Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.

So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the windows?"

Never googled or anything like that. For the next couple of months I had constant adverts for windows gates in Facebook.

Also, WhatsApp is definitely e2e encrypted. I worked there and saw the implementation (and the difficulties it causes for things like blocking spam/nasties) myself.

This was 1 year ago.

And do you and your landlord have the same internet connection?

How did you know gates are expensive?

It doesn't match you exactly to the other persons behind the same NAT, but it adds some information, raising the likelihood of ad coincidences a little. I have no idea how much. It's likely to depend on which IP address, and other tracking statistics.

If you have diligently blocked lots of tracking state, then IP address will be a relatively stronger signal, and this might (ironically) increase the likelihood of ad coincidences.

So today my wife and I were looking at dogs that need forever homes using her laptop

Later I got a dog food ad on my laptop that specifically mentioned shelter rescue pets. I haven’t used any of my devices or accounts for dog-related searches for at least two months.

Compare a nature made system to a man made system.

Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.

That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard today. It took a billion plus years for nature to come up with humans and about ten thousand years for us to go from written language to causing a mass extinction. To call such a comparison "hyperbolic" would be an understatement.

You have put together arguments that make sense individually, but do not make sense when you weave them together. Nature changes over time, but over a long period of time (e.g. evolution is slow). Our laws and regulations do not get updated to reflect the times, yes, but the times that are changing is because of humans, not nature. A manmade part of society is having a tough time catching up with another manmade part of society. Human progress is NOT slow, at least when you are comparing it with nature. Humans do not change on an individual level, but they change a great deal en masse culturally, psychologically, etc. We are actually almost built for adaptation and change intergenerationally.

There is a subtle point here about institutions refusing change, but you cannot make a valid comparison of speed between human institutions and nature.

What about "It’s insane how confused the trials here in the US have been."? That opinion is very important and has implications for how everyone here should act. The last 6 months have been expensively purchased and the best thing that could have been bought was good information. If that time has been wasted then there should be reform of an evidence-based nature. This is an opinion that really deserves debate, opinions thrown about and evidence dredged up. With encryption, HN will basically just agree that he is wrong and everyone likes encryption. Not much more to say. Maybe we will think of the children on the way thorough.

Encryption is an important issue but frankly that isn't what Gates is talking about, so arguing about it is a bit pointless. It is barely even germain to the topic he is talking about. He is talking about a global pandemic.

You can also read in his tone that he feels personally slighted by not being given a seat at the table in the US COVID response. People point to South Korea's success and call the US a failure, not realizing that if you implemented their measures in the US: things like forced contact tracing, forced registration, and locking up the infected in isolated sites, you'd have a civil insurrection on your hands.

A case and point: Seoul is riddled with security cameras on every street. This makes Seoul an incredibly safe city, but also with decreased sense of privacy. Cameras are everywhere, and this is not recognized much as a potential problem in South Korea.

With Covid, there is a pending legislation to sign in your name and social security number whenever you visit designated crowded areas. I am worried for the increased loss of freedom and privacy in South Korea, but the culture worries less about that, and more about mutual subsistence.

Evidently it is interesting to the HN croud, because this is how they vote.

Why argue about this? This is what we have a voting system on HN for. It shows us what is objectively interesting and what is not, we don't really need you or anyone else to tell us what should be interesting, we have real data to demonstrate what is.

Someone like Gates pushing for the end of private speech at scale is always going to be of interest to the HN crowd.

Point is, who cares what else he has to say if he says stuff like this? He's as much an expert on technology as he is on pathology, so if his opinions on technology are bad... well you get the point.

What is frustrating about this comment is that it inevitably commands the top of the HN thread, "for the 8-zillionth time", because its author's moniker automatically attracts "upvotes" due its familiarity, not because the comment is the most interesting.

That said, this comment is probably worthy of being at the top since the E2E debate is indeed a tired one and that sentiment probably has many sympathisers. However, as someone else pointed out, Gates brought this up, not HN. And it does directly relate to discussions about COVID on Facebook (WhatsApp) and the ability to censor them. Of course, there is also the argument that newcomers to HN will not know all the past discussions of E2E, nor are they expected to read them before commenting. We regularly see HN re-post items that have previously been submitted, re-opening discussions that are old hat, inviting us to re-hash them.

While some readers may grow tired of seeing the same topics discussed over and over again, other readers may grow tired of seeing the same usernames at the top of so many threads, over and over again, no matter what their comments.

This is one of the reasons for which I proposed that HN, by default, display discussions collapsed down to first branches. Just show the text for the first branches and collapse their corresponding conversations. Readers would only expand branches they find relevant or interesting and comment within them.

