It is generally not cool to accuse HN users of astro-turfing. And given the size and influence of this platform, I would be kind of surprised if the Israeli cyber unit would even bother.
I think it is much more likely these are actual HN users, a mix of those that a) don’t want to see Israel accused of anything, or probably even more common, b) really don’t want to see this issue pop up on HN—even when it is tech related, and even when it is from a beloved source like EFF.
The 'even' parts make it sound like you think those users are doing something wrong but neither of those things are really how HN works or is even supposed to work.
By “even” I simply meant I don’t agree with those users on a personal level. Specifically, I find this philosophy of copping out of difficult subjects lame. Obviously they aren’t doing anything wrong by HN standards/culture.
Ok but what do those things have to do with 'difficult subjects'? 'related to tech' or 'published by the EFF' are not in themselves criteria for an automatic spot on the front page. Lots of things in either category get moderated away by users and moderators all the time.
If this was not of interest to the HN community it wouldn’t be voted to the front page. HN has a bias which favors some sources, including the EFF, so that in it self makes it more likely to be voted to the front page. But if the EFF would release a story about a puppy playing with a kitten at a tech conference I doubt HN users would find it interesting enough to vote it to the front page, so being from the EFF or being about tech isn’t enough.
This story in particular has something which appeals to many HN users, so they up vote it. It also has something which others users don’t like, so they flag it. I’ve given my thoughts on the latter group, but as for the former group, I suspect this story is about a government meddling in social media, and that social media complied. It is a expose on current event, demonstrating with data what many people here expected. It contains quotes like:
> Between October 7 and November 14, a total of 9,500 takedown requests were sent from the Israeli authorities to social media platforms, of which 60 percent went to Meta with a reported 94% compliance rate.
This obviously appeals to a lot of HN users so they vote it up.
I don’t disagree with the moderation policies on HN. This story got unflagged by moderators eventually, and I agree with that decision. I don’t disagree that users should should be able to flag stories to death for whichever reasons. All I think here is that I find some of these reasons lame.
EDIT (a confession): I my self have flagged stories for very petty reasons some which would probably be considered lame by other HN users. So I’m actually a bit of a hypocrite here.
I'm pushing back against the conclusion based on effectively unverifiable or questionable assumptions, mostly. I think it mostly leads to just so stories about why something is or isn't ranked at whatever and most of them don't stand up to fairy gentle stickpoking.
If this was not of interest to the HN community it wouldn’t be voted to the front page.
This is one is at least easy and inaccurate - it takes very little to end up on the front page, at least briefly. You can't draw sensible conclusions about the hivemind from half a dozen votes.
HN has a bias which favors some sources, including the EFF, so that in it self makes it more likely to be voted to the front page.
That's an extra thing on top of the already inaccurate thing and I don't think it's particularly accurate itself. Plenty of other EFF stuff has been regularly criticized, downranked, occasionally even flagged.
From that point of view, it's impossible to know whether the rest of your theory of the trajectory of this story makes any sense since the premises themselves are faulty.
I’d like to understand why you find this unlikely. This is a very popular site, read by a large number of wealthy people. Its readership likely exceeds that of many mainstream news outlets. It is also fairly easy to maliciously influence - there’s just one stream of posts and the site is easily scriptable. If I ran a disinformation/psyop unit, it’d receive close attention. And yes you have to be a user to flag things here, that doesn’t absolve anyone of anything.
What made Canada special died decades ago, were it not for the strict visa process I would be living in the states (Vermont) right now, with a significantly higher salary (as a principal engineer), a lower income tax, healthier housing market, lower cost of living, and better quality of life.
>were it not for the strict visa process I would be living in the states (Vermont) right now, with a significantly higher salary (as a principal engineer), a lower income tax, healthier housing market, lower cost of living, and better quality of life.
Western Europe has all those things, is actually welcoming, has sane healthcare, and you don't even need to own a gun!
Moving from high taxes low pay shortage of housing in popular cities Canada to high taxes low pay shortage of housing in popular citied western Europe I don't think will make much of a difference. Being able to have a gun is an additional freedom.
Outside of tech it's not too different. Tech pay isn't even bad, it just doesn't exhibit the massively inflated salaries of the US. Software is an easier, less professional job than most professional fields, it doesn't make sense for it to command preposterous sums. Though American devs don't like having this fact pointed out to them.
Canada used to say our healthcare was better but that hasnt been true for atleast a decade. Its more choose your version of crappy. Do you want to oay with your life savings (usa) or your life (canada)
If it makes you feel any better, I've been in the healthcare IT field for 20 years. I tried to stay away from the doctors office as much as possible.
Last year I started feeling exhausted 24/7 and tried to make an appointment, but got turned away from my doctors office because my doctor retired and the new guy didn't want to let me make an appointment.
