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More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news. I don't mean this in

More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news. I don't mean this in a judgmental way, when I saw this posted I thought "that doesn't sound right, but I guess if it has so many upvotes on HN it must be true". It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584

carlmr 6y ago
>I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. While that may be true, for me the gut feeling was in line with the fake news, which makes it even harder to spot (confirmation bias). I never worked on iOS apps, but my consumer experience with Apple was such that I would have expected exactly this kind of behavior. They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one. I just assumed that a company that treats their consumers like this also doesn't treat developers fairly. Granted, this is my experience from a decade ago. I've never bought anything Apple since. So maybe they've changed.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one. Do they regularly sell keyboard replacement parts? If not, why expect them to "sell you one"? And the laptop was "out of warranty", wasn't it? How does "barely" change this?
  - bpfrh 6y ago
    (I'm not the one who you commented to) Because we all want to live on this planet for a few hundred years? I expect a company that produces things to either supply spare parts on demand, or allow a third party to produce them. Even more so, when the device I bought costs >1000$ Sure, legally they don't have any obligation to do so, but many things are legal but ethically wrong.
    - carlmr 6y ago
      Exactly, and every other laptop company I never had an issue getting spare parts. So they were intentionally behaving worse than average.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        Most other companies have easier case constructions though...
        RealStickman_ 6y ago
        I'm sure it would be in apple's interest and ability to make their parts as modular as possible to make repairs easier if that was what they were going for.
        carlmr 6y ago
        Then they should revise their designs maybe.
        coldtea 6y ago
        They have been working well for them though... from bankruptcy to #1 company in sales in 23 years based on such designs...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - carlmr 6y ago
    Just a new keyboard for a reasonable price, like every other laptop I've owned. I didn't expect it for free, but a lot of companies want to keep their consumers happy and will fix something that's just out of warranty, especially if it's a part that should last longer than 2 years, like a keyboard.
- merpnderp 6y ago
  This is a great point on how the world seems to have developed a deep sense of biases on just about everything and now we're left incapable of passing the "would only a cartoon villain do this" test. How is it ever possible to fix this, because we're quickly moving to a point where the most ridiculous of claims, that happen to fit with our biases, are instantly accepted as true and unshakable facts.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    At the end of the day, we must remember that just because we can believe something to be true is not actually evidence in support of it being true. Even the most mundane of claims should not be taken on faith alone. We may not verify everything, but we shouldn't repeat or make serious decisions based on claims for which we have not seen compelling evidence, no matter how believable the may seem.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    The problem is that real life is already stranger than fiction. The NSA actually tapped American phones and intercepted inter-datacenter links. Multiple major companies now have voice assistants that have been shown to send voice recordings to employees for review. Apple has used legal action to shut down repair shops. Real life is left incapable of passing the "would only a cartoon villain do this" test.
  - brlewis 6y ago
    To even have hope of getting people to overcome confirmation bias and look at evidence, we need concise and convenient ways of presenting evidence. Fact checking is too much of a chore the way things are now.
coldtea 6y ago
>More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news. "Fake news" is a regular thing on the tech/HN community. The whole hype around technologies (e.g. Mongo/NoSQL, etc) is just that. As Alan Kay put it "Programming is a Pop Culture".
- amelius 6y ago
  The reason is that as programmers we're highly dependent on the technical choices made by the masses.
- threeseed 6y ago
  You can't possibly be serious. There is no hype for NoSQL or MongoDB on HN. In fact it is the complete opposite with every one trying to push SQL and PostgreSQL for every use case under the sun.
  - barbecue_sauce 6y ago
    There was hype for NoSQL/MongoDB on HN ages ago, but it has long since passed. The only people bringing it up now just seem out of touch.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    There's no hype today, which is because the hype died out. 5-6 years ago it was all "SQL is dead", before those people got burned. I wasn't giving an example of a current hype -- just of a hype.
  - merpnderp 6y ago
    Why couldn't they be serious? NoSQL got big somehow. There was obviously a big push and support for it when it became big. How would HN be immune to this when it can't even spot an obviously fake story about Apple acting like cartoon villains?
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    threeseed is famously (to me) HN's personal MongoDB cheerleader. It always fascinated me. When I read the upstream comment my first thought was "I wonder if threeseed will show up." Not trying to call you out, I just think the consistency + choice of hobby horse is funny, and you always stand out as the one person defending MongoDB: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=MongoDB%20threeseed&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I always wanted to know though: why? What compels you, threeseed?
supernova87a 6y ago
That's what happens when you want to believe in symbols more than taking the time to investigate the complicated facts. And the symbol here was Apple as the big bad evil company trying to exploit developers. Maybe it's a lesson to temper outrage before knowing facts.
- xxs 6y ago
  In the very same thread there is a quote of devepors agreement with Apple that allows Apple to keep it.
tomduncalf 6y ago
My bad for posting the original tweet up without proper fact-checking... I've emailed the mods to ask them to correct or delete the original to avoid confusion in future. I had heard rumours that Apple did not refund the 30% previously, and seeing a developer of respected apps post it (along with a graph, although actually that didn't prove anything lol) and doing a quick Google (where the top result is "Apple's iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers"), I thought made it seem legit enough to post, and thought it would get shot down quickly if it was incorrect! Interesting lesson in the realities of post-truth as you say! Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- thih9 6y ago
  > Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched... It seems so easy to spread misinformation with this way of thinking going on. My point is not to blame you, I just wanted to point out that as long as we accept believable data as true, we’ll see believable misinformation on top of HN.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  It's a good example of the importance of using respect/a large platform appropriately. If I was in your position I also don't think I'd have really fact checked it, since that level of scrutiny on everything would be nearly impossible to maintain if I tried to fact check before posting any given titbit. And even then, I might have fact checked by checking in with a developer of respected apps that would have experience. A significant amount of the burden of getting this right is in the hands of the original twitter poster IMO. If you are originating, rather than sharing, a piece of information like apple keeping the refund, then the burden of fact checking should definitely be on you at that point.
