4 ms·

Hacker News has officially jumped the shark when not only do we have 300 stories about the same (political) topic on the front page, we have a top rated comment

Hacker News has officially jumped the shark when not only do we have 300 stories about the same (political) topic on the front page, we have a top rated comment following Godwin's law. Can I get an email or something when this site decides it wants to return to technology and not be r/Politics?

drhayes9 13y ago
I can't think of any single topic more important to the health of the Internet as we know it then this, right now. Sorry to be harsh, but dismissing these discussions as merely "politics" is short-sighted and naive.
- devindotcom 13y ago
  The "discussion" this comment is part of is one step away from "wake up sheeple." Comparing PRISM, about which we know very little, with the propagandists of the third reich is disingenuous, unoriginal, and unproductive.
  - drhayes9 13y ago
    Sounds fine to me, no Nazi comparisons needed here. But I was speaking to the grandparent comment's world-weariness WRT politics being all mixed up in his/her technology.
    - run4yourlives 13y ago
      It's not world-weariness as much as it is US politics weariness. If I wanted to know what the major current events were in a foreign country I'd turn on CNN.
      - unethical_ban 13y ago
        Translated: >If I wanted to know what the major cybersec/surveillence stories were in the country with defacto control of a large portion of the world's internet, a hotbed of technological innovation, and the home country of this website, I'd turn to one of the least reputable news sources in that country.
      - flyinRyan 13y ago
        Which would give you a ridiculous caricature of what's actually going on in the US. As much as I'd like to just ignore the US, they don't seem willing to let us.
- run4yourlives 13y ago
  If you think this is anything different from what has been happening over the last 30-40 years, (and probably longer than that) you are the one that is naive, not me. There is nothing new coming from this, other than the fact that people seem to have had their bubbles of ignorance burst. The internet is the same today as it was yesterday, because a large majority of people simply don't care. You may find this disturbing, but it is undeniable. The circle jerk of the last few days has more properly resembled a university politics class than it has technology and entrepreneurship. I'm not saying politics isn't important though, I'm saying it is better discussed elsewhere. There is nothing new or insightful being added at this point. It's all just meaningless twaddle. If you care, get off your ass and go join a campaign for a person that will stop this stuff.
  - drhayes9 13y ago
    If you knew this was happening and had proof before two weeks ago then you've got a great point. This is different. Now there's proof. Leaked documents implicating the largest consumer Internet companies that are recognizable names for every US citizen. Now these large Internet companies have to stand in front of their customers, their shareholders and say something about this. Now's our chance to demand answers from them and from our government. Now there's money involved; this strikes me as a very nice lever with which to move the world. I agree, standing around saying, "Well, I know there's spying going on but, oh well!" is not productive. My ass has been gotten off of for a very long time. But thinking that nothing is different today is over-the-top cynical.
    - run4yourlives 13y ago
      Now there's proof. So. Fucking. What. Call me cynical, I don't care. I've grown out of my desire to completely change the world. Right now I want a nice safe place for my family to be allowed to go about its business. I have that now, like I had it yesterday, and based on all available data I'll have that tomorrow. Yes, even with someone possibly monitoring that I called Indonesia 10 times over the past 15 years. Most western democracies have had this shit in place for years. Canada has CSEC (http://www.cse-cst.gc.ca/index-eng.html http://www.cse-cst.gc.ca/index-eng.html). ECHELON has been around since the cold war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON). France has internet monitoring. So does Australia. In case you haven't noticed, none of the nonsense around constitutions, human rights, legal decrees and such really matters. They're just guidelines, and how we interpret the words can and does change every damn day. The same law that upheld segregation is the same law that maintains that it is unconstitutional. It's all just interpretation. Get enough people to agree with your interpretation, and you can justify anything. Good luck fighting against that.
MrMan 13y ago
this kind of thing could destroy the bubble you live in, so you should pay attention.
- run4yourlives 13y ago
  Actually, having been around long enough to watch the fall of the Berlin wall on TV and not only remember it, but understand its significance, the more I hear of this story, the more it seems exactly like business as usual.
tlogan 13y ago
The reason why this is very important for Hacker News (and my business) is that me and my business depends on "internet" and "cloud". If people starts loosing confidence (i.e., that their data in cloud is mined to find "things"), we will be losing customers, people will be more and more hesitant to use "cloud" and "internet" (especially ones outside US), etc.
- run4yourlives 13y ago
  Perhaps you should talk to a Canadian then. Very few businesses have accepted "stored in US" data since the patriot act. As for the people that didn't care before, this changes nothing, really.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Even for those who don't accept it, the fact that so many others do means your data do effectively live in the cloud (at least to a significant extent). Particularly in the case of email. So ... it still matters.
mindcrime 13y ago
I wish people would stop carrying on about "Godwin's Law". It's completely meaningless and references to it are no more than just another Internet meme.
- run4yourlives 13y ago
  Like this and practically every other related discussion on HN right now, which was my point.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    I think you're confusing "point" with "hypocrisy".
DennisP 13y ago
"Ingram’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of an improper invocation of Godwin’s Law approaches 1. "...it should be evident Ingram’s Law does not excuse irrelevant, improper mentions of Nazism in any discussion. It is not a purely rhetorical device. But it ought to be used to counter any attempt to side-step proper mention or comparison with Nazism and Hitler or avoid admitting the similarities between Nazism or Nazi practices" http://richardvaningram.hubpages.com/hub/Godwins-Law-and-Ingrams-Law http://richardvaningram.hubpages.com/hub/Godwins-Law-and-Ing... Incidentally it turns out the Glenn Greenwald wrote a little commentary on Godwin's Law a few years back: http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/ http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/ In the comments to that article, Godwin himself showed up, and wrote that his Law was intended only to discourage frivolous comparisons to Nazis, not substantive ones.
- run4yourlives 13y ago
  If you think that was a substantive comparison, you are a fool.
  - chris_mahan 13y ago
    Fool? What sort of word is that? I'd look it up but I don't trust wikipedia... Wait, what? Fool? Really? Did you call someone on HN a fool? My oh my... What strong words! Sheesh, whatever happened to courteous discourse? Has that gone the way of the dodo?
    - run4yourlives 13y ago
      Yeah, when you've been here more than a year you can lecture me on "courteous discourse". Making a comparison equating a US spy/wire tapping program to a homicidal antisemitic lunatic that played a major role in exterminating 9 million people is naive at best and idiotic at worst. Believing such a comparison is apt does in fact make you a fool, by definition, because what you are displaying is foolishness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness By all means though, continue to believe in nonsense. That's your right. Don't attempt to tell me I can't call a spade a spade however.
Tangaroa 13y ago
Is the community jumping the shark, or is Hacker News under a denial-of-service attack? It's hard to tell.
Spooky23 13y ago
It's on point. Obama claimed a day ago that "nobody is listening to your calls". Give me a break -- that defines "the big lie". Nobody said the US government is a bunch of Nazis. But the US government is following a public relations play book that is similar many ways... A deeply disturbing development.
PavlovsCat 13y ago
You want the dog, but not the poop it is making, huh? "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." -- George Orwell I'd argue something similar goes for HN. Especially since "Politics" basically means how people live together in cities, and here a lot of the architects of our virtual city hang out. Yes, surveillance and effectively autocracy is older than technology, but with how the marriage is going lately, it's very much our concern. It's not like any of this would be possible without engineers and mathematicians who made it so.
flyinRyan 13y ago
What jumped the shark is constantly citing Godwin's law. What good is history if we can't learn from it or cite it?

