Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleyan | Hacker News Reader

Life got you down? Take a piece of advice from another of Bulgakov's (author of Master and Margarita) novels and stop reading the news. There is nothing actionable in the news; next to no utility. News is simply a time sink that depress your spirit. So take the good doctor's words from Heart of a Dog: "If you care about your digestion, my advice is [sic] never read soviet newspapers before dinner" and generalize it to the sources of outrage in your life that are getting you down.

With that said, I highly recommend reading Master and Margarita as it is my favorite novel. It is a work however that is deeply rooted in its time and place, so looking at annotations[1] that explain the subtlety is very useful.

This comment was based on my previous two comments here[2][3].

[1] http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14282358

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870327

View on HN

Full quote is a bit better:

(Location/time: early days of Soviet Russia, old and young doctor talking at dinner)

"If you care about your digestion, my advice - do not discuss bolshevism and medicine at dinner. And, god be with you, never read soviet newspapers before dinner."

"But... there are no any other."

"So, don't read any. You know, I performed 30 experiments at my clinic. And you know? Patients, that don't read newspapers, feel great. I forced others to read "Pravda" on purpose, they lost weight."

This is from the amazing book A Dog's Heart (Собачье сердце). There is an equally amazing movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whHySar4EoY), but I am not sure if there is a version with English subtitles. For me it's one of the best Soviet movies. To be fair it was created near the end of the USSR—in 1988. The novel itself was officially published for the first time only in 1987.

It was on the list of anti-Soviet literature for a long long time before that, and possessing it could get you into real trouble.

I have not seen many Soviet movies but https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091341/?ref_=nv_sr_1 is amazing in many ways. Also I can't help but wonder how it could be made. I find the last decade of the Soviet union incredibly interesting, probably because I was a child at the time.

There's an autobiography book by Danelia (the director) where he explains how some of the things in that movie were filmed. I doubt it was translated, tho.

E.g. they used half of a plane hull with construction foam on top of it.

This is so cool: that exact movie is an another one in my short "amazing Soviet movies" list. I still remember the first time I saw it. I was a teenager, it was a summer. I was on my way out, but the movie started and I decided to see what it's about. I don't think I moved for the entire duration of it. It was so different and so captivating.

Prime Video has it with English subtitles: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071PF4WCM

The official Lenfilm YouTube account has it also, but for some reason only with French subtitles. It looks like less of their catalogue there is English subbed, compared to Mosfilm, which has English subs for basically everything.

You'd think Youtube would put auto-translated subtitles everywhere by now, the technology is here. They have automatic text-to-speech for some videos too, which isn't perfect but if there's good French subtitles there's no reason to not use that for other languages. If only to get the gist of it.

When it comes to Russian->English translation, the technology is most definitely not here.

In fact it's readily available with English subtitles:

https://sovietmoviesonline.com/comedy/87-sobache-serdce.html or https://www.reelhouse.org/vintagefilmclub/the-heart-of-a-dog...

To each according to their need etc.

I took a Master in Margarita class in college during my study abroad, with each class physically exploring a key Moscow scene from the novel. Our first class started at Патриаршие пруды (Patriarch's Pond), near where Anushka drops the oil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Ponds

Now years later, I do data analysis to show how media can give us a skewed view of the world — and can be used to manipulate our beliefs:

How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...

And write a media literacy guide on Github:

Hack the Media https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

There's nothing actionable, except for longer term investments like where to live and how to plan your spending vs saving. Brexit is horribly fascinating in this respect, as the outcome controls whether I'll need do leave.

Definitely true for tribal politics though.

I doubt anyone will be made to leave. Suffer through paperwork sure.

Seeing what happened to the "Windrush generation", I wouldn't be so sure. This is a government with anti-immigration targets.

You make it sound like everyone who immigrated from the Windies from the 50s to the 70s has been specifically and vindictively booted out when ... well, nothing like that has happened at all.

Sure, there have been quite a few unfortunate and well-publicised outlier cases of people situationally caught between bureaucratic cracks, but as someone who lives in London, I assure you that thousands of long-since immigrated grandparents aren't getting booted out to satisfy some arbitrary ‘anti-immigration’ whim.

It's a mess for sure, but I'm not sure it's as you appear to be trying to paint.

I'm Irish and my gf is German. I'll be fine from the paperwork perspective in all probability, but my gf doesn't want to be in a situation where she needs to avoid living outside UK to retain right to return to UK - we have a house here. And neither of us has any interest in switching citizenship.

But more importantly, we don't want to be living in a country in a downward, inward decline. Brexit isn't going to solve the problems that disaffected leavers voted for, and I think it's going to get worse - Britain may get even more virulent demagogues. If we have children, we don't want them to grow up in an illiberal society, or be educated in this kind of a system.

Things aren't great elsewhere either, for sure. That's why it's so fascinating.

People aren't being made to leave but a lot of them are leaving because it's too much hassle to stay. They have to pay money to get a visa to stay and so they are saying they will leave instead as too much hassle. This is the general viewpoint of EU workers in general.

