No reasonable lefties spoke up against this. Indeed they defended it as necessary and proportionate, as they did when the company started discriminating against men in other ways.

People didn't just suddenly start killing jews in nazi germany

Comparisons to the Nazis are especially stupid in this context because you're right, they didn't just start killing Jews. They started by banning them from various high-status roles and jobs, describing them as the source of problems, hypothesising a Zionist Conspiracy to explain why so many Jews were running rich companies etc.

And that's exactly what we see happening today against ordinary white guys. These days if we're CEOs/on company boards/in high earning jobs it's a problem that needs a "solution" (sound familiar?), it's the result of a conspiracy of the patriarchy, and the solutions start with banning white men from educational opportunities, speaking opportunities, replacing them on boards and so on.

No reasonable lefties spoke up about any of this in Germany either, because the left is fundamentally built on narratives about oppression by one identity group of another. It always has been. It gives people easy excuses for their situation in life. Whether it's the proles vs the capitalists, Jews vs the Aryans, women vs men, blacks vs whites, LGTBQ vs straight white men, if there's a way to treat people as lumpen groups and pit them against each other then you'll find the left doing so as much as they can. The 21st century is no different.

I think your comment shows that you understand this. You accept that a decision may be correct, when measured in totally cold and statistical terms. But such decisions would not "change the status quo" and that would be a problem.

But that position is a deeply political one. Why should decisions at banks, tech firms, or wherever be deliberately biased to change the status quo? It's social engineering, a field with a long and terrible track record of catastrophic failure. Failure both to actually change reality, and failure in terms of the resulting human cost.

Injecting bias into otherwise unbiased decisions by manipulating ML models, or by manipulating people (threatening them if they don't toe the line), is never a good thing.

What about just learning based on the entire web?

I think you're using the word "unbiased" to mean "heavily adjusted for US centric views on racism and sexism" which isn't what the word really means.

If you train an AI on everything written - all books, all web pages, all newspaper articles etc ... a not impossible task these days - then you can argue you're as close to bias free as possible.

However a small number of AI researchers don't like the results they get when they do this, because the AI learns the world that truly exists instead of the one they wish would exist. But that's not a bug in the software. It's a bug in the researchers.

If you asked the developers of the facial recognition library, "does your software have problems with very low contrast conditions" they'd surely have answered yes. Fully conscious of the issue but, that's software. It's hard to get everything right 100% of the time.

Bear in mind "bias" is just a perjorative for "generalisation" or alternatively "lesson learned". AI algorithms are good at detecting patterns in data and bad at being politically correct. This is not a flaw of the algorithms, it's a flaw in people who can't accept measured reality and go into denial.

So an AI trying to hire programmers discriminates against female sounding names, because it's learned that this is correlated with success? Apply it to hiring nurses or primary school teachers and it'll probably do the opposite. This is only "bias" if you start from ideologically driven blank slate assumptions. Otherwise it's just common sense.

JVMs are sandboxed and verifiable too, not sure what use a fallback to stock JS is but you can run a JVM in JS (look at TeaVM), it's way easier to emit bytecode for almost any modern language than WASM simply because JVMs do garbage collection for you and it's not really any easier to build tooling for WASM than any other VM.

In the end the main reason to do WASM over other VMs is that this way Mozilla/Chrome guys get to own it, instead of a competing firm.

So political activists realised they can brainwash or pressure idiots by claiming that any opinion, person or class of people they don't like creates "lack of safety". It's a kneejerk reaction: safety first.

The worst case I saw of this so far was an event organised by my workplace, for teaching programming. But straight white men were banned. If you were a white man you had to show photos from Facebook to prove you were gay. The justification for sexism and racism was stated as creating a "safe" and "collaborative" environment. Implication: straight white men are unsafe. Except when they're teaching, of course. Then they're needed, so stop being unsafe.

There's nothing new about this sort of abuse. Orwell focused on the way leftists constantly manipulate language in 1984 with the idea of Newspeak. Consider the contradictory term "dictatorship of the proletariat" or how every communist country calls itself a People's Republic despite not being a republic, nor run by/for the people.

How is that not "very interesting"? It is extremely unusual, the onset of this violence has been very sudden, and the accompanying wave of censorship and debate-suppression that has accompanied it is very much within the scope of what HN regularly discusses.

As for (3), you give yourself away. Your problem is not that it's not interesting but rather you fear the political right and their message about immigrants.

Here's a thought. If their message is merely an "agenda" that they're "pushing", and if they're wrong, the Swedish authorities could kill it dead by simply recording the origins and ethnicities of the people blowing up Sweden and showing that they're all long term Swedes. But they refuse to collect this data, for obvious reasons: it wouldn't show that.

For as long as the Swedish government and people keep engaging in a massive coverup, you will continue to see the Sweden Democrats grow stronger. Their criticisms aren't being answered or met with compromise: they're being ignored, smeared and suppressed.

No, IPCC predictions have been wrong/over-aggressive in the past. Their 1990 long range predictions can be compared against the present now and are 40% out:

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/the-ipcc-1990-far-predictio...

