5 ms·

Side note: I wish discussion boards had a feature where you could upvote literature or some basic articles relating the to topics covered in the OP. This way pe

Side note: I wish discussion boards had a feature where you could upvote literature or some basic articles relating the to topics covered in the OP. This way people who are not familiar with the matter, or perhaps just curious about alternative interpretations could see other sources that the community deems worthy. For the article above, it would likely be an intersection of "War on ISIS", "Military Industrial Complex" and some less relevant, smaller topics, e.g. Weapons Manufacturing. Having a mechanism for storing background knowledge would be quite a bit nicer than just saying "I recommend 'War is a racket'. Especially since communities will downvote comments they think are prosaic, but are still helpful for newcomers.

dools 11y ago
Awesome I'd never heard of 'war is a racket', thanks! In return let me reccomend "the ruses for war" by john quigley and confessions of an economic hitman (and others) by john quigley as well as "a game as old as empire" with foreward by the same.
- bootload 11y ago
  'war is a racket' @dools, history isn't considered that important for learning. I found out about 'War is a Racket' reading about Smedley Butler USMC [0] and his warning on the attempted overthrow of FDR and the US government. [1],[2] If you followed the press carefully this month you'll see a AUD 49 Million dollar boost for Victorian CT, [3], Dassault saves 10,000 jobs, £12 billion goes to UK BAE and in Germany, €8 billion earmarked for defence. [4] Smedley was the Snowden of his era. [5] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot [2] http://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plotted-to-overthrow-fdr http://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plo... [3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-25/funding-boost-to-victorian-counter-terrorism-capabilities/6971524 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-25/funding-boost-to-victo... [4] http://www.smh.com.au/business/paris-attacks-war-on-islamic-state-brings-us50-billion-defense-boost-20151125-gl7dkb.html http://www.smh.com.au/business/paris-attacks-war-on-islamic-... [5] "Book of the Month: War Is a Racket | Jesse Ventura" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h30FE0MxEMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h30FE0MxEMc
- hitekker 11y ago
  Thank you in return: judging from google it seems like Quigley can teach the nontrivial stuff.
  - dools 11y ago
    Indeed! And once you're through with that check out Modern Money Theory by Randall Wray which puts the whole shitfight into a solid economical context!
npunt 11y ago
Agree. Current patterns in discussion board designs are very unsophisticated and drive content toward uninformed debate and reader exhaustion, rather than constructing understanding. Our entire news infrastructure (blogs/articles, television, etc) also suffers from similar problems. Its like we can't break orbit of much shallowness, except in relatively esoteric, insular communities online and offline.
- uptownfunk 11y ago
  Perhaps unrelated, but are there any groups (deliberately non-specific) working to address this?
  - npunt 11y ago
    Very good question, I don't know! I'm unfamiliar with the structures of working groups but I imagine it'd have to be pretty heavily social sciences weighted (ethnography, sociology/psychology, media studies, education, etc). Personally, I'd like to see a mix of rapid prototyping, science fiction (engaging in hypotheticals on systems and cultural impact), and solid research. Evaluation is going to be challenging due to the uniqueness of experiences in social systems (e.g. in social networks every feed is different, so less unified starting point). I think surfacing the problems-behind-the-problem like understanding / capturing the different starting points of each readers knowledge would play prominently in any truly transformative solution. On the business end, right now I can't imagine there's much of a business vehicle for driving this forward, as the market would favor general solutions applied to pre-existing properties (e.g. bolt-ons like Disqus) or incremental changes (e.g. better mod tools on reddit or something), whereas my strong suspicion is that deeper innovations probably need to be developed alongside wholly new online properties - you know, the medium is the message and all that. Evaluating success would be difficult given the need to create and verify new metrics of success, and I'm not sure many startups have the patience, knowhow, or desire to dig deep into research required for this. I guess its worth mentioning I started an online news company so I've had more than a passing chance to think about / be frustrated with this problem space. In the challenging environment of growing a journalism startup (not exactly a high $$ biz), I wasn't able to sink my teeth enough into creating new designs for media publishing and community tools, and was so unsatisfied with the present offerings that we just avoided going down the discussion board route altogether. It remains my belief that a 'news' is a sense-making and ultimately educational problem being solved (poorly) by publishing systems, and the field of 'journalism' lacks imagination in what ways they can create said news, assuming everything just becomes an article written by a journalist because thats how newspapers did it.
wh-uws 11y ago
At first I said to myself "that is a startup." Then I recognized it bascially exists in the form of the sidebars on reddit's subreddits. It really helps with content quality because you can somewhat assume hopefully everyone is working from the same knowledge set to discuss a topic.
- hitekker 11y ago
  Subreddit sidebars tend to be chosen by moderators. Not saying they don't represent their communities, more that there is a limit to how much time they can invest into the task of bringing the community up to speed on this or that. Factoring in the constraints of the sidebar makes it a somewhat less appealing option.
krapp 11y ago
I experimented with automating something this in a side project by scraping any outbound links on a submitted url - for articles and blog entries those tend to point to references or related material. It works moderately well, but spam links and login links are a problem. Hacker News could add something like that, and attach it to whatever code is being used to vouch for dead comments, so users could upvote the relevant ones. Combined with something to auto-merge similar stories, you might be able to tease out a decent web of context from posted material alone.

