computerthings

Where I live, people often put books in boxes out on the sidewalk as giveaways. They're worth nothing, but I love browsing through them if I have time, and sometimes I find something that does interest me. Books I want to throw away I never throw away, I put them out for others to take. I bet most of them just perish in the rain, but it's fine, it's better than throwing them in the trash right away.

It's something people do for people. It's not "in the public domain" for companies to gobble up with machines.

There's no law against scraping

There's no law against incurring as heavy and pernicious social and material costs to commercial scrapers as is physically possible within legal bounds, either. So what's the problem?

Yes, and? None of it left untouched, ALL of it pushed down, and most of it flagged and disappeared.

Ah, here goes the invisible, magic quota again.

Do you think you could defend the phrase "primarily using HN for ideological/political battle" in court?

Allowing people to have their view of the front page unaffected by flags would be trivial. But some who don't want too discuss this don't want other people to discuss it, either, they precisely don't want people to have discussions unimpeded by sophistry, in their absence.

Calling that out isn't "tribalism", and you boiling it down to that, and other generalities, as if it's people being "mad" that other people have a different flavor of ice cream, while there's by now been (at least) FIVE people doing Hitler salutes during speeches means you're not up to speed or not treating this as seriously as you probably think you do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhJdH63d6zM

https://cdapress.com/news/2025/feb/22/town-hall-security-det...

The identities of the men who dragged a woman out of a legislative town hall in the Coeur d’Alene High School auditorium on Saturday remain a mystery, with event organizers claiming no knowledge of who arranged the security detail or which company was used.

^ that's how you get that. Everybody is just "doing their part", looking the other way.

That's also how you get people posting endless walls of text about the topic they insist should not be discussed on HN, or doing mental gymnastics every single time the Nazi salute is mentioned, ignoring once again what dozens of people have told them in reply to it the first of the dozens of times they did that.

You also said this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113282 breaks site guidelines. You just call things "flamebait" and that's that.

no, this has nothing to do with your political views

Who believes that at this point? Speak up.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

If you want to order me to tolerate the fascism apologists has been having a field day on this site since over a month, you have to say that to my face. You do not have the personal capital or credibility to say "please". You made your bed, you sided with the anonymous, hooded executioners; we heard it the first time, now STFU already! And I'll speak my mind throttled to the showdead crowd, and if you make that impossible, of course I'll make new accounts. I'll make fake websites to have fake emails at JUST to not take orders from you.

Yet we're out protesting fascists, not immigrants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%932025_German_anti-...

By the last week of January 2024, the protests had become the biggest in Germany since the protests against the Iraq War in 2003. Soon after, according to some researchers, they had become the biggest in the history of post-war Germany.

then why is it always the same handful of people saying that

Fascists aren't "political opponents in a democracy", anymore than a burglar is a guest in your home just because they are located in your home.

for anyone who also wanted to know how that super neat list was made: https://www.tabulator.info/

You mean during the war of aggression when many Americans pretended to be Canadians when on vacation abroad, be it out of shame or fear of reprisal?

And mind you, that was without any Hitler salutes or calling astronauts "retards", that was "just" war under the pretense of being very concerned and wanting to avoid "a smoking gun in form of a mushroom cloud". We knew that was bullshit, but at least there was this pretense, that kinda softened and muddled things a bit. This time, it's also war, but it's in Europe. And there isn't even any tribute paid to decency even in the form of bald lies and hypocrisy, there is just a deranged snarl.

Oh, we're already looking at the likelihood of Trump arming Russia and joining the war on the side of Putin. But for some people, although probably a minority, that just increases the resolve. They simply will never be part of something like this: https://bsky.app/profile/doctoroxford.bsky.social/post/3liqw...

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So, what's this story getting unfairly penalized for? It's been bumping around between page and 2 and 3 after it had more than 80 upvotes and not even half the comments; meanwhile there's a story with not even half the votes, that is also older, which is firmly near the top.

There is also no qualitative difference between one water drop and a billion. One dropped on your head you wouldn't notice, a billion dropped on your head would drown you.

lots of discussions to read, lots of flags to wonder at

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It's the exact same gesture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Zwiv8erk0

As is what Steve Bannon did:

https://bsky.app/profile/eladn.bsky.social/post/3linqzuoecs2...

all the stuff they read online is fake

It isn't though? But the stuff that is fake has a corrosive effect on out ability to interact with that which isn't.

For example the fine article.. reading it, it didn't seem off to me, at all. Then I see a lot of people in the comments saying it "feels generated". The author is also in the comments saying it's not generated.

