Suggested new name: Loud. With respect to colors "loud" has the same positive connotation as "riot" ("loud colors" are rich and vibrant), and it also has the connotation of making one's voice heard.
Ironically that was the pun we were making back in 2015 when Riot used to be called Vector. Not only is a Matrix made up of Vectors, but also Vector would be the vehicle for virally spreading Matrix throughout the internet :D
Agreed it's not the best parallel to draw these days, though...
I still think Vector was a great name for a Matrix client. I don't think it would put off non-techies really, but I'm looking forward to seeing what you're coming up with!
This page is devoid of content except for a single "_" character. (I viewed the page in Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox with identical results.) What am I missing?
The date in the article title is wrong. The eclipse will either be Sunday evening January 20 or early Monday morning January 21, depending on where you are. It is visible in the Americas, British Isles, and in most of those parts of Eurasia north of the Arctic Circle.
They intentionally named their site that way to capitalize on Google search result traffic. If you read their articles, you realize they can barely put together two English sentences with proper grammar and structure. Furthermore, most of their articles are stolen from other sites. I've seen journalists from Motherboard, The Register, and Bleeping Computer accuse them of blatantly copying articles, and when I checked out the articles, they were right. I have zero problems with this. Couldn't have happened to a bunch of bigger assholes.
Cutting a business off from the financial system seems like a fairly harsh punishment for plagiarism, especially when there are other routes for a remedy. We may never know if that was the reason, though, so it's hard to measure whether justice was done or not.
I suspect that one of the sites they plagiarized which accept PP donations/subscriptions asked PP to take them off or risk the large news company switching to another payment processor.
Well, there's plagiarism and then there's impersonating a well-known (admittedly in niche circles) brand to make money. I think they made a good call here.
So, rather than using our existing copyright / trademark system to handle cases of brand impersonation or stealing content, we're just going to rely on payment processor companies to punish people? That sounds like a really bad idea.
Why should a payment processor be able to make such legal decisions? That's what the courts are for. The current trend of cutting services for political reasons is problematic at best, particularly when there's arguably a monopoly.
There needs to be more transparency, and a clear and fair system for arbitration and dispute resolution. Better still, one that's consistent across all digital services so people know what to expect when signing up without wading through a novel's worth of user agreements.
We have discrimination laws don't we? Are banks allowed to refuse service for any reason whatsoever?
We're talking about people's livelihood here. If transactions don't violate any laws, payment processors should not be permitted to refuse service. When they do refuse service, there should be transparency in reporting.
Yes, there are laws that protect against discrimination based on certain categories (religion, gender, race, veteran status, etc). Business owners still have the right to refuse service for other reasons of their choosing, like the customer being a loudmouth ass, or not following the dress code, without having to refer to a legal statute.
You're changing the goalposts. This thread is about:
1. (arguably monopolistic) payment processors upon which people's livelihood depends, not restaurants or other noncritical services of which there are many to choose, and
2. It's about discrimination for political motivations, not being abusive to your employees.
There's a hardly a line between religious and political convictions, and if you don't find discrimination along these lines troubling, then I think your bias is showing.
You are the one who is moving the goalposts. From your original comment:
> The current trend of cutting services for political reasons is problematic at best, particularly when there's arguably a monopoly.
Your statement asserts this is a problem ("at best") when a business cuts off service for political reasons, especially if "there's arguably a monopoly". Presumably, from your wording, you are also unhappy when a non-monopoly business cuts off service (which, technically, PayPal is, unless it faces antitrust action that I'm not aware of).
> There's a hardly a line between religious and political convictions, and if you don't find discrimination along these lines troubling, then I think your bias is showing.
And yet, in the U.S., there is a line, because there is an actual federal law that protects religious belief, and there isn't one for political beliefs. I'm not interested in arguing with you the validity of the precedent set by the 1st Amendment's protection for religion, or the validity of religion or its immutability in general, but that's the reality of our current legal framework. So yes, I am biased in favor of reality and not fantasy. Try imagining the tangled framework needed to protect political belief in a way that wouldn't infringe on freedom of expression if you want to understand why political belief has not yet enjoyed such protection.
> Presumably, from your wording, you are also unhappy when a non-monopoly business cuts off service (which, technically, PayPal is, unless it faces antitrust action that I'm not aware of).
That's disingenuous. A finding of monopoly status might be legally definitive, but it's not necessary to reasonably conclude that a corporation is a monopoly.
Online payment alternatives certainly exist, in a similar sense that alternatives to MS Windows existed in the 90s. The recent Patreon/SubscribeStar event suggests strongly that there is collusion at the very least, if the source of the suppression was not PayPal itself. That doesn't change the fundamental point being made.
