99% of social science or political topics and 50% of technical topics here do not… read as smart, and you’d be much better off spending the same time reading the first chapter of a relevant 101-level college textbook.
It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet,
i cant find the link, but there was a post about how to "be nice" and it was a revelation to a worrying amount of "geniuses" on here. bare in mind the sum total of the advice was "be nice, dont be rude"
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
Almost every (non-troll) online community that is relatively peaceful and has some semblance of moderation to remove flamewars thinks of itself as "the best community". Usually as compared to reddit, though if it's on reddit they will compare themselves to some other (hated) sub.
It's a fact of the internet. Every online community thinks of itself as the smartest, more thoughtful, more civilized. HN is no exception.
It goes without saying HN is not the smartest or more thoughtful online community. It's just... ok. Not the worst, not the best. Certainly NOT the place with the smartest people, though some smart people frequent it. As a regular, you can soon figure out HN's unspoken rules, blindspots, and areas where the group opinion is more likely to be accurate.
No need, because whether an online community is more thoughtful or smarter than another is very subjective. Almost by definition, HN is not it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that. Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.
There are communities I like better, which are smarter and more thoughtful, but I've no desire to argue with you.
It's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.
There's a reason why HN of all places has such a terrible record of handling actual sarcasm and telling it apart from genuine belief and that reason is NOT that "HN is really smart" lol
This one is at least healthy-ish for the mind. I’d much rather hacker news than any other news. Social Media is an emotional rage-bait cesspool these days. If it’s not for Hacker News those of us who abstain from the rest would be living in the dark.
I can confirm that at the congressional working level the difference in public statements have zero reflection on how the parties work together.
Namely, neither the Republicans nor Democrats have done anything whatsoever to reduce or curtail the powers of the federal or state government.
In every possible case where senators and Congress broadly are voting for more powers to spy, kill and otherwise dominate, they vote together the overwhelming majority of the time.
Is that to say that AOC and Crockett are “the same” as Tommy Tuberville?
No but those are the extreme outliers you see in public because they put on a show, and you only hear about a few.
Ultimately the U.S. citizens who vote are ignorant, spiteful, petty, and narcissistic. No different than any other country.
So unless that changes (it biologically can’t) then any effort to proactively solve it are futile in the long term
By function a GS will ALWAYS be subordinate to a political appointee and there’s nothing they can do about it
I posted elsewhere that I left a govt career as a military officer precicely because of this reality. It’s like a old boring joke now that politicians are corrupt and worthless.
I will tell you from the inside that not only is it true but it’s 10 times to 100 times worse than you think it is.
I have multiple stories of operational systems, functions, whatever you wanna call them that we’re working exceptionally well had good backing, good funding and were completely wiped out because whoever became the deputy under secretary for that budget line decided they didn’t want to do it anymore. and completely shelved decades worth of work. Like literally I remember having to unplug a server that was running life-critical beacons for POWs because they weren’t being used enough.
As if that weren’t enough that same development problem then shifted over to some new hot organization that is in the politicians jurisdiction and then they start over from scratch with none of the learning from the previous admin.
There is no positive system that can be affected by the United States government
It does not exist, they cannot functionally or structurally exist, because the government of the United States but is not and has never been built on supporting citizens or the global community it is built and has always been built to support wealthy politicians and that’s all.
I’m not aware of how every other countries work but the ones I’ve seen the inside are the same
Going into the government for the “mission” is probably the most intentionally ignorant thing somebody could do given the plethora of easily accessible data proving exactly this
Somehow this country has managed to do big and bold things when it is needed. Those great systems that were dismantled got built at one point so it is theoretically possible to do good. Furthermore other countries seem to do a better job at serving their citizens so its not like effective government is impossible((look at how the EU at least gets some things that benefit their citizens even though most of it is a mess).
There has got to be some pathway to get back to that.
> a GS will ALWAYS be subordinate to a political appointee
It’s worth being specific about what is meant by “political appointee” here. That term has specific legal meaning in the context of federal staffing, and (as I understand it, not a lawyer) is not the same thing as “GS employee who was hired as part of an administration’s political agenda”.
This is exactly why I left the US intelligence community and all public service starting in 2011.
It’s all about the data. Used to be that the govt had the best data about the world and could theoretically use it to help the citizens (though almost never in practice). That flipped around the year 2000 and the Govt spent a decade to catch up to the ISPs post 9/11. However the govt investment into data/AI couldn’t match private investment even barely. I saw this up front and personal and NOBODY in congress or the White House cared about data or AI - arguably they still don’t and have no real data/AI talent left in the government.
It was very clear by then that Automation broadly was going to consume the planet, and that whomever controlled the data flow behind it would control the levers of power, overthrowing the veneer of “rule by the consent of the governed” (which is an impossible fantasy that can’t actually ever exist).
When Hintons lab won ILVRC in 2012 based on a data focused approach - that was the time that everyone should have sat up and realized what was about to happen. Many in AI did exactly that and that’s why we’re in the state of tech we are in.
