Hacker News: tokenadult

Ask HN: Best Security Practices for Activists?

tokenadult — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 04:07:47 +0000

Eight years ago I asked for advice about security practices for activists, and received the helpful advice (from Thomas Ptacek, if I remember correctly) not to disarm unilaterally, but to use a useful tool if it helps a group of activists organize well, and not to obsess about the full theoretical security of one online tool versus another. I am seeing new groups of activists pop up organized through largely online channels, including some channels that were founded way back in the early years of HN by people well known to the HN community. I use Signal now and am curious Discord (which I have never used, but which is used a lot by a group of local activists). What tools and practices should I be familiar with in 2025? How can I help newbies to activism who are also newbies to technology (the kind of folks who would never visit HN) get up to speed with best practices? What habits are useful to practice and what tools are useful to use to facilitate communication without getting nonviolent, peaceful, legal protesters in trouble just because they are trying to organize to express dissent? (How much do those considerations change in the United States with new directors in all the United States federal agencies that have investigative powers and electronic communications resources?) Thanks for any suggestions you have.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43215762

Points: 17

# Comments: 10

New comment by tokenadult in "Algebra"

tokenadult — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 15:42:36 +0000

Thanks for sharing this particular Feynman lecture. The treatment here, using what are basically the Peano postulates to derive the field properties of the real numbers and then the basic structure of secondary school mathematics, follows the treatment of Landau's Grundlagen der Analysis (Foundations of Analysis), a concise book that Feynman was probably aware of as he presented his lecture. Feynman of course added a sense of excitement and wonder that makes this lecture charming to read. Such treatments of the foundations of secondary school mathematics are fairly commonplace in the better university textbooks of mathematics. I first learned of Landau's book in a discussion of mathematics education in a Usenet newsgroup back in the 1990s, and bought the German edition on the recommendation of Michael Spivak's famous textbook Calculus, which follows a similar approach (but starting from the field properties of real numbers taken as axioms). In those days, I'm pretty sure, the standard calculus textbook at Caltech, where Feynman taught, was Apostol's textbook, which starts a little bit differently but also takes a theorem-proof approach.

https://maa.org/press/maa-reviews/calculus-4

New comment by tokenadult in "Bluesky facing degraded performance due to record high traffic"

tokenadult — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 22:29:48 +0000

Contractual agreements are enforceable at law. That's what makes them contracts.

New comment by tokenadult in "Paper map sales are booming"

tokenadult — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 23:50:50 +0000

My user experience on several recent trips is that Google Maps showed me the exit number for the exit I would use next very prominently on top of the display (where it shows the direction of the next turn). Maybe that isn't rolled out consistently for all trips.

New comment by tokenadult in "PostDrop 1/23/23 Account Verification and Open Beta"

tokenadult — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 23:29:21 +0000

Further confirmation of the news that Post is open to all now.

https://post.news/article/2KkQM0Ou0VIvhpS0YB4RHFvANkc

PostDrop 1/23/23 Account Verification and Open Beta

tokenadult — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 23:27:13 +0000

Article URL: https://post.news/article/2KkOsCNsdwpHs19u0HeMQhibaPQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34496613

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by tokenadult in "So why a News Feed?"

tokenadult — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 20:54:14 +0000

Post is currently a progressive web app. There is no immediate plan to build dedicated mobile apps for Post.

New comment by tokenadult in "So why a News Feed?"

tokenadult — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:26:40 +0000

To access Post on my desktop computer, I just any browser to navigate to Post [dot] news. It's just a website. I have stored cookies on one browser I use, and I typically start up that browser with Post as one default tab. I have another browser I use for testing websites that shows me what Post looks like to users who have never logged in.

https://post.news/

So why a News Feed?

tokenadult — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 21:30:32 +0000

Article URL: https://post.news/article/2KYjMzTY05WmEZmxJnG3PGqyVpz

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34445888

Points: 78

# Comments: 57

Twitter chaos too much? There are plenty of other options

tokenadult — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 02:42:30 +0000

Article URL: https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-business-fbfe6651de2dc1d51fea81b8b4c689b7

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034591

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by tokenadult in "Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative"

tokenadult — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 16:56:03 +0000

OP here. My apologies for the phrase "Twitter alternative" in the article title, which is NOT exactly Noam Bardin's vision for the Post startup.