You are correct that I'm unhappy with discrimination based on political beliefs even when non monopolistic corporations are involved, but pragmatically, that's a much longer discussion. Tackling the immediate concern of people of people having their livelihood destroyed for expressing unpopular views would be sufficient as a stop gap.
> Try imagining the tangled framework needed to protect political belief in a way that wouldn't infringe on freedom of expression if you want to understand why political belief has not yet enjoyed such protection.
More than likely it's not a matter of difficulty, it has simply not been needed. The centralisation of power inherent to technology has been changing the landscape considerably.
Regardless, recent studies have clearly shown that conservative and liberal brains are structurally different, so to some extent, political discrimination is discrimination on physiology. I agree that it's a subtle issue as to what should and should not be considered a deeply held conviction, but it's becoming increasingly clear that it is needed.
As popular as PayPal may be, it's a far cry from being a monopoly.
That said, I do think holding money should be cause for more stringent regulations. Stopping service is one thing; holding funds entirely should absolutely happen only under direct court order (anything else would be theft).
Counterpoint: The “market system” is already a fiction, and contesting the laws to further promulgate that fiction is a non-starter. Calling a business a somethingnotquitea-monopoly isn’t an incantation that makes it true or legally sound.
This name confusion seems intentional and makes me default to unsympathetic, even though I suspect PayPal’s issue is not related to a name confusion root cause.
Even though the website seems to have a history of plagiarism I don't think they named the website after HN. By going through their about us section it looks like they started the website in 2010 as a cybersecurity and hacking news platform. The Hacker News is kind of a no-brainer name for this kind of website. Also THN seems to be an Indian website. I think HN was not at all popular outside the Silicon Valley in 2010. So no reason for them to name the website after HN that had an extremely small and passionate userbase. There is a good chance that they may not have even known about HN when they started THN. The name defintely has confused a lot of people though. Even Elon Musk seems to be following THN over HN in Twitter :)
Hacker News is about hacking too, in the original sense of the word. It's a gathering place for people to indulge in curiosity with fellow curious people.
Ah yes, just let me get out my 'debugging' machete. After all, I keep a widlarizer on my bench for troubleshooting problematic circuits.
"How do you WIDLARIZE something? You take it over to the anvil part of the vice, and you beat on it with a hammer, until it is all crunched down to tiny little pieces, so small that you don’t even have to sweep it off the floor"
A few months ago I was making a news ticker with headlines sourced from hnrss. I had used 'security' as a keyword and posts with score above 100.
I was looking for other sources that provide security news and stumbled upon this one too.
What I saw was all posts looked quite similar to the rss filter from hnrss, except all articles were re-written in a slightly different way.
It was all just redundant news from the hnrss feed and other popular security bloggers.
Do you have proof, or do you just happen to feel this way without actually knowing any background story? If you make such an accusation you should state your reasons, preferably observable facts. Both "hacker" and "news" are generic terms after all.
In addition, even if they did mimic the name, I would not see a problem. It's very descriptive, unlike a completely made-up word that someone spent a lot of effort on to establish as a brand.
I think that's not a great comparison. Hacker News is still essentially a niche site known to people who care about a specific set of fields relevant to startups. If you asked a random person on the street they probably wouldn't know about Y Combinator, much less Hacker News.
I'm not sure how to measure the actual level of recognition of a brand name, but I feel that Hacker News falls into the second or third tier of whatever that ranking is, whereas names like Facebook or Google form the top tier. That, combined with the relatively generic name, make me inclined to believe without further evidence that it's a coincidence - especially given the fact that the site is actually about news related to hacking, or hacker news.
A closer comparison I can think of is if I saw a watch company called "The International Watch Company". The real IWC is a luxury watch company, but the brand and its full name aren't known to many people. In that case too, my opinion is that the name is generic enough for it to feel like an honest coincidence.
In the "The International Watch Company" case, I'd expect a trademark search prior to naming the company. In the "The Hacker News" case, I'd expect at least a Google search to check for confusing/conflicting names in the same space.
In either of the above cases, a Google search turns up the conflicting name as the #1 organic hit, precluding my judgment of an honest coincidence, but I understand your position.
> This site, with the name "Hacker News", was already popular
You mean, with the name "ycombinator", right? I remember accessing this site a few times in the (distant) past and was a little confused as to what it was and what it was "selling" (based on the actual frontpage).
I'd check out https://ycombinator.com/ and assumed the news subdomain was a forum or some '1337' thing.
I say this as a slashdotter, digger, redditor (and others) - all of whom have and always had brand naming. I'd say that over the last couple of years, HN has crossed a bridge into the mass market. Before then... it was niche.
And it redirects there today, so you’d have to buy it back from Facebook for an exorbitant sum of money to do anything with it, then promptly get sued.
Yeah, when I was a college freshman in the 1970s, I got a printed directory of my classmates' names and photos which was informally called the "Face Book". By that time, it was already an old tradition.