pjc50 6y ago
Apple's opacity leads to this kind of thing. The "rebuttal" doesn't have a citation either. How do we know that it itself is not also fake news? Apple should have a nice clear page we can all link to that explains how this works. But nobody seems to have found one. Edit: no, really, this is important: we're in the middle of the lesson of "social media can amplify things that aren't true and you should check them". Great. So, how do we verify things? What should we be doing? The counter claim link at the top of this thread is also just a random unsourced tweet!
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  It's in the terms: "In such cases,Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User."
  - hardlianotion 6y ago
    In other words: the rebuttal is not clearcut.
  - ShroudedNight 6y ago
    I have never engaged in any kind of professional legal training; I am most definitely not a lawyer. That being said, my understanding of 'notwithstanding' in this context would imply that Apple reserves the right to retain its commission even when they refund the price to the End-User. https://weagree.com/weblog/notwithstanding-is-a-tricky-one/ https://weagree.com/weblog/notwithstanding-is-a-tricky-one/
  - voxic11 6y ago
    What is in the terms? That part says they can keep the commission if they want to. But the question is do they actually keep it.
    - LanceH 6y ago
      That may not have a single answer.
stunt 6y ago
This is not a new era. Tooling is new indeed which makes it tremendously faster and available. On the bright side, you can also get facts back rather quickly like this.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  You're thinking incorrectly as well. There is no need to debate patent nonsense. Just correct it and move on. Why did we as a community waste so much time discussing and getting outraged over patent nonsense as opposed to doing the rational thing and calling it patent nonsense from the outset? The answer to that question is troubling. HN as a community is far too accommodating to a lot of silliness simply because it gets votes. Remember yesterday's "news" that Intel was moving TSMC? And don't even get me started on the political nonsense HN upvotes. We should all be taking a good long look in the mirror. If we're not going to learn from incidents like this, at least a bit of self awareness would be nice.
Illniyar 6y ago
I don't see upvotes as being a form of agreement. I often upvotes things I have no knowledge about and sometimes even things I don't agree with that I think would be interesting to hear more about from the HN community. It an interesting topic for many HNers and such seems appropriate that it'll get on to the front page. That being said, downvoting dissenting comments in the thread are extremely problematic. And is a common theme in HN. Which I think stems from the implicit assumption by many people that upvoting a comment or item means agreeing with it.
- _qulr 6y ago
  Same. I legit didn't know the answer and thought it deserved discussion.
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
I pointed out that it was obviously a lie being spread by one solitary dumbfuck on twitter, but I was randomly shadowbanned one day by the huge faggot dang because he feels the need to protect grown adults from the bad fee-fees they might get from reading words on a screen, so no one saw my comment. Too bad.
jka 6y ago
Do you think that asking people to read -- and potentially answer a simple captcha-like comprehension question -- about content before amplifying it could help in situations like this? (Twitter is apparently experimenting[1] with the former approach) [1] - https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-unread-feature-conversations https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-un...
Razengan 6y ago
One of Apple’s main adversaries, Samsung, has been taken to court for paying students to manipulate social media against their competitors. And given Apple’s stance against the bread and butter of less scrupulous companies (privacy intrusion and data mining), it would be no surprise if there are many other people who are literally paid to make them look bad at any cost.
- Razengan 6y ago
  https://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web-reviews/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web-re... https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paying+students+for+reviews https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paying+students+for+...
malwarebytess 6y ago
Not only was the original story incorrect, but the top comment defending the incorrect information was also wrong.
- unix_fan 6y ago
  this is why I don’t take anything at face value, especially if it’s trending on social media. I wait for the drama to blow over,and check for the actual truth later.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
> I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. Another word for this is groupthink.
mcv 6y ago
Some years ago, HN had a reputation for loving everything Apple. That has clearly turned around.
nojito 6y ago
The idea that HN is well informed is incorrect. The top comments to many posts are completely incorrect. Social media caters way too much to feelings and biases.
hesarenu 6y ago
Isn't it again some random tweet not an actual apple document/confirmation.
natch 6y ago
Where people think they are well educated and well informed. You give us a lot of credit. Most of us are ignorant about a lot of things we have strong opinions on.
0xfaded 6y ago
This is a very good observation. The "news" that intel was moving to TSMC was also on the front page the other day.
rimliu 6y ago
“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”
- gridlockd 6y ago
  In this case, "the truth" is misleading. Apple presumably doesn't do what was claimed, but it reserves the right to do it.
christophilus 6y ago
At least the correction also made the front page. That’s more than can be said for normal media outlets who seem to broadcast the lie with a megaphone and bury the correction in a footnote.
thelittleone 6y ago
To be fair you say "our gut feeling" as if everyone shares the same 'gut feeling', i.e., that Apple would not do such a thing. On reading the original post my gut feeling believed that this could be or is quite likely true. Why? Because it aligns with the continuous declining customer experience I've had with them for the last 5-7 years. Examples include declining product quality, difficulty getting them to service properly, getting busted for impairing performance on older hardware (planned obsolescence) all that feels like tall poppy syndrome, dark patterns and arrogance.
UweSchmidt 6y ago
While voting is now getting considered a statement of ideological alignment (see Reddit banning people based on their vote for unsavory posts, and people in Germany being prosecuted for 'liking' a violent crime), my vote on the original post was to signal my interest, encourage posts of that sort on this website and to raise awareness, to encourage potential corrections.
- KingOfCoders 6y ago
  "people in Germany being prosecuted for 'liking' a violent crime" Do you have a link for this?
  - UweSchmidt 6y ago
    Can't find the article about a specific case, but according to the link below it appears that a new law specifically includes "liking" as punishable in serious cases. https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/nachrichten/region/daumen-hoch-fuer-hass-und-hetze-wird-strafbar;art140897,4364244 https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/nachrichten/region/daumen-ho...
    - KingOfCoders 6y ago
      Thanks though the article is very sketchy on "liking"
      - UweSchmidt 6y ago
        I agree.
coronadisaster 6y ago
If you post anything that aligns with republicans on this forum (true or not), it has a very high chance of being downvoted or not upvoted.
AndrewKemendo 6y ago
Critically though, a correction is at #1 top spot today. That's about as good as it gets. Corrections in newspapers don't run the same as headlines, nobody upvotes corrections to reddit or Instagram etc... I'd suggest that as far as iterating in the direction of finding the truth, this is a best in class example of how to do it.