Great you say, more jobs for the English. But now the businesses have to pay a higher wager and/or increase their costs which are passed down to us. Now we have to pay more, but we aren't getting any extra money and due to austerity it's even worse.

In my view, these kind of actionable news you can get from reading the news once a month or (my favourite) from The Economist every weekend.

Actually, this would be an amazing news service. "Actionable news", where the high-frequency scare-stories weren't reported on.

This is what I viewed as a balanced approach. No headlines websites or whatever but I read economist weekly

The Economist bought hook-line-and-sinker into Brazilian partisan politics a few weeks back. They were fooled by cultural affinity: party A speaks the language of liberal centrism but is actually much more iliberal (illiberal?) than party B. What's worse -- The Economist knew this in 2010-16...

What you are getting from The Economist is their opinions on the news, together with the news.

As an honest question, how well does this apply to Hackernews? I know that BBC News is bad for my health and does nothing for my career. Holistically I'm not sure about hn.

To be brutally honest, a lot of the negativity on HN probably isn't the best influence on your mental health. It's a trade-off between that and career benefits.

On HN, generally avoid reading the comments. Some very interesting things occasionally come up in the comments, true, but its just not worth the time sink and the effect on your psyche to dig through the dross and find them. Let this be the last HN comment you ever read...

Keep writing them though -- it's still a great outlet for one's own negativity and psychoses...

The problem with hacker news and social media in general is that "real" news is targeting it for clicks and views. Bloomberg, nytimes, washingtonpost and almost everyone else have social media teams dedicated to spreading their articles on social media. If anyone else was doing it, we'd call it spam.

Even worse, hackernews gives these organizations favorable treatment and privileges where they can get away with it. Can you imagine what would happen if foxnews spammed HN everyday?

The only saving grace for HN is that HN is so small that it is an afterthought for these spammers. The real problem is in reddit, facebook, twitter or larger social media. That's why those platforms are so toxic. It's overrun with news media employees and spammed content.

>That's why those platforms are so toxic. It's overrun with news media employees and spammed content.

4Chan isn't exactly overrun with spammers and it's the same toxic cespool that Reddit is (granted Reddit has better manners and at least pretends to emulate civil conversation). I don't think the news sites spamming their articles is more than a minor contributing factor.

HN is so dour and moody at times, many positive articles' top comment is someone expressing cynicism or dragging creators down. Jokes and levity are mostly banned (though looking at reddit I can understand why). The insightful/thoughtful conversations you can have are good, but the atmosphere is not the best 9/10 times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-to...

What could he learn from the news that would influence his actions or even opinions? If the answer is "nothing", what's the downside for this guy?

In my case I've been publicly shamed once or twice because I'm not up on what the latest generation finds offensive. Maybe that's just what getting old is though.

Apparently we're not allowed to say 'that one chick from the alien films' or 'miss/ms' enternamehere without deeply offending some of the population to the point of being yelled at. There are many other examples of this I'm sure, but I don't get out much.

Isn't it also ironic that there's a group of people on a site called hackernews saying not to read the news? This is my only source, and it depresses me to no end. But how else do you keep up in a very quickly evolving world like ours?

What part of the above is offensive? I'm afraid to talk to young people or Americans these days lest someone get mad at me. Were we the same with our parents I wonder?

Apparently with 'chick' it dehumanizes women, and with ms/miss it's something to do with the fact that you're implying they're young and/or a mistress? I honestly have no idea where people come up with this stuff. It's absurd.

How do you keep up? The point is that you don't.

Calling women "chick" has been iffy at best for at least 30 years. That's not new.

I've never heard of "Ms." being an issue, though, since it explicitly doesn't make assumptions about marital status like Miss and Mrs. do. I'd guess that someone didn't actually know what it meant.

I've always considered chick the exact same as dude. It's just a synonym for girl/lady. If used improperly it can be offensive, but then I'd argue any sentence you can think of where it's used improperly you could replace "chick" with pretty much any synonym for girl/lady and it'd still be offensive.

I agree, but struggle slightly:

In the past I've cut out the news and felt much better fairly quickly. However, it gets to a point where there's something that happens that I should be aware of - like the annual budget speech, or something related to my industry that's hit a headline.

I guess I need a means of separating the 99% outrage-inducing, unactionable mainstay from the 1% of things that I genuinely need to know about.

First, I started by stopping reading daily news; stopping refreshing the headlines every time I had a few minutes; stopping getting alerts; avoiding 'news 24/7' channels like the plague.

Then I stopped reading weekly news - what was the point? Whilst it's less of a burden that daily/hourly/minutely news, it's still unactionable for me - it has no utility, as you say.

But then it's been months and things have happened that I should know about, and the only option I have is to go back to getting alerts and 'triaging' my interest in them - except that this means that I have to process each headline again, and I'm basically back where I started.

it's a hard problem. I keep on HN because I want to keep an eye out for technology that interests me, and to check out people's cool side projects. But then that's maybe 1/20 posts and in other posts I end up just getting drawn in and dragged down by petty emotions and conflict. If there were a way to filter the latest posts down to just things I'm interested in and get that in a newsletter I might do it, but then how do I accurately describe what I'm interested in without seeing it first? I think it just requires the self-discipline to ignore and move past posts you know won't bring any benefit.

