61–67 of 67 posts
The trick always is...
I skim, and I skim quickly. I completely ignore entertainamy,and have learned to avoid empty stories, and ... Literally bot-shit. I had to take over a mailbox from an employee who almost never used it. 30k of emails. I started at 1~200 a day, and soon reached 1000+ and kept up with the current stream. Completed the whole task before my probationary review. The trick always is...
Media's aim is to keep people emotionally hooked on short term directional adjustments in political trajectory, including the presented minutia of the events that seem to determine it. The only way to consume news, without subjecting oneself to the inner turmoil that the news is designed to produce, is to develop a long term theory and then just check in with the headlines to make sure that things are progressing tow…
Media's aim is to keep people emotionally hooked on short term directional adjustments in political trajectory, including the presented minutia of the events that seem to determine it. The only way to consume news, without subjecting oneself to the inner turmoil that the news is designed to produce, is to develop a long term theory and then just check in with the headlines to make sure that things are progressing tow…
Another fun thing to do, along a similar train of thought, is to use something like the internet archive [1] to go look at your news site of choice, a year or two back, and see how their attention-grabbing predictions and declarations played out. In general, they won't. And this newfound knowledge can then be carried forward when reading the attention-grabbing predictions and declarations of today. It's basically a m…
When I am done reading the batch it creates another batch.
It learned that I'm not interested in breathless articles about Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the like so it shows me very few of them. I have about 120 RSS feed including news from some free sources like The Guardian and also some paywalled sources such as the LA Times and the Japan Times but also papers from arXiv, top articles from Lobsters, a few open source "planets", etc. I'd like to add more independent blogs but those are expensive to ingest with the superfeedr head end I use now which costs about 10 cents/month/feed. YOShInOn helps me find articles to submit to Hacker News so if you look at the articles I submit that gives you some idea of what I subscribe to.
YOShInOn generates links to archive.today for paywalled articles, which I don't feel bad about. The news media tolerates that site for the same reason you used to be able to log into every news site with media/media -- every journalist has to have access to every paper there is for fact checking, but no way is the New York Times going to stoop to buying their journalists accounts for every small town newspaper and no way a small town newspaper can afford to buy their journalists accounts for The New York Time. So they need some kind of paywall bypass, they just want it to keep quiet.
My wish for a better news ecosystem would be this: At the bottom of every story should be - at least one but preferably a few - exact quantitative predictions based on the story. So, for example, after a dramatic story about a pending government shutdown it should say: - over 100 children will die due to loss of funding to lunch programs (if shutdown occurs %78 - Government will be shut down for > 2 weeks %63 - > 10,…
My preference would be the opposite of this: I'd like to see news report factual information on events that have actually ocurred. Prediction is not news, it's a guess. A guess is fictional, not factual. I'd prefer factual news...
In my opinion; all news articles have implicit predictions, I'd like to see them be explicit so the journalists can be held accountable
for example, here's (opening paragraph) one of the top articles from Fox News:
The majority of official documents signed by President Joe Biden allegedly
used the same autopen signature, reinvigorating concerns over the former
president’s mental acuity and if he "actually ordered the signature of
relevant legal documents," a report published by an arm of the Heritage
Foundation found.
Trump’s return to the White House has increased geopolitical tensions, as he’s
enacted sweeping changes to the United States’ international military and
economic policies and upended decadeslong relationships with several close
allies. Tensions between the U.S. and Canada, in particular, have manifested
at recent sporting events, with Canadian fans booing the American national
anthem at professional games after Trump suggested that Canada allow itself to
be annexed.
(Fox News) 1) Other presidents personally signed most of their official documents (87%) 2) Biden was unaware of the content of legal documents being signed in his name (79%) 3) White House staff made executive decisions without presidential authorization (88%)
(MSNBC) 1) Canada will formally cut diplomatic ties with the US by the end of Trump's term (35%) 2) American citizens will face increased hostility or travel restrictions in at least 5 allied nations (40%) 3) At least three longtime US allies will form a new coalition specifically to counter American influence (81%)
I'm obv not sure I'm extracting those correctly, but I think you get the point; the tone in which articles are written (and even more insidious is the decision on which stories are "important" / the frequency of certain storylines over others) are intended to impart an opinion, I want that explicit
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strive to only read news that I pay for and I think that info gaps are a risk worth taking to maintain my mental health. I only subscribe to weeklies. I no longer see much value in daily news.
Genuine question: do you consider Hacker News news? Because I believe answer is yes (judging by the name). Maybe it would be good idea to once a week open some site that aggregates top HN posts of the week and treat it like weekly newsletter I guess every blog infrequently emitting posts can count as weekly news too, you don't even need to aggregate anything. RSS definitely helps to keep everything in one place thoug…
I'll open up HN on my phone when I'm waiting around - to see what people are talking about. Since I can't click on the referenced articles (I white-list URLs on my iPhone), I only read the comments and not the referenced article. But even on my desktop where I don't white-list, I rarely open the referenced article. I can get a tl;dr from reading comments even if there wasn't an explicit tl;dr comment.
HN has an awesome and open API so that certainly would be possible to create a weekly summary. And if it existed, I certainly would use it.