#AngelGate, Dave McClure and Re: Why I Stopped Reading Hacker News.
oonwoye.com
oonwoye.com
Ideas for you.
1) Write a health-care record management system for Nigerians. A free service that allows doctors to store medical records and notes about patient history and prescriptions. Since most people don't have government IDs, device a way to uniquely identify each person (parents name, place of birth, first name, gender, approximate year of birth, last place where a doctor has accessed the medical record, etc.)
I want to do something like that for Somalia, my home country, but don't have the safety to go back there and deploy it. Might go to the refugee camps in Kenya. Shot an email to Save The Children, no reply yet. I want to make a $100 Android tablet that photographs handwritten prescriptions and stores in a central location. The camera can also function as a way to capture visible problems for remote diagnosis.
If you can just pry data health data from the hands of government and NGOs and put it "out there", you wont be short of help.
2) Start a website where people can submit study materials suitable for cheap printing. Exercises and practice games that can be succinctly printed into a few, multicolumn pages. Get the feds to give you a printing service and churn out study materials, send on donkey backs to villages.
You can advance education tremendously by teaching teachers new games and teaching practices, that are fun for both them and students. Tap into new research on learning, and do the simplest stuff first.
3) Chronicle and catalog a verbal recording of the myriad of languges and dialects in nigeria. Send a voice recorder with several hours and let the elders speak about everything. Transcribe that into IPA and save it for the kids. The cities are growing and languages are dying. Also, provide corpora of your languages free online to linguists and programmers can develop NLP tools. As long as African languages remain oral we wont have a mention in computing.
4) Create an online talent website. Reward people for discovering street musicians, painters, folk artists and inventors. The talent gets a mention, and whoever discovered them gets a prop. Put in some game mechanics to encourage the more affluent people with the technical means to go out of their way to interact with, the often poor, local talents. Ignore government aid and other BS. You can bootstrap this with funds from local businesses and transnationals that want to feel-good aspect of this local involvement.
Regarding #3 :
This is an excellent but intractable idea. The sheer number of languages in that region is too staggering to capture even a majority percentage in such a manner; and it would be of little use to any but the academics in linguistics or cultural anthropology.
Better would be a tool that completely encapsulates the vocabulary and grammar of the main languages in that region, so that they may be learned online. There are no sufficient tools that do so at present, either online or in bookstores - and the children of the diaspora, and their children and so forth, could/would make great use of such a thing.
The principle behind my idea for language documentation is that logging diversity, in one Nigeria-wide record, also underscores the equality of the Nigerian people as a whole, across religious, linguistic and clan divides. Right now most people identify with one of few macro-clans, something that aborted our own Somali state.
Documenting dialects and noting the nuanced differences between people makes an amusement, a public spectacle if you will, of what could otherwise have been a matter of tribal pride and differentiation to feel superior over others. I didn't become a "Somali" until I saw the British records, and how identical we were to them.
Empower the minority sub-cultures, and the large clusters come apart. Give voice to individuality, and local culture at the micro-level, and, paradoxically, the larger group identity becomes stronger. Could you imagine how better off Africa would be if people didn't vote along clan lines?
[Edit:
I gotta get ready for a flight, but I really wanna keep this conversation going, hopefully with Oo's involvement.]
But you provoke interesting questions; Is it possible to mitigate or eliminate tribalism on any level, anywhere in the world? And if so, can software be integral to the process, or in any way accelerate it?
My reading of history tells me that favorable outcomes are possible in regards to both questions, however the form of such software is at the moment beyond my conception.
That's why karma exists. It shows the people who consistently have things to say, versus those who just yammer on to hear their own voice.
And that's why downvotes are necessary. If someone says interesting things occasionally, and never says pointless things, they add to the signal (rather than noise). If someone says just as many interesting things, but 100x as many pointless things, their karma would look exactly the same as the person who only added signal. Downvotes are the only way to distinguish those 2 people.
It requires a certain level of maturity, introspection, humility and openness to not simply tag opposing views as pointless and therefore worthy of a downvote.
Another way to express it is this - is it possible to upvote a comment that you disagree with? i.e. simply on the ability of the author to substantiate his points?
Perhaps we should introduce transparent algorithmic voting.
Hmmm....
look at this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1722384 as an example.
If someone says interesting things occasionally, and never says pointless things, they add to the signal (rather than noise).
not in all cases.
Do you think anyone can successfully argue in favour of communism without being voted into oblivion?
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: HN is largely self-correcting. The trick is to write a response when you get downvoted (unfairly, that is), because the downvote is usually a signal that either: a) you wrote a lousy one-liner or b) you didn't express your opinion in a clear manner - see (a).
