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Is that true? [0] The real question would be "inflation adjusted per-capita tax receipts over time" but a mid-work googling didn't turn up anything promising; that being said from the above graph _and_ the knowledge that inflation is increasing, your statement doesn't seem to mesh. Feel free to point out if I was really thick and got the wrong data or something. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W006RC1Q027SBEA
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Yeah, HackerNews seems to be getting closer to Reddit by the day.
I don't know what you mean by that. I participate on Reddit. I experience HN and Reddit as completely different animals. I see them as very extremely an apples to oranges comparison.
What I meant is:
Three years ago, HackerNews seemed (to me) to be a forum for intellectuals to discuss things business/tech-y. Opinions were mostly well thought out. When they weren't, they were challenged (thanks for calling me out [= ).
Now it just seems like the break-room banter. A lot of sensationalist articles seem to make the front page. A lot of purely comedic comments (which I do appreciate). A lot more unfounded anecdotes. A lot of promotional posts, etc.
Also -- and I'm admittedly putting on my tin hat here -- I've seen a lot of discussions that seem like they're just troll accounts trying to further polarize the community.
Maybe I'm part of the problem ]=
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There are now 5 million visitors a year. So it's not really shocking that more "mainstream" stuff does better these days than it might have done back in the day. I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later. I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, t…
> I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons. As politics has become more contentious in recent years, both parties have staked out more and more things as "theirs", which promotes people seeing information that is for or against (or even just about , and confirmation bias does the rest) one of these areas as being political. There's likely also…
I hope it doesn't impact the content or discussion too much.
That economic growth came at a pretty severe cost though. The budget deficit blew out by 17% in 2018 as a result of the tax cuts.
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There are now 5 million visitors a year. So it's not really shocking that more "mainstream" stuff does better these days than it might have done back in the day. I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later. I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, t…
> I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons. As politics has become more contentious in recent years, both parties have staked out more and more things as "theirs", which promotes people seeing information that is for or against (or even just about , and confirmation bias does the rest) one of these areas as being political. There's likely also…
Most likely, the two things were not specifically intended to disenfranchise Native voters. Neither taken alone is malicious. Taken together, the outcome is de facto disenfranchisement.
I'm very slightly Cherokee. I've begun following more Native American twitter accounts and I started a new blog to explore my Native heritage a bit. I've posted a number of items about Native issues because that's something I happen to be reading here lately.
There's no political agenda there, though I keep waiting to be accused of such. I post things I happen to trip across. HN can upvote or flag (or just ignore) as it sees fit.
I've largely given up on predicting what works here. I have essentially zero ability to do that.
Is it just me or has the HN front page been more overtly political in the last few days? This is #1, some fear-mongering about China from Bloomberg is #2 (as if we forgot their technical fear-mongering about China the other day), and both of the stories are mainstream news (explicitly discouraged in the Guidelines) and have no particular "hacker" angle, except insofar as many hackers participate in the world economy…
That economic growth came at a pretty severe cost though. The budget deficit blew out by 17% in 2018 as a result of the tax cuts.
For a long time I couldn't wrap my head around why defecits matter to the US when we print our currency. To be honest I still don't fully understand the hand wringing over a balanced budget and reading more about modern monetary theory is leading me to believe that for a superpower which issues it's own currency the defecit is more of a political issue that a concrete one. The defecit just keeps ballooning but the on…
But how would those creditors respond? They would refuse to lend in US dollars in future, and the US government and private companies would be forced to borrow in a foreign currency. Net result is that the US loses a valuable asset - the ability to borrow in its own currency - and becomes more like Turkey or Argentina.
Is it just me or has the HN front page been more overtly political in the last few days? This is #1, some fear-mongering about China from Bloomberg is #2 (as if we forgot their technical fear-mongering about China the other day), and both of the stories are mainstream news (explicitly discouraged in the Guidelines) and have no particular "hacker" angle, except insofar as many hackers participate in the world economy…
There are now 5 million visitors a year. So it's not really shocking that more "mainstream" stuff does better these days than it might have done back in the day. I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later. I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, t…
Posting factual and informative articles is promoting a certain kind of political agenda, truth-based.
That economic growth came at a pretty severe cost though. The budget deficit blew out by 17% in 2018 as a result of the tax cuts.
For a long time I couldn't wrap my head around why defecits matter to the US when we print our currency. To be honest I still don't fully understand the hand wringing over a balanced budget and reading more about modern monetary theory is leading me to believe that for a superpower which issues it's own currency the defecit is more of a political issue that a concrete one. The defecit just keeps ballooning but the on…
Also, there's the question of who owns all that debt that the US relies on for its continued existence. For example, China owns a big chunk of it, like ~$1.2 trillion. They buy tons of US Treasury bonds because they're considered a safe investment. China gives the US a bunch of money up front, and the US has to give China a bunch more money back in the future, like over the course of 10 years. A lot of Americans also own US bonds, which help fund the debt, but they own them because they're a safe investment, not because they want to lend the government money.
So, as long as the US is in debt, it's forced to rely on other countries and its own credit rating to keep it going. That's a problem. And at some point, the sheer amount of debt will lower that credit rating, making those US bonds less of a safe investment, and that would be the tipping point at which everything starts falling apart. It will be much harder to fund deficit spending, which could snowball into printing money, then fast forward 5 years and boom, zombie apocalypse (or at least a potential Venezuela or Weimar Republic type situation).
TL;DR: the deficit is an existential threat the US if it's not kept under control.
Is it just me or has the HN front page been more overtly political in the last few days? This is #1, some fear-mongering about China from Bloomberg is #2 (as if we forgot their technical fear-mongering about China the other day), and both of the stories are mainstream news (explicitly discouraged in the Guidelines) and have no particular "hacker" angle, except insofar as many hackers participate in the world economy…
I’ve been noticing this for some time as well. Either HN is becoming more political or someone is manipulating the voting. I honestly think HN is at its best when it’s apolitical.