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Did You Hear We Got Osama?

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131–140 of 212 posts

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#131
post #14

Wow. This really hit me in the face. This is exactly my situation, my issues right now (and I am also a college/university freshman). I am spending so much time consuming information that I am behind on essentially everything I should and could be doing. I think I needed to read this. "What followed were the most productive three years of my life." It's become an addiction for sure, but I have had enough. Seeing some…

You sound like me 3 years ago. I used to go into zombie-mode for long periods of time just reading every single link on Reddit, Google Reader, random news sites, etc. and afterwards I'd hardly be able to remember any of it. I still do this on occasion, but it's much less of a problem now. I had to take a tough approach with myself to build some better habits, but it worked. I decided was that if I was going to take t…

Fantastic idea!

I've recently taken to discarding my bookmarks and relying on other methods to save interesting links. If I want to save something for later use, I'll tweet about it, write a tiny blog post about it, or jot it down in a notebook. I'm not terribly diligent about it, but it's made a huge impact towards helping me filter what is truly important.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#133
post #14

Wow. This really hit me in the face. This is exactly my situation, my issues right now (and I am also a college/university freshman). I am spending so much time consuming information that I am behind on essentially everything I should and could be doing. I think I needed to read this. "What followed were the most productive three years of my life." It's become an addiction for sure, but I have had enough. Seeing some…

this is awesome! had to read through a lot of comments to get here, but power to you, man!

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#134
post #97

This is a topic that I've thought some on in that my company is in the recommendations space, and some thoughts on what make news recommendations difficult: The function of news is to facilitate smalltalk. I am reasonably convinced of this. News, as such, is mostly just something that you're supposed to have read so that you can get by in usual social interactions. What we read (and are supposed to have read) is very…

Why is there not a service that tracks news stories and algorithmically relates them into the narrative of history, driven by the singular question of "why?"? Something in between google news and quora/stack exchange (anonymized to avoid embarrassment of dumb questions like "what are Israel and Palestine fighting over anyway?" but with a points/voting system to propagate quality answers.) Whoever makes this, please Tell HN so I can sign up for your beta.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#135

I fundamentally disagree with the author, and yet agree with him at the same time. I don't have MPD, but he makes two different points. On the one hand: no, my life would be considerably less richer if I did not pay attention to the world around me. This includes knowing who the President is and understanding why that matters, particularly in the case of the US's first black President. I grew up in Texas, and it matt…

really interesting perspective, I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of "richness of life"

I guess my rebuttal would be that the news i was reading didn't make my life any richer. it's all so pandoring that it's intentionally not rich, I think.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#137
While I agree with the idea that, "consuming has a more immediate reward than creating," the need to be distracted isn't the only reason. We do want to be informed and reputable media outlets, for the most part, do want to inform. It is our inability to effective process the ever increasing amount of information out there. Maybe we need to take on less interests or maybe we need better filters (Google isn't cutting it?).

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#139

I disagree with your fundamental point that all news sources are not trying to educate or inform you, but are instead trying to entertain you in some bias way. Of course nearly all of them are in order to make a profit (Fox News for instance), but I'm frustrated that you don't see the value that organizations like The Associated Press offer to a free society. The AP is a non-profit, un-biased organization that provid…

installed AP Mobile. I think there's still gems out there, for example I love Planet Money.

I'll give AP Mobile a try, thanks!

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