Hacker News Reader

hnhnsomething12on Oregon becomes first state to legalize psychedelic mushrooms

Check out the Rat Park experiment or read Chasing the Scream for one idea of how incentives work when drugs are decriminalized.

Briefly: drug addiction, which is the bad outcome of drug use, emerges from hopelessness and mental trauma. Limited data suggests linking safe drug use to mental health resources, is an effective treatment plan for reducing drug addiction.

hnhnsomething12on My Resignation from the Intercept

My sense is that trust is the invariant in the reader-writer relationship. (Lack of) financing is one method to undermine trust, and a method that news organizations are not immune to. Just look at what the internet has done to them!

I'm curious about independent accreditation that journalists can attain and what kind of signal that could provide to contemporary distribution methods. It's easier for Twitter's algorithm to trust such an agency than it is to somehow infer credibility from the lame like/retweet signals it has direct access to.

hnhnsomething12on 1M Cell Minesweeper

There's already been MMO minesweeper games which are essentially infinite in all directions, similar to panning in Google maps.

IMO these solve the problem at the start of the game, because there's already an exposed edge you can work from. Someone, somewhere, had to make the first click; but from that point on every other player has a choice to avoid that experience.

Here's one such implementation: https://m3o.xyz/

hnhnsomething12on Won’t Subscribe

What exactly are the news publishers even providing these days? They aren't a trust authority and they aren't a distribution platform. The internet undermined the first and replaced the latter.

The future could be readers having a direct relationship with authors, and necessary infrastructure "unbundled" as it were. Author pays a non-partisan fact check service to accredit what they say. With proper accreditation they can appear on the distribution platforms with functioning micropayment models (think app stores).

The only reason this problem is unsolved is because the outdated publishers want to stay relevant and are using their existing momentum to die slow. They're the single point of failure in the three-party equation.

Articles will always need writers and they will always need readers. Everything else is up in the air.