- paulintrognon 6y ago
  Maybe a tag in the original title could also help? Something like: "[FAKENEWS] When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple doesn’t refund the 30% cut" People not reading the comments will then have a way of knowing this is false information.
  - aaron695 6y ago
    A current front page article - "Anti-climate action statements get more visibility in news coverage, study finds" is [FAKENEWS] You want to fight that battle?
    - Illniyar 6y ago
      The article is not fakenews. It covers a research about anti-climate statements. Those can be fakenews (though depends on the nature of the statement I would say).
      - aaron695 6y ago
        I'd like to keep this meta if possible. When you wrote this comment had you read the journal article to see if the Press Release and Press Release Title linked on HN accurately represents the published journal article?
  - yborg 6y ago
    Terrible tag idea, it's implicitly negative and accusatory. In this instance, the guy was apparently just honestly misinformed. The main problem is that most of the original thread ballooned with upvotes because it became general "<big corporate entity> is bad" kvetching which is perennially popular and probably doesn't belong on HN at all. As long as these kinds of threads aren't modkilled, these things will happen, you just have to deal with it. Tagging them won't solve anything.
wolco 6y ago
In fairness if you take what you find here and applied it to the real world. Everyone would be using rust/go. Meanwhile everyone is still using php.
bzb3 6y ago
It is 2020. If you believe what you read on the internet...
paulintrognon 6y ago
> We are in the post-truth era indeed. Was it really better before? The cognitive biases behind fake news are not knew. Maybe there were there from the beginning, but we are just getting better at spotting them?
- goalieca 6y ago
  No, we're certainly more politicized though.
peter_retief 6y ago
Now we wait for all the justifications. I really enjoy HN but there is a large number of politically indignant ready to punish who they disagree with rather than allow debate.
ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
That's why I treat HN the same way as Reddit. Just because people talk in a more sophisticated manner doesn't mean that they are anymore factual.
duxup 6y ago
Yeah there's certainly a factor of "title seems about right, I'll up-vote" out there. There have been a lot of articles where even the comments were entirely "nothing about this is right" and that's not counting opinion / perspective articles, like cold hard facts wrong. It's really frustrating to see on HN.
eternalban 6y ago
Downvotes should force a comment box, or have a link for list of users downvoting a comment. I don’t see what value anonymous downvotes bring to a forum dedicated to informed discussion.
Kiro 6y ago
Are you surprised? The HN crowd instinctively upvotes any headline that makes big tech look bad and is always quick to jump on the bandwagons in the comment thread without hesitation. We're no better than reddit.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  Nothing bad came of it, because it highlighted a potentially abusive clause in the terms that many developers might not even have been aware of when they agreed to them. "Apple is evil" might be wrong, but "Apple reserves the right to be evil" is still closer to the truth than "Apple is not evil".
  - Kiro 6y ago
    A lot of people won't see the rebuttal and will continue thinking this is true.
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      In terms of risk, it is better to believe that it is true, because it could become true at any time.
rvz 6y ago
> We are in the post-truth era indeed. Indeed we are, it's also the interesting thing about confirmation bias in communities. In any community, they seem to always believe any news that is immediately negative about the subject that they haven't researched about or want they don't like as the real truth. It's up to us to do our own research with actual evidence rather than sources such as: 'X suggested', 'sources say', 'my friend who works at ABCXYZ' or because it has 1000+ retweets, upvotes, etc. Generally, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed on social media content like FB, Twitter, HN, etc.
yepthatsreality 6y ago
Yes the Apple cult may have always been here but has grown more aggressive and defensive the last 5 years or so. Check any Apple thread and you will see similar results. You cannot utter a word of criticism towards the company without mass downvotes.
- sbuk 6y ago
  Likewise the FOSS cult. It has been ever thus. Both sides make false claims regularly.
- Illniyar 6y ago
  mmm... that's the exact opposite of this situation - statements in favor of Apple were downvoted.
- moogleii 6y ago
  I think you've misread the comment you're replying to; otherwise, I'm not sure I understand how your comment applies. He's saying the post claiming that Apple kept the 30% was fishy (and false). I don't know about a cult, but in this case, the criticism was unfounded. Ironically, your comment is an example of a cult of the anti-cult - always looking out for signs of that other cult.
eanzenberg 6y ago
Oh please, HN is one of the least trustworthy areas of my life primarily because of its echo-chamber, vocal minority ways. All online communities that allow upvoting / downvoting devolve to this. In fact, I’ve started perusing old-style BB sites of my interests which explicitly have no upvoting or downvoting, forcing me to read through comments and replies and where the only nominal “upvoting” occurs in popular threads with lots of posts that continuously push to the top of the BB. It’s a literal breath of fresh air. I’m close to done with community sites that allow upvotes/downvotes.
- ColanR 6y ago
  Any recommendations?
- lowkeynthorough 6y ago
  Curiously, stackoverflow uses upvotes and downvotes too. How does that work?
  - zymhan 6y ago
    StackExchange is a like a highly moderated subreddit mixed with a Wiki. Mods ensure the posts are of minimum quality, require sources for novel claims, and remove disinformation. An SE community also tends to strongly embrace the general rules for SE, which keeps it from being overrun with "reposts" and "clickbait".
  - johnfn 6y ago
    A lot of content on StackOverflow is trivially verifiable - just put it in your IDE and see if it runs. You'll notice that the more subjective questions on StackOverflow almost always 1) get closed immediately or 2) are filled with bad answers. (You'd think getting a refund is trivially verifiable, too, but who's going to go to all that work?)
  - rplnt 6y ago
    > just use jquery Not that well.
- 6y ago
sigzero 6y ago
People want to hate Apple.
lowtolerance 6y ago
Anytime there’s a negative news story against Apple, rational thought goes straight out the window.
kerkeslager 6y ago
I'm not really sure where the impression that HN is particularly well educated and informed comes from. My experience here is that people don't read what's linked, they just opine on the title (which may be clickbait) or other people's comments (which are also opining on the title or other people's comments--it's uninformed opinions all the way down). There are a few posters who are knowledgeable in their fields, but overall, I get the impression that HN users are remarkably uninformed on the topics they choose to opine on. HN specifically prohibits remarking on this when it happens; the guidelines say: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' I understand that the intent of this is to create a polite environment, but the end result is one where uninformed opinions are welcomed. It's even to the point that some people will proudly proclaim that they didn't read the thing they're responding to, often paired with a complaint that the linked content is too long, or that it didn't account for some gotcha (which it accounts for, just not in the first few paragraphs). To be clear: you may be informed on a topic, but if you don't read what you're responding to, you aren't informed on what you're responding to. And over time, people whose only source of "information" is uninformed comments are going to be uninformed on topics as well, while believing that they are informed. > It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed. But neither community consensus nor gut feeling have anything to do with truth. Primary sources, scientific observation, and to a lesser degree, logic and expert opinion--those are what we should be trusting.
