sidkhanooja

on reflection, i would appreciate average slop more than the occasional heinous slop people say when they are opinionated..

Comics! I recently finished Wanted (which made for a shitty movie, but a decent comic) and Watchmen (I despair I hadn't gotten around to it sooner).

Now I'm planning to read V for Vendetta, The Killing Joke, Batman: Year One, and some more. I've finally come around to comics as an art form, and I couldn't be happier!

If this article interested you then I'd highly recommend checking out TVTropes (https://tvtropes.org/) (trope roughly means any convention of fiction), if you've not already!

For this year, mine was Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

TL;DR - the book explains how humans are predictably irrational and how seeming cognitive ease in decisioning is simply laziness in action since the brain will substitute a tough decision for a similar but easy one! It has made me reflect upon why I think the way I do, helped me to remove most bias from my actions, and also has a great suggestion that you should ask others to check you if you sound stupid, which is not great for your ego but is necessary nonetheless.

Writing is one field that I think won't be able to achieve the 'human' touch anytime soon. Art? Sure, as we have already seen with DALL-E and the like. Music? Doubtful (look up Kandrake-Z for an example), but not sure if it will expand beyond plunderphonics and noise. But writing? Meh.

I don't know if anyone even uses content-generating AIs like this for writing - but I'd be glad to change my mind by seeing some hard numbers. I mean, except for incomprehensible content-generated articles that pop up on searches only because of PageRank's flaws.

There's no need of putting this as a separate post - you can paste the same text in your profile, your Keybase and HN accounts will get linked perfectly fine.

Most ads on Spotify are not even intrusive - they are (in)famously bad for advertising Spotify's own premium service (try premium for free!).

This is just ridiculous. If you're annoyed by the ads, get a subscription then.

Tangential, but I've recently noticed that due to huge fragmentation in the streaming industry (Netflix, PrimeVideo, Hulu, Disney+ et al.), I'm only using two - Netflix and PrimeVideo, and a third torrent streaming service (PopcornTime) when I can't find a specific movie/TV series.

I prefer to use the third option as few as possible, but I find myself having to use it more and more often as the years go by - geolocked content, huge swathes of content being removed on the whims of providers (The Office comes to mind), and 'originals' that are beyond even the so-bad-it's-good category that cannot even begin to fill the void left by the good content leaving.

I cannot ever see myself subscribing to a plethora of services - the best case is subscribing to a service when it's absolutely necessary (HBO/Hotstar) and then unsubscribing when you're done, which is not at all conducive to fulfilling long-term revenue plans of such services.

So what is the endgame of such services? Is it simply to build a huge catalog of content that you'll mindlessly devour whenever you're bored? Or something else?

Was thinking on the same lines, thanks for the confirmation.

Goodreads is the most flagrant violator of most, if not all, of these rules. Searching for a book, author or a user is a PITA, and has been that way for a long, long time.

The best autocompletion I've seen is on Wikipedia - no frills, and extremely accurate. If only all services were like this.

Personal anecdote, but it's nice to see the growing maturity of the Indian audience - no one in my circle of friends and family is complaining that big names such as Linkin Park, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay et al. and rock/metal biggies (Slipknot/Dream Theater/Pantera et al.) are missing. Growing tastes, perhaps?

And it's amazing to see Spotify grow so quickly. Almost all of the people I know (I'm guilty of the same) used a US free-tier account, and sideloaded modded applications to listen to Spotify. I used to think that was piracy as usual, but now all of us are on 1-year subscriptions. The price sensitivity ($9.99/month in US vs $1.68/month in India) does obviously make a difference.

For those not clicking on the link (like me), it's Andrew Wakefield - who published a blatantly false paper in The Lancet in 1998 [1], linking MMR vaccines to autism [2] - triggering the anti-vaccination movement, leading to a resurgence of hitherto eradicated diseases [3].

[1] - http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-paper.htm

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield#Epidemics,_ef...

I've been an avid reader since I was seven years old - I stopped in college (almost completely), but it was during my internship and job that I started reading vociferously again.

Nowadays after I finish the book, I try to review the books I've read on Instagram in the form of a post or a story - some people go to the extent of unfollowing me (seeing it as a stupid use case for the service), but some people I know IRL have also started reading the same books I finish.

Not every distraction is a force for evil.

Contrary to popular opinion, I find that Andrew Ng's Intro to ML (on Coursera/Stanford) focuses too much on basic math and theory - which doesn't detract from the course's quality, but makes the course a drudgery to go through.

Programming exercises involve a single line or two, and that too in Octave - which was all the rage back when the course was launched, but it's not so useful now.

Instead, start with this - https://www.fast.ai

It emphasizes practicality to the extreme - you are only taught theory/domain knowledge when needed. The instructor's amazing, the massive scale of knowledge imparted boggles the mind, and you feel like you've accomplished something when you're finished with it.

