hero/villain claim: So it's a tautology if you interpret it like this: You are currently A. You will die. If you don't die as A, you will die as !A. But it's not a tautology because there's an intermediate state between hero and villain that is neither A nor !A.
cancer claim: Again, it sounds like a tautology, but you aren't considering statistics. Sure, if nothing else kills you, you die of exploding fingernails. But the intent of that expression is to say that cancer is the default, it's not a bullet you can dodge forever. I'm not sure I agree, because "old age" != "cancer", but that's what it means.
Or was your question purely rhetorical? I tried...
That second link has a lot of other projects, some more recent. "At the end of 2014, Yahoo! gave three months notice that it will kill Yahoo! Directory." I haven't seen any evidence that Yahoo will act differently toward other projects they "sunset" in the future.
Strangely, yes. I still read it daily believe it or not. It's like a lighter version of hacker news or arstechnica. Ars and HN are usually too deep and suck away my time and brain power (in a good way!). But sometimes I just want to spend a couple minutes reading tech news without having to think too hard. That's slashdot.
But stay away from the comment section. It's horrible to navigate and lacks any interesting content at all. Seriously, don't even think about clicking into it.
My point is I don't want to forget. It still serves a purpose. I'd get over it if it vanished but I'd rather it not. I'm sure there are other alternatives out there though. Speaking of... any recommendations?
I just want an on topic, light reading, tech news site. No machine learning, Markov chains, or "How we at company X solved Y" articles. Also not interested in "random gadget Y that has X more pixels than the last" articles. Know anything that fits the bill?
I was blown away a few weeks ago when I came to chat with one of our tech leads during a lunch at his desk and he was reading slashdot. I asked him about it, doesn't read HN, reddit or really much else unless it's linked to from /.
Weird. I don't think I've found a reason to go there in the last 2 years and even before then it was a struggle to find something that wasn't already reported elsewhere days or weeks before.
It's kind of turned into my parent's facebook posts, echoing memes that have long come and gone but they think is new and original.
I still like slashdot because it covers a slightly broader range of subjects than HN.
I feel like there's still some value in a curated aggregator like Slashdot. The list of topics will reflect the interests of the editors, which in turn will influence the kind of community which forms around it.
HN and some subreddits are "better" than /. at garnering useful discussion for popular subjects which reach the front page. However, I still subscribe to slashdot's rss feed, and sometimes I discover items I find to be of interest there which do not interest the HN community generally (or are outside of its scope).
You used to be able to set your preferences to see dead ones and browse sections like new, but now they've unlinked them, so there is no way to check any more. It's sad because the moderators around here tend to do a really terrible job, butchering titles to be less informative and other harmful actions, and this just makes them even less accountable.
Used to? I can configure my account to see dead comments (and have), maybe this is different for newer accounts (but I've never heard this)? Also, I can see the new section when I browse incognito, so I'm not seeing what I think you are describing.
Also, moderation has become a lot more transparent over the last year or so (see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang) and I cannot think of a site offhand that does a better job of this.
Edit: My comments about moderation are related to the parent statement about how Hacker News often indicates why thread contents (such as the title) have changed.
Nothing against HN, but you must not visit a lot of sites if you can't name one site that moderates better than HN. Lest we forget, there are several people who have been hellbanned for multiple years without any clue. They waste a significant portion of their life talking to nobody because the person who developed the site felt passive aggressive was better than just banning someone outright and preventing them from rejoining. With incognito mode checking if you're hellbanned is a five second operation, yet dang hasn't replaced that aspect of HN despite its futility and childishness.
Most of those bans I've seen have been enough to make me cock an eyebrow, as well.
When you get banned from a subreddit you are told, by the system, via private message. Reddit has user-level shadowbanning as well, but I've only ever seen it used when it was warranted, like doxxing -- here, some of the hellbanned comment histories mystify me. Reddit certainly has its own share of weirdness but in my opinion, /r/askscience (to use one example) has absolutely incredible moderation that makes HN pale in comparison.
There was an interesting article a while ago on weird beliefs of some intelligent people. It really shows why 'intelligence' is a limited world and we shouldn't try mirroring beliefs of people (outside their area of expertise) because they're "smart".
Great examples are Gödels beliefs of ghosts and paranormal activity; some older Nobel laureates turned to 'weird' (for the lack of a better word) ideas at some point in time; etc. Not cited in the article, Gödel also believed to have found a logical proof of the existence of God: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kurt_G.C3.....
