I am only talking about targeted advertisement, not internet or targeting of content.
If you pay for advertisement, you would not be able to target it based on personal data of the viewers.
1,509 karma · joined February 27, 2012
If you pay for advertisement, you would not be able to target it based on personal data of the viewers.
Also, when your advertising is not public and only visible to subsections of people, it is more difficult to investigate what is going on. Facebook can do it themselves, but do we want to rely on a single company to do it? But when the advertising is public, it is easier to have a public discussion and have a possible backlash to it.
Sounds a lot like an edge case. Most consumer applications do not need theming.
I am not so sure. Did they really have a choice?
I think the financial incentives are lined up so that inevitably such a click-baity behavior and culture is nearly impossible to ignore for the news media as a whole. How can everyone choose not to report together, when it makes such a good-selling piece of content?
I am starting to think that algorithm-driven news sources and targeted advertising is something we should consider banning. Breaking up our collective culture into small bubbles of isolated realities is something that is driving many countries, not just the US, apart.
Even in Finland I see people who are not only entertaining, but 100% believing all the Trump conspiracies based on stories, Twitter posts etc. picked up from social media, although we pretty much don't have any mainstream news here. Even if the educated and responsible journalists have been drowned by the flood of fake news, do-it-yourself journalism and information warfare. They cannot keep up and don't have the time to fact check everything. And when they do, the people who believe in this... shit, have already moved on to the next piece of content that supports their view.
F this.
Perhaps in 20-30 years we will see social media as something akin to smoking. Something super dangerous, addictive and a mind virus. That's my most optimist hope.
Around the time of Snowden leaks, I decided to cancel my Facebook, Instagram, etc. accounts. I am still a YouTube junkie, it's hard to give up. But right now I think that's my only "AI algorithm curated wormhole" type of content that I consume. Even partly doing a "social media diet" has significantly improved my well-being. I was really surprised to see how much my mentality changed from the experiment. Haven't looked back since.
The Nazi party got into power in Germany democratically. They used the privileges given to them to take those privileges from others. Give people the freedom to elect their representatives with no checks and balances, and the results can be ugly.
The polarization and brainwashing happening through social media today makes me think it is completely feasible, if not inevitable, that a group will form that will enact actual censorship to the internet.
If you repeat your idea often and loud enough, you can make a large number of people believe anything.
Internet curated by algorithms is a perfect tool for spreading misinformation:
- You need not to carry the weight of any of the legal structures or responsibilities of a journalist.
- You can produce misinformation faster than the news cycle is able to react, meaning your misinformation will be able to poison the well before any conversation is able to take place.
- You can segment your audience so that dissenting opinion is nowhere to be seen.
- By the time any debunking by actual journalists can be done, your target audience is already exposed to the next cycle and can barely remember anything about the previous one.
This is extremely dangerous.
I am sure that the people who came up with automobiles weren't trying to create a vehicle of death, but there needs to be some kind of safety check akin to seat belts for the information propagation that takes place online. I am not sure what the answer is, but acknowledging the problem and trying to do something shouldn't be dismissed with a mere cry of "censorship" when information can and is being weaponized in a way and at a scale that has been impossible so far.
Can you elaborate?
Also, just as a sidenote, if you have no income other than governmental income support, Kela will pay these fees. So it is free for those who do not have the income to pay for it.
AFAIK, that's illegal. Your employer might not cover everything, but your employer cannot dictate what service you can use. I've seen this before where my employer said "we have health care, but you are not allowed to use it". I later on learned that that's totally illegal, they just wanted to cut costs by hoping that people would comply.
If you want top notch anything, it's pretty obvious that the privilege is accessible only to billionaires. There's no roof on how much money you can spend on any service. The point of the public health care system is that a basic level of care is guaranteed to everyone, not to provide the most opulent service that money can buy.
There are sometimes investigative journalism of malpractice cases in the media, but that happens on the private sector too. Yes, many people are often frustrated when they have to wait for their non-acute check up times, but "people dying in queues" as something that would be normal here in Helsinki is a total myth.
If you need immediate service, you get to a fast track queue and can get free dentist care on the same day. If it's non-acute, you can go to a private clinic which is highly subsidized but does costs some money. But nothing like in the US.
> And is the wait similar for major things like cancer, brain tutor, or heart surgery
If you have serious acute illness, you will not be stuck in a queue. Such a situation would probably be grounds to a lawsuit.
If that's too harsh of a criticism about React to you, that's fine, but I am not interested in continuing the discussion as it is rapidly moving away from my original point and your tone is becoming hostile.
But it was controversial. The React team even got ridiculed early on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY#t=35s
And the person who wrote that tweet wasn't alone. It's perhaps easy to forget how much opposition there was to React. Facebook was quite a bit further than many in the industry, and Pete Hunt from Facebook admits that "we weren't communicating what we were doing".
