Predictably, this story, despite almost a thousand upvotes, is nowhere to be found on HN front page. Daily reminder that HN is a commercial entity and works hard to avoid annoying their potential business partners.
Just wondering, what's the reasoning for not applying more heavy handed moderation on which stories get dumped off the front page? Why not manually suppress a submission when you think the comments are likely to be of low quality, rather than leave an unrepliable comment at the top? A more curated place would be welcome, in order to stave off some of the eternal September-ness places undergo. There are other places on the Internet to have those discussions; HN doesn't have to be the place for that. There seem to be quite a few submissions on the frontpage these days that would fall under the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" section of the guidelines and all I can do is flag them when I see them.
Moderation is soft power. People think we have the power to be heavy handed, and a lot of users think that's what we do (just look at threads like this one), but we don't and we aren't. Mostly we just try to please the community, while doing our best to foster the mandate of the site. Of course this is impossible; the community can't be pleased, because different people want different things and many are incompatible. But if there's a way to keep it least-unpleased, that's what we're going for.
The posts you're asking about are in the vexed category where parts of the community feel they absolutely belong on HN while other parts believe they don't. Not only that, but the topics themselves have contradictory qualities: they're partly intellectually interesting, partly sensational gossip, partly a political slugfest. Unfortunately the slugfest is dominating everything else right now. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824. That's also why I pinned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010948 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010908 to the top of the two threads last night.
I don't know if that answers your question. It's hard to talk about this briefly. I've written a lot about how we moderate politics on HN, and some of it may make sense in this context. Examples:
We don't moderate HN that way, as anyone can tell for themselves by looking at HN. There isn't any "business partner" who wouldn't have been "alienated" years ago by such shitty "moderation". (Btw, the only "business partners" that I know YC to be interested in are prospective startup founders who hopefully will apply and get funded. That's who YC's success depends on.)
When we ban an account and someone immediately creates a new account to carry on in the same way, obviously we have to ban that one too. Therefore I've banned this one too.
Making sinister-vague criticisms of HN/YC doesn't change this, even though people love to do it because then they get to say "aha! see what they do to critics?!!". Similarly, pre-posting excuses in your profile ("Soon to be banned for pointing out that HN condones racism"!!) doesn't change this, even though people love to do that too because then they get to say "see? just as I predicted!"
Obviously we can't be influenced by that kind of thing because if we let any of them work, it would be a license to break HN's rules with impunity. Fortunately the community is fair-minded and can look through comment histories to decide for themselves whether an account was breaking the rules. Your accounts have been breaking the rules so badly that (a) I don't think we have a choice, and (b) I'm not worried about the community verdict.
Btw, I don't want to ban you at all and would be much happier to persuade you to just contribute to HN in a positive way, despite how limited and annoying it is. Believe me, I'm frustrated by its limitations too. I can't help but imagine that if we could sit down and actually talk about all this, it would not be so hard to agree.
It's true that a lot of things that you don't like about HN (or Americans, or religious people, or racists, or any of the other groups that you've posted flamewar comments about) do actually exist. But in HN's case at least, it's not true that they have the weight that you ascribe to them. Rather, they exist as part of a statistical cloud, and there are a lot of things in that cloud, some of them are bad and distasteful and all of them show up here. It's an inevitable dynamic that we're all trying to deal with. There's no agenda to propagate those things.
Unfortunately we can't sit down and talk because we're limited to exchanging tiny text blobs through small internet pipes like prisoners passing notes through a crack in a cell wall. So I don't suppose I have much chance of persuading you, though I'd certainly like to try.
Same, but it also reminds me of another thing: I think it was the Solaris format(1M) utility; instead of the usual “y/n” question before performing a destructive action it said something like “will proceed with overwriting XXX in 15 seconds; press ^C to abort”.
Lol, no. Every technology product has to be modified to comply with FCC, not with whatever Chinese equivalent is. Completely reworking TV shows for American viewers is commonplace (Top Gear, The Office). And there is a long history of absolutely wild censorship, eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist.
Ah, I see, so y'all are part of the 50 Cent Army to play up the whataboutism. Nobody here said the US, as the world's largest economy and hegemon, does not influence things. The claim was that China doesn't. This claim is false, period.
The absolute claim may be false, but the degree to which China interferes with its trading partners’ projects and especially internal affairs is orders of magnitude lower than that of the US. That’s not whataboutism, it’s pointing out an important difference that actually has a major influence on how countries perceive the two powers.
You've identified that slave labor happens in the US prison system and elsewhere, I think that most people would agree with this. I don't see any evidence that slave labor comprises "a large amount of what you use."
Well, no, most people don’t realize US is using slave labor. Most people believe China does, though, despite no proofs. Sadly, people are still quite disconnected from verifiable reality.
Perhaps because of the suicide nets? I get the Foxconn is not technically slave labour, but you must admit that suicide nets may give to the observer the impression that the gap is not that large between whatever it is and slave labour?
I lose workers to foxxcon all the time. They are one of the best companies in SZ to work for, with high wages and good benefits.. I dont think many people in CN would agree with your definition of what slave labor is
To note, I don't actually have an opinion on if foxconn is slavery or not, my point was that they can easily appear that way to outside disinterested observers purely based on "they have suicide nets around the buildings" because of the obvious implications thereof, and also the spattering of news stories that play up those implications.
