This is such a small blip in all the crap this administration is perpetrating that most are probably not aware of it or are drowned out in the rage over inflation, tariffs, wars, immigrants, etc.
I'm a free speech absolutist (albeit one of apparently few people who actually knows what "free speech" is [0]) and I'm absolutely outraged and infuriated by this action and a long history of anti-speech actions by the USG, though this particular Administration is unprecedented in terms of censorship, general evil and authoritarianism in modern history. I also think it's unfortunate how many people in favor of all sorts of censorship now attack stawmen and treat something so vitally important as a joke like you have. The unseriousness you treat something incredibly serious with has become an endemic problem in our society, and directly inspires nihilism/fatalism/tribalism etc, feelings which in turn directly support authoritarianism.
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0: For example, if HN bans you, shadowbans you, makes your posts dead by default, flags, or downvotes, that's all free speech.
I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right? Is the difference the fact that HN is free to regulate its own platform as it wants to?
For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions. Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host. I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
Im no expert on free speech, of free speech absolutism, so please let inform me :)
Freedom of association and freedom of speech go hand in hand. You can say whatever you like. You should not be arrested for it. People may choose not to associate with you, or not to do business with you, or not to amplify your speech by hosting it for you.
If it was the government telling a platform to block certain speech, that would be a restriction in free speech.
The difference is that the ownership of HN has their OWN freedom to choose who they let post on here, and what they let be posted.
This is known as the 'Freedom of Association': The right to come together with other people to collectively express, promote, or pursue their common interest. This right also includes the right to accept or decline membership in the group for whatever reason they want. HN can choose to only allow whatever they choose on their site.
In the United States, this right is actually established (according to court rulings) by the same First Amendment that establishes the right to free speech.
The right to free speech does not require a private individual or company give you a platform to make your speech.
If I have a public platform and refuse to sponsor/publish/platform your speech, that is my free speech right! You don't have the right to force me to speak your words. Only the government is prohibited (by 1st amendment) from censoring/limiting speech (that does not cause or promote violence or injury to others). There are also some restrictions and protections also offered to the press (eg libel and defamation) and common carriers, along with the abomination of the DMCA.
Personally, I don't consider paid speech to be free speech, and I don't consider corporations to by humans, but the supreme court does.
Remember, facts aren't real, there is no truth, and crime is legal (in the current "Justice" Dept).
I don't think absolute free speech exists; there are always some limits to speech. Ideally not too many, but there are kinds of speech that I don't think you have any choice but to restrict if you want to have any kind of decent, safe and free society: threats, libel/slander, blackmail, and hate speech. Those are the kind of things that will silence, mislead or manipulate others, and are therefore by themselves a threat to free speech.
But things like criticising governments, questioning political or economic paradigms, or just making fun of powerful people, should always be legal and protected.
I think this depends on how you define 'hate speech'. Is talking about how billionaires are the scum of the earth hate speech?
I get the idea behind banning hate speech, but it gets really tricky when you try to think how to define and enforce it. Everyone agrees you need to be able to criticize groups that you don't like, so what makes it cross the line to hate speech (besides calls to violence, which would fall under the 'threats' category anyway)?
The worry is always that if you carve out an exception to free speech to protect vulnerable groups from harassment, how do you stop a future government from expanding those groups to include their political allies?
I think calls to violence usually only count as threat when they're targeted at a specific person. To me, hate speech is about creating an unsafe, threatening or oppressive situation for a vulnerable demographic group. Like saying a specific ethic group is a threat to society, or general attacks against women in general. Thing that, when repeated enough, will normalise the idea of violence or oppression against that group.
But what about similar speech against powerful groups, like billionaires? Well, they're not vulnerable or marginalised, they already have a disproportionally large voice, so they're not easily silenced. And of course being a billionaire is a choice; they can abdicate from their wealth in a way people can't do from their gender or ethnic group. So it's not the same. That said, calls for violence against them might still count as hate speech or be considered specific enough to count as threats.
There is obviously some fuzziness, but there also is with other limits to free speech, and there are courts to ultimately adjudicate that.
I agree with you that it isn't the same, and vulnerability matters.
My worry is that I can easily see an administration like the current US one claiming that MAGA Americans are the most vulnerable in the country, and they need to be protected.
Perhaps, but they don't seem to believe in free speech anyway. They're actively going after media that criticise the government, and are restricting government-funded scientists from using specific words that suggest research that doesn't fit their narrative.