- Tallasatree 6y ago
  It comes from the fictitious idea that if you play with bits, you're smarter than most people. My outside-of-industry perspective has me come to this conclusion.
  - kerkeslager 6y ago
    Well... I think there's an important distinction to be made between intelligence and knowledge. If you "play with bits", you probably are smarter than most people, because there are a lot of people who can't do that. I've spent a good amount of time as an educator, and it does seem to me that some people just can't wrap their head around programming. That said, being smarter than most people isn't worth much. I've also learned that intelligent people are a dime a dozen. There's no barrier to intelligence--you're just born smart, and fully half of people are born with above-median intelligence--so the relative value of intelligence is limited. Knowledge, on the other hand, is hard to come by: even if you're extremely well-informed on one subject, there are hundreds of subjects upon which you are completely uninformed. Intelligence can help you become informed if you apply it to learning, but as often as not, intelligent people just use their intelligence to skate by without having to learn things. I know that for a lot of my early schooling, I didn't apply myself to learning because I could get away without work due to my intelligence. This didn't pay off, and in my mid-twenties I had to really learn how to learn. Nowadays I would rather be informed than intelligent. EDIT: Note that in the "fixed vs. growth mindset" theory, "knowledge" is just the growth version of intelligence--I'm making a distinction between intelligence and knowledge, but that's not necessarily the terminology other people use.
karlakush 6y ago
The average HN user is not intelligent. If you've been reading this forum for any significant amount of time and still think "wow, these guys are smart," that does not reflect well on you. HN, like most internet forums, consists primarily of the lowest rung of society. It's a natural consequence of the fact that people without jobs have more free time and less money to spend on hobbies. For example, read any thread about UBI or the tech interview process (there are multiple posted every week). The large majority of HN commenters support UBI and hate the FAANG interview process. Why is this? Because they are not smart enough to pass the FAANG interviews and are struggling financially as a consequence.
reaperducer 6y ago
More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed Many threads in HN reflect the tribalism that now permeates society. There are plenty of people on here that will upvote a comment or story simply because it paints Apple in a bad light. Same thing happens to Google, Oracle, and to a lesser extent these days, Microsoft. It doesn't matter if a piece of information is true, it just has to align with someone's personal-conceived biases. We have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are better than the people who get sucked in by political trolls on Facebook just because we work with computers.
- chasd00 6y ago
  This was on full display when the early Covid19 studies were coming out suggesting many more infections than what was being counted. It implied changes to thinking and numbers were needed and people came out of the woodwork, with anger even, to discredit anyone who dared agree. Same goes for anyone who dared to consider Sweden's model as anything less than a killing field for their own citizens. it was pretty disturbing for me, i had held this place in very high regard prior to that experience.
josefresco 6y ago
Except, it wasn't false information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510
- nojito 6y ago
  That section is about payment processors and chargebacks. Which is standard practice across the board.
Shivetya 6y ago
If you read the thinly veiled political pieces on this site you would never expect anything different. For a site mostly aimed at start ups and technology this site has a very large anti business view branding the whole with the happenings at outliers within the world.
loceng 6y ago
Perhaps it was in part good timing for the false information, with the top tech CEOs hearing that Apple/Tim Cook was involved with as well - it would seemingly be the time for such an unreasonable behaviour of keeping 30% fee on refunds to make it to the surface for public viewing. I have a similar shock or fascination when seeing how little the HN crowd understands the benefits of UBI (when tied to inflation + VAT) - there's seemingly been little critical thinking done from foundational principles, and the same common misunderstandings repeat. There's enough momentum of people with little understanding jumping to post that those comments all gain the most traction, and it's too much to jump into discussion with. A good comparison of differences in abilities and then innate failure/mistakes that we can all make - Elon Musk, who understands exponentials and economies of scale via his success as a marker, and stating he decision makes from first principles, is in support of UBI. He says it's inevitable with technology-automation, and then comparing that to his tweeting some arguably misinformed or shallow on the details about COVID-19 - perhaps not having as full or clear as a picture as he should before someone with his reach posts about something so serious. To me however it's really all just signals for the state of the union, and these are canary moments that highlight how reactive people are and how ill-informed they are - due to not having a hierarchy of trusted sources that most of us follow. Is there someone who's as successful and trustworthy competence wise as Elon is with EVs (etc) but for viruses? It was supposed to be Fauci in the US, right? But he first lied to Americans saying masks don't work - and that lack of integrity is harmful and blinding.
dicomdan 6y ago
HN has been overrun by CCP trolls promoting fake news and propaganda for a long time now, more so than Reddit and Facebook even. At the very least the latter try to do something about it, whereas on HN it's business as usual.
- dang 6y ago
  That's not true at all. You've posted bogus insinuations about this repeatedly. It's time that stopped, so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
methodin 6y ago
It's more important how one deals with being wrong than always being right.
lazyjones 6y ago
The upvotes of false information, based on random Tweets meeting negative bias towards Apple, worry me less than the malicious downvoting of corrections, of opinions diverging from the echo chamber's collective bias, of meta-comments addressing these issues. The downvote is just used as a very low effort sh.tpost without content these days. It's risk-free and even more detrimental to actual discourse than its sibling.
nonbirithm 6y ago
And what if a more radical piece of demonstrably false information ended up being believed by enough people that they'd rise up to take corrective action? Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance? If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information. I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way. So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?
amznthrwaway 6y ago
This is not a site where people are well educated and informed. This is a site full of arrogant ignoramuses who like capitalism, technology, and white supremacy. Nothing more. If you had put it on a pedestal that was your own personal error, and you should simply stop being an idiot, instead of spouting nonsense about a post-truth era.
manmal 6y ago
And the correction has 1400 upvotes.
xvector 6y ago
What was worse about this is that some people that described and provided evidence that the story was false were often downvoted. For all of this community's focus on civility, clearly it, too, falls victim to mob mentality.

