stadia42

The non-paywalled start of the article reads like a ChatGPT answer to a high school essay question (i.e., no new insight beyond things anyone knows).

BTW, why is the article now flagged? Is it because it's paywalled?

None, and that's exactly how many blog articles I wrote on this topic.

This is not an ad hominem attack. It's fair to ask about an author's credentials when they write a public article. (I do believe he lacks the credentials, but happy to hear a counter-argument.)

To remark - none. To be taken seriously -- probably some, otherwise the noise of millions of bloggers is too much to handle. Which credentials, I'm not sure, hence my question.

FWIW, the author has university education and is currently a Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary, New York. I personally don't find it relevant to the topic, but was curious to see what others thought.

Of course you don't. I thought, however, that you may need some credentials to be upvoted by an audience of highly technical readers.

Can someone explain to me if the article in The Information on this topic is completely dumb, or whether I'm dumb for misunderstanding it: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-unbundles-.... (You don't need to pay, just read the few paragraphs visible for free.)

The author claims there's no benefit to consumers because prices went up. The whole point of the rule is to prevent MS from killing off competition by keeping the prices low. So the benefit should be in the form of a healthier ecosystem (and long-term high quality / price tradeoff) rather than the price level today.

"repulsive to the general public because regular people, on some level, understand that everyone has an unconditional right to the safety and dignity"

I want to point out a couple errors in your statement.

1. The correct verb to use is "feel", rather than "understand". "Understand" can only refer to an objective fact that can be verified, proven, etc.

2. While some "regular people" (including myself) share your views, it is not all of them, and not even an overwhelming majority of them. In fact, I suspect it's only a minority, perhaps a tiny minority of people worldwide who actually agree with you (and me). So perhaps a better way to say it, "repulsive to me and others who share my beliefs because we...".

These may seem like small things, but actually writing the way you do make your statements sound like a religious tract (kinda like "Human beings understand that God's will is absolute"). I doubt that was your intent.

Yes, a regular occurrence for the social issues that are either uncontroversial (e.g., reducing poverty, improving education, dealing with pandemics) or only lightly controversial (e.g., climate change, misinformation in the media, etc.).

For the more controversial topics, the talks are vetted more carefully, to make sure they align with the political position of the company, and that they don't raise too much opposition from any groups within the company.

The goal of the speaker is to convert as many (preferably influential) people as possible to their viewpoint. The goal of the hosting employee is typically the same, at least for the controversial issues (since those are usually highly politicized). The goal of the host company is to promote themselves as a bastion of certain (good, from their perspective) ideas, and/or as a place for thoughtful discussions.

No, I didn't mean that I cheat, and therefore everyone else cheats. I meant that the one time he got to see what's going on, he found that nearly everyone cheats. Unless he has some evidence to the contrary, a reasonable conclusion is that cheating is near-universal.

Evidence to the contrary could be, for example, that this class was very different from a typical class in some way, etc.

The professor surely knows that cheating is near universal because the incentive structure of modern life makes cheating optimal in expectation. Nothing he can do will change this fundamental fact. So why bother?

The answers to this question provide at least some intuition: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15656/volumes-of-n-....

You argue that most murders are criminals killing each other. Suppose you're right. So let's look at robberies instead. Those are primarily directed towards random people not towards other criminals.

The safest US city in that respect is Irvine with ~20 per 100k (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...). Irvine is indeed a very safe city, and I doubt parents would be concerned too much with letting their kids walk to school (if only the school was within a walking distance away).

Tokyo reported 224 robberies for 14m residents (https://knowledge.insight-lab.co.jp/tableau/opendata-crime-t...), or ~1.6 per 100k. So 10 times less than Irvine, the place that everyone considers to be basically completely safe.

Now move out of Irvine. Pick a city. San Francisco is ~360, NYC is ~160, Seattle is ~210. Even Mountain View, near Apple, Google, and many other high tech companies is ~60.

And btw, people in Tokyo generally do very little protect themselves from violent crime, since it's so rare. They walk around late, alone, often drunk, paying no attention to their surroundings. I'm pretty sure if people behaved like that in SF, the robbery rate would jump significantly.

See https://www.pnas.org/content/117/41/25237

So IMHO, the dumb one isn't the "pen test" from the Japanese TV, but rather the clickbaity YouTube video that makes fun of it. That said, the Japanese TV is slightly tongue in cheek, it doesn't claim to be a science channel.

Yup, I think you got it (especially how comments are an afterthought, and cost/benefit is therefore completely different).

Presumably because the comments are mostly spam or other noise? If they cleaned that up, more people would read the comments, maybe?

Instead of disabling comments, why wouldn't they use one of the techniques that successful discussion forums employ to filter out spam, extremism, and other noise?

HN being an obvious example, but there are plenty of others, each with its own approach.

Many successful online discussion forums rely on user moderation, which makes it feasible without Inquirer hiring a huge dedicated staff.

Note: I do not know if this argument against nuclear energy is valid. I'm submitting it in the hope that HN comments will help evaluate it.

Ah thanks! I incorrectly assumed that if so much effort is spent on this, it must be because it helps protect something valuable (directly by preventing bank or credit hacking, or indirectly by helping secure trade secrets behind encryption, etc.).

I didn't fully understand the implications. Why is there so much focus on privacy protection? Isn't by far the biggest application of this technology in security? (Presumably, ensuring that no one steals money out of my bank account is much more important than hiding my porn preferences from the advertisers.)

Yes, dang is super nice, he responded to my message and confirmed that everything is working as intended!

Thank you! I did contact dang, and everything is fine :) No evil botnets are involved!

This news brings hope to people who want to see Mr. Trump reelected in 2024.

That makes sense. I guess shadow banning may also expire over time?

Great! I'm glad no evil botnets are involved :) And thanks for the explanation!

So this automatic hiding by HN are indistinguishable to the regular users from the "dead" comments caused by downvoting? And the regular users can revive such automatically "hidden" comments in exactly the same way as they can revive comments downvoted to death?

About "we've banned this user": do you mean some comments will be replaced by this message, but others (future?) comments will be automatically assigned dead status but still visible?

Thanks! That at least explains how the comment became undead.

25 minutes later, the comment no longer shows as "dead", it's just a normal comment. Maybe people upvoted it? But how? I thought dead comments have no upvote button?

Or maybe there are no botnets, and I simply don't understand the mechanics of "dead" in HN. Like maybe some users get automatic "dead" status to their comments due to past violations? (That would be a bit strange though.)

> If they said "this" person said "this" thing, as-long as they hate him, they'll instantly jump on believing and ridiculing.

This is such a perfect observation! My very intelligent and well-educated friends, most of them successful engineers in the Silicon Valley, behave exactly as you described. And it's not at all limited to the current political divisions in the US.

Why would seemingly smart people trust random posts on internet, as long as those posts confirm what they want to hear?

My reading of the discussion at https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-concurrency-roadmap/41611: the Google Swift team members expressed hope for a bit more community involvement in the Swift language planning, and Apple folks very politely told them to shove it where the sun don't shine.

My guess: Google concluded that investing in a language developed behind closed doors of another company is a bad deal.

I don't blame Apple, it may be a good business decision for them, and of course it is completely within their rights.