>I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right?
Wrong. HN is not "censoring" you at all, which requires engaging in violence (or threat of violence) against you to inhibit you from speaking in public. HN is literally engaging in Free Speech itself. Take arguably the most fundamental free speech activity in a democracy: advocating to your peers for the candidate you wish to vote for and have elected to represent you. You've researched and listened to Alice, Bob and Carol. You decide the best is Alice, and to show your support you do the quintessential thing and put out a Vote For Alice lawn sign on your lawn. That's obviously free speech right? Now what if instead some volunteer from Alice's election team comes by and asks you if they can put up a sign on your property, and you say yes. That too clearly involves your free speech rights, even if you didn't pay for the sign. Now say Bob & Carol's campaigns turn up, and they ask to put up signs on your lawn too. You don't support them and say no. Have you censored them? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Free speech isn't "everything is equal nothing matters", everyone is trying collectively to iterate towards truth and value by making their cases and listening, without general use of force. To say that "I think this idea/person/item is the best choice" by definition is exclusionary, it's also saying "I think all the other ideas/persons/items are NOT the best choice". It can also simply be "I wish to engage with these subjects, not those". You can make a forum dedicated to airplanes & cats, and ban anyone who starts threads on boats & lizards. You may have nothing whatsoever against boats or lizards, but that's not what you personally want to focus on on your own forum you're paying for.
Hacker News is the private property of its owners. They have their own free speech rights. Exercising those rights is not censorship.
Others in turn are free to use their property and/or their voice on public property to make their cases, and they can try to convince you and vice versa. And there can be social consequences, if someone really dislikes your speech maybe they don't invite you to dinner anymore and urge others to do the same, who might agree (or go the other way, or just ignore it). Humans can get passionate sometimes. But by keeping violence out of the whole thing outside of narrow exceptions that undermine the approach itself, room is preserved for minds to be changed and rifts mended years or even decades later, and for ideas to come back around if someone cares enough.
Government enforcing things though always involves violence, either directly or one or more orders removed. But a general monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a defining feature of government. If government doesn't like Alice, and tells you take down the sign, or else, that's fundamental infringement. They're closing down the whole cycle (if a private person did that it'd also be a bunch of other crimes AND infringement, because private persons are not allowed to use violence against others at all by default outside of narrow exceptions). And if government tells you "oh you can leave up the sign about Alice, but it's not fair you censor Bob & Carol, you must put up signs for them too. Or else." that'd be equally infringing censorship. If everyone has a sign, it's the same message as nobody having one. It's still suppressing "I think Alice is the best choice".
>For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions.
It is easier and cheaper than any point in human history to put up your own website, including your own forum to try to form a community around. You have no right to an audience though.
>Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host.
What? What restriction has government in the US imposed beyond the long standing and unchanged exceptions that prove the rule (which essentially boil down to threats of violence, comms integral to crime, defamation AFTER a court case to prove it, serious violations of personal self with zero public value like CSAM, and purely commercial speech engaging in fraud)?
>I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
There is nothing to reinterpret. We've gotten it fine since the passage of Section 230. The problem are constant efforts to suppress what we've already got, in some cases coupled with completely orthogonal issues like failure to enforce ancient anti-trust legislation.
Well I was just noting a suspicious correlation. (Also childishness is up a lot more than 50%, in case my tone was unclear :)
But you've given me quite an interesting endocrinology research project here. Last I heard, the root cause of the drop remains unknown. (And it's still dropping.)
Did you really though? I never understood the "free speech absolutists" to care about speech they disagreed with. They made it clear that they only accept "patriotic" speech a long time ago.
That much was obvious for a long time to anyone paying attention. But I honestly believe that their success at newspeak-ing so many concepts was one of the final nails in America's coffin.
I hope I'll live until their fascist phase ends & historians can properly investigate all the immoral and illegal ways they've been influencing the population. My prediction is that they've scaled Cambridge Analytica to a level that'll make you sick.
I hate to see this strawman every single time there is an attack on free speech. You are actually mocking the fight for free speech. You aren't attacking the hypocrites that only use it when convenient.
The only purpose this rhetoric serves is to justify using the power of government to silence opponents the next time your side happens to be in power.
I think the ability for good concepts to be "tainted" by the opposition is the most dangerous manifestation of tribalism/group think, in modern society.
