Our small Indiana county has a Facebook group. Local news is limited here, so Facebook has become an enormously important means of communication. Some of the commentary in the group gets political, and heated, and that's fine, that's what we're there for. It's an important way for the 16,000 members in this county to know what's going on.

The group got banned, and no one knows why, and there's (practically) no appeal. Just some bot that is programmed to say no.

How can we reach someone to get it turned back on?

This is a big deal in a very small place.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330460

Points: 6

# Comments: 3

If so, that's a major problem. If the military is using it in some mission critical way, they can't be fighting the model to get something done. No such limitations would ever be acceptable.

If the limitations are contractual, then there is some room for negotiation.

Is there some common designer or vendor that they all use?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399387

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

They did not process 178 billion rows per second. They did a search that found something in a large data set by eliminating the parts of the data set that could not have contained the item. Same way I did by picking one grocery store and going straight to the shelf.

https://nclalegal.org/press_release/ncla-asks-supreme-court-...

I blogged about this some time ago: https://ccleve.com/p/a-privacy-amendment

There is a way to win an argument with a toddler. You find out what's bothering them, usually something emotional, and you validate it. "Yes! It's fun to stay up late! Yes! You don't want to eat your vegetables!" Once they feel heard, you've got a shot at getting them to do what you want.

That's a good way to win an argument with a non-toddler as well. Acknowledge that what they want is legitimate (if it is). Concede points of agreement. Talk about shared goals. Only then talk about a different path to the solution.

If a randomly-generated file happened to contain some redundancy through sheer chance, you could hand-craft a compressor to take advantage of it. This compressor would not work in general for random data, but it could work for this one particular case.

It's a bet worth taking, because the payoff, 50:1 ($5,000 to $100), is pretty good. Play the game 50 times and you might get a file you could compress.

The challenge, then, would be for the person offering the bet to generate a really random file that contained no such redundancy. That might not be easy.