carlmr 6y ago

>I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. While that may be true, for me the gut feeling was in line with the fake news, which makes it even harder to spot (confirmation bias). I never worked on iOS apps, but my consumer experience with Apple was such that I would have expected exactly this kind of behavior. They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one. I just assumed that a company that treats their consumers like this also doesn't treat developers fairly. Granted, this is my experience from a decade ago. I've never bought anything Apple since. So maybe they've changed.

coldtea 6y ago
>They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one. Do they regularly sell keyboard replacement parts? If not, why expect them to "sell you one"? And the laptop was "out of warranty", wasn't it? How does "barely" change this?
- bpfrh 6y ago
  (I'm not the one who you commented to) Because we all want to live on this planet for a few hundred years? I expect a company that produces things to either supply spare parts on demand, or allow a third party to produce them. Even more so, when the device I bought costs >1000$ Sure, legally they don't have any obligation to do so, but many things are legal but ethically wrong.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    Exactly, and every other laptop company I never had an issue getting spare parts. So they were intentionally behaving worse than average.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Most other companies have easier case constructions though...
      - RealStickman_ 6y ago
        I'm sure it would be in apple's interest and ability to make their parts as modular as possible to make repairs easier if that was what they were going for.
      - carlmr 6y ago
        Then they should revise their designs maybe.
        coldtea 6y ago
        They have been working well for them though... from bankruptcy to #1 company in sales in 23 years based on such designs...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- carlmr 6y ago
  Just a new keyboard for a reasonable price, like every other laptop I've owned. I didn't expect it for free, but a lot of companies want to keep their consumers happy and will fix something that's just out of warranty, especially if it's a part that should last longer than 2 years, like a keyboard.
merpnderp 6y ago
This is a great point on how the world seems to have developed a deep sense of biases on just about everything and now we're left incapable of passing the "would only a cartoon villain do this" test. How is it ever possible to fix this, because we're quickly moving to a point where the most ridiculous of claims, that happen to fit with our biases, are instantly accepted as true and unshakable facts.
- jjk166 6y ago
  At the end of the day, we must remember that just because we can believe something to be true is not actually evidence in support of it being true. Even the most mundane of claims should not be taken on faith alone. We may not verify everything, but we shouldn't repeat or make serious decisions based on claims for which we have not seen compelling evidence, no matter how believable the may seem.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  The problem is that real life is already stranger than fiction. The NSA actually tapped American phones and intercepted inter-datacenter links. Multiple major companies now have voice assistants that have been shown to send voice recordings to employees for review. Apple has used legal action to shut down repair shops. Real life is left incapable of passing the "would only a cartoon villain do this" test.
- brlewis 6y ago
  To even have hope of getting people to overcome confirmation bias and look at evidence, we need concise and convenient ways of presenting evidence. Fact checking is too much of a chore the way things are now.

coldtea 6y ago

>More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news. "Fake news" is a regular thing on the tech/HN community. The whole hype around technologies (e.g. Mongo/NoSQL, etc) is just that. As Alan Kay put it "Programming is a Pop Culture".

amelius 6y ago
The reason is that as programmers we're highly dependent on the technical choices made by the masses.
threeseed 6y ago
You can't possibly be serious. There is no hype for NoSQL or MongoDB on HN. In fact it is the complete opposite with every one trying to push SQL and PostgreSQL for every use case under the sun.
- barbecue_sauce 6y ago
  There was hype for NoSQL/MongoDB on HN ages ago, but it has long since passed. The only people bringing it up now just seem out of touch.
- coldtea 6y ago
  There's no hype today, which is because the hype died out. 5-6 years ago it was all "SQL is dead", before those people got burned. I wasn't giving an example of a current hype -- just of a hype.
- merpnderp 6y ago
  Why couldn't they be serious? NoSQL got big somehow. There was obviously a big push and support for it when it became big. How would HN be immune to this when it can't even spot an obviously fake story about Apple acting like cartoon villains?
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  threeseed is famously (to me) HN's personal MongoDB cheerleader. It always fascinated me. When I read the upstream comment my first thought was "I wonder if threeseed will show up." Not trying to call you out, I just think the consistency + choice of hobby horse is funny, and you always stand out as the one person defending MongoDB: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=MongoDB%20threeseed&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I always wanted to know though: why? What compels you, threeseed?

supernova87a 6y ago

That's what happens when you want to believe in symbols more than taking the time to investigate the complicated facts. And the symbol here was Apple as the big bad evil company trying to exploit developers. Maybe it's a lesson to temper outrage before knowing facts.

xxs 6y ago
In the very same thread there is a quote of devepors agreement with Apple that allows Apple to keep it.

tomduncalf 6y ago

My bad for posting the original tweet up without proper fact-checking... I've emailed the mods to ask them to correct or delete the original to avoid confusion in future. I had heard rumours that Apple did not refund the 30% previously, and seeing a developer of respected apps post it (along with a graph, although actually that didn't prove anything lol) and doing a quick Google (where the top result is "Apple's iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers"), I thought made it seem legit enough to post, and thought it would get shot down quickly if it was incorrect! Interesting lesson in the realities of post-truth as you say! Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thih9 6y ago
> Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched... It seems so easy to spread misinformation with this way of thinking going on. My point is not to blame you, I just wanted to point out that as long as we accept believable data as true, we’ll see believable misinformation on top of HN.
vikramkr 6y ago
It's a good example of the importance of using respect/a large platform appropriately. If I was in your position I also don't think I'd have really fact checked it, since that level of scrutiny on everything would be nearly impossible to maintain if I tried to fact check before posting any given titbit. And even then, I might have fact checked by checking in with a developer of respected apps that would have experience. A significant amount of the burden of getting this right is in the hands of the original twitter poster IMO. If you are originating, rather than sharing, a piece of information like apple keeping the refund, then the burden of fact checking should definitely be on you at that point.

pjc50 6y ago

Apple's opacity leads to this kind of thing. The "rebuttal" doesn't have a citation either. How do we know that it itself is not also fake news? Apple should have a nice clear page we can all link to that explains how this works. But nobody seems to have found one. Edit: no, really, this is important: we're in the middle of the lesson of "social media can amplify things that aren't true and you should check them". Great. So, how do we verify things? What should we be doing? The counter claim link at the top of this thread is also just a random unsourced tweet!

