I think that it's more about politics and investors/advertisers not really clicking. The rest I just don't see, we already opened the flood gates to stuff like discussing "another trivial update of this piece of software a bunch of us use". Most of the comments aren't technical, and it's not like anyone ever got downvoted for telling an anecdote about their child or their parents, and "X is awesome" is exactly as valuable as "X is shit". Yet one is allowed, the other isn't.
> Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
What's the hacker angle? There isn't one. It's interesting to people who care about politics and for people with dollars in their eyes. Amazon being "in the industry" is enough. How's that interesting? Maybe it's the idea that having a lot of users or commanding a lot of investments makes something intellectually interesting, a notion that is as widespread as it is mediocre.
All in all, I often feel the best analogy to some HN subcircles is the beam breakers in Stephen King's The Dark Tower. Don't think too much about it, just do what feels good, and just avoid what scares you, nevermind how that feeds into what disfigured and forced people into settling for such a life to begin with. Gotta keep those attention spans short while pretending to be deep.
For every 10 stories about people labouring under psycho bosses for years there's one of someone standing up to them the second they violated boundaries. The opposite ratio would be a start, and people who don't do that in their life I genuinely have no business and no politics to discuss with, and I don't care for their rationalizations of their weakness and accomplicehood, either. I read and comment because different people write and read here, too.
> "political battle of the day"
That doesn't require you to not think or respond deeper than that. How many "0.001 release of the day" posts trigger people into tirades about general programming principles? How much do we learn from that? There is no consistency here, either, and if you find one interesting, why don't you find the other even more interesting?
If people understand intellectual curiosity, why don't they understand the combination of intellectual curiosity, a moral grounding, and a will? Maybe because those who don't have it can't possibly accept that they are indeed the weakest link. It's like when we assume attractive people are dumb -- we wish! Sometimes they just have and are everything we do, and then some.
You're downvoted because you're exactly right. People on here generally can't handle inconvenient truths that include themselves. Never trust a person who can't rend their garments.
> This generation
No. Resoundingly NO! These smug clowns can't speak for anything and anyone. They're not even a generation, just farts in the wind. Even just 1% of the people paying attention outweigh them easily, and at any rate, the world belongs to those who genuinely care about it. Period, anyone who disagrees can come fight me. Think less "no child left behind" and more "Noah's Ark"; they had their chance, they made their choice, let's not be held hostage by them. At the very least, let them queue after those who are not ungrateful.
Can I flag you? Yes? Oh, there's the link. I just flagged you.
You see, this is why some of us want less politics on HN. Because every political topic inevitably turns into people doing the thing you're doing here - assuming that those who have different views than you are "smug clowns", instead of trying to figure out why their views differ from yours.
> Every time, I speak out for the truth on HN, I am down voted continuously, only half-hearted tech-blabla is suffered here.
Not every. Be precise. I checked.
> Any discussion about important future stuff is instantly penalized by the system here.
I disagree. Just browse the front page history if you don't believe me. There's plenty of discussions about important future stuff that's hanging on the front page every week. It's just that we have a strong quality expectation here, both in terms of posted articles and the discussions they generate.
> I really regret to have registered at all.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Just doing geek-stuff and enjoying the live as techie is just to hollow for me. It really makes me sad.
And I agree. It's hollow for me too. Personally however, I find politics to be one of the least effective and least efficient way of contributing to betterment of the world. Many people on HN disagree with me about that. But either way, lots of people are interested in things outside the tech sphere. It's just that when people are interesting in changing things, they're interesting in actually changing things - and not being sidetracked by ego-based flamewars.
Yeah, but when you stand up to snoops and crooks, you don't have to contort yourself in ways that are a.) undignified and b.) futile anyways, and c.) waste your own resources of which you have fewer than the server rooms of megacorps, so why not do that.
Allow people to tag their posts, and have friends who tag their posts. Then have an option to not see posts of type X (link, photo, text, video, audio) tagged with Y by contact Z. Have further options to display little icons with some info for hidden posts to easily expand them inline. And so on.
Yes, you'd have to manually curate some things, but otherwise I think it's mostly just a matter of not hiring any marketing people, and creating the features first and looking how to make them easily usable second. Especially if the goal isn't to "kill FB", but simply offer an alternative to those who want the good bits and actually like, uhh, reading manuals and being proficient with the tools they use.
They can't come if there is nowhere for them to come to, and then it's easy to pretend they don't exist. But they do, even among the old and young and not so technical.
> Some malware is used to generate money by click fraud, making it appear that the computer user has clicked an advertising link on a site, generating a payment from the advertiser. It was estimated in 2012 that about 60 to 70% of all active malware used some kind of click fraud, and 22% of all ad-clicks were fraudulent
If you want to coin a new term feel free, but malware means what it means and refers to malicious, not "more malicious than", not "malicious against the user" etc.
Does this encompass malware that sends unique device identifiers to 3rd parties? Google account names? Or are those extremely common practices not considered malicious at all? In my opinion those are much more malicious actions. The only way to compare malicious with malicious is indeed relative. If one arguably malicious action is prohibited but another is not, you have to question the motivations. "More malicious than" common practice therefore seems like a very good question to ask.
Yes, I absolutely agree that plenty of commonly practiced or even accepted things are malicious, too, at least with the way they're hand waved away ("to improve our service" and worse).
> Overall i find your reply very negative and zero value. You didn't pass yandex test, right? :)
That cuts both ways - you don't see a problem with the needy practices of pretty much all major and many minor tech players, right? You don't get sick with all this mediocrity adorned with euphemisms, all this crap called awesome and all the greatness in life belittled? Do you honestly know not a single person that does quality work they can be honest about for a fair price that you would assume it's either "business" or "charity"?