It was a bit much to swallow for many at first, but in the end, the VDOM was such a powerful idea that React was destined to take off sooner or later.
div({className: 'm-3', onClick }, 'the text')
navBar([navItem('Home', '/'), navItem('About', '/about')])
JSX was also one of the main reasons why people opposed it at first. We were taught to never mix HTML and JS and put markup in a separate file. Of course separate template files as a concept were bad in the first place, but it served as a red herring for those learning. It "felt wrong" to many people who wanted to "just write Javascript". React works perfectly fine without JSX. I mean the syntactic sugar is nice, but the VDOM implementation was the breakthrough innovation that made React popular. You can have JSX if you want, but at the time of release, most people hated a new compilation step just for a bit of syntax comfort.
> its original API of `React.createClass` was really no different from hundreds of similar APIs.
Yes, this is the API that I am talking about. There was never a need to combine state handling into the first virtual DOM engine. If there are hundreds of similar APIs, why create another one? Why not let the developer choose their own favourite Class implementation? Some people (such as myself) try to distance themselves from OOP as much as possible, so the class API was quite worthless.
Again, Facebook did an incredible job. I'm just commenting on why some people (not me) feel like React is "just another framework oh my god when does this stop". If they released the VDOM engine separately and the framework parts after that, people would understand that you can build your application in a way where you can pop out React and replace it with any other VDOM implementation. Most people don't seem to know this, and that's why they insist on calling it a framework.
Also, JSX caused so much confusion among people who were used to template engines. There was a huge opposition to React as a whole simply because JSX looked weird when people were explicitly taught to never mix JS with HTML. React didn't need JSX to work. For my first applications I didn't use it because I didn't want an extra compilation step, and the build/packaging tools back then were quite painful when compared to those of today. I could use React perfectly fine and it did its job in pure JS. JSX to me was just syntactic sugar, but it became a huge red herring to people who were introduced to React.
There's no reason why JSX had to be included at the same time with React. There's no reason for it to provide classes, the whole bells and whistles.
They could have released just the Virtual DOM part of the library (which was the major innovation) and keep other parts of it to themselves or release them later. When React released with so many features at once, it looked on the surface like just another framework. In fact, people still call it a framework today, even though it isn't one and was never really meant to be one.
And the fact that React was released in a such a big package, it meant that people weren't eased into each of the concepts, one at a time. Suddenly you not only have to learn about Virtual DOM, but the class API, JSX at once. Some people even throw Redux at the junior programmer at the same time. Imagine having to learn so many concepts at once! No wonder it's hard to learn.
It's a pretty basic pedagogical concept. You have to introduce each concept in isolation and then build understanding of the whole from those parts. If you do not understand what the problem with vanilla DOM manipulation is, there's no rush to learn JSX and Redux!
I guess in the end I'm just glad you decided to play around with vanilla DOM manipulation and build from that, step by step. "Learn everything at once" doesn't work very well.
There are people who take an effort to produce something and then take the extra step to show it to others so they might learn or collaborate. And those people often get comments where their project is being picked apart with a fine-toothed comb, packaged in an abrasive tone.
This happens over and over again in IT. There's plenty of people with insecurities who - for reasons that psychiatrists understand better than me - rejoice in taking others down.
Lots of people would say it's because we are hidden to each other behind the screen and would never say this stuff to a colleague. I guess that's part of the reason why it's so prevalent in HN. Though, I've seen the same style of rhetoric in the industry, face-to-face.
"You should go to back to school before talking about CSS" and plenty of laughing was something directed at me when I suggested that the ´class´ attribute for HTML tags has semantic meaning beyond just hooking up CSS rules to it. I had trouble explaining it, but my colleague with longer industry experience took it as "lol this noob junior programmer doesn't even understand what ´class´ means". He didn't even stop to consider how class attributes can be used through Javascript and beyond, he immediately went for taking me down as fast as possible.
And that f'ing hurt. And after that I have probably been toxic to other people too. I wish I could go back and undo all the times I have hurt someone like that. Totally unnecessarily and without reason. But I can't. That's why the least I can do when someone suggests that "hey, tone it down a bit" is to shut up with the explanations why I am right to say what I'm saying and think whether there's a more constructive way to go forward.
"Unlimited vacation days" is the biggest joke. Seriously, there's nothing stopping you from never showing up to work? In reality it's a way to make sure nobody ever takes time off if they want to have any chance of promotion.
It's the norm that people in a workplace are primarily seen as cogs in the system, humans with needs and opinions as second. Any time the latter is perceived to potentially affect the former, you will be told to fall into line.
Yeah, you can make the same argument about any practice. If the team doesn't care, you cannot fix anything by doing or not doing any practice. A good team can suffer from a bad practice, but no practice can overcome a bad team.
Clean up your feature flags and definitely don't use a framework for it unless you are doing continuous A/B testing.