"Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told."
Absolutely agree with this, as being his best essay.
The unfortunate fact, however, is that both moderators and participants of pg's own discussion site seem to have never read it, or never taken it to heart. There are definitely things you're not allowed to say here. The notion of open discussion of ideas does not exist.
I suspect that is a misinterpretation of moderating practices here. As long as you aren't doing things like engaging in personal attacks, you are allowed to express yourself pretty freely here. However, they do penalize articles on certain subjects, in part because the discussion of some subjects typically does not go well.
It is sort of like "Yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater is not a protected form of free speech." Putting inflammatory topics with inflammatory titles etc on HN will get it downmodded (or they will change the title to something less inflammatory, etc). That doesn't mean you can't say it. It does mean they want the front page to be dominated by intelligent, meaty discussion, not ranty, fighty, strongly emotional drivel.
When things get downmodded in order to get less attention by removing them from the front page, inevitably, someone says something about how their right to free speech is being impeded or "Why can't we talk about this here?" I have seen the moderator reply to the effect of "You are talking about it still, it just isn't on the front page anymore."
Some people think "right to free speech = right to be on the front page if I get enough upvotes, no matter how much I have violated the guidelines" and will say something nasty about how things are moderated if their desire to be attention whores has been interfered with by the folks who, you know, get paid to run the place as they see fit.
Because it is the moderator's opinion that such content is not very relevant to HN and gets disproportionality upvoted. Basically they disagree with the enthusiasm of privacy advocates.
> Users are flagging these posts. The HN community is divided. Some people think that there are too many NSA stories; others, too few. On any issue where the community is divided, upvotes compete with flags, and stories rise and fall according to the tug of war.
> The HN software adds a small default weight to NSA stories. The purpose of this is obviously not to suppress them. If we were trying to do that, it would be a large weight and not a small one. Instead, it's tuned so that NSA stories can still easily make the front page—and so they do. It's an attempt to strike a balance between the different segments of the community who strongly disagree with one another about how much NSA is the right amount of NSA.
>It's an attempt to strike a balance between the different segments of the community who strongly disagree with one another about how much NSA is the right amount of NSA.
Because dang is the one who added the weight, the blatant implication here is that dang believes that "the balance" needs to be more towards not having NSA stories overwhelm the front page.
I don't see how you can read what dang wrote and somehow think that he is not suppressing NSA stories. He very clearly states that he is suppressing them, just not to a large degree. Just because he says "we are not suppressing them" before describing their method of suppression does not mean the are not suppressed.
Why is it necessary to strike a balance between the two sides of this conversation? As he states, the NSA stories still make it to the front page. What actual effect does this have? As far as I can tell, it simply makes the stories less visible than they would otherwise be. No amount of linguistic gymnastics is going to make me think this is not a description of suppression.
The amount of doublespeak going on here is baffling. Dang very clearly states that the intention is to lessen the enthusiasm of these topics, and it's being weighted in favor of the pro-NSA side, which is pretty much exactly what I said: Dang disagrees with the enthusiasm of the anti-NSA (pro-privacy) side of the debate.
By the way, the title you originally submitted ("Reporters at NYT Try Not to Crack Case of Who Owns Their Newspaper") breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait.
Using HN titles to editorialize is something we specifically ask people not to do, so please don't do that.
Actually, it looks almost exactly the same; you just add a cdef int or long to the fibonacci for example. And using the Python scientific stack (which would likely give you all the speedups you will ever need) _is_ Python and looks like Python.
> As those who control we (white men) have the responsibility to fix the issue.
White men don't control anything , rich men who happened to be white do (in US). Making everything about race IS racist. The article is certainly racist.
I did not know that white men controlled all firms. Are there even any statistics on tech companies owned by non-whites being more open to "non-gender conforming" people?
I really liked some of the old-school command line stuff like reverse history search and Snoopy swearing (!$). However, I still prefer Fish to Bash and Zsh, even though those two things are not included. It gets the really important stuff just right and makes the rest configurable.
Btw, is it just my imagination or is using Ctrl-c with Fish much faster?
"It is easier to develop a phobia about snakes than electricity or carbon monoxide, probably because we have built in neurological mechanism that confer that propensity.
Likely most animals have a similar propensity to develop a fear of fire: or it might come automatically. If there was such a fear-of-fire mechanism, we have lost it: and dogs have as well. If this is correct, one could learn about this hypothetical mechanism by comparing dogs and wolves."
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These are heavily biased towards population genetics and quantitative genetics. Would appreciate suggestions for blogs of smart people writing about molecular biology.