Best of all, it's free. And you can start Deep Learning there too when you're done with ML, if you feel the need (or interest).

I use a OnePlus phone (don't know if HN users have heard of it), and OP users rarely use the fingerprint unlock.

Although the user is definitely compromising on security, the speed of face unlock is such that it is near-instantaneous. Double tap the display, and you don't even have to blink - the phone unlocks.

It may be a gimmick in the early days of Android (think Nougat or even Oreo), but it's definitely not a gimmick now, for me at least. It's fast enough to have proved its worth.

Malwarebytes Anti Malware (MBAM). It is exceptional for a free tool. Windows Defender is too simplistic for my liking, with a very small filter list.

That being said, I run ComboFix + ADWCleaner + RKill + JunkwareRemovalTool every few weeks to remove any malware that may have creeped in.

The stigma is real, because Tor is actually extremely slow (at least in India) for everyday use. Even when I want to visit sites that are blocked by Indian ISPs, and which do have an easily found .onion address, I don't bother with it - I'd rather use a free VPN instead, despite the lack of transparency involved - Tor is just too slow.

Unless it (somehow) finds a way to decrease latency in the future, it will remain as it is today - filling a useful niche for the masses, and even a daily driver for the privacy concerned - but I can't see it ever being in the mainstream. The average users couldn't give two hoots about privacy - they just want things to work, which is an understandable PoV.

And why would anyone visit HN with it? FB, I can get behind, but what tangible benefits would you get from using Tor on a site which (afaik) doesn't track you, and doesn't sell your data? Genuinely curious.

Quora used to be good before 2012-13(?), what with its credit system and all. You had a fixed pool of points to ask questions. Potential people who wanted people to ask them questions could arbitrarily set their points, and these points were deducted from questioner's pool, and added to the answerer's pool.

When this was removed, it was the beginning of the end. Clickbait, self-promotion, rabid people-centric cults, unrelated answers (no person X, you should not answer with a sob story for 'what's the weather like in Seattle these days?'), no question details allowed, answers catering to the lowest denominator, crappy feeds, and (imo) the worst - fabricating actual relationships, sob stories, and credentials (IIT/MIT/etc.) to garner more views and become a top writer (w/e that's worth).

And the rabid and toxic community is nauseous, to say the least. No enforcement of community standards means that every non-mainstream opinion (or even an opinion that goes against the Quora mainstream) is lambasted as if you had insulted the commenter's family.

Although HN's moderation policy may seem caged to some, it is the reason for the quality of the community's discussions. Quora is a textbook example of what happens when users are given freedom to do whatever they want to. It is the reason why I deleted my Quora account happily (even though I had 1M+ views on my answers, and I liked answering the most mundane of questions) - the site is not worth the time you devote to it.

r/bitcoin comes to mind whenever I think of the words "Bitcoin" and "cult" in the same sentence.

Google Plus has become the new Voat then, eh?

Disheartening to see that Facebook is unabashedly aping the cornerstones of various sites (reddit) and apps (Snap).

That said, a downvote, or a "dislike" button, is almost always a double-edged sword - although it can be used to tune out hateful comments, it can also turn potentially meaningful comment sections into echo chambers extremely fast.

I do not see this turning out well.

Reddit w/o RES is like McDonalds without the Big Mac. Been using it for years.

Shame that most of its features are broken with the pathetic new redesign though[1].

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/7urcrp/res_des...

First time I have ever seen this actually being discussed online.

Twenty or so of my friends of friends use Telegram. None of them use it for mundane things such as chatting. You name the content, you have a channel for it, ergo you have direct download links for it.

But how is this any worse than downloading illegal content through torrents (TPB et al.)?

EDIT: Should have worded this more correctly. I am not a participant in pirating stuff through Telegram, my friends are; I use it for Android stuff (Substratum, custom ROM support, etc.).

Reddit has its issues (brigading, trolling, execssive politics, 12-year old level "memes" on serious discussions), but it was a site you could visit without regret, and get lost in for hours.

With the new redesign, it is Facebook - people share a link, you click the comments section, it shows you the top comments, you upvote the top comments (or the ones that agree with your view), and rinse and repeat till infinity, because you have infinite scroll. Which is not how I want the future Reddit to look like.

Yes, it is good for advertisers. Yes, it is good for the the new wave of people who will arrive from Facebook.

But it is utterly disheartening for Reddit to stray so far from what I viewed its core emphasis as - comments.

The service looks like a ripoff of Instagram (loves, not likes) and Reddit (communities). What problem is the site exactly trying to solve? I had to spend the better part of a month trying to hound my friends to use Signal. I am not going to waste time for a service that's not even worth the effort.

I already think we have Voat for garbage discussions. One such site is more than enough.

As I am a firm member of the KDE camp, this is great to hear!