infodroid

As HN has gained increasing prominence in mainstream media and the wider tech community over recent years, it has attracted a vocal and sizable mass of users that think it is fine to display a lazy and wilfully ignorant attitude.

The existing HN mechanisms to discourage such low quality content are no longer effective, because this mass of new users is now self-reinforcing.

I interpret low-effort comments as the output of individuals who are disrespectful towards the goals of a good faith discussion community, because they willfully or carelessly contribute noise and dilute the signal.

Because I interpret this behavior as antisocial and disrespectful and an act of initiating incivility, I have grown increasingly hostile towards such users, and have started attacking them openly "in response".

We're going to have to part ways here. Because I don't think I am going to back down on this principle. I believe it's fair and just to punish this bad behavior by making these people feel bad for harming the commons.

I know if I continue doing this, it is not going to be acceptable, and I know I will no longer be welcome here.

This is why I am moving on from HN.

Over the past few years, the increase in zero-effort contributions have all but destroyed the quality of discussions on HN. And you aren't doing anything about it. HN is looking more indistinguishable from Reddit and I'll be damned if I let that happen.

Civility should be reserved for people who are looking to argue and discuss in good faith.

Why couldn't you just fucking google it?

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

Your inane rant disguised as a question doesn't add anything to the discussion.

It doesnt really matter whether you opted in or out. In the end, all that matters is whether the projected profits from abusing your data exceed the projected legal costs of doing do.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13348502 (2017)

If you like this, then check out Neocities, a free and modern Geocities reboot:

https://neocities.org/

There are many fun sites to discover using the tag system, which emulates web rings:

https://neocities.org/browse

A similar project is 'mocker', a "crappy imitation of Docker, written in 100% Python": https://github.com/tonybaloney/mocker

Like when Bill Gates called it his "new favorite book of all time".

What is often overlooked and misunderstood is that the bulbs were not only valued for their beauty, but more importantly for their use as commercial breeding stock.

Since it was not possible to reproduce the best bulbs through seed propagation, the already rare buds themselves were the only source of producing future varieties exhibiting the same beautiful patterns. This goes a great way to explaining the high prices paid, and debunking the myth of irrationality.

"The tulip market involved only bulbs affected by a mosaic virus which had the effect of creating beautiful, feathered patterns in the flowers. Only diseased bulbs were valued by traders, because a particular pattern could not be reproduced through seed propagation. Only through budding of the mother bulb would a pattern breed true." - Garber, Famous First Bubbles https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.4.2.35

This seems like bad advice because it doesn't address the legitimate need for keeping your browsing history private from overzealous, data-mining ISP's [1].

And even in the case of a known-hostile ISP that engages in invasive practices like supercookies or ad injection, it's unrealistic to ask users to set up and maintain their own VPS servers.

For the average internet user, a "glorified proxy" service that is hassle-free to set up is a simple and effective means of protection against such a menace.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/everything-you-need-to-kno...

It's also useful for older versions of software to gracefully handle newer configuration files. If the software really is backwards-compatible, then this should come for free. Just don't throw a fatal error when processing an unknown configuration key, and preserve any unrecognized configuration items when saving the configuration file.

Retaliating against the US assumes that the rest of the world doesn't want the same powers that the DHS now has, which is unrealistic I think.

I don't think it would take very much to go from rosetta stone to a more comprehensive feature comparison.

For example, the table could show the blank cell in a different color if it is a default feature, or if it an unsupported feature.

Alternatively, the cell could contain a message such as "(default)".

The table doesn't yet distinguish between lacking a command line flag due to absence of a feature vs due to the feature being the default. This is similar to the situation with case-sensitive search in GNU grep, which ends up with a blank cell even though it is the default. See: https://github.com/beyondgrep/website/issues/72

It's a fair criticism but I don't think it is designed to be misleading.

The chart was created by Andy Lester, the creator of ack, who thinks that more open source projects should point to their "competing" projects because it's not really a competition: http://blog.petdance.com/2018/01/02/the-best-open-source-pro...