I appreciate the comments here from HN users. I've hardly posted here in a long time, because in recent years I have posted mostly about politics, which is off-topic posting here on HN. A federated world of specialized online communities is an appealing idea, and I will be trying out the Fediverse as well. (A lifelong friend who is an infosec specialist has landed on a server about infosec, and that's probably where I will establish a lurker account, in the interest of being on a securely configured server.)

Information security in an online service is one of the features I look for, and why I prefer big, well invested commercial online services to home-brew solutions. I figure HN has enough back-end infrastructure to keep what data I share with HN safe, and Facebook does too. (One can dislike how Facebook allows advertisers to look at user data while still appreciating how Facebook keeps away certain kinds of criminal threat vectors.)

The user perception of the user experience ultimately decides what users think about online networks. Part of the user experience in any network is the other users. That's what I've long appreciated about HN. That's what I liked about Twitter as I took care to follow interesting people who post there. I'll see about the newest communities and who else is there, and decide based on my preferences as everyone else will.

Thanks again for the back-and-forth in the discussion here, which has been good food for thought.

New comment by tokenadult in "Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative"

tokenadult — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 16:40:14 +0000

The phrasing "Twitter alternative" is my fault in setting the title for the thread-opening post here. The "Twitter alternative" phrasing should not be attributed to the founder of Post.

I get the impression that the founder, Noam Bardin, DOESN'T think he's building a Twitter alternative but rather, in the beta welcome page's words, "a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; converse freely; and have some fun. Many of today's ad-based platforms rely on capturing attention at any cost — sowing chaos in our society, amplifying the extremes, and muting the moderates. Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them."

Twitter has never been quite like that. If the founder's vision succeeds, I might like Post very well indeed. In all such things, the proof is in the user experience as experienced by each user, but I think the goals sound good for Post.

Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

tokenadult — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 14:28:39 +0000

Article URL: https://post.news/?r=Bo9HV

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33655193

Points: 142

# Comments: 219

Math Teacher's Life Summed Up by the Gifted Students He Mentored

tokenadult — Sun, 07 Apr 2019 15:59:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/07/707326070/a-math-teachers-life-summed-up-by-the-gifted-students-he-mentored

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597605

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by tokenadult in "Ask HN: If you were asked to design Mathematics courses"

tokenadult — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 16:12:53 +0000

I would start by largely imitating the courses that already exist in the country of Singapore. They are pretty good examples of international best practice, and they are available in English, the language of school instruction in Singapore.

https://www.singaporemath.com/Singapore_Math_s/331.htm

New comment by tokenadult in "Ask HN: Improving the world as a software developer"

tokenadult — Sun, 20 Jan 2019 03:39:40 +0000

A good framework for looking at careers and figuring out if your best trade-off is to do your occupation as a direct way to make the world a better place or to make your living and then donate money to make the world a better place can be found in the book Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices about Giving Back by William MacAskill. In many ways, it is the best career planning advice I have ever seen in any book, and I'm applying for myself and encouraging my four children to use the same planning framework.

https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Altruism/...

The geometry of bike handling: It’s all about the steering

tokenadult — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 23:30:14 +0000

Article URL: https://cyclingtips.com/2018/11/the-geometry-of-bike-handling-its-all-about-the-steering/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18791979

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Scissors Congruence: interactive demonstration of Wallace–Bolyai–Gerwien theorem

tokenadult — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 17:53:53 +0000

Article URL: https://dmsm.github.io/scissors-congruence/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18674374

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by tokenadult in "4,000-year-old termite mounds found in Brazil are visible from space"

tokenadult — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 16:25:34 +0000

"The mounds, which are easily visible on Google Earth, are not nests."

This sentence from the article kindly submitted here ignores that Google Earth imagery includes imagery taken from airplanes as well as from satellites. Statements that such-and-such an object (a classic example is the Great Wall of China) is visible from space, or from the Moon, go back to eras long before human space flight. Most such statements are wrong.

As other comments previous to mine have noted, various specialized imaging devices in satellites (or on airplanes) can have a higher resolution than human-eye vision. But the headline "are visible from space" is surely an exaggeration. Space flight has been going on since 1960s, but there has been no report of the termite mounds till now, it appears.

Is Computer Science Really All About Math?

tokenadult — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 21:54:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/10/22/is-computer-science-really-all-about-math/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18304905

Points: 1

# Comments: 0