You could take this one step further and only show the first two lines (or n characters) of first branch comments. This would force a style where authors would have to provide a two line summary of their comment (if it is a first branch comment) in order to facilitate scanning. With this approach the list of first branches would almost look like the HN home page, where you can quickly scan the short titles and expand topics of interest.

To address your comment directly, if the inevitable makes it to the top of the first branch list it will be easy to scan other first branches on the same page without having to scroll or take any action. This might promote participation in other threads within the conversation and maybe even the bubbling-up of more "worthy" contenders for the top first branch.

Give me top threads and a level below them to see a rebuttal -- if I want to see more I'll break them down.

I do wish there was a way to see if there are high value or low value posts below, like someone got gilded or got 400 upvotes or something. Not sure how this would be implemented though; I could see terrible pun threads getting too many upvotes and throwing that off.

Plus the tone & tenor of the discussions is usually better, e.g. full sentences, (mostly) coherent posts, etc. Not like on Reddit where the top post on something that makes the front page is literally just "bruh".

I think is generally good. I wouldn't call it "great". I can only assume that people who think it is great only ever care about tech (where HN is a good tech site) and politics (where every politics discussion on the internet is terrible). Every other interest I have has a forum that is better than HN. HN suffers somewhat from its demographic monoculture and seems to have way more opinionated arm-chair quarterbacks than other forums I'm in. I assume that many other "career-related" forums have similar issues, though. I can imagine lawyer forum probably has lots of lawyers who have never practiced Constitutional law but giving strong opinions on it on a daily basis.

Rather the very difficult and important issue, how do you stop someone with 80 million followers from spreading lies and large numbers of people believing them, and who determines what are facts and what are lies. By Facebook, Twitter, etc.. removing Trump's posts for instance, aren't they taking upon themselves the authority of what's true and what isn't?

I have to believe the only answer is something they call freedom of speech. You can say whatever the hell you want publicly. I'm appalled by the fact the highest authority in the world retweeted the sperm doctors video as well, but I'm not so comfortable with FB, Twitter, etc. deciding for me what is true and not, or worth me reading, either.

So, the encryption issue doesn't apply here. It's a serious issue, but separate. The problem is not that encrypted lies can be sent. The lies that reach 1000 people aren't the problem. The problem is the unencrypted lies that REACH 80 million+ people.

Consider that the pile-on of that doctor - an African from Cameroon where Christianity is blended with traditional tribal superstition - happened around the same time as the Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health published a Newsweek piece on how HCL is a valid early-stage treatment [1].

I understand this is how the media works: an advocate of HCL who has fringe cultural beliefs was retweeted by Trump, so the story was irresistible and endlessly amplified (including here by Gates).

But the quality of debate would be so much better if the media engaged with the (superficially) strongest proponents of a position (such as Harvey Risch) and aimed withering criticism and analysis at them instead. Shouldn't the focus be on dismantling the claims of the most, not the least, credentialed proponents?

Instead the media from all quarters deliberately amplifies the most fringe proponents, so now HCL is shorthand for expressing disdain for particular cultural beliefs, and those 10 million views were significantly driven by most media outlets covering her.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exis...

The media, which is mostly left leaning, ignores this and instead prefers to take cheap shots at Trump whenever possible on the subject. It seems very biased, very childish, and entirely divorced from reality - actually that more or less sums up the state of US politics lately.

That debate has of course not been particularly honest: amplifying the weakest proponents, fabrication of negative data with the Surgisphere scandal [1] and fixating on studies which don't replicate the claimed beneficial outpatient (pre-hospitalization) treatment processes (low-dose HCL, zinc, azithromycin).

However none of that means HCL is actually effective, just that the public debate being prosecuted is quite weak when looked at carefully.

It could just be that once a mainstream position is established (which might be correct!) it becomes easier to engage in influencing to enforce or signal tribal commitment to the established consensus in place of continued honest debate.

I really don't want to hear about the cultural beliefs of the weakest advocates, or of studies which don't replicate the claimed treatment.

I want to see engagement with the strongest advocates, and studies which irrefutably rule out the specific treatment, and if they rule this out as just another alluring low-cost, ineffective treatment, then at least we've reached that point honestly.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/covid-19-studi...

And honestly, doing placebo-controlled studies might be a colossal mistake. If people genuinely benefit from the placebo effect, it's a feature, not a flaw. If people get HCQ+Z-pac+zinc and recover then it's a victory either way. If people are incorrectly led to believe HCQ is poison and get a reverse-placebo effect then we're not really helping anyone, are we?

Something I've wished for; hacker news only with top level comments

This is one of the things Slashdot did rather well with its categorization and ratings, though if that system were used then I’m sure everything would just be rated +5 Insightful with little signal over the noise.