Ignore the news • Hacker News Board

Re: Ignore the news

#41

Post by bpatrianakos » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 1:40 PM UTC

I hope we all start to move past this phase. Is it really worth the energy of starting and maintaining a "news diet" when you already know what's wrong with news? I went through a phase where I thought no news would be good for me. Then I grew out of it. I realized that if a person understands what's wrong with news they're really not the ones who need to abstain. It's everyone who hasn't realized it yet.

I read a lot about this "no news/news is bad for you" meme going around the past few years and I have to admit it's getting a little lame. How about just taking the news for what it is and take in what you want and leave the rest. Am I odd in that I don't have any emotional reaction when I hear of a rape, murder, or most other tragedies on the news? I was in Europe during the Oklahoma tornadoes and when I heard about it on the news when I came back I thought "hmm, so this is the new big story for the next week" before falling asleep. It's not that I don't care, but I also kind of don't care.

Re: Ignore the news

#42

Post by icebraining » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 1:45 PM UTC

slacka wrote: post #35

icebraining wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an intellectual curiosity for world news and strong critical thinking skills. And apparently, a penchant for throwing around insults. choosing to get his news from Twitter over let's say NPR https://twitter.com/nprnews Of all the hoax or inaccurate stories that I've come across this year, Twitter take the crown followed by news aggregators and email. Twitter is just an aggregation technology. If you get inaccu…

Cute, except the article stated he was getting them from "people" NOT news outlets. Sorry if my insults offended you, but this article was link bait trash designed to make the misinformed, filter-bubbled, over-protective moms feel better about themselves. I call it how I see it.

Cute, except the article stated he was getting them from "people" NOT news outlets.

"People" (usually) don't create news, they filter them from other sources, such as news outlets. Some republish crap, others distort those news when tweeting them, others mostly just filter the irrelevant and republish the useful.

Getting crap is a consequence of your own choices, not of the underlying technology.

Sorry if my insults offended you, but this article was link bait trash designed to make the misinformed, filter-bubbled, over-protective moms feel better about themselves. I call it how I see it.

http://xkcd.com/386/

Re: Ignore the news

#43

Post by unimpressive » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 2:04 PM UTC

yareally wrote: post #26

workbench wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read so many bad "articles" on medium this month that I'm gonna stop clicking them.

I mostly come to HN for the comments and the articles secondary. Sometimes I want to flag a link bait or potentially bad article, but I decide against it because while the article might be sub-par, the comments that will follow on HN will be much more insightful and interesting.

It's too bad I don't know more about how to set up a problem in game theory, or I'd try to evaluate how this logic will eventually impact HN. Because I've seen it used more than once.

Re: Ignore the news

#44

Post by throwmeaway141 » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 2:05 PM UTC

regal wrote: post #21

danso wrote: post #6

As a former newspaper person, I'm inclined to say "But oh, knowing current events is our civic duty"...and it is ....but consuming journalism isn't the same as consuming news, and reading a lengthy in depth story about an event that happened last month or last year or even the last decade is likely more helpful than staying abreast of the 24 hour news cycle. This has been said before, but I'd also argue that the cons…

"all those accumulated hours of listening didn't mean a thing." This is exactly it. I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years (so a whole heck of a lot of time to kill), and frequently spent hours every day reading the news. One day I asked myself, "What have I learned?" I couldn't come up with anything. After that, I quit reading the news and started reading cl…

I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years

I know this isn't really relevant to the main topic under discussion, but thank you so much for posting this. I thought I was the only one in the world. I work eight hours a day and I have between 10-30 minutes of real work to do each day, mainly fairly dull administrative stuff and answering the occasional email.

I'm not underperforming, I do everything that's asked of me and plenty more besides, but there's just not enough for me to do. I can't even surf job sites or anything, to find something a bit more stimulating, because my screen is overlooked by colleagues. The workplace is poorly organised and unstructured - there are no performance reviews, no targets, nothing.

I end up spending most of the day reading HN in my browser (because it's a 'safe' text based site that I can read without it being eye-catching to colleagues/the boss) and other sites in elinks in a terminal (to prevent images, huge fonts, etc). I also listen to a lot of speech radio, because that's invisible and still stimulating.

I don't know why I really wrote this comment, but I just wanted to say how appreciative I am that I know I'm not the only one. It's been 18 months now...

(Throwaway because my real account is under my real name.)

Re: Ignore the news

#45

Post by conanbatt » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 2:10 PM UTC

I also dislike reading the news. I picked up this habit 2 months ago and i feel it wastes so much time.