Flesh out your argument, tell people that you do have a point, and say that you don't think the downvotes were fair. You'd likely see a correction within the next couple of hours.
This of course assumes that you do have something intelligent to say. If you don't, the downvotes are deserved.
Also, I note that in your response to the parent's comment you've not articulated your arguments. You merely make assertions.
not in all cases.
that goes with the herd
HN karma rewards the most cogent, the most intelligent comments. Those are usually well articulated ones. Simple assertions are not well articulated arguments, even if they are true.
A simple format for writing a clear argument is to use the framework of: Assertion -> Reasoning -> Example. HN may occasionally downvote comments based on content. But only if the argument isn't well articulated. That's been my experience, at least.
PS: if you're a karma lover, you may be in this for the wrong reasons.
The actual comment that got a ton of upvotes was one that said they should NOT be heard in front of a judge - which contradicts your post. No one suggested Dave be "burnt at the steak." In fact, most said that he was dumb for lying about the meetings being highly borderline on collusion. Those that stated that also said he (and others) should be in the court of LAW if they committed crimes that had broken the LAW.
Here are the most downvoted comments:
1) McClure's response wasn't defensive. Defensive would have been keeping quiet and not admitting to have been there in the first place.
2) No, that's disagreement. People who have something to hide usually don't draw attention to themselves.
3) But once you have enough money like Mcclure, you can say "Fuck you" when you want to and not worry about losing your job.
4) I'm going to pistol whip the next person that says "AngelGate"
5) Don't listen to rap, then. Stick with pop.
6) I'm having trouble believing this is not a hoax. This doesn't feel real to me. The entire thing feels like it is staged by Arrington and McClure.
The first button you click up if you agree or disagree with the view expressed.
The second button you click up if you think the comment is well written, irrespective of your agreement with the content.
One Karma metric will measure how much people agree with you, the other how much they respect your defense of those views.
Clearly a lot of people want a means to show their opposition to a view. And clearly others want the vote up button to be used to judge the sophistication of the comment. Obviously - no matter how much it's argued over - people are going to do what they bloody well like with the button. Why not make everybody happy?
In my experience good content expressed in bad, offensive, or passive-aggressive writing isn't worth my time. Not as a reader, wanting to skim through the thread for the most cogent arguments, and certainly not as a commentator (these people are usually - well, not trolls per se, but close to the definition).
1) You give the user the ability to disagree by vote. What you're doing is that you're giving people the ability to click a button instead of writing a counter-argument. How does that add to the discourse? This doesn't benefit a group now, does it?
2) You have two voting metrics. How would the ranking algorithm work? Why is populist agreement important to how the comments are arranged? Does that not make groupthink more prominent, not less? If so, why clutter the interface?
3) Is there anything wrong with a fuzzy definition of how voting is used? Sure, people have been downvoted before because other people disagreed with them, but by and large this is a rare occurrence. Oftentimes comments are downvoted and then upvoted again, when more readers stumble across the comment and think: 'say, this isn't right, this shouldn't be downvoted even though I don't agree with it'. It's happened to me before.
Why does this happen sometimes, and not other times? I have a theory about that: good comments run the risk of being downvoted when a) they disagree with the prevailing groupthink on HN ... AND b) they are badly written. (badly here is defined as: unclear, or disorganized, or just plain bad). You rarely run the risk of being unfairly downvoted if you take the time to write your comment, and write it well. My experience at HN seems to support this, I'm not sure if the theory would hold true all the time, but I suspect that it does work, most of the time.
I think ambiguity about how comments are used is okay, and there really isn't anything terrible or wrong with the current system. At least, nothing to justify the addition of another metric.
In my experience that's not correct. I haven't been commenting much lately, and when I do it's often because I disagree with something, and thus have an opposing argument. I've never received any significant downvotes, though I have received my fair share of counterarguments, most of them intelligent and all of them in a civil tone. Interestingly my average karma per post has never been higher.
Still better would be to make downvoting cost one point to the downvoter. This would discourage rather than prevent downvoting (and people will happily pay to correct real injustices).
It would also more accurately reflect human psychology: in IRL conversations a participant occasionally gets angry, but it always comes at a cost to himself.
should be "Dave McClure should be burnt at the stake"
Because you do not appreciate his art?
I am only guessing that it is because he was to be looked as someone who does not give two. And want to also stand out. I admire that. Maybe it can be toned down a little bit because society forces it.
That is just a way to say, "It's OK, he's rich and can be a horrible writer because he INTENDS to write horribly." If I read your blog and you typed this way, I'd condemn it and think you were an idiot - why should it be any different because he "writes checks?" (And that is not because "society forces it," it's because he's trying to talk about serious things and be a serious person but he talks like an 8th grader.
Stop babying him as an angel investor - he's human too.