Unrealistic goals need to be reconsidered. And to avoid blindness, every goal must be considered allowed to fail.

The creation of good leaders is every bit as part of human nature as the corruption of bad ones. Trying to wish away that fact is futile - and wishing away is all that's happening here.

For meaningful discussion, some form of top-down moderation absolutely is required. That does not mandate imitating any particular other site's manner of top-down moderation, however. So ask yourself, what about top-down moderation is harmful?

If you want to ensure that no central party can cause harm, the only possible answer is for each cluster of users to host it themselves, e.g. like Diaspora - and likely also exchange the data over something like Tor to prevent ISP-level meddling. You can't just pretend that any single host or network is infallible. (And related - currently, on Hubski, whoever is the first to post a certain link gets unquestioned moderatorship over that thread, which is clearly worse than subreddit moderators who have to post at least some sort of rules).

If you want to create communities under the fundamental requirement, there has to be something better than following users (who won't share everything I want to read) or following tags (which offer absolutely no moderation). Think about how small communities work on Reddit - someone has an idea for a subject, they create a new subreddit, act as its (usually sole) moderator, people post/view content there. Since the moderator only has localized power, corruption is minimal, and since they do have localized power, abuse is also minimal. To expand from that smallness, remember that there are often multiple small communities with a similar focus, with some number of overlapping subscribers, but completely unrelated moderators.

To actually produce a workable system, we need something like: every user is the moderator of their own personal subreddit on every single subject, but anyone can post in that provided they have appropriate ranking (settable per user+tag to either "whitelisted" or "not blacklisted"). Allow anyone to add tags to any posts, but the tags will only be relevant to people who (directly or indirectly) trust them for that tag - have something similar to "upvoting the fact that a tag applies". Do not make it possible to follow users, except in a specific tag (but do provide a standard tag for "follow me in this for when I start a new tag"). But do have the sense of tag relationships - perhaps a "suggestions" stream from any particular stream you're viewing.

Maybe, just maybe, the whole "no moderation" thing is a doomed experiment.

From the numbers I've seen, if we seized all that money, it would pay off the entire national debt and a third more ($20 trillion illegal money, $15 trillion debt).

Of course, I'm not sure if it's legal to seize all the money, or just the unpaid taxes. My instinct is that it's legal to at least freeze it all.

Also, who would have guessed I'd one day be cheering for the PATRIOT Act?

TL;DR: you can no longer unpublish your own packages, but we can still do it against your will.

But if the moon was the result of a collision between some proto-moon and the proto-Earth, how do we know the magnetic readings weren't from the proto-moon?

And do we have any idea what that collision would have been like?

I can't find "more" in that context in the original article.

If anyone thinks Microsoft wasn't aware of this possibility and didn't do this on purpose for more publicity, think again.

She [Dr. Flammang] wanted to study the fish more closely, but the species is rare and protected, and she could not bring any of them into her lab.

He [Dr. Suvarnaraksha] scooped two of the fish into an aquarium and made videos of them walking at different angles.

Did I miss something?

Of course on-demand won't last. It's fundamentally inefficient.

What it does do is force established quasi-monopolies that work in traditional batch operation to move closer to the balance point of the capitalist ideal (e.g. rational actors, free entry/exit to the market - the latter is the relevant issue here).

Do we know whether the moon has been tidally locked since the time of its creation, or whether it waited a while?

If the impact hypothesis is correct, would that explain the location of Procellarum?

I didn't mean fear of homosexuals as individuals, but fear of homosexuality as an act - and an act that becomes acceptable.

For example, I bet that far more people find tobacco smoking (physically and morally) repulsive, but don't have a phobia of it.

Which is why I think terms like "homophobia" are literal definitions.

I'm also reminded of the original justification for "an eye for an eye" - to limit the revenge for some crime to something just. And I do think that the perceived lack of even that (in favor of rehabilitation) is another driving factor here.

Mu.

Humans are social creatures, and the social effects far exceed the technological ones.

I think this is the k-tuple conjecture that the article talks about, but:

Look at the odd numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, ... every third one is a multiple of 3, every fifth one is a multiple of 5, every seventh one is a multiple of 7, etc.

The same exact pattern holds with any stride: 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, 91 ... because if α is a multiple of β, then α+βγ is obviously also a multiple of β.

I originally thought of this in the context of twin primes. Since every third odd number is a multiple of 3, twin primes can only happen in the gaps, but the gaps are more likely to get hit by being a multiple of some other odd prime the further you go.

Now, with a stride of 10 (but still considering multiples of 3), we know that adjacent primes are much more likely if they don't have to cross the multiple of 3 gap (or rather, don't have to cross it very often). But, at the same time, there are many other smaller strides which might generate a prime even closer. While each of them is also vulnerable to the 3, their strides are smaller so they are more likely to have something* escape.

Stupid multiples of 7

I came over in one of those migrations, but still spend a lot of time at Reddit.

I spend a lot of time frustrated with Hubski's nonstandard markup (at least Markdown is somewhat of a standard, even if Reddit/StackOverflow/Github all have their own flavors).

I also observe that despite attempts at technological differentiation, Hubski's only advantages and disadvantages are those of any smaller user base.

Wait, did people not know this? I thought it was obvious.