381–390 of 407 posts
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Care to share links to some of these insightful posts?
> Care to share links to some of these insightful posts? Implying that the writings could only have been online? There once was a time when we wrote on paper, with pencil and pen, or if you were really well off you had a typewriter.
(But no, they are not online as they were essays that I did for school).
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"Except when I'm on HN" Very possible that there are people on HN that don't care as well. But because of the overwhelming amount of people who make their opinions known who do care, it would be karma suicide to admit otherwise except in the most delicate terms. Even if you don't need or care about karma points it generally doesn't feel good to have people load up on you. I wonder at what point any issue within a gro…
There are a few, i've seen their posts here and there, and they do seem to get downvoted pretty severely. It's unfortunate, not necessarily because I agree with them but everyone has the right to at least make their case. That seems to be one of the downsides of the karma system - when a population of high karma users tend towards a certain point of view it creates social pressure for others to reinforce the orthodox…
I would add also that I'm sure there are people that don't realize that a high karma score can come not only from comments such as you describe but additionally simply because someone was the early poster of a story that got voted up.
So in a certain karma range we don't know how many points are from that vs. from agreement with a comment. (My guess though is that as karma increases most of it comes from comments and activity that is not related to posting a popular link).
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There are a few, i've seen their posts here and there, and they do seem to get downvoted pretty severely. It's unfortunate, not necessarily because I agree with them but everyone has the right to at least make their case. That seems to be one of the downsides of the karma system - when a population of high karma users tend towards a certain point of view it creates social pressure for others to reinforce the orthodox…
"without having a measure of the posters' relative popularity" I would add also that I'm sure there are people that don't realize that a high karma score can come not only from comments such as you describe but additionally simply because someone was the early poster of a story that got voted up. So in a certain karma range we don't know how many points are from that vs. from agreement with a comment. (My guess thoug…
It really does seem all but meaningless, and yet it seems as if the whole culture of this site is build around farming it and gaming it.
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That's what I thought when I was 15. It's probably what most academically gifted 15 year olds think. Go back and read some of your stuff in another 5 years, and then another 5. And tally the face palms. It's a good exercise in humility, something that is often hard to appreciate as a 15 year old
It would be beneficial for the discussion if you could recall any specific examples of things you misinterpreted or missed as a teenage reader.
I woke up to this around 25 or so. It was actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series, of course, not the forgettable movie) that tripped this for me; I realized I cared far more about the characters than any campy horror show had any right to make me care, and I began to wonder why, and poke into the mechanics of how that was done. That turned out to be a longish and interesting journey.
(I know I've mentioned several media that aren't "reading" here, but it trivially applies there as well.)
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Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.
My god, when you are older, you will look back and wish that you pursued the "shallow" things in high school. Some of those experiences are not going to be available at any other time in your life. Being an intellectual is overrated; don't be so quick to judge your peers, many of them are wise in ways that you cannot see.
I had only a few high school friends, I neither attended prom nor anther school-related party, never joined a sport-team[1]. Fast forward 11-15 years I have great friends (only a handful of whom were my classmates), am engaged to a wonderful woman, and have no dearth of hobbies.
What do I think was most important? Learning, pursuing things that were interesting to me and cultivating a passion for them (note how so many people are in a quixotic search for pre-existing passions, i.e., in a quarter-life crisis?), interacting with older individuals (they took me seriously, did not make fun of the way I dressed, did not mock my accent or my lastname, did not beat and otherwise bully me, etc...), taking AP classes as well as classes at near-by colleges (the last two activities opened my eyes to new subjects, taught me to learn, and convinced me to pursue a higher education), etc...
I regret not paying enough attention to academic subjects that I _thought_ did not interest me (in college, it turned out that they interested me a great deal), assuming that I had no chance of getting into certain colleges or paying for them, not cultivating an interest in topics like philosophy or history early enough (sticking to just computing, etc...), not participating in "nerdy" clubs (like robotics, programming competitions, etc...)
Yet on the "social" front I've zero regrets: it is much easier to make friends when you've got more in common with people then a school district boundary; dating is much easier when you're independent (not living with your parents, not reliant on a group of friends for all of your social outings), well read, educated (whether formally or self-taught), and otherwise interesting. I don't feel I've missed anything by foregoing that part of life.
[1] Caveat: if you do enjoy a sport, by all means join a sport team or play intramurally. Just don't play a sport for the sake of playing a sport or for a college resume (universities want well rounded student bodies, but they don't necessarily require that every student be "well rounded").
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Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.
That's what I thought when I was 15. It's probably what most academically gifted 15 year olds think. Go back and read some of your stuff in another 5 years, and then another 5. And tally the face palms. It's a good exercise in humility, something that is often hard to appreciate as a 15 year old
If you could run the experiment the other direction, I wonder how different the results would look. That is, what proportion is "growth" and what is simply "difference".
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No. You're making an unfounded assumption, which is that the interpretation Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman took of that slide deck --- an interpretation Snowden appears to share --- is also what NSA believes to be the case about their access to Google's servers. It does not follow logically that because one interpretation of an NSA slide deck is that they have direct access to the servers operating Google Mail th…
Funny that you should mention moving goalposts. That seems to be the M.O. of the NSA apologists. First, the arguments is "It's not content. It's just metadata, which is no different from addresses on postal mail envelopes". That's already a terrible rationalization. But, then, revelations come out that it is more than metadata being captured. It's actual call content and no warrant is required for a run of the mill "…
For me, it's simply a matter of valuing truth over privacy.
Thanks orokusaki
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Indeed all states derive their power from the consent of the governed, do they not? What would have happened if even a third of Iraq decided to ignore their government under Saddam? The government couldn't have responded. Governments work because we agree to do what they say. Now things like drones centralize some of the power in ways that could not be done before but only to a point and the complexity overhead count…
>Complacency is how tyranny works everywhere and in all ages. I think your point specifically about Iraq is largely likely to be correct, but I have never been able to swallow this argument, which comes up just about every discussion of tyranny I see/hear. A fundamental component of true tyranny is violence or an immediate threat of violence (as opposed to the somewhat more abstract monopoly on force that democratic…
1. Threatening violence against those who oppose them.
2. Propaganda purporting to show the exceptional nature of the dictator. North Korea for example portrayed Kim Jung Il as a genius mathematician, philosopher, writer, and much more.
3. Socially isolate resistance and ensure they cannot talk to eachother. This takes many forms, but in Iraq for example, a lot of effort was spent fomenting conflict between various small groups in Iraqi society.
The goal is an environment where nobody can effectively oppose not just because they are afraid, but because the images of the grand dictator are so prevalent and everyone is so preoccupied that organized opposition is just not possible. The result is that as soon as folks stop being complacent because organization becomes feasible, the dictatorship falls.
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My god, when you are older, you will look back and wish that you pursued the "shallow" things in high school. Some of those experiences are not going to be available at any other time in your life. Being an intellectual is overrated; don't be so quick to judge your peers, many of them are wise in ways that you cannot see.
As someone approaching 30, but with very clear memory of their mdi-to-late teens, I will disagree. I did not pursue any of the "shallow" things in high school and I do not at all regret that. I had only a few high school friends, I neither attended prom nor anther school-related party, never joined a sport-team[1]. Fast forward 11-15 years I have great friends (only a handful of whom were my classmates), am engaged t…