There are items in there that are deleted/[dead] on HN (and not very recent). How come?

You can see dead things on HN if you turn on "showdead" in your account settings.

In wich ways is this different and superior to a fee?

People have tried and failed with fee-based email before (e.g. HashCash). I do wonder if the postal service could do something here: every citizen has an address, people pay some pittance to deliver mail to that address, and it's a federal crime to tamper with that email. Physical junk mail is annoying, but nowhere near as bad as spam.

'The series dangerously feeds into the racism of the hysterical moment we find ourselves in today.'

Could this RNN model perhaps be used to filter click bait headlines from HN automatically? Perhaps one could perform some sort of backward beam search to figure out how likely a particular headline would've been produced by it. If there are words in a headline that the model doesn't know, one could perhaps just let it replace it with one that it knows.

Maybe I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that Reddit would be much better off as a dontation-based non-profit. It seems ethical that nobody should make money off of user-generated content except the users are compensated for their time (which is unpractical); at least not beyond what’s necessary to keep the system up and running and occasionally add handy features to it. I bet the amount of time it takes to develop and run Reddit fades in face of the collective amount of time there is spent on creating and curating content by millions of people. I’m actually surprised that none of the comments here are touching on this point.

I’m not sure what this site is supposed to be for: Is it (a) to generate more ad revenue for reddit to be finally self-sustaining or (b) an attempt to come up to the expectations of Reddit's VC shareholders (i.e. a separate startup to generate more revenue than necessary for self-sustenance).

I think a cargo cult also has something to do with signaling, sort of like a status symbol ("They can't really be Y if they are not X!" -> "Look at us how X we are!"). It's a self-reinforcing meme that is used as a heuristic for value estimation, but usually fails catastrophically because of its heuristic and self-reinforcing nature.

I think that's more a result of the kind of person that adopts a cargo cult mentality.

What do you mean exactly? I mean that the status symbol aspect of a cargo cult is a crucial part of its self-reinforcement mechanism.

Beautifully said and matches closely my intuition and how it is depicted at the beginning of the film Her.

I have this script bound to cmd-shift-6: https://github.com/jomo/imgur-screenshot

Then lets steelman this point of critique: Why doesn't Apple keep their OSes in beta for a couple of months more to release something that is really stable? Is the sample size of beta testers really too small? I doubt 6 months or so later would be a big disadvantage to the competition, quite the contrary, I think releasing more stable 1.0s could be a considerable advantage.

>Why doesn't Apple keep their OSes in beta for a couple of months more to release something that is really stable?

First, because a lot of those bugs you only find in real-life bizarro setups, and beta testers are not enough. Besides not all beta testers actually help with bug reports -- some programmers just test their own software, others just want to play with the latest OS, etc.

Second, because not all of those bugs will be fixed even if a beta tester finds them. There will be a cost-benefit (opportunity cost) analysis, and some might need extensive changes to some subsystems, and only get fixed with the X.2 or even X.4 or X.5 release, half a year or more later.

Third, because there will always be bugs, and at some point you need to release.

Fourth, because OS releases usually also enable or leverage several new hardware features in Macs and iOS devices. Delaying the OS would mean delaying those hardware units, or putting them out with the old OS and no way to use some new advanced hardware stuff they are advertised with (stuff like Bluetooth 4 back in the day, Retina support, or something similar).