81–90 of 104 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always liked the look of lobste.rs but never knew anyone active there who could invite me (I've spent the last few years working at tiny startups and haven't spent nearly enough time networking with others outside my immediate circle).
what's your email?
RSS. Mercilessly tightly curated email, mastodon, diaspora, and reddit. But really: books. Mostly books.
Books are good; no arguing that. I am however very much interested in how you find the email lists to curate.
Has to be someone with curiosity, something to contibute, willingness to correspond (I'm a pseudonymous space alien cat, acquired taste), consideration of my time (and likewise). It's a small set.
RSS. Mercilessly tightly curated email, mastodon, diaspora, and reddit. But really: books. Mostly books.
This. I feel like the secret to being meaningfully informed is maintaining a balanced signal:noise ratio. Over time, I’ve come to realize that this is fundamentally impossible without “mercilessly tight” moderation, and tools/services that give you that power (RSS, email), because the state of the world is 1 part signal to 99 parts noise. Books, and by extension libraries, are a viscerally physical representation of…
I'm currently curating from a listing of 25k+ law articles on a topic of interest. Availability of those (free, online) has a huge influence. Thanks to the Library of Alexandra (Sci-Hub) and LibGen.
Adler's How to Read a Book is quite useful -- the synoptic approach especially.[2]
Making rapid assessments of suitability is crucial. Being prepared to revisit those assessments, either way, later, also. Developing indicators of crap or possible gold help immensely. Again, see Adler.
I spend considerabe time with older sources. They're often known to be wrong or inaccurate, but:
* The path they reveal in development of understanding is often hugely useful. To understand the bug, it helps to know how it came to be.
* The rhetorical and ideological battles to which they may have been part is usually now known, often spent. Literature -- science, technology, fiction, philosophy -- is all tremendously ideological, and being removed from the frame under which it was constructed, or being aware of it, helps immensely.
* One often finds one's own crazy notions expresed there, sometimes partially, sometimes far more clearly. I've generally found that the questions I've been most concerned with are in fact long-standing ones.
* Much current discussion retreads older thinking, though aparently unconsciousy and/or in complete ignorance.
The Copyright Abyss -- many materials published since 1924 -- is aboth a hinderance and a blessing. It's not complete (LibGen, Sci-Hub, ZLibrary, Open Library via Archive.org), but it is sufficiently effective that it tends to force consideration of earlier works.
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Notes:
1. The US Library of Congress houses 24 million catalogued books and over 168 million items in total.[3] Its annual reports show about 300,000 new book additions annually, a remarkably stable rate, since the 1950s.[4] Bowker issues about 300k ISBNs annually to traditional publishers, and another million to 'untraditional" (self-published) authors.[6] Google have estimated 129 million books were published, ever.[7] And there's the question of how many books can matter, culturally. About 3/4 of Americans read at least a bok a year,[8] which suggests a floor somewhere around 60 books over a lifetime. Given that there are other informational channels, how much information must be transmitted intergenerationally to preserve culture -- technically, socially, values, etc? "Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh."
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
3. https://loc.gov/about/general-information/#year-at-a-glance
4. https://loc.gov/about/reports-and-budgets/annual-reports/ http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000072049 [4]
5. One of the exceedingly rare cases in which Hathi Trust is actually useful.
6. http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-Data.html
7. http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-...
8. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-fe...
I have some tildes invites. Shoot me an email at yesreply (at) hoomane (dot) org with just a link to another profile of yours to make sure we keep the community full of nice humans. I’ll send you back one to the email you used.
The voting is based on a pagerank reputation system. Users earn reputation from getting thier comments upvoted and, in turn, increase the rank of the posts they upvote. This makes rankings sybil-resistant making manipulation harder and moderation easier. So far its been a great way to keep communities focused and resistant to mob mentality.
Each community manages their own reputation system (admins are in the personalization vector).
There is also a prediction-market mechanism overlayed on top of the rankings — you can bet on post's relevance within a given community (this is abstracted from the UX at the moment).
Disclosure, I'm the founder.
https://relevant.community/relevant/top has a good mix of technology and culture/society content similar to HN. The voting is based on a pagerank reputation system. Users earn reputation from getting thier comments upvoted and, in turn, increase the rank of the posts they upvote. This makes rankings sybil-resistant making manipulation harder and moderation easier. So far its been a great way to keep communities focus…
Also, TIL of the concept of a Sybil attack, AKA sock-puppeting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
> an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer networks [...] named after the subject of the [1973] book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. The name was suggested in or before 2002 by Brian Zill at Microsoft Research
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you curate Twitter? I have my account inactive since forever because I wasn't able to deal with the flood of messages.
Make sure you are super careful who you follow, Mute a lot of people and use the "I don't like this tweet" judiciously.
personal finance and so much more.