However its not 100% waste. At least here in Argentina, what I read on the newspaper have direct consequences on economic decisions in the every-day life. Literally, from going to the super market, to spending with your credit-card to buying illegal currency.

On the other hand, Argentina is going through the middle of a political-economical crisis so the news become a very relevant termometer.

Re: Ignore the news

#46

Post by venus » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 2:26 PM UTC

throwmeaway141 wrote: post #44

regal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"all those accumulated hours of listening didn't mean a thing." This is exactly it. I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years (so a whole heck of a lot of time to kill), and frequently spent hours every day reading the news. One day I asked myself, "What have I learned?" I couldn't come up with anything. After that, I quit reading the news and started reading cl…

I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years I know this isn't really relevant to the main topic under discussion, but thank you so much for posting this. I thought I was the only one in the world. I work eight hours a day and I have between 10-30 minutes of real work to do each day, mainly fairly dull administrative stuff and answering the occasional email. I'm no…

You know what, I had a job like that for a while. It's called being a sysadmin at a medium size company, because after a while, if you're competent, you basically automate yourself out of any regular work. Every now and again would be something irregular - an urgent update, hardware failure, X or Y, but the vast majority of the time there was nothing to do at all.

For the first year or two it seems cool to be paid to do nothing but after a while I realised I was literally idling away my life, so I switched to actually building things instead.

Re: Ignore the news

#47

Post by mathattack » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 2:29 PM UTC

Quoting Taleb (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb)

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers."

Of course this assumes that you're not in the business of knowing what other people know. If it's important being in the zeitgeist than you have to keep track of the drivel. This is one downside of working in Sales. :-)

Re: Ignore the news

#48

Post by gurkendoktor » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 2:30 PM UTC

kmfrk wrote: post #10

lovskogen wrote: post #7

I've been doing this for a long while. I don't see any value in the typical "daily news". Instead I read books, or articles from a selection of sites. And of course HN. Daily news is a waste of time.

Hacker News doesn't fall under "daily news"?

HN could delay each submission by a week or a month and it would be as good or bad as before.

Re: Ignore the news

#49

Post by figbucket » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 2:43 PM UTC

pinaceae wrote: post #37

figbucket wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone already has a bubble around them. The difference is whether you consciously choose to let information/ideas/people/news in or not. Making the conscious choice to filter to your preferrences is important and liberating because it enables you more control over the kind of life you want to live.

i question the placement of the filter. by filtering at the source, you will never be exposed to something outside your bubble. the NYT front page (as an example) is great as it covers such a wide array of topics, just browsing over them gives you the chance to learn something new. if your current interests and beliefs act as filters, then how will you ever develop new ones? or, coming down to the core topic of this…

You're right however part of the freedom comes from choosing where your bubble ends. Consciously choosing where you filter what you allow into your bubble be it NYT front page or fox news etcetera.

>if your current interests and beliefs act as filters, then how will you ever develop new ones?

This partly comes down to being another personal choice and also consider that many things are linked in a way that enables you to develop new interests and beliefs.

One example of this is Wikipedia. Starting from pretty much any point of interest, you can find a great depth of chain linked resources to information you can choose to read and allow influence your interests and beliefs

>or, coming down to the core topic of this site, how will you know your audience... ?

Best to start by building what you know however I realise that's unrealistic. After that you just accept that you can't filter everything because somethings you want in your bubble have baggage. "Every rose has its thorne" as the saying goes.

Re: Ignore the news

#50

Post by throwmeaway141 » Mon, Jun 03, 2013, 2:55 PM UTC

venus wrote: post #46

throwmeaway141 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years I know this isn't really relevant to the main topic under discussion, but thank you so much for posting this. I thought I was the only one in the world. I work eight hours a day and I have between 10-30 minutes of real work to do each day, mainly fairly dull administrative stuff and answering the occasional email. I'm no…

You know what, I had a job like that for a while. It's called being a sysadmin at a medium size company, because after a while, if you're competent, you basically automate yourself out of any regular work. Every now and again would be something irregular - an urgent update, hardware failure, X or Y, but the vast majority of the time there was nothing to do at all. For the first year or two it seems cool to be paid to…

This could also be my story - when I started here, things were set up so inefficiently that it was a full time job. Now, I've scripted and automated most stuff so it just happens, and all I have to do is check that it's happened, and fix it if it hasn't.

Sometimes I consider breaking things, just so I've got something to do to fix them...