Funny, the same US "free speech absolutists" get upset about "censorship" outside the US (mostly in EU countries) all the time, so it would be completely on point.
No E.U. censorship happened here and they're still legally allowed to operate in Italy. In the past they've been attacked by Italy several times and always won. This is a pure US threat against a pure European entity. It's like if France thought it could shut down Samsung - and then Samsung quit operating.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. You seem to be saying the "free speech absolutists" getting upset about censorship in the EU is a bad thing. While, at the same time, saying them not getting upset about this is a bad thing.
In criticizing their inconsistencies, you are highlighting and simultaneously missing your own inconsistencies.
Good point, we should also allow foreign organizations to contribute to US election campaigns and make Facebook ads because they might also believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, uh... right?
It's OK to say you wish a politician was dead. It's not OK to pay someone to kill them. It's OK to say that you support some criminal activity (let's say Luigi), but it's not OK to offer direct financial support for their crimes.
> It's OK to say you wish a politician was dead. It's not OK to pay someone to kill them.
Both actions are equivalent, as such words are (social and/or political) capital bounties offered to the masses in return for fulfilling the death of said politician.
Capital always exists, even in the form of words. To deny a variant of capital whilst allowing another variant is inconsistent/doublespeak.
Just because it's not printed onto a piece of denominated paper, doesn't mean that such capital doesn't exist.
> Both actions are equivalent, as such words are (social and/or political) capital bounties offered to the masses in return for fulfilling the death of said politician.
Neither the law nor common interpretation of words agrees with this. There is a significant and crucial difference between words and actions.
> There is a significant and crucial difference between words and actions.
The difference is artificial, and delusionally blinds itself to the base reality that social/political capital exists.
Again, just because there isn't a cash figure attached to that bounty, doesn't mean that a reward hasn't been attached to it in the form of social/political prestige.
Do you think your country is the only one that thought of free speech? Your particular implementation is irrelevant, I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve by giving us a lecture on how some foreign country justifies their self-perception.
That being said, it is somewhat humorous how you're confirming the stereotypes that apparently even that needs guns and violence over there somehow?
> Hmm, I would have expected more outrage from the US "free speech absolutists" over this US government decision
The crowd that claims to be in favor of free speech should be in favor of free speech for everyone, not just US citizens. This thread isn't about the government - it's about how HN's very vocal "free speech" crowd are actually libertarians who want to say awful things and not get called out rather than people who stand up for the concept of free speech in general.
Why is my position invalid? I'm in favor of the exact type of free speech provided by the Bill of Rights for citizens of the USA, of which I am one, and that I do not care about the fantastical universal "for everyone" form of free speech that is being pushed on HN?
Let your own countries defend their own "free speech" rights. The UN cannot defend it for you, and you cannot defend it for yourself.
"Free speech absolutists" demonstrably don't even care about free speech for Americans on American soil. "Free speech absolutism" is, in 99.9999% of cases, a euphemism for 1) holding abhorrent views and 2) being a gigantic fucking crybaby when someone criticizes you for them.
> we were sold on this dream that Europe would become like the United States
Sorry but that's just made up bullshit. The EU is not a "United States of Europe", and thinking along that line will ineviatably lead to tons of misconceptions.
> USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers
That's a bit oversimplified. The Russians got quite a few important scientists and engineers in other areas (aircraft design, nuclear physics, electronics, radar, optics), they just didn't make as good use of them as the US (e.g. the 'American Germans' essentially won the space race for the US).
Talking about the role of V2 in the development of rocketry in various countries is more or less relevant to the discussion of Isar, because it was a major milestone, and it did influence all rocketry worldwide, in many different ways.
Rocketry may be much more talked about, but in terms of headcount is was a tiny thing compared to the number of German experts who were "invited" into all Allied countries after the war. Just France and UK had brought in about 3 thousand persons each. If one had said that this did not happen, that would have been an error. But simply not bringing this up at all because it is not very relevant to the discussion of Isar is fine, I think.
Debating who "won" the space race, and who "used" Germans "better" is not something that I want to do.
> Whether they are European is a matter of perspective
What? Scandinavia isn't part of Europe now? The "EU" is an organization, "Europe" is a continent. "European" includes everybody living in Europe (and yes, that even includes the Brits and most Russians).