So here I am on a waiting list, in a city where 10% of the population don't have a doctor either. I've been waiting for over a year.
I wish I could change fields, "once you've seen how the sausage is made, you'll want to be a vegetarian"...
Yah you are paying with your life. Its shockingly stupid because there are lots of good examples to oick and choose from how to do a public payor system correctly (singapore does it best imo but nordics and france are options for examples of better tham here just not best)
Yes. Waited 18 months for a 15 minute cateract surgery that I needed 18 months ago. Should have had my license taken away this past year they were so bad.
And the sync is locked behind their offering, if you use other software to handle the sync, you're out of luck if you want the data to be available on mobile since you can't dynamically choose the location of the vault.
It's still miles ahead of other offerings when it comes to having the data be "open", but I found this limitation frustrating.
I've been using Obsidian for months now. I couldn't justify the high sync cost even though the offering is nice. So I hacked a solution with the community plugin "remotely save", syncing to WebDAV. I thought it would be shoddy and after 2 days I would just go with the official solution. But no. Obsidian is a "too good to be true" kind of thing.
Also, the fact that it's just files allows me to shamelessly use Restic to back it up. No "intergrations" or "export workflows" - my data is my own (although it might be snooped by the app), I get to decide what to do with it, how and where to put it.
For me, this is the future. Imagine your data is yours. You get to enjoy all the possible ways of making value out of it, not just in some crippled ways that make other rich people richer.
Last time I checked 3rd party plugin 'Remotely Sync' worked fine on mobile. You just create a new vault with any name you want, install the plugin, fill-in the settings and the sync will copy content of your existing vault there. After that sync will work in both ways. Personally, I use S3 backend and didn't encounter any issues so far.
This is only partially true. Their business model is based on business use, not personal use. They do allow free community based solutions. Like Notion - use it for free for personal stuff. But better UX and you get to take your notes home.
They're not the exception of the rule, the rule is just going to kick off later for you (pre-IPO, when cost cutting measures will take place and the process described above will start)
I don't disagree, but I was more talking about the instances of PE acquisitions that get squeezed out. Obviously though you are right, at the end of the day they will want to make the business look as attractive as possible when they offload it. But to me that's still better than getting bought out to get squeezed and left to rot
What are you basing this on, banks have less real time constraints when it comes to certain data but thats rare. You will almost never see a bank, processor, etc. archive their system of record data.
>This seems like an odd requirement to me. What are the use cases beyond a few minutes past the end of the ride?
Exactly what he the OP said, authorization. Card networks cap latency of authorization requests (the time the merchant submits a request, to when it makes its make through the merchant processor, networks, issuer processor and back.)
I get the sense that a 2 month trial would have been a better option (41 days + buffer). It provides clients with the required amount of time to get up and running while also time boxing them and applying some pressure on them to commit.
An unlimited free trial falls into the same trap of customers leaving until they're "ready" to integrate, time boxing it sort of forces them to commit to the integration at some point.
I could certainly be abnormal, but I'm much more likely to sign up for something that has a real free tier. There's honestly very little difference to me between 60-day free trial and just having to pay from the start, I know that once I do the work to integrate then I'm committing to having to pay. At least for a startup with little revenue and little cash, 60 days is just too soon to commit to having to pay, unless it's like $10/mo.
What's worked better for me is the "startup scholarship" that a lot of companies are doing now. A year is far enough away that we'll either be out of business or have the cash to pay, and I don't need to worry that I'm getting my money's worth by the time the 60-day trial ends.
I'm a big fan of Posthog right now because they have both a generous free tier & a generous startup scholarship. I've moved a ton of stuff to their platform.
A lot of it probably depends on your product though. If you're solving a very targeted problem then you might not be able to create a reasonable free tier. But a lot of B2B tech stuff is like... sure you can charge a bunch of users $5 apiece, but you risk missing the signup of the one user that was going to pay you $10k. Anything with usage-based pricing is going to have Pareto distributed revenue and you need to do everything you can to make sure you're capturing those customers on the tail.
> There's honestly very little difference to me between 60-day free trial and just having to pay from the start, I know that once I do the work to integrate then I'm committing to having to pay.
Yep. That's the problem with timed free trials. It applies pressure to sign up only within your magical goldilocks timeframe, otherwise you'll likely bounce because you're not ready to start your 14/30/41/60/etc. day eval.
I don't think it would make a considerable difference. Not mentioned in the post, but I have a limited unlimited free trial. Taking into account the usage limits, it's not useful for a production deployment so it applies pressure once integrated. That way I only apply pressure to those that actually integrated.
If I were to do a timed trial again, it'd apply pressure to evaluate and plan the integration right now, and the product may not even be at the stage where they're ready to do that yet i.e. still in dev. This needlessly applies friction, which I want to avoid doing until they're ready.