Kurzweil predicted it, everyone in the singularity and transhuman communities saw it and the rest of the world has not changed their behavior and have accelerated this process.
Unless society as a whole gets her act together and organizes this planet for the benefit of humans and ecology, this is not going to the way anybody wants it.
Everything that removes the last vestiges of human directed action and control is accelerating rapidly.
No I was pointing out the absurdity of your comment. Cops are called to respond to violent crimes in America, Chinese people aren’t (presumably the response time would be far too long) so even if they were identical people, you’d expect a lot more police shootings than ones by Chinese citizens on the streets of America.
The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but that ship sailed here centuries ago) but they do send vans to harvest the organs of dissidents. And Google “persecution of Uyghurs”.
They’re not a benign organization just because they shoot less, they just get shot at less.
My dude I spied on the Chinese for a decade I know more about the Chinese than you’ll ever understand
Let me be clear, the Han don’t care about anybody but the Han that’s a fact. What they do to Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims is horrible and those repressions shouldn’t exist.
However they pale and comparison into the historical horrific conditions of nonstop genocide from 1650 more or less until present day if you include the global war on terror and the modern prisoner slave market encoded into the constitution (13th amendment)
If you wanna go all the way back to the cultural revolution then absolutely fine but my argument there is going to be that’s no different than any of the culls that the United States or any other country have done. So they don’t get a pass but they aren’t worse
Ultimately all you have to do is put up the “death toll” from state action both inside the nation and outside the nation to compare numbers. I’ll let you go ahead and do that exercise.
No that the communist party has only ruled in China for less than 100 years but the same structure in America which has been completely depraved since the founders of the country were alive and actively shaping the politics of the US is coming up on 350 years ago.
I mean for Christ sake we bought the southern United States from France in order to maintain our slave plantations as the French were getting rid of all their slave holdings worldwide. And then after the Civil War which was supposed to solve that ethical burden they completely gutted the entire process of reconstruction in order to prevent the full completion of it because the population was so racist they did not want to do it. As a black person in America I will tell you the slave population in jails is higher than it ever was anywhere else.
If that’s not a disqualification on its own of any type of ethical foundations I don’t know what is.
I love Hacker News because there are people smart enough to write passably well but insane enough to get to this sort of thing within two hops of discussing a vacuum maker going bankrupt.
I won’t engage the insanity of calling anything we’re doing genocide (I guess we’re just really bad at it because the targeted populations are growing while we do it despite all our weaponry) because what’s the point? But if you think Amazon is more evil than the CCP because police shoot more Americans than the population of China, my only hope is that you learn to use logic as coherently as the language.
It is, however, about as likely as my Roomba assassinating me because the CIA ordered it to. I say this without malice and not as an insult: therapy can help. This is likely trauma response.
Yeah HN is a weird a place I’ve been messing on a long time.
I treat these discussions like if I was taking the hardest to defend positions.
Despite whatever you might think of Louis CK he taught me the idea that you try and lose the audience early snd then win them over then you have the best joke. I think it’s the same for intellectual sparring and I love causing chaos.
It’s a good critic in my actor-critic model. Plus I have an insane amount of experience so most of my ideas are kind of nested complexities and I don’t like to translate to college level.
No county matches the depravity of the U.S justice system? Other countries (china for example) have reeducation and labor camps. The us has its problems, and we should make things better! But it's incomparable, china actively imprisons political enemies, puts Muslims in "reeducation" camps, and has an iron fist on free expression.
Hard to tell if someone is ignorant, not bright, or a CCP propaganda bot these days, but anyone who thinks the Chinese government is preferable to Amazon is one (at least) of those 3.
I don't like this kind of surveillance any more than anyone else on HN, but we get this here all the time. People make these posts that X leads to Y and jump way over the details. Sometimes X does lead to Y. Other times, it's the Underpants Gnomes: There's a big "???" step between X and Y that people don't like to take the time to articulate. This is how conspiracy theories take hold--you ignore the ??? and just assume "Of course X leads to Y! We all know it!"
HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.
Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.
We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.
Yes? You also have several cameras and microphones in your pocket, and probably wearing more microphones on your head at various times of the day. And so does everyone around you.
GP is correct. "Roving camera/microphone" -> ??? -> "harm". What is "???" and what is "harm" specifically, and how the former leads to the latter, in specific steps?
Why are all us HN old timers in here arguing about this
I thought this was settled
People are walking around with self spy devices and putting them everywhere and giving all their private data to corpos.
That’s not new, we know it happens, we know companies use “anonymized” data for advertising. Its in public records for large companies balance sheets and there are thousands of data brokers who live exclusively on this data.
There are multiple compelling and popular documentaries about this.
Lol was thinking the same. Btw if you're into sensors, keen to chat. I'm the founder of crewline.ai, just raised our seed and are bringing on a couple key founding engineering hires.
I know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patterns
but yet here we all are
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