People got upset that religions got included it. I can understand the disagreement, but I can't understand the need to censor the discussion. Whether you believe it or not, it shouldn't be a stretch to concede that religion is weird, in some sense. It's completely outside our usual phenomena, and it's an arbitrary explanation for several questions, or maybe it's a relief. But it's as strange as it is interesting that so many people hold those beliefs.
That was a ridiculous and divisive article. I'm not surprised it was penalised - controversial stories like this attract flamers and trolls - and that killed K5.
Many have identified the "flag" link as a super downvote. I've seen stories fly off the front page in a matter of minutes less than an hour after being submitted due to flags. It definitely happens.
More than once I've been in a comment thread where conversation dried up, and it is because the story got flagged to page 2 and beyond. I won't list topics but the usual suspects are fairly obvious.
(I'm not complaining, but it's intriguing to me that this comment shot from +3 to 0 between refreshes.)
From what I understood many articles are flagged automatically based on certain rules, like spotting attempts of gaming the voting system. Of course it can have false positives, but I don't think there's any malice involved here. And while I agree that there have definitely been instances of articles being buried due to miss-usage of the "flag" link (which is necessary IMHO) or to overzealous moderators flagging based on certain topics, I don't remember seeing censorship because of a conflict of interest with YCombinator.
Of course, I could be wrong - I used to think that Slashdot wouldn't ban negative pieces on Sourceforge either.
OP said "HN buries articles" without qualifying that YC is involved, and my comment followed up on that aspect without resorting to conspiracy theories. You are reading my comment in the context of nearby offtopic conspiracy fodder and have, as a result, completely misjudged my point.
You even repeated and agreed with the sole point I'm making.
That is what I said, yes. But not even a flaw (though it can be seen as one), so much as just something that has to happen—like the CAP theorem, or more analogous, Arrow's impossibility theorem.
There are precedents of HN doing funny things. E.g. they mess with rankings of comments. They'll often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of the comment thread (it's clear here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354815 - that a comment made after some 30 days of the submission is sent straight to the top). There have been precedents in which comment threads critical of Dropbox and Stripe were messed with. After a lot of these occurrences, they did something really smart: they instituted a policy change on HN that "HN is not a support service for YC companies" -- that if anyone has complaints, they should take it to YC companies themselves. Now, whether that is really a good-faith policy change or a clever ploy to cut down anti-YC talk, I'll leave that up to you.
Re 7354815, what we did was reopen the thread past the editing window so a concerned user could post relevant new information—that a controversy involving his company had been settled. That was only fair, and we'd do the same for anyone. I've done similar things a couple times for other HN users who wrote in to ask, and will continue to, because I'd feel bad not to. It has nothing to do with YC.
That was a unique case in my memory. "Often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of a thread" is pure fabrication. As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest. It's literally the first thing PG emphasized to me when explaining how to moderate HN.
A recent example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622711. That class of outrage thread is something we routinely penalize, but we penalized this one less because it was about Airbnb. There's no way it would have stayed on the front page for hours otherwise.
> As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest.
I think strictly speaking that may be true, however I suspect the reason that that is is because of the precautions already taken by the HN software and HN operators, e.g. by rankbanning. When users who have voiced anti-YC sentiments are already rankbanned, for example, you don't even need to intervene, because those comments will already have sunk to the bottom. So I think you can probably successfully refute my individual points but the larger spirit of my assertion remains.
that a comment made after some 30 days of the submission is sent straight to the top
Newer comments are given a boost in rankings so they have a chance to get upvoted. That comment might have been upvoted enough to stay on the top afterward (I am not affiliated with YC or HN).
Here it seems user-driven (people flagging articles that are entirely appropriate as way to suppress them), but the fact that this happens often and doesn't seem to be perceived as a serious problem by the site maintainers does deserve attention.
Karma based voting is supposed to drive attention to the most popular stories and users, and away from everything else. It's possibly not seen as a serious problem because the system is working as intended.
What would be "most popular" doesn't get a chance to be seen if a concerted minority flags certain kinds of articles, as it seems the parent post is suggesting.
Part of being popular on HN is not being controversial enough to be flagged. Even something as contextually neutral as a thread having more comments than upvotes will flag it. It is elitist and undemocratic, and intentionally so, although the staff has mentioned that they do try to counteract the downward bias of the site when they feel a story has merit.
> for example they buried the story on Hola yesterday
Pretty sure that was because it was a dupe and that the original had massive discussion here. One pattern I've noticed is that a story will often break on HN early, before it hits the main tech press. A day or two later, when more mainstream posts start appearing, we get a new wave of submissions about the story. Anyone who didn't see the original will wonder why those are getting buried. In the current system, there's no good answer to this—other than that a few indomitable users post links to the original discussion. We do have some ideas about how to fix it more systematically.
