Yes, HN is my safe space. I have enough politics in my daily life, I don't need it when I'm with phone in my bed trying to wind down.

And which politics? American internal politics are foreign and distant to me. How much do you care about my country internal affairs? Probably not much. And it's OK, you can't fix every country in existence, and if you tried to care you would get insane.

Pro-tip: when you see a headline on the main page, you don't have to click on it. Just keep scrolling.

While I completely agree in principle, these threads get very very heated so I can kinda see why HN/dang/our reptilian overlords are trying to keep them from becoming a majority of the site (which they easily could be, absent the flagging of these stories).

Sure, within reason.

Also, I totally understand pruning back discussion that is political, and way off the topic of the actual post/story. People should reasonably be able to read and discuss a non-political story without big political discussion springing up.

Yeah, I don't know where you draw the line. Like, I personally have often gotten a lot of value from HN political threads, but they have been getting worse and worse since about 2016 (I wonder what happened then?) so I can see why other people might just be sick of dealing with the noise.

> How much do you care about my country internal affairs? Probably not much.

Oh how I wish this were true of non-Americans.

>one of your non-political core contributors goes by @zyklon1488 on twitter

I think this is exactly what author meant? This is just a tool, private life or political opinions of contributors are not relevant, as long as they don't try to force them on other project members. The only thing that matters is the quality of submitted code.

But by doing this, you limit your talent pool to folks who accept to associate with hateful folks.

>The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue

Obviously, but most of university research - at least in Europe - is funded by public money. The idea is that research funded by public money should be public by default, unless there's a reason to do otherwise.

>Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?

Yes, of course.

Yet it's not American "public" money that funded it.

And it's good to realize what 'public' means in this case: paid for by the general public. What companies produce is also (often) paid for by them, only not via taxes but through purchases, subscriptions, etc. Why should the software produced by companies be exempt?

American public money funded most of the tech that the whole Europe is depending on and extracting trillions of dollars value. Your American using Italian uni stuff is nonsense.

So the argument is basically: because taxes, and only taxes, paid for something somewhere, it should be free for everybody everywhere?

Ah wait, you're somebody else. Why the somewhat unhinged attack on Europe? Because Europe is getting US tech for free?

30 years ago, one of the things we were all naively hoping for was that a globally connected network would help to reduce the tribalism, obsolete these "American money" and "European bits" and "Chinese protocols" ideas and stop all the cross-border fighting over what's mine and what's yours. When a piece of software has contributors from 50 countries, how could it "belong" to one country? Obviously we are in an even worse spot, global cooperation wise, now than we were in the 90s.

I've seen this work in certain situations, CERN and the LHC for example (I was on a data team for a detector). Everyone was driven by the science, where you came from didn't matter. With that said, and this part is going to be inflammatory potentially, people who are fear and tribal/in group driven are likely never going to be swayed (and building the mental model up via comments to properly contextualize this is beyond the scope of this thread). Tech doesn't fix people problems.

It might have been a bit naive, and very much reliant on a more open, more liberal, and less neo-liberal, international order than we have right now. Greed and power are not (<-edit: I had skipped that bit) conducive to such ideals.

Indeed, it appears they are upset that "the whole Europe is depending on and extracting trillions of dollars value" from American open source spend in some way.

North Korea has its own Linux. Google has its own Linux. There are Linux distributions maintained by a single person. Belgium will do fine.

Maintained, with heavy leaning on other people having actually written all the stuff, enabled by an open market.

The hypothetical specifically precludes that.

The same way you discover official clearnet domain names, i.e. by using a search engine, getting url from a friend, etc.

But you can share torrent links via onion hidden service easily.

Isn't "alcoholic" defined as a person who "struggles with addiction" to alcohol? I think that makes sense.

I think it's defined as someone who "is addicted" to alcohol.

2011 was 15 years ago. I was not even legally adult back then. And even if I was old enough back then, people are allowed to change their opinions in 15 years.

The set of people that left their country is not random, and certainly statistically biased.

>Things could not be worse than they have been.

Things can always get worse.

The GP didn't say changing Maduro to other president is bad, but that "periods of violent transition" can have dire consequences for the regular people. And US seems to be in it for the money, not to liberate the downtrodden.

I wish them peace and prosperity, though.

I wish them peace and prosperity as well. Everyone does. It’s been 25 years of hell and it was just going to continue as such.