People have a tendency to cherry pick predictions that worked out or which assert a requirement for even more panic, whilst ignoring predictions that didn't work out (of which there are many).

Your argument is basically unfalsifiable: scientists must be listened to because they all agree (itself a dubious or false claim), but the internationally agreed consensus must not be listened to because it's "bland" and influenced by people who might disagree (but who in the end endorsed the report anyway).

It appears that evidence is only accepted as legitimate if it's more alarming than past evidence: how could this argument ever ramp itself down? And how can the argument both be argument by authority whilst simultaneously attacking the credibility of those authorities?

My point is a more general one: people argue for censorship as the only way to maintain a workable forum, but, I don't believe that, based on my prior experience. I'm not saying it's easy to build a really great spam filter for social forums, but Slashdot proved out a lot of good techniques, and anyway censoring stuff en-masse just creates a different set of problems: social rather than technical.

Wealth mobility in the USA is pretty high. It's entirely possible for billionaires to stop being billionaires, or for people to temporarily become rich and then lose it again. Lots of stories like that out there. Elon Musk has made fortunes and lost them several times, I think.

Taxation is not an illegal or immoral appropriation of property

Obviously it's not illegal by definition.

Immoral? Yeah, I think a 100% tax rate i.e. communism would be deeply immoral. And taxes today are very high, and frequently lead to huge misallocation of resources. I think you could easily argue for lower taxes from a moral position.

This is partly because email isn't "for" anything except communication. The idea that platforms must stand for something is new and wrong. A good platform stands for nothing and is open to everyone.

1) This is the case, isn't it. In America the Republicans were far more relaxed about the ruling allowing unlimited US campaign money, then spent around half the amount the Democrats did and won.

If they were really being duplicitous about it you'd have seen major freakouts amongst Trump supporters about his very low levels of spending, but I don't remember much of that. You saw far more angst amongst Democrats about the "free" news coverage he got by virtue of saying popular-but-unpopular things.

I'm not saying people are totally consistent on this, but at least in the last election, Trump's behaviour appears to have matched the overall right wing pattern of not really believing political spending is a big deal. The US needs a pretty high baseline of political ad spend just to communicate "there's an election on day X, vote for candidate Y" to 350+ million people in a very short space of time. Beyond that it doesn't seem to matter.

2) Why shouldn't they protest? It's perfectly possible to both believe that government control over speech is bad on principle, and also that political advertising isn't as powerful as your opponents believe.

3) Why should people doing political ad spending be forced to be identified, but people posting political views on the internet not be? A good reason to not force identification of such people is to stop retaliatory attacks by extremists designed to silence people, a very real problem. This is especially important in elections where there's a risk whoever comes to power will try to get revenge on people who supported their opponents. Not normally a risk in US politics because of the First Amendment but it's been seen elsewhere.

Censorship deletes things: it reduces the size of the marketplace of ideas.

Money adds things: if I spend money tomorrow to buy some ads it doesn't affect you unless either (a) you're also spending money and trying to buy the same ad slots or (b) your views are very weakly held and you become convinced to change sides by my witty advert.

The "get money out of politics" position is based on an unstated assumption that if you buy, say, 1 million adverts, then it's practically guaranteed that (say) 5% of those adverts will successfully change people's minds regardless of how bad your arguments are, and so if you keep spending more and more then you can eventually buy whatever outcome you want.

But is that assumption true? I don't think it is. There have been studies of this which showed political advertising is pretty ineffective in general, beyond informing people that there's an election and who the party candidates are. And there have been two high profile cases in 2016 of votes that were won by the side that spent by far the least (Trump and Brexit). If money was so powerful they should have had no chance, but it didn't work.

Additionally if this really worked, you should see taxes always fall as rich people buy ads supporting politicians who support lower taxes, which in turn frees up more money to buy ads, ad infinitum (ho ho ho). But this isn't what we see: ignoring occasional spikes to levels so high they were totally ineffective at being collected, the tax burden and size of government has gone up over time rather than down. Rich people seem to be doing pretty badly at buying the sort of policies they're supposed to want.

On the other hand, if people don't know a position, idea or possibility exists at all they can't possibly support it. You can ignore voices you disagree with but you can't pay agree with voices that don't exist anymore.

Yes, this doesn't deal with things like "is YouTube ranking biased" but it's a start. You posit that sites would be obliged to publish onslaughts, but many spam filters are pretty good at filtering such attacks. For instance that's where CAPTCHAs came from (there are better technical solutions than CAPTCHAs but you get the idea).

Slashdot also had a rather sophisticated moderation and scoring system, that allowed spam (hot grits etc) to be downranked and appear auto-collapsed, whilst longer form content was upvoted and expanded by default - even if it was a reply to negative ranked content.

You may feel a personal preference for HN, or not, but they were essentially the same from the perspective of any lawyer.

In other words HN could easily keep its distinctive feel without ever banning or erasing anything, just by implementing sufficient controls that let users see what they want to see: in fact it already does via options like showdead.