That's interesting, I didn't know about their relation to SourceForge. But I guess every one of those giant sites would have a Digg moment if not really well taken care of.
I remember the first time when Slashdot was suggested to me by my professor teaching OS 304. (5 years ago)
Slashdot has already had plenty of Digg moments, and the current dismal amount of user activity there is fine enough proof of that. There was Jon Katz, the moderation wars, hot grits and all the other trolls, the non-stop complaining about the story submission / selection process, the multiple redesigns (including the big redesign that everyone hated, years ago), the sale to Dice...
Not everything ends the same way. Some things never really end.
The simple fact is that after 15 years of corporate mismanagement there isn't anyone left there that cares anymore. It is really sad, when we started the sites, all we ever wanted to do was help the OSS community. But those were the days before a plethora of other alternatives existed.
I don't consider SN to be a good alternative to Slashdot. It exhibits many of the same problems as Slashdot, but they're usually worse at SN than at Slashdot.
While many of the stories are the same at both sites, they're typically on Slashdot well before they're on SN. Many low-quality submissions get through on SN, as well, most of which would have no chance at Slashdot. Of these low-quality submissions at SN, many of them come from a small number of frequent contributors who are known to consistently send in biased and inflammatory submissions. While Slashdot's editors aren't known for doing a good job, we aren't seeing anything better out of SN's editors, and in fact I'd say they're doing a worse job based on some of the submissions I've seen there that have made it to the SN front page.
The SN community is also quite tiny. Most of the comments I've seen come from a relatively small number of people. Slashdot still offers a much larger community. This results in much better discussion at Slashdot, while much of the discussion at SN is inane, if not totally off topic.
Slashdot's moderation system isn't great, but I do find it generally does help me identify high quality comments, while also helping me to disregard low quality comments. That's not the case at SN. When I read the comments at SN, I always have to set it to show -1 comments. Very insightful and informative comments often end up at -1 on SN, while many of the highly-rated comments are absolutely worthless. The very small number of active users results in an even smaller number of users who are allowed to moderate, and this has resulted in the moderation system being used to push specific agendas or target certain other users, rather than giving a quasi-objective rating of a comment's value. The moderation system at Slashdot is generally helpful. The moderation system at SN is used as a weapon.
SN had a lot of potential. But now that the Slashdot beta site is gone, and likely won't be back, the biggest benefit of SN is gone. With its lack of quality submissions, with its small community, with its moderation problems, and with it's other less-serious flaws, SN provides no benefit over Slashdot. Slashdot offers better stories faster, its community offers wider and deeper points of view, its moderation system is much fairer and more balanced, and it's just a much better news source than SN is.
If this were 2009, I might be shocked, but Slashdot has fallen so far from the top that I don't even care anymore. Such a poorly mismanaged site. The community used to be great in the early 2000's, but we all moved on.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadcancer claim: Again, it sounds like a tautology, but you aren't considering statistics. Sure, if nothing else kills you, you die of exploding fingernails. But the intent of that expression is to say that cancer is the default, it's not a bullet you can dodge forever. I'm not sure I agree, because "old age" != "cancer", but that's what it means.
Or was your question purely rhetorical? I tried...
But stay away from the comment section. It's horrible to navigate and lacks any interesting content at all. Seriously, don't even think about clicking into it.
I just want an on topic, light reading, tech news site. No machine learning, Markov chains, or "How we at company X solved Y" articles. Also not interested in "random gadget Y that has X more pixels than the last" articles. Know anything that fits the bill?
Weird. I don't think I've found a reason to go there in the last 2 years and even before then it was a struggle to find something that wasn't already reported elsewhere days or weeks before.
It's kind of turned into my parent's facebook posts, echoing memes that have long come and gone but they think is new and original.
I feel like there's still some value in a curated aggregator like Slashdot. The list of topics will reflect the interests of the editors, which in turn will influence the kind of community which forms around it.
HN and some subreddits are "better" than /. at garnering useful discussion for popular subjects which reach the front page. However, I still subscribe to slashdot's rss feed, and sometimes I discover items I find to be of interest there which do not interest the HN community generally (or are outside of its scope).
Also, moderation has become a lot more transparent over the last year or so (see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang) and I cannot think of a site offhand that does a better job of this.
Edit: My comments about moderation are related to the parent statement about how Hacker News often indicates why thread contents (such as the title) have changed.
Most of those bans I've seen have been enough to make me cock an eyebrow, as well.
