801–810 of 812 posts
This article does seem to get at the essence of HN, appreciative of dang and sctb's humanity while not ignoring the problems. Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia. If there's one critique that I believe is paramount it's that HN has, due to its readership, an ethical obligation that goes beyond making discussions all…
... the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility. What kind of power do you think we have? We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook. Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
In actuality we're no different than the billions of others on the planet and no amount of Silicon Valley startup experience is going to change that.
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Building your own video card is political, sorry. I'm not even kidding. To elaborate: * To get the obvious one out of the way: it's something you need sufficient free time, money and knowledge in order to even do, so the author likely comes from a certain amount of privilege which colors his experience. * Building a video card is in itself only possible due to the existence of open standards and free access to the re…
No, an article about building your own video card is not political. Admittedly, if an article about building a video card went into opinions on open standards, included anti-consumerist comments, talked about legal considerations then it would be political to a varying degree. But an article about building a video card in of itself does not have to mention any of that and would therefore be non-political. If everythi…
The word "political" doesn't have no meaning, unless you take it to be understood as purely binary (i.e. "there are politics in this or there are not") in which case it's indeed a useless qualifier because, as I explained, there are always politics in it if there are humans involved. So yes, "x is political" is a useless statement because it is practically tautological in most situations where it is uttered -- but the same is true for "the Earth isn't flat", yet that's a perfectly sensible thing to say when dealing with Flat Earthers, just as "everything is political" is sensible to say when someone claims it very much isn't.
You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
EDIT: It's also important to understand the distinction between "x has no meaning" and "x is no useful distinguishing quality". "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do, including what humans write, especially when they write about other humans. That's meaningful. But the qualification of something humans do as "political" is indeed useless just as qualifying water as "wet"[0] is generally also useless, because if those qualities are always present for everything in that category (i.e. all water is "wet", all human communication is "political") there's nothing the presence of the quality distinguishes any of those things from (of course water is "wet", hence why we don't talk about "wet water" and just talk about "water" instead, with the implicit understanding that because it is water, it is also wet).
[0]: Using the colloquial definition of "wetness" here. There are other definitions according to which e.g. soapy water is "wetter" than pure water but that's not generally what a layperson means when they say something is wet (i.e. is covered or soaked in water).
I liked this article, though I think it missed the best part of Hacker News. To me, Hacker News can feel like walking through Dumbledore's office -- magical and mind-bending collections of incredible devices, ideas, and oddities. Just yesterday someone posted a comment with links to UI design libraries that I've been subconsciously wishing for in my dreams (humaans, undraw.co), and I used it in a product demo. As a s…
Since this comment gained traction, here are some better examples of what I meant by dumbledore's office: A romp through approaches to generative adversarial networks described as if they are realms in a Tolkein world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251308 (This week's) complete guide to building a terminal text editor from scratch in C which gently holds your hand at each step: https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you! Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?
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No, an article about building your own video card is not political. Admittedly, if an article about building a video card went into opinions on open standards, included anti-consumerist comments, talked about legal considerations then it would be political to a varying degree. But an article about building a video card in of itself does not have to mention any of that and would therefore be non-political. If everythi…
You can't just reply to a detailed explanation of why something is political with "no, it isn't". That's not an argument and I'm pretty sure it isn't in the spirit of HN's guidelines (whether or not I personally agree with them in general or not). The word "political" doesn't have no meaning, unless you take it to be understood as purely binary (i.e. "there are politics in this or there are not") in which case it's i…
That's an interesting take since I refuted your points. You simply added a bunch of potential political concepts to something that wasn't political and then claimed it was.
> You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
> "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do
If it applies to everything that humans do then there is no "involves politics" or "expresses politics". A human taking a shit isn't expressing politics no matter how hard the struggle is -- so I've just refuted that obviously over-broad point.
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The majority of the time you've killed my comments.
What comments? That's not something we commonly do, unless we've banned the account.
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What comments? That's not something we commonly do, unless we've banned the account.
It's rarely/ever paid off to engage with you on these issues, but if you genuinely do care, I have a 10 year history in which some of my comments have been killed, and in the majority of those comments it's been because of the very existence of disagreement, not because of the nature of how the disagreement was playing out.
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What comments? That's not something we commonly do, unless we've banned the account.
It's rarely/ever paid off to engage with you on these issues, but if you genuinely do care, I have a 10 year history in which some of my comments have been killed, and in the majority of those comments it's been because of the very existence of disagreement, not because of the nature of how the disagreement was playing out.
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It's rarely/ever paid off to engage with you on these issues, but if you genuinely do care, I have a 10 year history in which some of my comments have been killed, and in the majority of those comments it's been because of the very existence of disagreement, not because of the nature of how the disagreement was playing out.
Any description of why comments are killed by anyone other than the people who killed it is imputing motives based on almost no direct evidence.