PavlovsCat
-- Alan Kay
Direct your complaints to the source of your problem, namely the shitty browsers on mobile. Even suggesting to let HN fix their abysmal stylesheet would be wrong. Go to the source -- and if it turns out they don't care about requests to provide actual tools, tell them off.
I want good things, I have them, and now I want greedy, needy people to stop pushing their mediocre, poorly understood imitations to drown out the really good things we might use and nurture instead, hurting us all and even themselves in the process.
> How do you think a company gets to improve and optimize their product? By surveys?
If what you make serves a purpose other than generating needs to make a profit from, then you'll probably be fine with mostly simply paying attention to what you're making, using it yourself, and occasionally making surveys and collecting metrics from volunteers to see if there's anything you missed.
I complained about this from day one, and not once did I get anything but patronizing handwaving in response.
If I want to buy a pizza, I'll enter "buy pizza in $city" or something, but if I just enter "pizza", I want to see what every person on the planet would see if they used the English language version of the search engine (and then on top of that have the option of personal customization that I can undo or suspend anytime). IMO the convenience of "just typing 'pizza' when you want directions to the nearest pizza place" is nothing at all compared to the fracturing of the public space, for lack of a better way to put it.
> Of course it is "more useful" to commit an injustice than to be victim of it; for the sake of the thinking dialogue with myself, this point of utility must be abandoned.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Wahrheit und Politik"
> Natürlich ist es "nützlicher", Unrecht zu tun als Unrecht zu leiden; um des denkenden Dialogs mit mir selbst willen muss gerade dieser Nützlichkeitsstandpunkt aufgegeben werden.
-- Max Frisch
> Warum reisen wir? Auch dies, damit wir Menschen begegnen, die nicht meinen, daß sie uns kennen ein für allemal; damit wir noch einmal erfahren, was uns in diesem Leben möglich sei.
It's better to fail as a good person than to succeed as a charlatan, and a bit of money can't plaster over the faculties of the mind drying up, among that the ability to resist charlatans in other contexts, including the political. "Business sophistry" is simply sophistry, brownnosing your boss is just brownnosing, and either you feed sophistry and naked emperors, or you don't. Everybody has "reasons", but more importantly, every day new people come into the world, and they deserve a clean shot at life more than crooked people deserve respect and comfort. Save your soul, you just have the one.
> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
-- Kant
The trouble is that issue is that earnest discussion of these serious issues has been suppressed for more than a year, and that by now, talking about this "cute" stuff while pretending said suppression is going leaves a certain aftertaste. I guess in your mind, ignoring an elephant on the couch is just the thing a curious intelligent person acting in good faith would do. But that's just you.
> The generic discussions are always the same
That's just as true for many articles about social media, node, golang, whatever. It can be demonstrated in 5 minutes that what you criticize consistently in one context, isn't even worth a mention in many, many others.
In the elevator sure, though just as often it's abbreviated EG for Erdgeschoss, which does mean ground floor. We call the floor above that "erstes Geschoss" or "erstes Obergeschoss", whereas that would be the second floor in English, but we never say "nulltes Geschoss", always Erdgeschoss.
> The aim of the missions was to track, and when the conditions were deemed right, kill suspected insurgents. That’s not how they put it, though. They would talk about “cutting the grass before it grows out of control”, or “pulling the weeds before they overrun the lawn”.
> And then there were the children. The airmen would be flying the Predators over a village in the tribal areas of Pakistan, say, when a series of smaller black shadows would appear across their screens – telling them that kids were at the scene.
> They called them “fun-sized terrorists”.
[..]
> Toward the end of his service, Haas switched to training new recruits in the technology of drone warfare. That shocked him anew, as he discovered that many of the younger intake were gung-ho about the power they wielded at their fingertips. “They just wanted to kill,” he said.
> He remembers one training session with a student in which they were flying live over Afghanistan. The student said that a group of people on the ground looked suspicious.
> Why? Haas asked. Because they look like they are up to no good, the student replied.
> Would you act on that? the instructor asked. Sure, the student said.
> Haas immediately pulled him from his seat, took over the mission himself, and promptly failed the student. “I tried to get the students to understand that preservation of innocent life had to take priority.”
