[tptacek]

What's frustrating about this question is that it (inevitably!) commands the top of the HN thread with a discussion of the least interesting thing in the article. It's an article about COVID and Facebook, and here we're recapitulating the end-to-end encryption debate for the 8-zillionth time.

[solarhoma]

I would argue that this statement from Bill is the most interesting. This statement shows Bill Gates, someone who has influence on legislatures, making a statement against encryption.

[flocial]

COVID will eventually pass even with unnecessary fatalities in its wake. E2e encryption and loss of rights will stay around much longer.

[api]

What does encryption even have to do with COVID? All the disinformation I see is cleartext on social media.

[eanzenberg]

Gates is scared people are passing bad information through encrypted platforms such as whatsapp. Next, he will require 24/7 monitoring of every private citizen to make sure we don’t call him mean names.

[philliphaydon]

I'm not convinced e2e encryption exists in WhatsApp. Every time I have conversations about products in whats app I get those products as adverts in Facebook.

[Buge]

Did you or your correspondent view a web page related to the product before or after the conversation? Viewing web pages is quite common.

Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

That doesn't mean there's no E2E encryption. WhatsApp can take the text of your conversations and also send plaintext to Facebook for ad targeting, while the actual conversation to the other person is still E2E encrypted. Or do "local" analytics on the phone to find keywords for ad targeting. Etc.

[mewpmewp2]

I have had this happen without any devices nearby, consistently, meaning we must be chipped already.

[artellectual]

That in and of itself is a testament to how problematic our man-made legal system is.

Compare a nature made system to a man made system.

Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.

[akiselev]

> Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.

That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard today. It took a billion plus years for nature to come up with humans and about ten thousand years for us to go from written language to causing a mass extinction. To call such a comparison "hyperbolic" would be an understatement.

[avindroth]

> Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.

You have put together arguments that make sense individually, but do not make sense when you weave them together. Nature changes over time, but over a long period of time (e.g. evolution is slow). Our laws and regulations do not get updated to reflect the times, yes, but the times that are changing is because of humans, not nature. A manmade part of society is having a tough time catching up with another manmade part of society. Human progress is NOT slow, at least when you are comparing it with nature. Humans do not change on an individual level, but they change a great deal en masse culturally, psychologically, etc. We are actually almost built for adaptation and change intergenerationally.

There is a subtle point here about institutions refusing change, but you cannot make a valid comparison of speed between human institutions and nature.

[roenxi]

Everyone has a range of opinions and some of them will be factually/morally/logically/practically objectionable. The fact that Gates has an opinion that you, I or indeed everyone disagrees with is not interesting.

What about "It’s insane how confused the trials here in the US have been."? That opinion is very important and has implications for how everyone here should act. The last 6 months have been expensively purchased and the best thing that could have been bought was good information. If that time has been wasted then there should be reform of an evidence-based nature. This is an opinion that really deserves debate, opinions thrown about and evidence dredged up. With encryption, HN will basically just agree that he is wrong and everyone likes encryption. Not much more to say. Maybe we will think of the children on the way thorough.

Encryption is an important issue but frankly that isn't what Gates is talking about, so arguing about it is a bit pointless. It is barely even germain to the topic he is talking about. He is talking about a global pandemic.

[khawkins]

It does speak to why he's treated with so much distrust, as is discussed by other threads. Unlike the average person, Gates is someone who can actually make things happen with his incredible wealth. It suggests a form of paternalistic authoritarian attitude towards social issues that undeniably colors his attitude towards this pandemic.

You can also read in his tone that he feels personally slighted by not being given a seat at the table in the US COVID response. People point to South Korea's success and call the US a failure, not realizing that if you implemented their measures in the US: things like forced contact tracing, forced registration, and locking up the infected in isolated sites, you'd have a civil insurrection on your hands.

[avindroth]

History of democracy in South Korea is short, and privacy is not recognized as an important virtue. Sacrificing your rights for the nation (or historically the kingdom) is an important duty, and failure to abide by such ‘selflessness’ is deemed as malicious and egocentric. It will take many more decades for South Korea to shed its cultural shadow of being subject to a ruler.

A case and point: Seoul is riddled with security cameras on every street. This makes Seoul an incredibly safe city, but also with decreased sense of privacy. Cameras are everywhere, and this is not recognized much as a potential problem in South Korea.

With Covid, there is a pending legislation to sign in your name and social security number whenever you visit designated crowded areas. I am worried for the increased loss of freedom and privacy in South Korea, but the culture worries less about that, and more about mutual subsistence.

[tangjurine]

If a student failed a biology class because his hyper-religious parents would beat him if he didn't, he still failed.

[khawkins]

And it's right to publicly shame him for that?

[emiliobumachar]

Nature may be less considerate. The problem with failing or particular case isn't the shame, it's the death and destruction.

