible analogy. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s...
At the end of the day is anyone arguing it was a bad thing that the Americans got to the bomb (and used it) before the Germans, Japanese or Russians did? I'd hand the button over to someone like Truman over Hitler or Stalin any day of the week. Do I like the tools the NSA has in its possession? No. But I am happy they got there (and have access to them) before the Chinese, Russians or Arabs did. Are there going to be…
I think that actually " all the embarrassingly smart technologists around here" need to spend their time designing and creating better tech that doesnt allow the alphabet soup agencies the option to spy on people in such a broad fahsion, making it expensive and difficult to spy on everyone means they have to spend more time looking for the people worth spying on and only spying when they think it is worthwhile and going to lead to something.
what happens now is they spy on everyone, then after an incident go backwards through the data to see what led up to the incident. Which is useless to all the dead and inujured and usually only works to point out where these agencies missed opportunities to prevent the attack.
To give you an example, the recent terrorist hostage taking in Sydney, there was no warning or raising of the terror threat prior to the incident by the Australian Secret Services, although they are fully involved in the spying and are linked with the NSA and GCHQ. After the event we find out that there were double digit warnings provided by members of the public to a information line put in place to act as a confidential way to raise a concern. If they didnt rely on spying on everyone they would be in a better position to investigate tips such as this and focus all (or more) of their resources on these individuals instead of spreading it thinly across everyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not exactly difficult to move past the first page or to use the search bar, and any comments about those stories are going to appear on /newcomments anyway. If there is an effect of 'minimizing awareness' at work, I don't think the effect is very large.
You seem to be saying placement on the front page shouldn't impact the eyeballs driven to a story. If that's what you believe, I won't try to convince you otherwise.