In today's world, we should change it to "... never read reddit/youtube/twitter/newspaper comments before dinner". Most of it is just digestion-disturbing outrage and a repetition of the same narratives over and over and over and over.

Newspapers with a certain quality, a long-term perspective and in printed form is fine though if limited to weekends.

I think GP really meant newspapers, not newspaper comments. If they didn't, then I believe they should have.

I remember when I first consciously decided to stop reading mainstream news. I was in high school then; I had my Firefox configured to put RSS feed from national newspapers as a drawer of bookmarks under the address bar (oh, the days you could do that in a browser...). Took me a while to realize the reason why I feel so sick in my stomach on mornings and evenings was that just looking at the headlines disturbed and depressed me. I unsubscribed from the feeds, killed the bookmark drawers, and after a short period of FOMO, I started to feel better.

The "Newspapers with a certain quality, a long-term perspective and in printed form" are few and far between. If you can find those, by all means, stick to them.

> There is nothing actionable in the news; next to no utility

For long term money planning, where to put your money, which areas of the world have problems, the news are important. You can skip your local gossip, but knowing what happens in the world is important for long term planning.

I disagree strongly that reading the news is necessary for investing successfully. Do you have evidence or arguments? Since your position contradicts research by Nobel prize winner Gene Fama, I'd be curious to see the evidence for the other side of the argument.

> the news are important

Not daily news.

"There is nothing actionable in the news; next to no utility. News is simply a time sink that depress your spirit."

I largely agree with the statement, but as naive it might sound I still consider being aware and forming an opinion of what is happening in the world and my country as a civic duty, as unpleasant as it is.

Look for a slower news source in your region. The 24 hour news cycle produces mostly low-quality content, where you want to be more aware of the big things that happen that have more impact.

Unless they are Hacker News, which are sometimes actionable and lift my spirit every morning.

Agreed; the modern slogan of "Think globally, act locally" is pretty much guaranteed to result in frustration and disappointment.

What are the long-term effects of being unaware and uninformed on ones health?

This assumes that you would be not around people who will tell you in normal conversation important things that you should know. That would be the unhealthy thing.

Most people can safely give up reading and watching the news and still be aware and informed through their normal daily interactions and lives of the world around them.

Well I think not having news might be better than watching Tv news or something, I’m not sure if choosing this is actually good in comparison to reading a reasonably good news source that’s not freaking out about trivialities all the time. And I say this as someone who is fairly out of the loop with many day current events / headlines and relies on other people to hear about like eg upcoming weather events or something

There's nothing actionable in the news if you live in Russia. But if you live in a democracy, I hope you'll take your responsibility as a citizen seriously enough to pay attention to what's going on, from time to time, lest your community meet the same fate.

Here's the thing: following the news is not the most effective way of paying attention to what's going on. For that, a citizen needs to seek out some more information about what's happening around them; the news is just a constant feed of overt ads, hidden ads, and outrage-inducing reports on current trends in tribal politics.

Which Russian news sources don't contain anything actionable in your opinion? I've been following the recent schism in the Orthodox church and the land conflict between Chechnya and Ingushetia on meduza.io (popular independent media website), and I feel that it is quite decent.

Well, meduza.io is not strictly Russian. That's why they can raise a lot of hot topics without fear to be silenced by Kremlin.

On news being not actionable, this is what Douglas Adams had to say

we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn't have any impact. We're not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that's happened to somebody a world away and something that's happened to someone round the corner. We can't really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it's happened to our sister. We've all become twisted and disconnected and it's not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don't impact the world.

From the most brilliant stream of consciousness I have ever read: http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams

An observation also made by Thoreau, in 1850mumble:

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.

>>tunnel under the Atlantic

If only...

That was great. Thanks.

Its my favourite text! I must have quoted from it a huge ndres times. The bit about Balinese agriculture is particularly great. Such an observant mind.

Someone here in hn said luxury of not reading news reeks of privilege.

Take the blue pill or the red pill ? Not reading the news will make you happier. Reading the news will make your life miserable. Still, I don't want to be the person that lives in a bubble without understanding how the world is moving and become part of the problem.

It's that last bit that needs justification - that being ignorant contributes to the problem. The claim is that your knowledge or ignorance, peace or anxiety, affect only you.

Although even if you accept that claim, you could argue that being aware of the world made you a better person even if it makes you unhappy - a sort of Socratic argument that "escaping the cave" is inherently good. In that case you'd have to justify (only to yourself, of course) that "news" is the right kind of knowledge to accomplish Goodness.

This would be true if what you call "news" was objectively valuable information. To me it appears more strongly curated to misinform and create irrational emotional responses for the benefit of some (mostly political leaders and large businesses) to the detriment of the audience.

Agree that that is BIG assumption. I just didn't want to bring all the misinformation issue in to the discussion. IMHO, It is better to be uninformed than misinformed.

also: you may have choices to make in a mind free of the trappings of the news that the constancy of the news is likely to undermine

9/10 of all news is read for one's entertainment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com