> Overall i find your reply very negative and zero value.
The "argument" that "it's a business so hey" could justify anything, including robbing people, as long as you don't get caught. You know that providing value for society is one of the reasons societies let corporations operate at all, right? Modern business seems to think now that the bath tub is filled nicely (for them), there's no need for the plug anymore.
In kindergarten I asked a friend why "Hitler didn't like Jews". He said his grandmother was Jewish and he didn't like her, which made sense to us. When I was 9, my Jewish best friend and I had friendship armbands in neon colors, which I loved to bits, exclaiming that "I'm a Neon-Nazi". Still totally clueless, it was still all just words to me. The deeply appalled reaction of his mother was like a gut punch, probably like my innocent but horrid statement was to her.
When I was 11 and alone, I randomly changed channels (we only had the 3) and was faced with a bunch of corpses being shoved into a grave by a caterpillar. I remember that as if it was yesterday, and with everything I learned since then, that was the horrible anchor. But like you probably too, I wouldn't want to unsee it either. And I still sometimes can't help but wonder about the streets I walk through. Did some of those houses see people get dragged out and carried to their murder? How would the dead judge our too common unwillingness to speak out against injustice, even though we're very free to do so in comparison to them? There's so much, but I fear it less than I fear looking away.
While I also think testimonies, big and small, by real people (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/YadVashem/videos ) are important and need to be preserved, I can honestly say that for me, they were not really necessary, that is they came long after this had already become and integral part of me. Even "just" what can be read in books sufficed, but that's because I went looking for it, because I needed to learn. Similarly, I think it's perfectly possible for people to be so jaded to even shrug off a testimony given in person. So that's both good and bad news, I guess?
>How would the dead judge our too common unwillingness to speak out against injustice, even though we're very free to do so in comparison to them? There's so much, but I fear it less than I fear looking away.
The dead were people too, not saints. They share the burden of creating an unjust society.
> There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
-- Hannah Arendt
Read the serious thoughts of the heavy weights who lived through that time. Don't other Nazism, so many things that made it tick have since metastasized, not vanished. I would say we're constantly reenacting it on various scales, and to during that then solemnly swear to never forget that one horrible thing is kind of perverse in its own right.
> I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied, ‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’.
> When she saw the segregation of African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or in the school system, that was, for her, like the prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly and generously made the imaginative leap to those who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them in the embrace of her own suffering.
> For my mother, the Nazi holocaust was a chapter in the long history of the horror of war. It was not itself a war – she was emphatic that it was an extermination, not a war – but it was a unique chapter within the war. So for her, war was the ultimate horror. When she saw Vietnamese being bombed during the Vietnam War, it was the Nazi holocaust. It was the bombing, the death, the horror, the terror, that she herself had passed through. When she saw the distended bellies of starving children in Biafra, it was also the Nazi holocaust, because she remembered her own pangs of hunger in the Warsaw Ghetto.
-- Norman Finkelstein
Read Sebastian Haffner's book about the times in Germany before the Nazis and see if you can find parallels, I found it uncanny. Everybody and their dog is all about numbers, be it users, money, hits. Not about judging your workmanship with your own mind. Judging "objectively" is something we actually pretend we can do, rather than something only lunatics would assume for themselves.
Hannah Arendt again:
> The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
> One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
> For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
> The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different.
> The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
> Since no one is capable of forming his own opinion without the benefit of a multitude of opinions held by others, the rule of public opinion endangers even the opinion of those few who may have the strength not to share it. This is one of the reasons for the curiously sterile negativism of all opinions which oppose a popularly acclaimed tyranny. [...] public opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere.
> The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
> There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
> If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
> The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules."
> When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.
> The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans.
> Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena - homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
> What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality — as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.
> There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.
> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
> I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
> As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
> When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
> For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this insight.
> Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
> The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Since the comment is way too long either way I decided to cut my own rambling rather than these quotes I think are all dearly important and as timely as ever. FWIW, I consider this sharing the best I know of, I can put things in my own words but not this well. And if it makes just one person go to the library and get a bunch of books by Hannah Arendt, it's worth it.
> Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
What's the hacker angle? There isn't one. It's interesting to people who care about politics and for people with dollars in their eyes. Amazon being "in the industry" is enough. How's that interesting? Maybe it's the idea that having a lot of users or commanding a lot of investments makes something intellectually interesting, a notion that is as widespread as it is mediocre.
All in all, I often feel the best analogy to some HN subcircles is the beam breakers in Stephen King's The Dark Tower. Don't think too much about it, just do what feels good, and just avoid what scares you, nevermind how that feeds into what disfigured and forced people into settling for such a life to begin with. Gotta keep those attention spans short while pretending to be deep.
For every 10 stories about people labouring under psycho bosses for years there's one of someone standing up to them the second they violated boundaries. The opposite ratio would be a start, and people who don't do that in their life I genuinely have no business and no politics to discuss with, and I don't care for their rationalizations of their weakness and accomplicehood, either. I read and comment because different people write and read here, too.
> "political battle of the day"
That doesn't require you to not think or respond deeper than that. How many "0.001 release of the day" posts trigger people into tirades about general programming principles? How much do we learn from that? There is no consistency here, either, and if you find one interesting, why don't you find the other even more interesting?
If people understand intellectual curiosity, why don't they understand the combination of intellectual curiosity, a moral grounding, and a will? Maybe because those who don't have it can't possibly accept that they are indeed the weakest link. It's like when we assume attractive people are dumb -- we wish! Sometimes they just have and are everything we do, and then some.