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
It's in the terms: "In such cases,Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User."
- hardlianotion 6y ago
  In other words: the rebuttal is not clearcut.
- ShroudedNight 6y ago
  I have never engaged in any kind of professional legal training; I am most definitely not a lawyer. That being said, my understanding of 'notwithstanding' in this context would imply that Apple reserves the right to retain its commission even when they refund the price to the End-User. https://weagree.com/weblog/notwithstanding-is-a-tricky-one/ https://weagree.com/weblog/notwithstanding-is-a-tricky-one/
- voxic11 6y ago
  What is in the terms? That part says they can keep the commission if they want to. But the question is do they actually keep it.
  - LanceH 6y ago
    That may not have a single answer.

stunt 6y ago

This is not a new era. Tooling is new indeed which makes it tremendously faster and available. On the bright side, you can also get facts back rather quickly like this.

bilbo0s 6y ago
You're thinking incorrectly as well. There is no need to debate patent nonsense. Just correct it and move on. Why did we as a community waste so much time discussing and getting outraged over patent nonsense as opposed to doing the rational thing and calling it patent nonsense from the outset? The answer to that question is troubling. HN as a community is far too accommodating to a lot of silliness simply because it gets votes. Remember yesterday's "news" that Intel was moving TSMC? And don't even get me started on the political nonsense HN upvotes. We should all be taking a good long look in the mirror. If we're not going to learn from incidents like this, at least a bit of self awareness would be nice.

Illniyar 6y ago

I don't see upvotes as being a form of agreement. I often upvotes things I have no knowledge about and sometimes even things I don't agree with that I think would be interesting to hear more about from the HN community. It an interesting topic for many HNers and such seems appropriate that it'll get on to the front page. That being said, downvoting dissenting comments in the thread are extremely problematic. And is a common theme in HN. Which I think stems from the implicit assumption by many people that upvoting a comment or item means agreeing with it.

_qulr 6y ago
Same. I legit didn't know the answer and thought it deserved discussion.

FriendlyNormie 6y ago

I pointed out that it was obviously a lie being spread by one solitary dumbfuck on twitter, but I was randomly shadowbanned one day by the huge faggot dang because he feels the need to protect grown adults from the bad fee-fees they might get from reading words on a screen, so no one saw my comment. Too bad.

jka 6y ago

Do you think that asking people to read -- and potentially answer a simple captcha-like comprehension question -- about content before amplifying it could help in situations like this? (Twitter is apparently experimenting[1] with the former approach) [1] - https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-unread-feature-conversations https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-un...

Razengan 6y ago

One of Apple’s main adversaries, Samsung, has been taken to court for paying students to manipulate social media against their competitors. And given Apple’s stance against the bread and butter of less scrupulous companies (privacy intrusion and data mining), it would be no surprise if there are many other people who are literally paid to make them look bad at any cost.

Razengan 6y ago
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web-reviews/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web-re... https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paying+students+for+reviews https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paying+students+for+...

malwarebytess 6y ago

Not only was the original story incorrect, but the top comment defending the incorrect information was also wrong.

unix_fan 6y ago
this is why I don’t take anything at face value, especially if it’s trending on social media. I wait for the drama to blow over,and check for the actual truth later.

AmericanChopper 6y ago

> I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. Another word for this is groupthink.

mcv 6y ago

Some years ago, HN had a reputation for loving everything Apple. That has clearly turned around.

nojito 6y ago

The idea that HN is well informed is incorrect. The top comments to many posts are completely incorrect. Social media caters way too much to feelings and biases.

hesarenu 6y ago

Isn't it again some random tweet not an actual apple document/confirmation.

natch 6y ago

Where people think they are well educated and well informed. You give us a lot of credit. Most of us are ignorant about a lot of things we have strong opinions on.

0xfaded 6y ago

This is a very good observation. The "news" that intel was moving to TSMC was also on the front page the other day.

rimliu 6y ago

“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”

gridlockd 6y ago
In this case, "the truth" is misleading. Apple presumably doesn't do what was claimed, but it reserves the right to do it.

christophilus 6y ago

At least the correction also made the front page. That’s more than can be said for normal media outlets who seem to broadcast the lie with a megaphone and bury the correction in a footnote.

thelittleone 6y ago

To be fair you say "our gut feeling" as if everyone shares the same 'gut feeling', i.e., that Apple would not do such a thing. On reading the original post my gut feeling believed that this could be or is quite likely true. Why? Because it aligns with the continuous declining customer experience I've had with them for the last 5-7 years. Examples include declining product quality, difficulty getting them to service properly, getting busted for impairing performance on older hardware (planned obsolescence) all that feels like tall poppy syndrome, dark patterns and arrogance.

UweSchmidt 6y ago

While voting is now getting considered a statement of ideological alignment (see Reddit banning people based on their vote for unsavory posts, and people in Germany being prosecuted for 'liking' a violent crime), my vote on the original post was to signal my interest, encourage posts of that sort on this website and to raise awareness, to encourage potential corrections.

KingOfCoders 6y ago
"people in Germany being prosecuted for 'liking' a violent crime" Do you have a link for this?
- UweSchmidt 6y ago
  Can't find the article about a specific case, but according to the link below it appears that a new law specifically includes "liking" as punishable in serious cases. https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/nachrichten/region/daumen-hoch-fuer-hass-und-hetze-wird-strafbar;art140897,4364244 https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/nachrichten/region/daumen-ho...
  - KingOfCoders 6y ago
    Thanks though the article is very sketchy on "liking"
    - UweSchmidt 6y ago
      I agree.

coronadisaster 6y ago

If you post anything that aligns with republicans on this forum (true or not), it has a very high chance of being downvoted or not upvoted.