[Erlich_Bachman]

> The fact that Gates has an opinion that you, I or indeed everyone disagrees with is not interesting.

Evidently it is interesting to the HN croud, because this is how they vote.

Why argue about this? This is what we have a voting system on HN for. It shows us what is objectively interesting and what is not, we don't really need you or anyone else to tell us what should be interesting, we have real data to demonstrate what is.

[justsee]

We aren't recapitulating the e2e debate, Gates is in his interview.

Someone like Gates pushing for the end of private speech at scale is always going to be of interest to the HN crowd.

[stjohnswarts]

It remains interesting that the various powers that be continuously want to take away what little privacy we 99% have. They can't imagine a world where normal people can exist without their oversight. This includes most billionaires and elected officials. I am glad he is contributing his billions to helping solve covid and other global disasters but these little clips can be telling about the individual's belief and to always realize they have many sides to their character.

[sxxahsuxh]

Bill Gates said something stupid and people are talking about it. His phrasing is what I expect an old person who doesn't have decades of industry pioneering experience in technology to say. So weird.

Point is, who cares what else he has to say if he says stuff like this? He's as much an expert on technology as he is on pathology, so if his opinions on technology are bad... well you get the point.

[frogpelt]

He probably feels like he is the subject matter expert on technology but on medical stuff he listens to other people who claim to be subject matter experts.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

In defense of the OP, fair balance: a counter complaint

What is frustrating about this comment is that it inevitably commands the top of the HN thread, "for the 8-zillionth time", because its author's moniker automatically attracts "upvotes" due its familiarity, not because the comment is the most interesting.

That said, this comment is probably worthy of being at the top since the E2E debate is indeed a tired one and that sentiment probably has many sympathisers. However, as someone else pointed out, Gates brought this up, not HN. And it does directly relate to discussions about COVID on Facebook (WhatsApp) and the ability to censor them. Of course, there is also the argument that newcomers to HN will not know all the past discussions of E2E, nor are they expected to read them before commenting. We regularly see HN re-post items that have previously been submitted, re-opening discussions that are old hat, inviting us to re-hash them.

While some readers may grow tired of seeing the same topics discussed over and over again, other readers may grow tired of seeing the same usernames at the top of so many threads, over and over again, no matter what their comments.

[robomartin]

@tptacek

This is one of the reasons for which I proposed that HN, by default, display discussions collapsed down to first branches. Just show the text for the first branches and collapse their corresponding conversations. Readers would only expand branches they find relevant or interesting and comment within them.

You could take this one step further and only show the first two lines (or n characters) of first branch comments. This would force a style where authors would have to provide a two line summary of their comment (if it is a first branch comment) in order to facilitate scanning. With this approach the list of first branches would almost look like the HN home page, where you can quickly scan the short titles and expand topics of interest.

To address your comment directly, if the inevitable makes it to the top of the first branch list it will be easy to scan other first branches on the same page without having to scroll or take any action. This might promote participation in other threads within the conversation and maybe even the bubbling-up of more "worthy" contenders for the top first branch.

[blaser-waffle]

I've set up a similar approach with 3rd party apps on reddit.

Give me top threads and a level below them to see a rebuttal -- if I want to see more I'll break them down.

I do wish there was a way to see if there are high value or low value posts below, like someone got gilded or got 400 upvotes or something. Not sure how this would be implemented though; I could see terrible pun threads getting too many upvotes and throwing that off.

[127]

It will remain very interesting up to the moment where someone comes up with a solution on how to escape a tyrannical panopticon totalitarian state.

[freddie_mercury]

HN is as much of an echo chamber as any other internet forum. 90% of the time you can predict in advance what the top-voted comment is going to be. Most of the time it will be some pointless quibbling about how the subject line technically isn't correct somehow. The rest of the time it'll be about one of the three or four hobby horses of HN. "I don't use social media", "WFH has no flaws", "whiteboard interviews are worse than waterboarding", etc.

[waihtis]

Any community will have an echo chamber, that's part of the basic human fabric. It's still a great forum (and you probably think so also.)

[Erlich_Bachman]

Exactly, while it is also an echo chamber, I would argue it is one of the better ones. It selects information to echo in a much more effective and useful way than many other platforms. This is why we are here. Not because we assume that it would be somehow 100% objective place where everything is true. Is that even possible? If you have to select, from the tons of info out there, a list of something that can be parsed by a human in reasonable time, you will automatically filter out, and thus create a subjective view of reality.

[blaser-waffle]

Aye. Generally speaking, the filtering here is better, and the groupthink is operating at a different level than the broader population. It's groupthink nonetheless, but if you anticipate that you can usually find good info.

Plus the tone & tenor of the discussions is usually better, e.g. full sentences, (mostly) coherent posts, etc. Not like on Reddit where the top post on something that makes the front page is literally just "bruh".

[freddie_mercury]

> It's still a great forum (and you probably think so also.)

