ern

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331.
by ern 10y ago
I fully agree with your last paragraph. In "sensible" online communities, we flag, we hellban and we hide too much nowadays, creating filter bubbles for ourselves, and, more dangerously for those who fall for nonsense, and we allo
332.
by ern 10y ago
Google is a private company that can choose how to make money. If it chooses to not show advertising on any particular category of site, that's a commercial decision. If its shareholders or customers are upset they can unseat the board
333.
by ern 10y ago
An interesting observation about the HN thread that you linked to, is that the most substantive reply, that pointed out that Trump was sitting at a real, 25% chance of winning was not voted down.
334.
by ern 10y ago
Thanks, but that's a column that accuses feminists of the same thing that GP did. It isn't a column by a feminist accusing Trump voters of being gender traitors, although it does link to a single blog post on Slate http:&#x2F
335.
by ern 10y ago
No, I'm talking about all the columnists who openly refer to that 42% as traitors to their gender. I did a Google search (ironic, I know) for "Trump traitor gender" and I couldn't find columnists referring to Trump-vot
336.
by ern 10y ago
If by "bias" you mean the systemic blindness against the polling data showing the possibility of a Trump win, I agree with you. But if you are implying that having a strongly-held political opinion is "bias", then I disa
337.
by ern 10y ago
I have found personally that those who are worst at believing and forwarding misinformation online are in their late 40s and 50s-young enough to use technology, but old enough to have not learned how to deal with a deluge of information. Th
338.
by ern 10y ago
Zuckerberg seems to be downplaying Facebook's fake news problem, and I'm not particularly optimistic about Google taking it seriously either. Software engineers are smart- software engineers who work for Google and FB especiallly
339.
by ern 10y ago
In 1988, Japan loomed large in the American psyche, the same way China does today, if not more so. It was the unstoppable economic juggernaut that was destroying American jobs. I doubt Trump would had the same views of Japan specifically, a
340.
by ern 10y ago
I know that getting Mark Zuckerberg to care about the problem is absolutely key to the health of our information ecosystem. Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying it's "crazy" to think that fake news on FB could have influenc
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by ern 10y ago
Their algorithms are already doing this. It's not like it's a pure chronological feed.
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Mark Zuckerberg: The idea that fake news influenced the election is 'crazy'(money.cnn.com)
3 points by ern 10y ago|0 comments
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by ern 10y ago
Zuckerberg seems to be denying that its a problem: http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/10/technology/facebook-mark-zuc...
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by ern 10y ago
“People are smart and they understand what’s important to them,” noted Zuckerberg. Huge amounts of money are sunk into political advertising and propaganda, and have been for ages. Facebook is a great platform to spread those views. To di
345.
by ern 10y ago
AI curated feeds are, of course, not the free flow of information, rather they are blind algorithms looking at what one's "friends" like and what you've previously liked and then feeding you more of the same, creating fi
346.
by ern 10y ago
Successive Australian governments seem to hold a different view. Australians have joined US wars in Vietnam(!), Afghanistan and Iraq. The idea that Australia can do without a military alliance with the US and live in splendid isolation is a
347.
by ern 10y ago
Australia relies implicitly on US security guarantees. Given Trump's previous pronouncements about allies paying their own way, at best, there is a good chance that Australia is going to have to budget more to protect its vast territor
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The surge of fake pro-Trump news coming from Macedonia(abc.net.au)
3 points by ern 10y ago|0 comments
349.
by ern 10y ago
Rewriting your front-end in a new webframework every 6 weeks isn't a thing that actually happens I don't think any sane person would rewrite their apps everytime a new flavor of the month tool came out, but all this technical ch
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by ern 10y ago
It's a very small group: apart from the US, the only other non-metric countries are Burma and Liberia. It would be very difficult, I'd imagine, to do a meaningful comparison between these countries.
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by ern 10y ago
Indirection may be fundamental to programming, but it is a fairly self-contained concept that in my experience can be grokked quickly. The math required for an engineering degree is based on arithmetic, algebra, trig and calculus, all of wh
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by ern 10y ago
The problem with software engineering is that understanding it well is as fundamental as understanding arithmetic Asking this may be trite but: do you have evidence to back that assertion up? Why couldn't we say that about other prof
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by ern 10y ago
Now that there is a push to get all kids coding in school, this criterion will have to be tightened: I wouldn't be surprised to see: "had first PR merged into a Github project before college". Of course these arbitrary crite
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by ern 10y ago
I may have misunderstood you, but you do realize that Mercurial is also a DVCS like git, right?
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by ern 10y ago
git is popular because git is popular (and also because of the DVCS model). I'm pretty sure that it didn't win because of UX but because of network effects ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect ). Th
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The brutal ageism of tech(newrepublic.com)
32 points by ern 10y ago|2 comments
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by ern 10y ago
I agree with you largely. I've inherited plenty of unmaintainable code, including a few user-created abominations. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the idea of end-users writing applications is bad per se , rather, that mor
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by ern 10y ago
In the business software world, the barrier to entry for end-users seems a lot higher than it used to be. Learning PHP, standing up a database and getting it all hosted is a lot more difficult that taking an application suite like MS Access
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by ern 10y ago
Becoming a profession also means developing ethics. Those "childlike things" are amazing, but not at the expense of other people. This is especially important for people who develop line-of-business systems for paying clients. Unl
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by ern 10y ago
We keep getting caught in theoretical cesspits. Perhaps the way forward is to reduce our focus on philosophical discussions of programming paradigms, and to iteratively figure out, using well-defined metrics and outcomes, how best to develo

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