Swipe-based touch keyboards don't work for me. Compared to touch-tapping, I find I have worse accuracy. I also find them much more frustrating, because correcting a swipe mistake is a lot more expensive compared to tap mistake. At least when tapping, I get steady and immediate feedback when spelling out a word, and I can fix a mistake quickly just using backspace and without much thought, and then carry on as usual. But with the swipe keyboards I tried, I find out about mistakes only after I spelled out a whole word, and at that point it's really awkward to fix without breaking my flow. Often what happens in my case is that all the autosuggestions are way off the mark.

Writing anything on modern touchscreen smartphones is so frustrating. I think the problem is that the touchscreen is always going to be an inferior interface to a physical button.

I remember what it was like using PDAs and smartphones with actual physical keys. After a brief period of adjustment to a new device, I was soon typing without any mistakes. It was such a low-friction transfer of my thoughts to digital form, I took it for granted it would always be that easy.

I look forward to trying one of the new Blackberry phones for my next upgrade.

Debut on Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11234702

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15930073

recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642116

You might have a good excuse, but don't deny what is really going on here.

These "free" analytics services have a dark side. The price for using them is that they get to build profiles of your users, with varying degrees of invasiveness. And once you sign up with them, you are selling out your users.

I read that they use the same suppliers that are used by US-based System76 and other Linux-focused vendors, so no surprises there.

There is a video review from Quidsup up on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhpPsktOZFw

You suggest you were a victim of some kind of injustice, yet there isn't enough information to think that. You don't actually explain why your initial change was reverted. And you don't say whether you acknowledged the reason your changes were reverted when you reverted the page to your version. If you didn't respond to the initial feedback, this can be interpreted as malicious behavior. And just because you "attached links to documentation that I'm right, showed examples etc.", doesn't mean the documentation met the necessary standards or adequately supported your change. Instead of engaging in an editing war, you should have used the Talk page to get feedback on the best way to push your changes through.

recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631473 (12 days ago)

How we treat advertising on social media is a matter of convention, a social negotiation. If we agree that it's just targeting demographics and not endorsing the actual content, then that is what it means, and advertising dollars wouldn't care about the content. The effectiveness of social media advertising doesn't need to be sensitive to content.

And maybe it isn't totally different from newspapers and TV news programs. Just like we don't associate advertising on news media with the often violent and disturbing content of the news itself, we don't need to treat social media advertising as endorsing its user-generated content. And in fact, we haven't been doing that until the recent YouTube controversy.

I'm thinking of the bigger picture here, especially taking into account the way YouTube was unfairly attacked.

The whole point of social media is for users to generate the content and to decide for themselves what makes content good or bad. In the past, advertising would fund the service, targeting specific demographics. It was never seen as endorsement of specific content.

Now advertisers want to start dictating the terms, to decide what specific content they approve of. Social media starts to look like traditional, sponsored, top-down media. This defeats the whole purpose.

Social media is selling out, and we are mistakenly cheering this on as a good thing.

Someone needs to put a stop to this bad meme... On social media, advertising is not an endorsement of the content. This might be the case for traditional media, but social media is different. Advertisers and platforms need to recognize the difference, to accept the lack of control over user-generated content as a feature, and to push back on unfair criticism. But perhaps their real goal is increasing their control over social media content.

> ... using a less strict version... Nice to know there's a name for it.

Using distributivity for creative simplification of a hard multiplication problem is a useful skill... It's a mental shortcut, like Russian Peasant Multiplication.

But it isn't the same as, or just a "less strict" version of it. The latter is an algorithm, and relies on binary arithmetic and the "simple" operations of doubling, halving, and summation.

The problem in the case of the Twitter announcement is that it appears dishonest. RT/Sputnik were not the source of the fake news stories that marred the US election, and yet are taking the blame for it. While the real producers of fake news aren't mentioned and get a free pass:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38168281

Unfortunately the links you posted don't provide any evidence or suggestion that RT or Sputnik promoted these stories.