On the surface, that sounds like a reasonable position to take. ("Cowley proposes an alternative: that language acquisition involves culturally determined language skills, apprehended by a biologically determined faculty that responds to them. In other words, he proposes that each extreme is right in what it affirms, but wrong in what it denies. Both cultural diversity of language, and a learning instinct, can be affirmed; neither need be denied.")
GPT's ability to fool intelligent people into thinking that it is "intelligent" itself seems like a powerful argument that language, more than anything else, is what makes humans capable of higher thought. Language is all GPT has. (Well, that and a huge-ass cultural database.)
Intelligence is one of those areas in which, once you fake it well enough, you've effectively made it. Another 10x will be enough to tie the game against an average human player.
There's a really easy, yet unconscionably horrible experiment we could perform to test the assumption that we're preprogrammed with any sort of knowledge.
Take a baby and stick it in a room. Let it grow up with absolutely no stimulation whatsoever. They are given food and that's about it. What do you think it can demonstrate knowledge of by the time it reaches 5? 10? 15?
All behavior is learned behavior. People talk about sucking and breathing and walking horses and what not, but babies do have to learn how to latch and how to feed. Now, they can work it out themselves. But quick acquisition of a skill does not mean the skill already existed.
Not to mention it's a far cry from sucking to language. Or knowing what a person is. Or who a person is.
It's a bit more than that - the Russian part of civilisation came _from_ Ukraine. Kiev is much older than Moscow, and that's not something Rashists can forgive.
That's quite a one-sided viewpoint. Kievan Rus was founded by Rurikids who were Scandinavians originally based in Novgorod (now Russia). According to the Nestor's chronicle, Kiev basically became the capital after Oleg of Novgorod (a Rurikid) killed local princes Askold and Dir. Age of Kiev has nothing to do with it. 1000 years ago there was no "civilized Ukrainians vs non-civilized Russians" argument, it was just a bunch of equally civilized East Slavic tribes conquered by Norsemen. Novgorod's birch bark documents and other artifacts show that Novgorod was influenced by Scandinavia more than it was by Kiev. There are several times more references to Novgorod in Scandinavian sagas than there are to Kiev. Novgorod also participated in the Hanseatic league. It was more complex and multi-faceted than what you describe.
Novgorod was conquered by Moscow a couple hundred of years before Kiev. Yes it's now considered to be an integral part of Russia but I historically it's not really more of a predecessor of the modern Russian state than Kievan Rus is, it's just another East Slavic/Rus subjugated (quite brutally) by the Muscovite empire.
Perhaps, but I was replying to the comment above... Modern Russia is clearly a successor state to the Grand Duchy of Moscow so I don't really see how can it have a bigger claim to the history of Novgorod than to that of Kiev/other ancient city states in the current territory of Ukraine.
> don't really see how can it have a bigger claim to the history of Novgorod
Maybe not bigger, but the people of Novgorod now live in Russia and believe they are Russians. What's with that state-centric view? Ukrainians are Ukrainians despite multiple occupations, but if Novgorodian people believe they are Russians it's illegitimate and they lose all the claims, and are now relegated to have their claims go through Kiev->Moscow. Only "pure" identities with existing independent states can have claims?
This "Ukraine is the true Rus, and Russians are some splinter northern Finno-Ugric goblins" nationalist narrative is just tiresome and incoherent. It's pretty obvious that both sides have about the same level of claim.
> Novgorod now live in Russia and believe they are Russians
Obviously. However their relation to the Novgorodian republic is about as strong as that of modern Italians to the Roman Republic. Also I think any such claims are absurd and absolutely irrelevant (imho this applies to Kiev/Novgorod and to Moscow).
> This "Ukraine is the true Rus.. nationalist narrative is just tiresome and incoherent
Sure, you're right. However this narrative seems to be mostly a response to Russian claims that Ukraine is not a nation and that it should not exist.
> Russians are some splinter northern Finno-Ugric goblins
Nah... Politically and somewhat culturally they are probably closer to the Mongols (I'm actually half serious, the authoritarian and imperialist tendencies ingrained in Russian culture were probably inherited from the Golden Horde rather than Kiev/Novgorod.)
All the duchies into which Kievan Rus disintegrated were ruled by houses tracing their descent from Rurik. Thus, any one of them could try to "reclaim the ancestral lands" by the standards of that time. Of course, there was a little hitch there since the lands would need "gathering" first...
Moscow ending up the one who actually pulled it off is kinda ironic, though, given that it was very much an upstart that wasn't even there when Kievan Rus was still a polity united under a single ruler. Goes to show just how effective collaborationism (in this case, with the Mongols) can be to build a power base.
Google likes to (semi-legally) kill other people software they don't like, like they killed Gaia, the Open Source Google Earth client (which was, in many ways, technically superior to Google's, btw.)
That makes me worry how long we'll have gmaps data in BlenderGIS. Although the OSM data is pretty dang good; less chance of running into some godforsaken royalty thingamabob.
Speaking of which, BlenderGIS would be a pretty neat geo viz platform for presentations. Bit too much of a learning curve for Normal People though.