I think is generally good. I wouldn't call it "great". I can only assume that people who think it is great only ever care about tech (where HN is a good tech site) and politics (where every politics discussion on the internet is terrible). Every other interest I have has a forum that is better than HN. HN suffers somewhat from its demographic monoculture and seems to have way more opinionated arm-chair quarterbacks than other forums I'm in. I assume that many other "career-related" forums have similar issues, though. I can imagine lawyer forum probably has lots of lawyers who have never practiced Constitutional law but giving strong opinions on it on a daily basis.

[sukilot]

Bill Gates was the one who linked encryption to Covid, not HN.

[dpweb]

Was puzzled by Gates' statement there. I didn't catch how the 'demon sperm doctors' video was related to encryption.

Rather the very difficult and important issue, how do you stop someone with 80 million followers from spreading lies and large numbers of people believing them, and who determines what are facts and what are lies. By Facebook, Twitter, etc.. removing Trump's posts for instance, aren't they taking upon themselves the authority of what's true and what isn't?

I have to believe the only answer is something they call freedom of speech. You can say whatever the hell you want publicly. I'm appalled by the fact the highest authority in the world retweeted the sperm doctors video as well, but I'm not so comfortable with FB, Twitter, etc. deciding for me what is true and not, or worth me reading, either.

So, the encryption issue doesn't apply here. It's a serious issue, but separate. The problem is not that encrypted lies can be sent. The lies that reach 1000 people aren't the problem. The problem is the unencrypted lies that REACH 80 million+ people.

[justsee]

It was disappointing to see that segue from Gates.

Consider that the pile-on of that doctor - an African from Cameroon where Christianity is blended with traditional tribal superstition - happened around the same time as the Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health published a Newsweek piece on how HCL is a valid early-stage treatment [1].

I understand this is how the media works: an advocate of HCL who has fringe cultural beliefs was retweeted by Trump, so the story was irresistible and endlessly amplified (including here by Gates).

But the quality of debate would be so much better if the media engaged with the (superficially) strongest proponents of a position (such as Harvey Risch) and aimed withering criticism and analysis at them instead. Shouldn't the focus be on dismantling the claims of the most, not the least, credentialed proponents?

Instead the media from all quarters deliberately amplifies the most fringe proponents, so now HCL is shorthand for expressing disdain for particular cultural beliefs, and those 10 million views were significantly driven by most media outlets covering her.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exis...

[eloff]

Yes, objectively the evidence I've seen supports that HCL and zinc, if given early enough, improve the outcome for the patient.

The media, which is mostly left leaning, ignores this and instead prefers to take cheap shots at Trump whenever possible on the subject. It seems very biased, very childish, and entirely divorced from reality - actually that more or less sums up the state of US politics lately.

[justsee]

In the above comment I'm advocating for honest debate, not HCL.

That debate has of course not been particularly honest: amplifying the weakest proponents, fabrication of negative data with the Surgisphere scandal [1] and fixating on studies which don't replicate the claimed beneficial outpatient (pre-hospitalization) treatment processes (low-dose HCL, zinc, azithromycin).

However none of that means HCL is actually effective, just that the public debate being prosecuted is quite weak when looked at carefully.

It could just be that once a mainstream position is established (which might be correct!) it becomes easier to engage in influencing to enforce or signal tribal commitment to the established consensus in place of continued honest debate.

I really don't want to hear about the cultural beliefs of the weakest advocates, or of studies which don't replicate the claimed treatment.

I want to see engagement with the strongest advocates, and studies which irrefutably rule out the specific treatment, and if they rule this out as just another alluring low-cost, ineffective treatment, then at least we've reached that point honestly.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/covid-19-studi...

[khawkins]

I'd like to see people approach the debate with enough nuance to recognize that the science on recent topics is extremely flawed, and the trustworthiness of results is decreased significantly when it becomes politicized.

And honestly, doing placebo-controlled studies might be a colossal mistake. If people genuinely benefit from the placebo effect, it's a feature, not a flaw. If people get HCQ+Z-pac+zinc and recover then it's a victory either way. If people are incorrectly led to believe HCQ is poison and get a reverse-placebo effect then we're not really helping anyone, are we?

[RabbitmqGuy]

This.

Something I've wished for; hacker news only with top level comments

[gorgoiler]

Perhaps all top level comments could have a subject or title. It would be as if they were, themselves, submissions.

This is one of the things Slashdot did rather well with its categorization and ratings, though if that system were used then I’m sure everything would just be rated +5 Insightful with little signal over the noise.

[reillyse]

Yea, I feel bad about this tangent. I actually enjoyed the article, I just got annoyed about what I felt was a mischaracterization of the entire piece, leading to that mischaracterization dominating the discussion, I'm going to upvote the next comment..

[reillyse]

I'm very confused, why did this get downvoted ? If anything downvote the entire thread...