infodroid

As HN has gained increasing prominence in mainstream media and the wider tech community over recent years, it has attracted a vocal and sizable mass of users that think it is fine to display a lazy and wilfully ignorant attitude.

The existing HN mechanisms to discourage such low quality content are no longer effective, because this mass of new users is now self-reinforcing.

I interpret low-effort comments as the output of individuals who are disrespectful towards the goals of a good faith discussion community, because they willfully or carelessly contribute noise and dilute the signal.

Because I interpret this behavior as antisocial and disrespectful and an act of initiating incivility, I have grown increasingly hostile towards such users, and have started attacking them openly "in response".

We're going to have to part ways here. Because I don't think I am going to back down on this principle. I believe it's fair and just to punish this bad behavior by making these people feel bad for harming the commons.

I know if I continue doing this, it is not going to be acceptable, and I know I will no longer be welcome here.

This is why I am moving on from HN.

Over the past few years, the increase in zero-effort contributions have all but destroyed the quality of discussions on HN. And you aren't doing anything about it. HN is looking more indistinguishable from Reddit and I'll be damned if I let that happen.

Civility should be reserved for people who are looking to argue and discuss in good faith.

Why couldn't you just fucking google it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

Your inane rant disguised as a question doesn't add anything to the discussion.

It doesnt really matter whether you opted in or out. In the end, all that matters is whether the projected profits from abusing your data exceed the projected legal costs of doing do.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13348502 (2017)

If you like this, then check out Neocities, a free and modern Geocities reboot:

https://neocities.org/

There are many fun sites to discover using the tag system, which emulates web rings:

https://neocities.org/browse

A similar project is 'mocker', a "crappy imitation of Docker, written in 100% Python": https://github.com/tonybaloney/mocker

Like when Bill Gates called it his "new favorite book of all time".

What is often overlooked and misunderstood is that the bulbs were not only valued for their beauty, but more importantly for their use as commercial breeding stock.

Since it was not possible to reproduce the best bulbs through seed propagation, the already rare buds themselves were the only source of producing future varieties exhibiting the same beautiful patterns. This goes a great way to explaining the high prices paid, and debunking the myth of irrationality.

"The tulip market involved only bulbs affected by a mosaic virus which had the effect of creating beautiful, feathered patterns in the flowers. Only diseased bulbs were valued by traders, because a particular pattern could not be reproduced through seed propagation. Only through budding of the mother bulb would a pattern breed true." - Garber, Famous First Bubbles https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.4.2.35

This seems like bad advice because it doesn't address the legitimate need for keeping your browsing history private from overzealous, data-mining ISP's [1].

And even in the case of a known-hostile ISP that engages in invasive practices like supercookies or ad injection, it's unrealistic to ask users to set up and maintain their own VPS servers.

For the average internet user, a "glorified proxy" service that is hassle-free to set up is a simple and effective means of protection against such a menace.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/everything-you-need-to-kno...

It's also useful for older versions of software to gracefully handle newer configuration files. If the software really is backwards-compatible, then this should come for free. Just don't throw a fatal error when processing an unknown configuration key, and preserve any unrecognized configuration items when saving the configuration file.

Retaliating against the US assumes that the rest of the world doesn't want the same powers that the DHS now has, which is unrealistic I think.

I don't think it would take very much to go from rosetta stone to a more comprehensive feature comparison.

For example, the table could show the blank cell in a different color if it is a default feature, or if it an unsupported feature.

Alternatively, the cell could contain a message such as "(default)".

The table doesn't yet distinguish between lacking a command line flag due to absence of a feature vs due to the feature being the default. This is similar to the situation with case-sensitive search in GNU grep, which ends up with a blank cell even though it is the default. See: https://github.com/beyondgrep/website/issues/72

It's a fair criticism but I don't think it is designed to be misleading.

The chart was created by Andy Lester, the creator of ack, who thinks that more open source projects should point to their "competing" projects because it's not really a competition: http://blog.petdance.com/2018/01/02/the-best-open-source-pro...

Swipe-based touch keyboards don't work for me. Compared to touch-tapping, I find I have worse accuracy. I also find them much more frustrating, because correcting a swipe mistake is a lot more expensive compared to tap mistake. At least when tapping, I get steady and immediate feedback when spelling out a word, and I can fix a mistake quickly just using backspace and without much thought, and then carry on as usual. But with the swipe keyboards I tried, I find out about mistakes only after I spelled out a whole word, and at that point it's really awkward to fix without breaking my flow. Often what happens in my case is that all the autosuggestions are way off the mark.

Writing anything on modern touchscreen smartphones is so frustrating. I think the problem is that the touchscreen is always going to be an inferior interface to a physical button.

I remember what it was like using PDAs and smartphones with actual physical keys. After a brief period of adjustment to a new device, I was soon typing without any mistakes. It was such a low-friction transfer of my thoughts to digital form, I took it for granted it would always be that easy.

I look forward to trying one of the new Blackberry phones for my next upgrade.