Ask HN: Favorite subreddit?

I guess, depending how you define "a lot".

Semantic web is about making the meaning of your content easier for machines to extract. The idea is to have a single HTML document that is readable by people, but is also marked up with microformats or similar rich markup to enable easy acquisition of data by machine (i.e., without being dependent upon the structure of the HTML).

The BBC's Programmes web site was a good example of this for some time, but I think this seems to have fallen by the wayside somewhat. Here's an instance though, where the broadcast times are marked up with XSD datetime information in addition to the human readable times: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016ljx7/broadcasts

I wouldn't say Semantic Web really has much to do with SEO per-se, although Google, Yahoo, etc. do use embedded RDFa, Microdata and Microformats information as part of their indexing and ranking in some fashion. It's really more about providing meaningful, well, semantics, for "stuff" on the web. In the full vision of the semantic web which includes inference and what-not, it allows you to ask more interesting questions, because you have "knowledge" about the relationships between entities.

For example, imagine Wikipedia using Semantic Web technologies (which they do to some extent, and also considering dbPedia which is kind of a side project). Now imagine you want to find, say, all the capital cities of countries in Africa. Now you might get lucky and find that somebody has already compiled that list. But if not, you'd have to manually trawl through the list of countries in Africa, and find the capital city for each, and note it down. But if each country is semantically related to its continent, and countries have properties for things like capitalCity, then you could compose one relatively simple SPARQL query and find that exact list in a few seconds.

There's actually more to it than that, but that's one example of what the SemWeb is about.

The useful links on the sidebar explain it best I guess. Just a lot of in jokes between a handful of regular posters.

To quote rationalist fiction author Eliezer Yudkowsky: > But when you look at what Sherlock Holmes does - you can't go out and do it at home. Sherlock Holmes is not really operating by any sort of reproducible method. He is operating by magically finding the right clues and carrying out magically correct complicated chains of deduction. Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that reading Sherlock Holmes does not inspire you to go and do likewise. Holmes is a mutant superhero. And even if you did try to imitate him, it would never work in real life. [0]

A hallmark of rationalist fiction is that it invites the reader engage with the story by thinking rationally. A tactic employed by Yudkowsky is to pause just before the climax of the story and prompt online readers to use what they know to get the protagonist out of their current bind, or else, Yudkowsky promises, the protagonist will meet a less-than-ideal end.

Yudkowsky's stories [1] are a great introduction to the genre. I'm particularly fond of "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", which makes a habit of preying on the reader's sentimentality.

[0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/3m/rationalist_fiction/ [1] http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/

I generally agree with you.

To enjoy this subreddit, it's best to think of it more as a collection of in "depth" posts, than it is of "quality" posts. That means it often offers some really bad, but very long and detailed content. It's something I subscribe to and occasionally find gems in.

Most importantly, I enjoy that the content is all original discussion as opposed to articles I will probably find elsewhere.

The whole truth is probably more fluid and multifaceted but these are some of the interesting claims I've seen on there.

1. Al Nusra a branch of Al Qaeda is embedded amongst the moderate rebels and were the main fighting force in Aleppo.

2. Allies Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been flooding Syria with weapons to anyone who will take them including radical groups. SA sees situation as opportunity to spread Wahhabism to the region.

3. Early on the coalition had been using a funneling strategy that involved bombing locations peripheral to ISIS with the goal of forcing them to move into civilian regime territory.

It has helped me understand why my marriage failed and made me realise how I need to behave differently when I start dating again.

I must admit, a lot of the commenters there have extreme views and some of them come across as misogynists.

However, for some reason I persevered and started reading some of the theory. What I read aligned so accurately with my previous experiences and the way I've been treated by women that I couldn't ignore it, and I've been hooked since then.

Thank you for at least attempting not to pass judgement!