AndrewKemendo 6y ago

Critically though, a correction is at #1 top spot today. That's about as good as it gets. Corrections in newspapers don't run the same as headlines, nobody upvotes corrections to reddit or Instagram etc... I'd suggest that as far as iterating in the direction of finding the truth, this is a best in class example of how to do it.

paulintrognon 6y ago
Maybe a tag in the original title could also help? Something like: "[FAKENEWS] When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple doesn’t refund the 30% cut" People not reading the comments will then have a way of knowing this is false information.
- aaron695 6y ago
  A current front page article - "Anti-climate action statements get more visibility in news coverage, study finds" is [FAKENEWS] You want to fight that battle?
  - Illniyar 6y ago
    The article is not fakenews. It covers a research about anti-climate statements. Those can be fakenews (though depends on the nature of the statement I would say).
    - aaron695 6y ago
      I'd like to keep this meta if possible. When you wrote this comment had you read the journal article to see if the Press Release and Press Release Title linked on HN accurately represents the published journal article?
- yborg 6y ago
  Terrible tag idea, it's implicitly negative and accusatory. In this instance, the guy was apparently just honestly misinformed. The main problem is that most of the original thread ballooned with upvotes because it became general "<big corporate entity> is bad" kvetching which is perennially popular and probably doesn't belong on HN at all. As long as these kinds of threads aren't modkilled, these things will happen, you just have to deal with it. Tagging them won't solve anything.

wolco 6y ago

In fairness if you take what you find here and applied it to the real world. Everyone would be using rust/go. Meanwhile everyone is still using php.

bzb3 6y ago

It is 2020. If you believe what you read on the internet...

paulintrognon 6y ago

> We are in the post-truth era indeed. Was it really better before? The cognitive biases behind fake news are not knew. Maybe there were there from the beginning, but we are just getting better at spotting them?

goalieca 6y ago
No, we're certainly more politicized though.

peter_retief 6y ago

Now we wait for all the justifications. I really enjoy HN but there is a large number of politically indignant ready to punish who they disagree with rather than allow debate.

ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago

That's why I treat HN the same way as Reddit. Just because people talk in a more sophisticated manner doesn't mean that they are anymore factual.

duxup 6y ago

Yeah there's certainly a factor of "title seems about right, I'll up-vote" out there. There have been a lot of articles where even the comments were entirely "nothing about this is right" and that's not counting opinion / perspective articles, like cold hard facts wrong. It's really frustrating to see on HN.

eternalban 6y ago

Downvotes should force a comment box, or have a link for list of users downvoting a comment. I don’t see what value anonymous downvotes bring to a forum dedicated to informed discussion.

Kiro 6y ago

Are you surprised? The HN crowd instinctively upvotes any headline that makes big tech look bad and is always quick to jump on the bandwagons in the comment thread without hesitation. We're no better than reddit.

gridlockd 6y ago
Nothing bad came of it, because it highlighted a potentially abusive clause in the terms that many developers might not even have been aware of when they agreed to them. "Apple is evil" might be wrong, but "Apple reserves the right to be evil" is still closer to the truth than "Apple is not evil".
- Kiro 6y ago
  A lot of people won't see the rebuttal and will continue thinking this is true.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    In terms of risk, it is better to believe that it is true, because it could become true at any time.

rvz 6y ago

> We are in the post-truth era indeed. Indeed we are, it's also the interesting thing about confirmation bias in communities. In any community, they seem to always believe any news that is immediately negative about the subject that they haven't researched about or want they don't like as the real truth. It's up to us to do our own research with actual evidence rather than sources such as: 'X suggested', 'sources say', 'my friend who works at ABCXYZ' or because it has 1000+ retweets, upvotes, etc. Generally, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed on social media content like FB, Twitter, HN, etc.

yepthatsreality 6y ago

Yes the Apple cult may have always been here but has grown more aggressive and defensive the last 5 years or so. Check any Apple thread and you will see similar results. You cannot utter a word of criticism towards the company without mass downvotes.

sbuk 6y ago
Likewise the FOSS cult. It has been ever thus. Both sides make false claims regularly.
Illniyar 6y ago
mmm... that's the exact opposite of this situation - statements in favor of Apple were downvoted.
moogleii 6y ago
I think you've misread the comment you're replying to; otherwise, I'm not sure I understand how your comment applies. He's saying the post claiming that Apple kept the 30% was fishy (and false). I don't know about a cult, but in this case, the criticism was unfounded. Ironically, your comment is an example of a cult of the anti-cult - always looking out for signs of that other cult.

eanzenberg 6y ago

Oh please, HN is one of the least trustworthy areas of my life primarily because of its echo-chamber, vocal minority ways. All online communities that allow upvoting / downvoting devolve to this. In fact, I’ve started perusing old-style BB sites of my interests which explicitly have no upvoting or downvoting, forcing me to read through comments and replies and where the only nominal “upvoting” occurs in popular threads with lots of posts that continuously push to the top of the BB. It’s a literal breath of fresh air. I’m close to done with community sites that allow upvotes/downvotes.

ColanR 6y ago
Any recommendations?
lowkeynthorough 6y ago
Curiously, stackoverflow uses upvotes and downvotes too. How does that work?
- zymhan 6y ago
  StackExchange is a like a highly moderated subreddit mixed with a Wiki. Mods ensure the posts are of minimum quality, require sources for novel claims, and remove disinformation. An SE community also tends to strongly embrace the general rules for SE, which keeps it from being overrun with "reposts" and "clickbait".
- johnfn 6y ago
  A lot of content on StackOverflow is trivially verifiable - just put it in your IDE and see if it runs. You'll notice that the more subjective questions on StackOverflow almost always 1) get closed immediately or 2) are filled with bad answers. (You'd think getting a refund is trivially verifiable, too, but who's going to go to all that work?)
- rplnt 6y ago
  > just use jquery Not that well.
6y ago

sigzero 6y ago

People want to hate Apple.

lowtolerance 6y ago

Anytime there’s a negative news story against Apple, rational thought goes straight out the window.

kerkeslager 6y ago

I'm not really sure where the impression that HN is particularly well educated and informed comes from. My experience here is that people don't read what's linked, they just opine on the title (which may be clickbait) or other people's comments (which are also opining on the title or other people's comments--it's uninformed opinions all the way down). There are a few posters who are knowledgeable in their fields, but overall, I get the impression that HN users are remarkably uninformed on the topics they choose to opine on. HN specifically prohibits remarking on this when it happens; the guidelines say: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' I understand that the intent of this is to create a polite environment, but the end result is one where uninformed opinions are welcomed. It's even to the point that some people will proudly proclaim that they didn't read the thing they're responding to, often paired with a complaint that the linked content is too long, or that it didn't account for some gotcha (which it accounts for, just not in the first few paragraphs). To be clear: you may be informed on a topic, but if you don't read what you're responding to, you aren't informed on what you're responding to. And over time, people whose only source of "information" is uninformed comments are going to be uninformed on topics as well, while believing that they are informed. > It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed. But neither community consensus nor gut feeling have anything to do with truth. Primary sources, scientific observation, and to a lesser degree, logic and expert opinion--those are what we should be trusting.