When you get banned from a subreddit you are told, by the system, via private message. Reddit has user-level shadowbanning as well, but I've only ever seen it used when it was warranted, like doxxing -- here, some of the hellbanned comment histories mystify me. Reddit certainly has its own share of weirdness but in my opinion, /r/askscience (to use one example) has absolutely incredible moderation that makes HN pale in comparison.
Great examples are Gödels beliefs of ghosts and paranormal activity; some older Nobel laureates turned to 'weird' (for the lack of a better word) ideas at some point in time; etc. Not cited in the article, Gödel also believed to have found a logical proof of the existence of God: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kurt_G.C3.....
People got upset that religions got included it. I can understand the disagreement, but I can't understand the need to censor the discussion. Whether you believe it or not, it shouldn't be a stretch to concede that religion is weird, in some sense. It's completely outside our usual phenomena, and it's an arbitrary explanation for several questions, or maybe it's a relief. But it's as strange as it is interesting that so many people hold those beliefs.
The original discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525645
More than once I've been in a comment thread where conversation dried up, and it is because the story got flagged to page 2 and beyond. I won't list topics but the usual suspects are fairly obvious.
(I'm not complaining, but it's intriguing to me that this comment shot from +3 to 0 between refreshes.)
Of course, I could be wrong - I used to think that Slashdot wouldn't ban negative pieces on Sourceforge either.
You even repeated and agreed with the sole point I'm making.
That was a unique case in my memory. "Often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of a thread" is pure fabrication. As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest. It's literally the first thing PG emphasized to me when explaining how to moderate HN.
A recent example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622711. That class of outrage thread is something we routinely penalize, but we penalized this one less because it was about Airbnb. There's no way it would have stayed on the front page for hours otherwise.
I think strictly speaking that may be true, however I suspect the reason that that is is because of the precautions already taken by the HN software and HN operators, e.g. by rankbanning. When users who have voiced anti-YC sentiments are already rankbanned, for example, you don't even need to intervene, because those comments will already have sunk to the bottom. So I think you can probably successfully refute my individual points but the larger spirit of my assertion remains.
Newer comments are given a boost in rankings so they have a chance to get upvoted. That comment might have been upvoted enough to stay on the top afterward (I am not affiliated with YC or HN).
Pretty sure that was because it was a dupe and that the original had massive discussion here. One pattern I've noticed is that a story will often break on HN early, before it hits the main tech press. A day or two later, when more mainstream posts start appearing, we get a new wave of submissions about the story. Anyone who didn't see the original will wonder why those are getting buried. In the current system, there's no good answer to this—other than that a few indomitable users post links to the original discussion. We do have some ideas about how to fix it more systematically.
I guess if you destroy the reputation of one of your businesses you might as well take care of the others at the same time!
I remember the first time when Slashdot was suggested to me by my professor teaching OS 304. (5 years ago)
Not everything ends the same way. Some things never really end.
While many of the stories are the same at both sites, they're typically on Slashdot well before they're on SN. Many low-quality submissions get through on SN, as well, most of which would have no chance at Slashdot. Of these low-quality submissions at SN, many of them come from a small number of frequent contributors who are known to consistently send in biased and inflammatory submissions. While Slashdot's editors aren't known for doing a good job, we aren't seeing anything better out of SN's editors, and in fact I'd say they're doing a worse job based on some of the submissions I've seen there that have made it to the SN front page.
The SN community is also quite tiny. Most of the comments I've seen come from a relatively small number of people. Slashdot still offers a much larger community. This results in much better discussion at Slashdot, while much of the discussion at SN is inane, if not totally off topic.
Slashdot's moderation system isn't great, but I do find it generally does help me identify high quality comments, while also helping me to disregard low quality comments. That's not the case at SN. When I read the comments at SN, I always have to set it to show -1 comments. Very insightful and informative comments often end up at -1 on SN, while many of the highly-rated comments are absolutely worthless. The very small number of active users results in an even smaller number of users who are allowed to moderate, and this has resulted in the moderation system being used to push specific agendas or target certain other users, rather than giving a quasi-objective rating of a comment's value. The moderation system at Slashdot is generally helpful. The moderation system at SN is used as a weapon.
SN had a lot of potential. But now that the Slashdot beta site is gone, and likely won't be back, the biggest benefit of SN is gone. With its lack of quality submissions, with its small community, with its moderation problems, and with it's other less-serious flaws, SN provides no benefit over Slashdot. Slashdot offers better stories faster, its community offers wider and deeper points of view, its moderation system is much fairer and more balanced, and it's just a much better news source than SN is.