So braindead and stereotypical are these comments that you might think they are themselves AI generated. But, picking a few at random, I checked out their profiles and they seem genuine.

Maybe I don't read enough LLM slop, but that doesn't read like LLM slop to me. I have a hard time imagining the prompt that would create it, I have an easy time seeing a human write it, so to me "it doesn't feel generated". But that's all just us "feeling" something. Like in that well known Carl Sagan quote: "unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true"

Can I or the author prove that it's not generated? No, so that is enough to cast anything into doubt. And I don't think that destroying all trust between humans would make them super-resilient and rational and experts in spotting disinfo. I think it could isolate people completely, not even cut the bonds between them but singe the ability to even make bonds, and that might be to the horrors that the rootlessness of industrialized mass societies gave birth to what blindness is to darkness. Without the village it takes to raise a child, and also to "make" a mind, and a heart, there might be no more hearts and minds as we understand and cherish them.

When I talk to some old folks I know and they insist on "knowing" something from Facebook, and have to step on egg shells to not hurt their feelings, while my alarms are tingling because of what they tell me, and all of that without "AI" crap involved... man, there's so many vulnerable people out there, who are lonely enough as is. They will learn nothing from being assaulted like this, it will just make life more painful and confusing and misleading for them. All because their "engagement" is worth a few cents to someone. As if the brains and lifespans of people are just fruit to squeeze juice and pulp from.

Do I seem down on LLM slop? Because I'm super down on it and I want that to come across :)

I'd say the owner is making it worse, and it's not the responsibility of people to invest more of their effort into his platform when they can build up something they can feel way more ownership of. Bigger isn't always better. The people who would miss out on things they don't want to miss out on aren't switching, but I haven't seen a single person who did switch expressing regret. Logically speaking, that's not what you see when people do something motivated purely on emotion ;)

What do you know about the deliberations and discussions went into these laws.

because once you label someone who disagrees with you as a Nazi you are free to censor them,

Show examples of it.

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luckily, all I needed to know is in the page source:

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Apart from government being very different from private business indeed; I wouldn't want to eat food, drive a vehicle, or use software made by a company made with that mindset. "Safety first" is also a hard rule in all sorts of sports where people move faster than non-expert spectators can fully comprehend. If you need to cut corners to "gain efficiency" it just means you're bad.

Do you consider the original quotes "unsubstantive", too, seeing how it's flagged yet upvoted? Because like it or not, you have a lot of that on this website, most recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43112777

Show me one that has substance. I see a lot of really wild stuff, but it all boils down to indirect attacks [0], not arguments. Seen any different? Show me.

[0] "why did democrats/progressives/leftists never say anything when.." and all that, basically lumping all criticism of this into whatever fantasy category the author happens to prefer, and then projecting what is being avoided on that category of people.

Some want to talk about the substance, others kick up sand, and then some people say "oh this is not nice, let's split the difference and just shut it all down until it goes away". Which is essentially the end result of what all the kicking up sand is trying to achieve.

What signs do you expect so it can be called fascism?

I think some people just know a few images from the Nazis at the height of their power. Or the death camps, that were only discovered because the Nazis lost the war (the plan was to erase all traces, after all). No concept of the 1920s, not even "Mein Kampf", nothing.

What makes you so sure/special in this regard?

Germany? the scope of the discussion is already limited to the AfD. What makes Germans special in their opinions about Nazis in Germany to is deep experience and knowledge with the subject you are belittling. And I'm also not spending any time banning hate speech on social media, heh. Whatever chip on your shoulder you have about Germany I can barely even decipher and you're right, it's best to agree to disagree.

Yes, they are.

https://extremismterms.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/altern...

AFAIK they don't terribly mind what Israel is doing in Gaza, and even the ADL has that page about them.

There is a lot more if you are not convinced. At any rate Alice Weidel being lesbian means as much as some of the original Nazi leadership being homosexual, nothing. Homosexuality isn't a taboo anymore, holocaust revisionism is. Those to whom it isn't are anathema to those to whom it is.

That made me think of how Arendt described the pre-totalitarian mishmash of opinions and totalitarian "opinions"

That is genuinely all. If that is not welcome here, fine, but this "what are you trying to say?" as if there has to be some other layer I just don't get, or this flagging spree against me now.

much better to just explain it explicitly in your initial reply.

"this made me think of" is implied to me. I could have put some specific phrase in italics, but other than that, just flag the thing. Any reply I make just gets used against me anyway, so do whatever.

Malicious compliance what?

And what did my comment get flagged for?

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