> Because he failed the student, Haas was later rebuked by senior officers. They told him that they were short of bodies to keep the drones flying, and they ordered him to pass students in future so that there would be a sufficient number trained and ready to go.
> I think the university should tolerate a large diversity of opinion, which it does not. I think there is a severe failure - the failure is one of honesty, in my opinion. That is, I don't believe that scholarship within the university attempts to come to grips with the real structure of the society. I think it is under such narrow ideological controls that it avoids any concern or investigation of central issues in our society.
-- Noam Chomsky, interview in Business Today (May, 1973) https://chomsky.info/197305__/
-- George Orwell
That's how you write honestly for the target audience.
> Nasdaq runs more than 40 different algorithms, using about 35,000 parameters, to look for market abuse and manipulation in real time.
That is how you use big words on an audience not capable of seeing through their meaninglessness, and it's the responsibility of people who do see through it to call it out.
Weasel words are like your little lucky charm, aren't they? What "ideology" would that be? Resisting the ideology you peddle isn't an ideology. Not being a Nazi isn't a politcal stance. I'm German, I just don't march in goosestep -- criticizing something out of China is "national battle" in your mind. Nevermind I do the same for any other nation as well. Nevermind the mountains of sophistry you enclosed yourself in.
How is using flags and moderator privileges, how is you lying, not doing battle? I can actually argue my points, that is what you don't like. You pay lip service to what I do, and you never actually engage. The last time I asked you what's wrong with my comment, you couldn't say either. I told you then, if you can't actually point to a consisten principle you apply, if all you have is these weasel words, ban me or don't. You just ignored it.
So don't spit in my face and pretend it's snowing. You can do that on your own little site, you couldn't do it in an open forum where you actually have to own your words and can't just throw out a convenient lie and run off.
> The problem with bringing such links into arguments like this is that no one does so for reasons of intellectual interest. For example, in this case, people aren't actually interested in the plight of the Uighurs.
That's you. That's not everybody though, only a sociopath would think it is, and it certainly isn't me. You use these people as welcome fig leaves to not own your own shit, and you lie through your teeth when it comes to manipulation on this site.
So fuck you and your supposed moral high horse.
> Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17763554
> people aren't actually interested in the plight of the Uighurs. Rather, it's convenient ammunition for justifying pre-existing political and national feelings.
Hardly anyone would say that to the face of someone who gets tortured, and nobody would say it while they get tortured.
For every Nazi who actually laid hand on anyone, there were hundreds or thousands of Nazis who "merely" looked the other way, with oh so flowery language.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dx8rn0/absolutely...
Can't talk about that here, it all gets flagged like a brick, because hey, anyone who cares is just "virtue signalling". I mean, how the fuck could totalitarianism be important for any intellectuals? Just like no intellectuals wrote about the Nazis or Stalin, why would they, it was all just partisan dick waving contests.
https://twitter.com/arslan_hidayat/status/118550371514021478...
Imagine being in bed with something so horrible, you don't even dare to lift the covers. Congratulations, to all whom it may concern. May you live a long life, see interesting times, and all that jazz. All of it.
The context is "disagreeing with unions", which wasn't further qualified.
edit: and certainly not restricted to Google. Just re-read chrisseaton's comment -- downvoting me doesn't change what's written here, it just adds the data point of dishonesty and underhanded tactics.
> These examples are hilarious, but also a little insulting to employees who actually need unions.
How so?
That is very much unlike, say, "defending all American gun laws to a T, without mentioning at all what you actually think, because they made you do it for being unfair or mistaken about something". And where that is the case, how you say things doesn't really matter, you won't get anyhwere either way. So you might as well be blunt, and if they want to correct something, let them. If they want to make excuses about being offended and not correct anything, it stands as is.
I know, because I get that all the time, when Americans say "Germany doesn't have freedom of speech" or such, because glorifying Nazism is illegal. I don't start pretending Germany is perfect in response to that, I quote them some basics about freedom of speech, stuff about American law and whatnot, and try to explain how there is no "totally unrestricted" free speech anywhere there is a listener. Then they always (no exceptions so far, probably because intelligent Americans don't even say "there is no freedom of speech in Germany" to begin with) drift off into nonsense or fall silent, because their brain seems to be unable to process what I'm telling them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dx8rn0/absolutely...