Tallasatree 6y ago
It comes from the fictitious idea that if you play with bits, you're smarter than most people. My outside-of-industry perspective has me come to this conclusion.
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  Well... I think there's an important distinction to be made between intelligence and knowledge. If you "play with bits", you probably are smarter than most people, because there are a lot of people who can't do that. I've spent a good amount of time as an educator, and it does seem to me that some people just can't wrap their head around programming. That said, being smarter than most people isn't worth much. I've also learned that intelligent people are a dime a dozen. There's no barrier to intelligence--you're just born smart, and fully half of people are born with above-median intelligence--so the relative value of intelligence is limited. Knowledge, on the other hand, is hard to come by: even if you're extremely well-informed on one subject, there are hundreds of subjects upon which you are completely uninformed. Intelligence can help you become informed if you apply it to learning, but as often as not, intelligent people just use their intelligence to skate by without having to learn things. I know that for a lot of my early schooling, I didn't apply myself to learning because I could get away without work due to my intelligence. This didn't pay off, and in my mid-twenties I had to really learn how to learn. Nowadays I would rather be informed than intelligent. EDIT: Note that in the "fixed vs. growth mindset" theory, "knowledge" is just the growth version of intelligence--I'm making a distinction between intelligence and knowledge, but that's not necessarily the terminology other people use.

karlakush 6y ago

The average HN user is not intelligent. If you've been reading this forum for any significant amount of time and still think "wow, these guys are smart," that does not reflect well on you. HN, like most internet forums, consists primarily of the lowest rung of society. It's a natural consequence of the fact that people without jobs have more free time and less money to spend on hobbies. For example, read any thread about UBI or the tech interview process (there are multiple posted every week). The large majority of HN commenters support UBI and hate the FAANG interview process. Why is this? Because they are not smart enough to pass the FAANG interviews and are struggling financially as a consequence.

reaperducer 6y ago

More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed Many threads in HN reflect the tribalism that now permeates society. There are plenty of people on here that will upvote a comment or story simply because it paints Apple in a bad light. Same thing happens to Google, Oracle, and to a lesser extent these days, Microsoft. It doesn't matter if a piece of information is true, it just has to align with someone's personal-conceived biases. We have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are better than the people who get sucked in by political trolls on Facebook just because we work with computers.

chasd00 6y ago
This was on full display when the early Covid19 studies were coming out suggesting many more infections than what was being counted. It implied changes to thinking and numbers were needed and people came out of the woodwork, with anger even, to discredit anyone who dared agree. Same goes for anyone who dared to consider Sweden's model as anything less than a killing field for their own citizens. it was pretty disturbing for me, i had held this place in very high regard prior to that experience.

josefresco 6y ago

Except, it wasn't false information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510

nojito 6y ago
That section is about payment processors and chargebacks. Which is standard practice across the board.

Shivetya 6y ago

If you read the thinly veiled political pieces on this site you would never expect anything different. For a site mostly aimed at start ups and technology this site has a very large anti business view branding the whole with the happenings at outliers within the world.

loceng 6y ago

Perhaps it was in part good timing for the false information, with the top tech CEOs hearing that Apple/Tim Cook was involved with as well - it would seemingly be the time for such an unreasonable behaviour of keeping 30% fee on refunds to make it to the surface for public viewing. I have a similar shock or fascination when seeing how little the HN crowd understands the benefits of UBI (when tied to inflation + VAT) - there's seemingly been little critical thinking done from foundational principles, and the same common misunderstandings repeat. There's enough momentum of people with little understanding jumping to post that those comments all gain the most traction, and it's too much to jump into discussion with. A good comparison of differences in abilities and then innate failure/mistakes that we can all make - Elon Musk, who understands exponentials and economies of scale via his success as a marker, and stating he decision makes from first principles, is in support of UBI. He says it's inevitable with technology-automation, and then comparing that to his tweeting some arguably misinformed or shallow on the details about COVID-19 - perhaps not having as full or clear as a picture as he should before someone with his reach posts about something so serious. To me however it's really all just signals for the state of the union, and these are canary moments that highlight how reactive people are and how ill-informed they are - due to not having a hierarchy of trusted sources that most of us follow. Is there someone who's as successful and trustworthy competence wise as Elon is with EVs (etc) but for viruses? It was supposed to be Fauci in the US, right? But he first lied to Americans saying masks don't work - and that lack of integrity is harmful and blinding.

dicomdan 6y ago

HN has been overrun by CCP trolls promoting fake news and propaganda for a long time now, more so than Reddit and Facebook even. At the very least the latter try to do something about it, whereas on HN it's business as usual.

dang 6y ago
That's not true at all. You've posted bogus insinuations about this repeatedly. It's time that stopped, so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

methodin 6y ago

It's more important how one deals with being wrong than always being right.

lazyjones 6y ago

The upvotes of false information, based on random Tweets meeting negative bias towards Apple, worry me less than the malicious downvoting of corrections, of opinions diverging from the echo chamber's collective bias, of meta-comments addressing these issues. The downvote is just used as a very low effort sh.tpost without content these days. It's risk-free and even more detrimental to actual discourse than its sibling.

nonbirithm 6y ago

And what if a more radical piece of demonstrably false information ended up being believed by enough people that they'd rise up to take corrective action? Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance? If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information. I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way. So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?

amznthrwaway 6y ago

This is not a site where people are well educated and informed. This is a site full of arrogant ignoramuses who like capitalism, technology, and white supremacy. Nothing more. If you had put it on a pedestal that was your own personal error, and you should simply stop being an idiot, instead of spouting nonsense about a post-truth era.

manmal 6y ago

And the correction has 1400 upvotes.

xvector 6y ago

What was worse about this is that some people that described and provided evidence that the story was false were often downvoted. For all of this community's focus on civility, clearly it, too, falls victim to mob mentality.