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Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#341

Post by sebleon »

thowar2 wrote: post #34

Education should be on this list. The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education. 1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy. 2) The current goals for education do not align with current…

Agreed, education is probably the most high leverage investment out there for society. That being said, I'm highly skeptical that it will be fixed by a profit-driven, venture-backed business.

Much like healthcare, education's goals dont fit capitalisms mold.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#342

Post by mej10 »

davidivadavid wrote: post #281
RangerScience wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", perhaps?

It seems like that reference always pops up in discussions about education. Is anyone aware of any attempts at tackling the idea in reality?

I don't know whether either of these set out with the idea of creating the Primer, but they seem similar.

Osmo - https://www.playosmo.com/en/ - seems pretty cool. Uses the iPad camera and packets of materials for interactive learning experiences. It could evolve into something like the Primer.

"One Laptop per Child" has/had similar goals while not being nearly as advanced/cohesive as the Primer.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#343

Post by pgodzin »

masonic wrote: post #340
pgodzin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A ban on 7 Muslim-majority countries with exceptions for minority religions. In addition: "I’ll tell you the whole history of it: When he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban,'" Giuliani said on Fox News. "He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’" source: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/316726-giuliani-t...

with exceptions for minority religions. That appears to be totally false. Where do you get that? https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/01/29/protecting-nation-foreig...

"(b) Upon the resumption of USRAP admissions, the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality. Where necessary and appropriate, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security shall recommend legislation to the President that would assist with such prioritization."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/politics/refugee-musli...

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#344

Post by mjolk »

sparkzilla wrote: post #316
mjolk wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My site, an actual working solution to the problem of both fake news and bias, is doing great (Over three million page views last month). How is crowd-funded media a solution to the problem of bias and factually unsound reporting? I found a link to your site from your profile and it appears to be a gossip and tabloid site with a focus on UFC.

It's early days, so we haven't filled out a lot of our content. While our main newsline is on Conor McGregor, the UFC fighter, there is not much fake news or bias surrounding him. A far better example is to look at the newsline for Emma Sulkowicz, the so-called "Mattress Girl" [1]. Ms Sulkowicz, at that time a student at Columbia University, claims she was raped and in protest at what she saw was the University's lac…

Thanks for responding. To be sure, I'm asking the following questions in good faith as I want your site to work.

> Newslines fixes the problem of bias by allowing people to build up the page by adding news events.

If people are just citing existing biased sources, isn't this just trading half-truths? Is the idea that somewhere in the middle is typically the truth? This sounds like it's prime to create middle ground fallacies.

> Each news event comprises only the factual information in the source article. Even if the source is highly partisan we can still extract non-biased information.

Who is "we"? If it's your staff (or you), then I'd need to trust you. If it's the collective "we", then we're back to bias, but worse because it's masquerading as impartial.

> Also, because each post goes through editorial review, the potential for fake new is minimised.

Which makes it sound like the prior in the previous issue -- this sounds like closed source Wikipedia.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#345

Post by masonic »

pgodzin wrote: post #343
masonic wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with exceptions for minority religions. That appears to be totally false. Where do you get that? https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/01/29/protecting-nation-foreig...

"(b) Upon the resumption of USRAP admissions, the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality. Where necessary an…

Again disproves your claim about "A ban on 7 Muslim-majority countries with exceptions for minority religions".

The "ban" is religion-blind. In the future, as refugee claims processing resumes, minorities can be prioritized; it does not "ban" with religion-specific exclusions altogether... now, or then.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#346

Post by pgodzin »

masonic wrote: post #345
pgodzin wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"(b) Upon the resumption of USRAP admissions, the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality. Where necessary an…

Again disproves your claim about "A ban on 7 Muslim-majority countries with exceptions for minority religions". The "ban" is religion-blind. In the future , as refugee claims processing resumes , minorities can be prioritized ; it does not "ban" with religion-specific exclusions altogether... now, or then.

You're right, sorry - quoted the wrong passage. This is the one I meant to:

"(e) Notwithstanding the temporary suspension imposed pursuant to subsection (a) of this section, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may jointly determine to admit individuals to the United States as refugees on a case-by-case basis, in their discretion, but only so long as they determine that the admission of such individuals as refugees is in the national interest — including when the person is a religious minority in his country of nationality facing religious persecution"

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#347

Post by FLUX-YOU »

tptacek wrote: post #30

A category of applications that I'd like to see YC helping along are those things that could help ordinary people run for office. The things off the top of my head I can see technology helping with: * Leveraging social networking to generate social permission for people to stand for office, which I think is the most important obstacle facing people who might consider running --- far more so than money. * Using techno…

Along with Crowdfunding/Kickstarter, a platform that allows for the White House's petition signature mechanics for city/state offices (with a lower threshold for "response required" correlated with population for the candidate's office/area) might be a good way to engage constituents: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/about

You could also possibly allow constituents to place donations that would go through if the petition succeeds and a response is given.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#348

Post by snomad »

Cleisthenes wrote: post #186
thowar2 wrote: post #34

Education should be on this list. The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education. 1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy. 2) The current goals for education do not align with current…

Using public education for any form of job training is one of the gravest mistakes that has put us in the current position. The reason for public education is to have an informed citizenry able to participate fully in society. Using it as job training is just corporate welfare, that is using tax money to pay for something businesses should do themselves. There is often overlap in the skills needed in an informed citi…

At one point, we had more trade schools. Somehow they fell out of fashion as the 70s became the 90s. Perhaps we should bring back publicly funded trade schools (including IT!), and allow universities to morph back into pure education.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#349

Post by Strom »

Kluny wrote: post #139
thowar2 wrote: post #34

Education should be on this list. The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education. 1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy. 2) The current goals for education do not align with current…

We can start moving toward an education system that works once we agree on some core values. Someone else said that the goal of education is to produce factory workers. I disagree. I think the goal of education is to allow one teacher to effectively babysit up to 30 children at once. With both parents working, it simply isn't possible for them to give kids the attention they need to keep them healty and sane, let alo…

I don't think the 30-to-1 ratio is the problem. From my own experience the main problem is grouping by age. Children should be grouped by skill instead. [1] I was always top of the class in math and held back by the slow pace dictated by the national education plan for my age. At the same time there were other topics like Russian language where I didn't learn as fast as was expected of my age. This meant that as the years went by I understood less and less of the new material that was being taught because my Russian fundamentals were weak. I imagine other children experienced something similar in math. I think we could do much better if children advance in classes based on how much they've learned, not based on when they were born. Also advancement in different topics need to be decoupled from eachother as much as possible [2], because I think it's completely expected that everyone will have their own personal strong topics and weak topics.

--

[1] I think schools teach much more than just what's on the national education plan. Making friends, making enemies, dealing with puberty etc are all valuable lessons that have less friction when the group of people you're around have similar amount of experience with those things. Thus being grouped with people with wildly different experience levels in these areas can be detrimental. While the primary grouping factor should be skill, there's probably a good case for secondary range limits by age, which is a decent estimative measurement of children's experience in these social areas.

[2] I understand that full isolation isn't possible, because physics requires math knowledge, which in turn requires writing & reading skills. Still, even with these dependencies we could do a lot more decoupling than what is being currently done.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#350

Post by matheweis »

About news - I think this recent tweet by Elon Musk is particularly relevant: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/825936326264360961

"Reading the source material is better than reading other people's opinions about the source material"

It'd probably need a few iterations to get it right, but I'd be willing to pay somewhere in the range of $25/mo for something that published or linked directly to the source material that is driving the current news cycle along with a succinct summary with no commentary.

Something vaguely HN-like but for all current news topics, not just tech news.

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