What would you say is the American equivalent to that? And what would be the American equivalent to this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/d1rp31/are_we_rea...
And that is, all other actions considered, such a harmless and cute clip. Keeping it SFW.
https://www.facebook.com/MichaelYonFanPage/videos/9503534286...
How do you explain this?
> You are not as immune as you think
You don't know what I think. Personally, I'm not even American, and have criticized the US for the stuff you mention more harshly than the average American by orders of magnitude. That doesn't mean I don't see the infinite difference between the US government sometimes sucking, and the CCP (== no elections, no free press, torture camps, putting down protests over the law being broken with force, dictating to companies what they may post in Western countries, and so on). Yeah, Snowden had to run, but we can talk about Snowden. There's American books by American publishers about American war crimes, Noam Chomsky leads a full, critical life. There's a greater risk that the Chinese government might kidnap or assassinate him, just for saying something they don't like in passing, than the US govt laying hand on him. So to even mention the CCP and the US in one sentence... again, I'm not even American, and even I know all that and more.
The only data point you're offering for what you think about the subject at hand is this "mirror check". Those are a dime a dozen, people pretending to be objective or neutral, and calling it a mirror check -- when the whole point of the exercise them getting away from their own personal stance and responsibility, while creating straw men up about a generic other.
http://www.danielgoleman.info/three-kinds-of-empathy-cogniti...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/ch... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552873
Welcome to HN, where that can get 40 points and yet not be found among the first hundreds of stories. Poof, gone like that, but not even a [flagged] tag. At this point, there's even CCP officials who are less committed than HN is: They leak stuff, you can't even discuss it.
https://twitter.com/austinramzy/status/1195688077731061760
> The material was brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that the disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi Jinping, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions. There are nearly 200 pages of speeches by Xi Jinping, XJ party secretary Chen Quanguo and security boss Zhu Hailun. There’s another 150+ pages of directives and orders on controlling the Muslim population. I’ve reported on China since 2003, and can’t recall a leak like this.
> It is stunning to hear party leaders in their own words ordering a drastic crackdown on extremism, including mass detentions, and the cold calculations with which they weigh the consequences. Chen redistributes Xi’s speeches after he goes to Xinjiang in 2016, and calls for a “smashing, obliterating offensive” and issues a vague order to “round up everyone who should be rounded up”. But perhaps the most telling document is a guide for officials to explain the camps to children of detainees. It is full of veiled threats, pseudomedical language of psychological infection and assurances the party will take care of you.
We're doing it right now, the top level parent comment was dead before I made my first reply to you.
> Maybe the moderators could tell you why you can't vote if you emailed them?
HN could also have a feature that allows mods to communicate with users. I'm not going to use my main email anyway, and making a throwaway email for that is no more "community-like" -- it's just a hoop I don't see any reason for jumping through. Being transparent about moderating, and discussing such things in the open rather than behind closed doors, is a courtesy so basic for my sensibilities I won't beg for it from those who don't give it freely.
Such a signal is also sent by downvotes without argument, not to mention piling on to a downvoted or flagged comment (people can respond to response to a flagged comment just fine, and can agree with each other about how horrible the flagged person is or what else they probably advocate for, and all that stuff), while that person is rate limited if not shadowbanned.
I can't vote on comments anymore, neither positive nor negative. No clue why, it's been that way since a few months and I stopped caring, just like I wouldn't terribly mind "writing for the showdead community exclusively".
But I know that I upvoted comments that I found reasonable, and unfairly greyed out. So either I was manually selected for that, without any precedent or any communication, or there's an algorithm that blindly removes voting from people who don't agree with the herd enough. Either way, the people who haven't been on the wrong end of the stick much are always super quick to assume that means there's nothing shitty going on. But that has more to do with what people want to believe, not with actually looking into any of it.
32. How we built Uber Engineering's highest query-per-second service using Go (2016) (162 points, 11 hours ago, 102 comments)
33. Google whistleblower: the medical data of millions of Americans is at risk (160 points, 2 hours ago, 45 comments)