81–90 of 192 posts
But then, following the news teaches me stuff about the world and how it works. It reminds me how complex the world is and how dangerous. It educates and it coins me.
I've always wondered how Aaron found the courage to live his life and fight for his ideals like he did. Maybe ignoring the larger scope was one of the reasons.
Then he says the news doesn't help with his voting choice and he can get everything he needs to know from a simple guide but nothing could be further from the truth. If you really want to get involved in that, you can gather much more information about candidates and their real thoughts and if they would vote how you want them to vote on issues. You won't get that from any simple guide or the TV news.
For example, maybe a bad one, I knew the brother of one of the candidates running for governor a while back. He's an asshole. I worked next to a lady whose husband was in the state legislature and knew the candidate closely. When I mentioned that I met the candidate once before she said, "Good family!". From there I could have learned a lot if I pursued it. You won't learn any of that from a brochure or the TV news.
The problem with TV and radio news is you can't pick and choose what you want to see or hear. Newspapers were good for that. You could flip pages quickly. Online news sources have that ability if online source is worthy and organized but those are few and far between.
In the past, TV news at most stations was its own department, especially at the networks, and not under control of marketing or advertising. This is no longer true. Despite some great reporters still working in newspapers, marketing has taken that over, too, cause the idea is to sell newspapers, not news.
The same is true for television. How often, now, do you see ads for upcoming entertainment shows during the "news"? How often does a new product come out and it finds itself on the "news"?
Unfortunate but true, the real news, along with in-depth discussion and analysis, can be boring to most. PBS probably is the only daily national news worth watching if you really want to learn but you may find yourself nodding off if the subject isn't of interest. Again, advantage newspapers and properly structured online news sources that don't emulate TV (CNN).
I worked in television news for about 10 years long ago with reporters who used to work in respected newspapers. I hate TV "news" today.
I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My company considers one of its systems "more secure" because they enforce a policy that all passwords must contain 8+ non-space characters. The implementation? "Must be 8+ characters; must not contain spaces." I've expressed my view on this (and similar password-related policies) many times, but apparently it's all simply a box ticking exercise for pen testers...
There are much better ways to enforce this validation. Shoot me an email if you'd like any assistance. Also, https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn is amazing.
The most ironic thing I think about this piece is that he claims not to have followed the news since he was 13 and has drawn this conclusion... Having spent a large portion of my life keeping up with the news, other than a few minor quibbles about semantics, I'm inclined to draw the similar conclusions. Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda relating to daily events that further th…
> "Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda" This was starting to be discussed on HN the other day, but unfortunately didn't seem to get much traction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202533
I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current f…
People should re-read this and understand that this is the best way of doing marketing for your startup. "I agree, here's my solution".
I kind of agree, I often feel like I'm addicted to online news. I dislike it's shallowness. I despair at it's ignorance to history and context. But then, following the news teaches me stuff about the world and how it works. It reminds me how complex the world is and how dangerous. It educates and it coins me. I've always wondered how Aaron found the courage to live his life and fight for his ideals like he did. Maybe…
Whoa, what? How can you use 'coin' as a verb in this context? The news turns you into a different word or phrase? You've just blown my mind. Or is that a typo?
I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current f…
> I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. People should re-read this and understand that this is the best way of doing marketing for your startup. "I agree, here's my solution".
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Well once I push these code changes in the next few minutes you should be able to click on the upvote again to remove it. For now, don't worry about it :) We see the "frontend" as a daily email that goes out or an app with a daily push notification that says "Hey, here you go, the best news of the day in 30 seconds." So the hours of work that the people are putting in on the back-end really just reduces the amount of…
That all makes sense. In terms of a frontend I was thinking of a read only type system. At lunch time I come to HN to entertain myself. Occasionally I jump over to bbc news (which is pretty dire) or aljazeera. It would be great to have a page I could drop into to get the digest.
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I guess I must be too dense, but I simply do not know how to use grasswire. I'm stuck with live feed on left which shows me exactly the kind of useless "breaking" stuff I want to avoid and popular feed on the right which I don't seem to be able to control beyond either providing fact-check or comment. What am I missing?
What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia. It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a litt…