mtowle

Public policy circles can (and will) think whatever they find soothing. The rest of us continue to roll our eyes inwardly, just as one does when listening to Tolkein fans debate whether the Eagles should've merely flown the Fellowship to Mt. Doom. (I say this not as a beltway outsider but as a man who grew up 7 miles from Langley, went to the Pentagon for TYKTW Day, and who lives and works in the area to this day.)

I get what you're saying. Politics is a choice between the unpalatable and the disastrous. Duh. Of course the Eagles should just fly them there.

What Tolkein geeks and policy wonks alike force themselves to ignore in order to have these mine vs. yours logicality debates to begin with is that the premise of their debate is a fantasy world. "If we want blank, we should vote blank" tacitly assumes that voting blank and persuading others to vote blank can sway the outcome of an election. Any thinking individual can see immediately that this is untrue.

I don't disagree, but at the same time, by the nature of the system, people aren't capable of behaving in a way that rewards what they like. "Vote-signals," if you will, are as noisy as human communication is capable of being.

>not the fantasy land of trickle-down economics

The war on straw wages on

"In all fairness" my ass. It's only a man's name.

herro :)

You would presume that now, yes. Nobody who was presuming that when he said it, however, made much of an effort to speak up.

Sort of like how "everybody knows" it was Congress's fault campaign promises X, Y, and Z didn't pass, yet at the time, nobody stopped to ask how much these promises can mean if the position he's campaigning for isn't capable of fulfilling them in the first place. "I presume by 'guarantee' he meant he'd try his best, since obviously the POTUS can't even introduce laws anyway. And as a former Constitutional law prof., I'm sure Obama knows that." Oh, super. Thanks.

Hey man,

Just wanted to say you're doing an A+ job of responding to people's concerns here in the thread. People usually suck at this, too, but you've really got your shit down. Which, to me, demonstrates that you've been working the product over and over in your head, i.e., the opposite of what everybody else in this space is doing.

Because you're absolutely right. Fuck the Match.coms. Fuck the click click click click model. I'm not 16. I have neither the time nor the inclination.

How could anyone possibly care about such a thing?

It's articles like this one that make me wonder why anyone is submitting pieces from the NYT, et al. Their audience is simply not HN's audience.

"That's a lot!" Nah, if anything, it's surprising Nakamoto would even be that close. Hopes are one thing, but nobody predicts successes of this magnitude.

>because of

That's how the history is written, yes. And how the history is written...is irrelevant. Where are all these profitable, distant colonies with voices in parliament today? Australia? Canada? Technically not sovereign, but they operate as separate nations. No country in the world fits the description of the U.S. you claim would have otherwise been inevitable, and you don't give this a second thought. The oldest truism is the ephemeral nature of Empire. You let your piecemeal study of history delude you.

I think you're misunderstanding me. It's my claim that any sufficiently profitable colony sufficiently far away from its mother country will inevitably cease to be a part of said mother country. The how is irrelevant.

The flow of human events isn't bound to individuals. Names merely get played up in the remembering, and the events downplayed. E.g., America was going to revolt regardless of whether T.J., et al had ever been born. Really amazing that a war is misremembered as activism....pass the K-Y.

In fairness, I thought it was a quality piece otherwise. It was probably just something her editor threw in.

>If our experts can't agree on the value of bitcoin, why should consumers?

This is quite possibly the dumbest rhetorical question I've ever heard. On like 3 different levels. Replace 'bitcoin' with, like, anything. Oranges. Trees. Cars. What the eff are you talking about, lady.

See my response to the other guy. I don't think you can "explicitly" solve the community problem, due to the issue of poseurs. E.g., if you explicitly create a site called FilmEnthusiasts.com, you'll get some film enthusiasts (i.e., exactly what you're after), but you'll also get a bunch of knuckleheads who think the Dark Knight was the 6th best movie ever made. http://www.imdb.com/chart/top

You have to solve the problem implicitly, which means setting up barriers/hurdles/shibboleths to entry, which is anti-thetical to the web, which is why it's so goddamn hard to do on the web.

Alright, here's what I've got so far.

Constraints: 1. The web as it exists today is largely slanted toward clickthrough. Yes, this means that the Reddit Comment Model dominates, but it also means that the content users link to is sensationalist and, frankly, poor quality, because the publisher doesn't much care how long the user stays, only how many clicks they generate. 2. Content vs. comments. In my web forum experience, which is more extensive than I'd like to admit, form factors tend to favor one or the other, either in terms of quantity or quality. There is no such thing as a high-quantity, high-quality forum; if there were, you wouldn't be trying to make one. 3. Growth vs. loss of cohesion, aka the Eternal September problem. I've seen this solved only twice in countless tries, but each under very unique circumstances. (One of them is r/SRS, which I think is a bunch of silly people, but they've both grown a lot and kept being exactly what they want to be, which is something virtually no online forum can say they've accomplished.)

