AlecSchueler

Not only that but if you actually read the linked document it isn't calling for a VPN ban. It's a general report on what VPNs are and how they're perceived by various bodies. It does make reference to the UK Child Safety Commissioner's suggestion that they should be restricted to adult use only but it also talks about how essential they are for business etc. On the whole it's quite balanced and the existence of such a report seems very reasonable.

"some benefits" is really underselling it though.

Personalised algorithms.

> the algorithm here is title-blind

It's that true? I thought I had seen it said that there were keyword penalties to discourage things like political posts that could be turned off and on

> It's the same for every user

It isn't. Users who vote and flag more often are more likely to have things from /new surfaced on their main page for example.

> users also determine (by voting) what is popular

The algorithm considers various other things such the ratio of votes to comments, age of the post etc.

Just compare how different the front page is to /active

> Ycombinator doesn't promote or bury any particular post with their own algorithms

Certain things do get put above the popular stuff if they're fresh enough and your account is deemed to be a taste setter.

> they don't exercise any editorial review or control.

They can decide things like overturning the flagging of a post or burying something even without the flag etc.

No, Guy Kewney got it.

The "goal" of science is understanding. I'm not sure what your issue with it is.

> how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing

We can actually make petty good estimates because of things like carbon layers in the ice. It's happened in the past, you're right, and usually it precedes large scale extinction events.

Generally in science when your see the same results being reproduced by different researchers your certainty should increase.

Even if that were true (it isn't) you would want to consider the systemic issues that background self-sabotage.

If only we were all privileged enough to believe that the problems in the world today weren't real.

The claim was that a site could "infer when you sleep, when you work, and when you browse because you cannot sleep." Is that not true? I know that the timing of my HN comments tells a pretty clear story about my schedule having recently looked at a histogram.

And they have trillions riding on milking you for all your data and ad impressions.

Sometimes your grass is just yellow.

You think people in Nordic countries think they'd be able to trust their government more if they were American?

Maybe if you had some suggestions or wanted to lead by example?

It would be difficult to have spent any time at all on this website in the past two years without hearing the arguments for why slop farms undermine trust online, poison future training data sets, worsen the signal to noise ratio and eat up untold resources.

> Wrapping a phrase in quotation marks forces Google to find pages where those exact words appear in that exact order.

This hasn't been the case for at least five years surely?

But the argument wouldn't be nearly as strong.

> I do wonder how "the market" is going to sort this out

Unlikely to do a better job than it did with anything else.

What's up with the bot accounts that just vaguely describe the article? Is it for karma farming accounts to sell on? I'm not opposed to bot accounts inherently but the stuff they so often post is just mind numbing to encounter, it feels like a little bit of my life has been stolen every time I get to the end of such a paragraph.

Watching from the sidelines isn't disconnecting from politics, it's supporting the status quo. Please reconsider your position.

Back to the beginning of time or back several centuries?

The government literally removed research into trans-fats because of their transphobia. Much free speech

The terrifying thing is that we can't just ignore it anymore, though. These people are wielding the power of the world at a time of global crises.

Because it's incredibly frustrating to see the government remove women and men of colour from government websites, deleting climate data, and sending out violent mobs to round people up while people sit around saying their main worry is that regulatory bodies will move to make things "too woke." There's no "woke" equivalent to the insanity being acted out by the US administration.

> But it's all just work, all the ways down.

> What you are describing is working for someone else

That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work.

But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.

> Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work

Could the market itself be encouraging demographic segregation. If we measure and focus on economic growth above all else then the workplace becomes the place more important than all others.

Consider the cost of generating the image.