drhayes9 13y ago

I can't think of any single topic more important to the health of the Internet as we know it then this, right now. Sorry to be harsh, but dismissing these discussions as merely "politics" is short-sighted and naive.

devindotcom 13y ago
The "discussion" this comment is part of is one step away from "wake up sheeple." Comparing PRISM, about which we know very little, with the propagandists of the third reich is disingenuous, unoriginal, and unproductive.
- drhayes9 13y ago
  Sounds fine to me, no Nazi comparisons needed here. But I was speaking to the grandparent comment's world-weariness WRT politics being all mixed up in his/her technology.
  - run4yourlives 13y ago
    It's not world-weariness as much as it is US politics weariness. If I wanted to know what the major current events were in a foreign country I'd turn on CNN.
    - unethical_ban 13y ago
      Translated: >If I wanted to know what the major cybersec/surveillence stories were in the country with defacto control of a large portion of the world's internet, a hotbed of technological innovation, and the home country of this website, I'd turn to one of the least reputable news sources in that country.
    - flyinRyan 13y ago
      Which would give you a ridiculous caricature of what's actually going on in the US. As much as I'd like to just ignore the US, they don't seem willing to let us.
run4yourlives 13y ago
If you think this is anything different from what has been happening over the last 30-40 years, (and probably longer than that) you are the one that is naive, not me. There is nothing new coming from this, other than the fact that people seem to have had their bubbles of ignorance burst. The internet is the same today as it was yesterday, because a large majority of people simply don't care. You may find this disturbing, but it is undeniable. The circle jerk of the last few days has more properly resembled a university politics class than it has technology and entrepreneurship. I'm not saying politics isn't important though, I'm saying it is better discussed elsewhere. There is nothing new or insightful being added at this point. It's all just meaningless twaddle. If you care, get off your ass and go join a campaign for a person that will stop this stuff.
- drhayes9 13y ago
  If you knew this was happening and had proof before two weeks ago then you've got a great point. This is different. Now there's proof. Leaked documents implicating the largest consumer Internet companies that are recognizable names for every US citizen. Now these large Internet companies have to stand in front of their customers, their shareholders and say something about this. Now's our chance to demand answers from them and from our government. Now there's money involved; this strikes me as a very nice lever with which to move the world. I agree, standing around saying, "Well, I know there's spying going on but, oh well!" is not productive. My ass has been gotten off of for a very long time. But thinking that nothing is different today is over-the-top cynical.
  - run4yourlives 13y ago
    Now there's proof. So. Fucking. What. Call me cynical, I don't care. I've grown out of my desire to completely change the world. Right now I want a nice safe place for my family to be allowed to go about its business. I have that now, like I had it yesterday, and based on all available data I'll have that tomorrow. Yes, even with someone possibly monitoring that I called Indonesia 10 times over the past 15 years. Most western democracies have had this shit in place for years. Canada has CSEC (http://www.cse-cst.gc.ca/index-eng.html http://www.cse-cst.gc.ca/index-eng.html). ECHELON has been around since the cold war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON). France has internet monitoring. So does Australia. In case you haven't noticed, none of the nonsense around constitutions, human rights, legal decrees and such really matters. They're just guidelines, and how we interpret the words can and does change every damn day. The same law that upheld segregation is the same law that maintains that it is unconstitutional. It's all just interpretation. Get enough people to agree with your interpretation, and you can justify anything. Good luck fighting against that.