dools 11y ago

Awesome I'd never heard of 'war is a racket', thanks! In return let me reccomend "the ruses for war" by john quigley and confessions of an economic hitman (and others) by john quigley as well as "a game as old as empire" with foreward by the same.

bootload 11y ago
'war is a racket' @dools, history isn't considered that important for learning. I found out about 'War is a Racket' reading about Smedley Butler USMC [0] and his warning on the attempted overthrow of FDR and the US government. [1],[2] If you followed the press carefully this month you'll see a AUD 49 Million dollar boost for Victorian CT, [3], Dassault saves 10,000 jobs, £12 billion goes to UK BAE and in Germany, €8 billion earmarked for defence. [4] Smedley was the Snowden of his era. [5] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot [2] http://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plotted-to-overthrow-fdr http://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plo... [3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-25/funding-boost-to-victorian-counter-terrorism-capabilities/6971524 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-25/funding-boost-to-victo... [4] http://www.smh.com.au/business/paris-attacks-war-on-islamic-state-brings-us50-billion-defense-boost-20151125-gl7dkb.html http://www.smh.com.au/business/paris-attacks-war-on-islamic-... [5] "Book of the Month: War Is a Racket | Jesse Ventura" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h30FE0MxEMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h30FE0MxEMc
hitekker 11y ago
Thank you in return: judging from google it seems like Quigley can teach the nontrivial stuff.
- dools 11y ago
  Indeed! And once you're through with that check out Modern Money Theory by Randall Wray which puts the whole shitfight into a solid economical context!

npunt 11y ago

Agree. Current patterns in discussion board designs are very unsophisticated and drive content toward uninformed debate and reader exhaustion, rather than constructing understanding. Our entire news infrastructure (blogs/articles, television, etc) also suffers from similar problems. Its like we can't break orbit of much shallowness, except in relatively esoteric, insular communities online and offline.

uptownfunk 11y ago
Perhaps unrelated, but are there any groups (deliberately non-specific) working to address this?
- npunt 11y ago
  Very good question, I don't know! I'm unfamiliar with the structures of working groups but I imagine it'd have to be pretty heavily social sciences weighted (ethnography, sociology/psychology, media studies, education, etc). Personally, I'd like to see a mix of rapid prototyping, science fiction (engaging in hypotheticals on systems and cultural impact), and solid research. Evaluation is going to be challenging due to the uniqueness of experiences in social systems (e.g. in social networks every feed is different, so less unified starting point). I think surfacing the problems-behind-the-problem like understanding / capturing the different starting points of each readers knowledge would play prominently in any truly transformative solution. On the business end, right now I can't imagine there's much of a business vehicle for driving this forward, as the market would favor general solutions applied to pre-existing properties (e.g. bolt-ons like Disqus) or incremental changes (e.g. better mod tools on reddit or something), whereas my strong suspicion is that deeper innovations probably need to be developed alongside wholly new online properties - you know, the medium is the message and all that. Evaluating success would be difficult given the need to create and verify new metrics of success, and I'm not sure many startups have the patience, knowhow, or desire to dig deep into research required for this. I guess its worth mentioning I started an online news company so I've had more than a passing chance to think about / be frustrated with this problem space. In the challenging environment of growing a journalism startup (not exactly a high $$ biz), I wasn't able to sink my teeth enough into creating new designs for media publishing and community tools, and was so unsatisfied with the present offerings that we just avoided going down the discussion board route altogether. It remains my belief that a 'news' is a sense-making and ultimately educational problem being solved (poorly) by publishing systems, and the field of 'journalism' lacks imagination in what ways they can create said news, assuming everything just becomes an article written by a journalist because thats how newspapers did it.

wh-uws 11y ago

At first I said to myself "that is a startup." Then I recognized it bascially exists in the form of the sidebars on reddit's subreddits. It really helps with content quality because you can somewhat assume hopefully everyone is working from the same knowledge set to discuss a topic.

hitekker 11y ago
Subreddit sidebars tend to be chosen by moderators. Not saying they don't represent their communities, more that there is a limit to how much time they can invest into the task of bringing the community up to speed on this or that. Factoring in the constraints of the sidebar makes it a somewhat less appealing option.

krapp 11y ago

I experimented with automating something this in a side project by scraping any outbound links on a submitted url - for articles and blog entries those tend to point to references or related material. It works moderately well, but spam links and login links are a problem. Hacker News could add something like that, and attach it to whatever code is being used to vouch for dead comments, so users could upvote the relevant ones. Combined with something to auto-merge similar stories, you might be able to tease out a decent web of context from posted material alone.