It’s common, but disingenuous to talk about the Overton window as though it was some immutable, one-way thermodynamic process. The truth of course is that it goes both ways, that discussion and dissent do exist. History, American and otherwise, is full of examples of overreach that doesn’t lead to the desired result, but the opposite.

In theory it works both ways - but once politicians and government agencies gain power, they will not lose them easily.

Its been nearly two months since I started emailing hn@ycombinator.com without a reply. I’ve changed email providers in case it was a spam issue, and still nothing. So, I’m trying this again. Please respond.

I have to remember that one if I ever feel like burgling someone’s house. “Ah yes yer honor, I did try to break in for research purposes!”

I can live with the unpleasant UX as far as that goes, but where it implodes for me is having to sift through endless fake reviews, counterfeits, and shit products. “Amazon’s Choice” is frequently garbage, and everything else is a coin flip at best. I have to use Fakespot just to sift through the more obvious dreck.

Of course it’s AWS printing their money, not retail.

Fakespot is pure trash. That thing doesn't work at all. According to Fakespot everything in Amazon is fake. Even small legitimate third-party sellers get bad ratings from Fakespot. But that's not even the worst part. I have found dubious listings where Fakespot didn't detect anything and gave them a semi-decent rating when it's obvious that the reviews were manipulated just by looking at them.

If you want to understand a product reliability is pretty simple. Just browse the 1 and 2 star reviews. You can find a lot of valuable information about the products in those reviews.

If you still want to use something to evaluate the reviews use Reviewmeta. It's much better and transparent than Fakespot.

> According to Fakespot everything in Amazon is fake.

http://www.chioka.in/class-imbalance-problem/

>According to Fakespot everything in Amazon is fake.

I really don't know how good or bad fakespot is, but I get a roughly uniform distribution - it's not at all rare for me to see an A or B, and I'm pretty sure I don't see more F's than those.

It’s really quite surreal. Unless it’s a highly commoditized item, I don’t bother with Amazon anymore.

FWIW, it's still a decent place to buy books. I go to my local bookstore first, because reasons, but Amazon comes through whenever they can't source it through their distributor.

But yeah, when I die, I want Amazon electronics sellers to be my pallbearers so they can let me down one last time.

What do you use instead? I'd love to be able to ditch amazon for most purchases.

Literally any thing else. For photography equipment, B&H or my local camera shop. For non-Apple computer stuff, local MicroCenter, NewEgg, etc. For non-techy stuff, local stores. Even the dollar stores have laundry soap, dish soap, etc.

I've actually gotten used to taking a weekend afternoon for errands or maybe in the evenings on the way home. It's a good way to just unwind from the computer for a while. There are times to avoid certain stores (Central Market on the weekend). Shopping online pretty much means being in front of the computer all of the time.

Just the devices used to choose targets. It seems like splitting hairs when you effectively don’t build guns, you just build gunsights to use a metaphor. Note that I’m in favor of supporting the military, but I’m not in favor of pretending that support however it comes about doesn’t ultimately connect to killing people.

I mean, GPS, too, right? I think you've exaggerated the definition to well beyond reason.

While GPS can be used to target bombs, it can also be used to target many other things, like cameras and airplanes and helicopters and containerships and taxi rides. Simply because GPS is useful in war does not make it a weapon of war.

Spy satellites don't help industry or commerce or transport or safety or medicine. They solely help those who kill hundreds of people for a living.

Spy satellites, due to their very restricted scope of usefulness (and to whom they are made useful), are weapons of war. We'd be having a different discussion entirely if their outputs were livestreamed to the whole planet (like the GPS signals are). Those that run them don't permit that, because then they wouldn't be quite as useful for committing lots of murders.

That’s true, but you don’t get clicks from outrage by just saying the boring truth. I’ve also been reading rants from people who think the US is going to throw a bunch of other charges at him when he gets here, which is just hilariously wrong. In general a state can’t request extradition on charge A then throw B-Z into the mix when the plane lands. The only way to expand on the original charges are with permission from the country which received the original request on the basis of new information.

But again, that doesn’t feed the conspiracy-minded mob or generate clicks.

Edit response to emiliobumachar:

If the US broke international law and their treaties with the UK it would be a really bad look at the very least. Conversely if that doesn’t happen what are you going to be convinced of?

(Sorry about responding this way, but after two months of getting no response from the mods about rate limiting me, I’m just adapting.)

> In general a state can’t request extradition on charge A then throw B-Z into the mix when the plane lands. The only way to expand on the original charges are with permission from the country which received the original request on the basis of new information.

Does anybody think UK would not give all the permissions when asked?

The charges have to be based on new information, and the UK judiciary isn’t overtly political. All told I think Assange will go down for the hacking, and then be off to Sweden. After that I suspect the world at large will be done with him. He isn’t anything like as important as he and his few supporters seem to think.

It feels like AMP is Google nailing its own coffin to me. It probably felt like a winning move when Bell and AT&T made people buy their own products to use telephone systems, but it led directly to their disruption by the DOJ. Even though some poeple at Google probably realize that, it won’t matter if they cash out beforehand, if working on a project gets them promoted, and if institutional inertia is in control.

Google is hurtling toward an antitrust case they won’t win, and it will really be all their fault.

I use an old SE and I love it. It does what I want a phone to do, and just works every time. For my desktop I want freedom, but on my phone I want to have a safe App Store and not spend a lot of time wondering if the app I want is malware or counterfeit or a scam. I just want it to be a working item and that’s it.

Maybe she feels the same way? No need to buy here an $800 model either, you can get really good iPhomes for a fraction of that price.

The first three top-level comments all laud the decision. That would appear to be the opposite of your central claim that May I remember that most HN jumped to defend Boeing and the FAA, without a shred of evidence?.

Maybe you would be able to make a better point if you dropped the jingoism and histrionics. It can also be helpful to not lump the tens of thousands of people here into one bin of “HN did x” when trying to make that point.

My central claim is this:

> It took China for once having an independent policy instead of "impartial" agencies pushing their agenda onto a defenseless world.

And I stand by my comment about HN: I clearly remember the bias on the discussion. The top comments are top comments once the story settles. And the replies to those comments show a different picture.

> Maybe you would be able to make a better point if you dropped the jingoism and histrionics.

There is something worse than being slightly offensive: being biased and pushing damaging narratives onto the rest of us.

Let's notice that the truth has come out because a Max crash would also affect americans. Whenever interests are not so nicely alligned, we in the rest of the world end up paying the price.

You keep raising the issue of bias, but the one piece of supporting “evidence” for that bias doesn’t support your claim. You brush that off by saying it changed “after the story settled” as if that meant something.

I’m thinking that a mirror might help you with your bias concerns.