MrMan 13y ago

this kind of thing could destroy the bubble you live in, so you should pay attention.

run4yourlives 13y ago
Actually, having been around long enough to watch the fall of the Berlin wall on TV and not only remember it, but understand its significance, the more I hear of this story, the more it seems exactly like business as usual.

tlogan 13y ago

The reason why this is very important for Hacker News (and my business) is that me and my business depends on "internet" and "cloud". If people starts loosing confidence (i.e., that their data in cloud is mined to find "things"), we will be losing customers, people will be more and more hesitant to use "cloud" and "internet" (especially ones outside US), etc.

run4yourlives 13y ago
Perhaps you should talk to a Canadian then. Very few businesses have accepted "stored in US" data since the patriot act. As for the people that didn't care before, this changes nothing, really.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Even for those who don't accept it, the fact that so many others do means your data do effectively live in the cloud (at least to a significant extent). Particularly in the case of email. So ... it still matters.

mindcrime 13y ago

I wish people would stop carrying on about "Godwin's Law". It's completely meaningless and references to it are no more than just another Internet meme.

run4yourlives 13y ago
Like this and practically every other related discussion on HN right now, which was my point.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  I think you're confusing "point" with "hypocrisy".

DennisP 13y ago

"Ingram’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of an improper invocation of Godwin’s Law approaches 1. "...it should be evident Ingram’s Law does not excuse irrelevant, improper mentions of Nazism in any discussion. It is not a purely rhetorical device. But it ought to be used to counter any attempt to side-step proper mention or comparison with Nazism and Hitler or avoid admitting the similarities between Nazism or Nazi practices" http://richardvaningram.hubpages.com/hub/Godwins-Law-and-Ingrams-Law http://richardvaningram.hubpages.com/hub/Godwins-Law-and-Ing... Incidentally it turns out the Glenn Greenwald wrote a little commentary on Godwin's Law a few years back: http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/ http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/ In the comments to that article, Godwin himself showed up, and wrote that his Law was intended only to discourage frivolous comparisons to Nazis, not substantive ones.

run4yourlives 13y ago
If you think that was a substantive comparison, you are a fool.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  Fool? What sort of word is that? I'd look it up but I don't trust wikipedia... Wait, what? Fool? Really? Did you call someone on HN a fool? My oh my... What strong words! Sheesh, whatever happened to courteous discourse? Has that gone the way of the dodo?
  - run4yourlives 13y ago
    Yeah, when you've been here more than a year you can lecture me on "courteous discourse". Making a comparison equating a US spy/wire tapping program to a homicidal antisemitic lunatic that played a major role in exterminating 9 million people is naive at best and idiotic at worst. Believing such a comparison is apt does in fact make you a fool, by definition, because what you are displaying is foolishness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness By all means though, continue to believe in nonsense. That's your right. Don't attempt to tell me I can't call a spade a spade however.

Tangaroa 13y ago

Is the community jumping the shark, or is Hacker News under a denial-of-service attack? It's hard to tell.

Spooky23 13y ago

It's on point. Obama claimed a day ago that "nobody is listening to your calls". Give me a break -- that defines "the big lie". Nobody said the US government is a bunch of Nazis. But the US government is following a public relations play book that is similar many ways... A deeply disturbing development.

PavlovsCat 13y ago

You want the dog, but not the poop it is making, huh? "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." -- George Orwell I'd argue something similar goes for HN. Especially since "Politics" basically means how people live together in cities, and here a lot of the architects of our virtual city hang out. Yes, surveillance and effectively autocracy is older than technology, but with how the marriage is going lately, it's very much our concern. It's not like any of this would be possible without engineers and mathematicians who made it so.

flyinRyan 13y ago

What jumped the shark is constantly citing Godwin's law. What good is history if we can't learn from it or cite it?