I shouldn't have to explain this stuff. The Nordic countries are exceptionalist in my understanding from talking to them. It's an easy search to go down this rabbit hole. It's a little different from Catalan wanting to be independent but still European. This is not my area of knowledge I have just been exposed multiple times first hand. Where are my scando fin buddies to chime in? Lulz
Looking at a map Norway is on the same continent as Vietnam so that statement makes no sense. Please have some sort of context and understanding before making such statements. They "seem" to be part of Europe but they have historically wanted to have it both ways: one foot in one foot out. Go research it yourself I am probably totally wrong! HN comments are not a reference source.
There's a clearly defined border between the continents Europe and Asia.
I guess the confusion comes from thinking of "European" as some sort of cultural identity (which frankly doesn't exist, unless you only look at the last hundred years or so, and even that is generous), instead of the people living in the geographical region called "Europe".
That was just because the Russian's didn't trust "their" Germans as much as the Americans trusted "theirs". Operation Osoaviakhim was mostly about knowledge extraction, not about cooperation. The other difference was that the "Russian Germans" didn't go to Russia on their own will (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim).
Once the knowledge was "extracted" the Germans were allowed to return though (good thing Stalin was already dead at that time).
Former Junkers engineer Brunolf Baade then went on to build the first and only German jet airliner for East Germany - which then of course was cancelled as soon as it was ready to enter production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baade_152).
Americans didn't trust either. But then Sputnik happened and Americans only had oopsnik[0], so they turned to neglected Redstone made by von Braun[1][2]
When did you last encounter or use a linked list ? :)
Linked lists fell out of fashion once the cpu/memory latency gap opened up towards the end of the 1990s. For most use cases it's simply better to use a tightly packed array, even use cases where linked lists would intuitively make more sense.
Every day, all day. It is a myth that linked lists fell out of fashion.
Of course, "it depends". There are things that better live in tightly-packed arrays (large lists of free-standing objects), but there are things that are almost impossible without linked lists. In these cases, being "intrusive" has massive advantages.
I guess you can spend an entire coder career without having to use linked lists, and then you cannot imagine why anybody would ever use them (and make it a meme). The linked lists that do exist in your programs may be abstracted away from your visibility.
Therefore: sure, an article about linked lists will spawn numerous HN comments from such coders who don't know the shoulders they're standing on. It's linked lists all the way down... below the flat surface of high-level frameworks.
Anything where you use a state machine that has to remember the parent state is effectively an intrusive linked list (even if they rarely have more than two elements); similarly the most obvious implementation of undo/redo. In these uses it's less complex and more understandable than having an explicit container, and constant-factor performance is irrelevant since we're talking about spending a few clock cycles to retrieve information in response to a human-speed GUI interaction.
You might also note that TFA is much more recent than "the end of the 1990s" and describes one of the most important software systems out there, which to the best of my knowledge still uses these techniques in the same way.
Hmm interesting, the doubly linked list presented here is missing the elegant 'overlapped list header' trick from AmigaOS (at least that's where I saw it first):
E.g. an AmigaOS list node looks conventional, it has two pointers, one to the next node (succ), and one to the previous node (pred):
In an empty list, lh_Head points to &lh_Tail, and lh_TailPred points to &lh_Head. The lh_Tail pointer is always null (this is the 'end marker').
In a populated list, lh_Head points to the embedded Node struct of the first list node, and lh_TailPred points to the embedded Node struct of the last list node. The ln_Succ pointer of the last node points to the address of the list header's lh_Tail pointer (...which is always null).
That way you only need an existing node pointer to walk forward and backward, or insert or remove a node. When walking the list by following the succ or pred pointers you know you've reached the end when encountering a null pointer.
Apparently the Linux-style lists in the article require to know the address of the list header to detect when the end is reached which isn't needed for the Amiga style list (at the cost of an additional 'sentinel null pointer' in the list header).
Pretty much all of AmigaOS was held together by such doubly linked lists.
(I hope I got that all right, it's been a long time)
> There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't
They probably stopped supporting macOS when Apple introduced the notarization bullshit. Can't blame the DF team tbh, macOS is a royal PITA to support (even without notarization), Apple doesn't mind breaking stuff from one OS release to another.
I still remember getting support mail every time Apple released an OS update. For a week or two there'd be reports of things crashing randomly with stacktraces that didn't seem to make much sense.
One of reasons why I stopped trying to make mac/ios apps.
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