Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

motherboard.vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 214 posts

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#71

Post by nradov »

chm wrote: post #56
malchow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSJ has floors of smart, trained, inquisitive journalists who assemble real original data and break real original stories, and who try hard–through single, double, and triple verification–to ensure the accuracy of every single figure and fact they report. Which is why it's sometimes annoying to see people treat paywalls as though they were moral disgraces. Source: I help invest for the chairman of the company.

I don't see it as a moral disgrace at all, but it really is an inconvenience. I have no way of creating this myself, but why doesn't the "Netflix" of journalism exist? Or why can't I just pay X$ more to my ISP, who has deals with publications such as the WSJ, to offer me access to their articles? I'd rather just browse and read, not manage subscriptions. EDIT: Apparently I'm replying too fast. Note that I quoted Netf…

ISPs probably wouldn't get enough customer adoption of such a service to make it worth their while. Someone needs to resurrect micropayments and figure out a way to make them work. There are a lot of people who don't necessarily want to subscribe to a news site but would be willing to pay a few pennies to read individual articles.

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#72

Post by chm »

heartbreak wrote: post #65
chm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being facetious or was this a real story? I'm not in America and have not heard of it.

It's real, and it's not in the Opinion section. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/18/be... (Paywall)

It wasn't behind a paywall for me at least. The article has a sensationalist headline but the content is what you would expect for a discussion about averages and pseudo-random quasi-uniform distributions : the average moves slightly. Big deal!

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#73

Post by DonHopkins »

Have other people noticed how many articles go out of their way to compare things in different units, like "30% of people do this, and 1 out of 5 do that"?

It's like they're trying to make it hard to compare things numerically on purpose, so you have to read and believe the conclusion in their verbal narrative.

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#74

Post by saganus »

heartbreak wrote: post #65
chm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being facetious or was this a real story? I'm not in America and have not heard of it.

It's real, and it's not in the Opinion section. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/18/be... (Paywall)

I didn't believed you until I read the article.

"$137 million divided by 4.7 million is ... $29.14.

More than 4.7 million contributions means, at most, 4,749,999 -- or else the campaign would round up to 4.8 million. Even with that higher number of donations, the average is $28.95. Which is more than $27."

This is laughable...but I haven't yet decided if it's in a good or a bad way. I mean, really? they are complaining about a 1-2 dollar difference from what BS says?

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#75

Post by jarjoura »

chm wrote: post #56
malchow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSJ has floors of smart, trained, inquisitive journalists who assemble real original data and break real original stories, and who try hard–through single, double, and triple verification–to ensure the accuracy of every single figure and fact they report. Which is why it's sometimes annoying to see people treat paywalls as though they were moral disgraces. Source: I help invest for the chairman of the company.

I don't see it as a moral disgrace at all, but it really is an inconvenience. I have no way of creating this myself, but why doesn't the "Netflix" of journalism exist? Or why can't I just pay X$ more to my ISP, who has deals with publications such as the WSJ, to offer me access to their articles? I'd rather just browse and read, not manage subscriptions. EDIT: Apparently I'm replying too fast. Note that I quoted Netf…

Isn't this Google News, Facebook Instant Articles, and now Apple News? They all ofter a ranked service that also happens to remove the visual clutter in exchange for guaranteeing eyeballs.

Articles probably make less money per person, but it's less customer hostile and I bet in the end makes these original content creators more money.

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#76

Post by morgante »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #54
wildmusings wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People make the mistake of equating editorials with political news. They are not the same thing. The opinion section, the pages that have OPINION in big bold text at the top, are forthrightly conservative/libertarian, even though they have at least one regular liberal opinion columnist (William Galston) and constantly have guest articles written by politicians and business leaders of all stripes. The news sections ar…

This is precisely what conservatives say about Fox News. Is the editorial firewall more effective at WSJ than at other News Corp properties? If not, you're being duped.

> Is the editorial firewall more effective at WSJ than at other News Corp properties?

Yes, it is. I know a number of liberal journalists who work at the WSJ and would never work at Fox and definitely wouldn't give a conservative tilt to their stories.

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#77

Post by st3v3r »

jkoebler wrote: post #37
uxp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some of those reporters are contracted to write five or even 10 posts per day. It's not like a NYT or WSJ reporter spending three weeks or three months on one story. Vice doesn't necessarily fall out of that category either. Smack dab in the middle is the statement: "I still had outstanding questions, which I asked Apple ... The company has not yet responded." The number of times I've read a developing story that h…

I wrote this article, I gave Apple 18 hours to respond. The article has now been out for four hours or so, and it's been close to 24 hours since I originally asked them. Apple RARELY responds to press inquiries and the only time it has reliably spoken to the press was during the recent encryption battle and that's because it desperately needed the public to understand its argument. I understand what you're getting at…

That really doesn't seem like a lot of time for them to respond. Especially given that for 10 or so of those hours, people are probably at home, asleep, or with their families.

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#78

Post by engi_nerd »

jeff_tyrrill wrote: post #45
bobwaycott wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the only time s/he's done it, and it reads as unnecessary ad spam—which is frequently looked down upon here. The same thing was downvoted in another thread. And if this user is going to continue doing it, it's going to become very annoying very quickly.

Hacker News would be immensely more valuable and useful to me if a poster such as abhi3 posted such a well-written summary on every story.

I don't want summaries in the discussion. I want actual discussion.

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#79

Post by Symbiote »

ktRolster wrote: post #57
heartbreak wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Washington Post was the paper that investigated and then wrote an article explaining that Bernie Sander's average campaign contribution is not actually the famous "Twenty-seven dollars", but in fact $27.88.

That sounds about as serious as this article from Vice. It's just click-bait. The worst thing they found (as far as I can see) is that the government required Apple to have a recycling program. What a horrible thing the first article was hiding from us.

The point is, that every manufacturer in the USA has a recycling program, as required by law. Why does Apple's press release get published as news?

Re: Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

#80

Post by specialist »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #39
c3534l wrote: post #21

What does it say about the world we live in where blogs do more basic journalism than CNN? All that one would have had to do is read the report actually provided. I don't think I'm being too extreme when I say that, apart from maybe PBS, there is no reputable source of news in America. If you don't believe me, pick a random story, watch it as it gets rewritten a million times through Reuters, then check back on the f…

Unfortunately it is very difficult to know which blogs have good journalism. Social media aggregators tried to collect the best from around the internet, but ended up even more sensationalist and biased than traditional media.

Any outlet providing citations, sources, verifiable data is a good start.
Post reply on HN