Potential exploits: 1. Your name, The List. You're not a bunch of submissions that happens to appear in ranked order, you're The List. How many items are on The List each day? If the answer is infinite, not much thought went into making the list, which means you aren't a site that rewards depth. One alternative model: Take link/topic "requests" and let users vote on which will appear the next day. This avoids the ever-present problem of reposts, which is what drives away longtime users fastest. Whatever, say, 7 topics win, those 7 items are linked and up for discussion the next day. Losers are cast into the abyss and nothing from that domain can be resubmitted for another week. (Or you could just hand-pick from among the requests. Whatever.)

2. Lack of time-sensitivity. You're trying to be the opposite of the 24-hour news cycle. If somebody has a thought-provoking piece from 2001 about 9/11 (like Hunter S. Thompson's take on the event), then awesome! People would love to see that. But it'll never match up against Fox, CNN, et al., who put food on the table by shortening your memory. So don't let them compete. No news. Fuck news.

Why I think the above can defeat Eternal September:

First, to characterize the problem: it is not people. People are never the problem. People are largely whatever situation you put them in. Eternal September was Usenet's fault, not the fault of incoming college freshmen, as former Usenet folk like to claim.

Take it out of the internet context. What's something else people get sick of? And then are super surprised to find out later that other people are into? I.e., the same way people get into Reddit, enjoy it, decide it's declining, leave altogether, then vomit when they hear it's getting 5B pageviews a month?

Music. Top 40. Whatever you're listening to when you're in your teens/20s, you're going to be listening to the rest of your life. But it's not like the Backstreet Boys were so much better than Justin Bieber. (Let me tell you, the people hating on Justin Bieber now freaking loved NSYNC, and I've got the photos to prove it.) It's just that after listening to X amount of music, your tastes are established, and everything new after that sounds the same because it all sounds sufficiently different from what you're used to.

How do you defeat that? Change the form factor. No more radio. 5 songs a day. They better be fucking good.

Like I said, I don't necessarily know. I'll tell you what, I'm going to go think about it for an hour and come back.

For now, stating the problem correctly will have to suffice: What form factor rewards Depth over Sensationalism? The latter should be understood both in the journalistic sense and in the "wow, that's a cool animated gif" sense. NB: if there's a universal law of content aggregators, it's that the less time it takes to absorb content, the higher its upvote ceiling and the more that category dominates. E.g., on Reddit, imgur > gifs > youtube > political headlines > short articles > your niche. Call me crazy, but you may seriously want to consider doing away with votes, headlines, even the "next" button. I really don't know. Brb in an hour or so.

You may want to reconsider the "top 15" thing, and even the pages of content thing, if you're trying to fill the longform niche. I don't know what direction you'd necessarily want to go in, but I do know that the form factor you're using right now is the same one that gave rise to the problem you're trying to solve.

The top python link, which should direct to http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ instead directs to http://www.crummy.com/software/beautifulsoup/ --which causes crummy.com to throw a 404 error at you.

Either that or you're a narcissist and insist on everything being about you. "What's with the baby clothes section on Amazon? Babies can't buy clothes."

>The very fact that the counter-argument has to be carefully constructed is itself damning

Either that or the need to carefully construct arises when you know how snarky and dismissive the fine folks on the other side tend to be. They are, after all, invested in their beliefs to a greater degree, as they serve as an "out" for personal career failings. And given the extreme correlation between insane beliefs and self-flattery ("God says I should be king!", etc), that in and of itself is, what's the word....damning.

To be clear, I'm solely focusing on the opportunity for racism. E.g., it's not an accident that the Germans, in the aggregate, that anti-Catholic sentiment in the 1850s was significantly stronger in the North than in the South.

There's no way Montanans tweet just as often as Californians.

I want to see that predefined rubric. I am unwilling to believe Iowans are more racist than Mississippians. Being racist in Iowa means hating like 3 people in the next county over.

After I'm a billionaire, for my second startup, I think I'll hire exclusively women, save myself 30% on human capital, and run everyone out of business. "Take that margins! Pow! Kablam!"

Somebody give me a Nobel for thinking of this. Obviously, since no one's doing it, I am a genius.

Pokemon startup?

    mew.io (available)

Banks must hire among the most inept IT people of any industry. Every time I log into PNC, I literally switch tabs and try and "do something else" for at least a minute, because that's how long it takes their Virtual Wallet bullshit to load. At least, that's what the site says it's doing. Loading. Only they have "HTML5" emblazoned in huge letters on the page, for some unknown reason, which inevitably makes me wonder what the fuck is taking so long then. Let me guess, your SOAP requests are 3 miles long. Uphill. Through the snow.

>FIRST

--itself a meme