(1) Your sentiment is common on HN and I do agree that a college degree is overemphasized as a universal panacea, but it's also absolutely true that lots of people benefit from a university education. Comments like yours make it sound like every individual student would be better off if they skipped college. I don't think that's true.
(2) Going to college is like joining a gym. Some people go to the gym every day, seek out the in-house trainers for free tips, study fitness YouTube videos in their spare time, maybe even make a ton of friends at the gym. Other people pay the same monthly fee but can never seem to find the time to actually go to the gym yet they find plenty of time to play video games and eat junk food. My point is that you can't blame the gym if you don't get in shape. Students have to actively participate in the process if they are going to get the most out of it and unfortunately many do not. I don't think that's entirely the responsibility of the college.
So either you're not from the States or you were well funded in your own educational pursuits. Both are fine this, is not a personal attack.
It is not hard to find evidence that American university is outrageously expensive. And for what is the average result? You learned the theory/basics of X subject? Or you met cool people and had a good time?
I think we're getting to the point that it is not worth it for a common job and certainly not for a common job in tech.
(Not arguing medicine or advanced science/engineering degrees!)
Even in the crudest measure, lifetime earnings, going to college still looks pretty good. Getting a tech job in the first place is much easier if you have a degree. This is not to deny that some have managed without it and have done very well, but they walked a harder road to get there.
More and more websites are getting rid of user comments on their websites. Just in the last couple of months the National Review and The Atlantic have got rid of comments.
In simple terms they couldn't keep up with comment moderation and were not able or willing to invest in enough moderators.
So I have to give credit to HN to having one of the most civil comment sections on the internet. What I like about HN is that the comments VERY RARELY descend into the inevitable political sniping that seems to happen almost everywhere else on the internet, even when discussing controversial topics like Trump, and even the percentage of snarky and dismissive comments is kept pretty low.
I wonder if the idea that you may be interviewing or be interviewed by any of the people you are conversing with means that one “behaves” better?
I am convinced that the combination of voting up good comments with strict, clear and fair moderation is an important reason. Add to this that reputation among peers may matter to people and maybe that is the formula.
I'm not so sure about the interviewing part. First, I am one of the few who does not use a pseudonym on this site, most do.
I have also seen people say some pretty absurd things using public Facebook comments that have their real name and details attached to them, I don't think people are considering that they may be making some career limiting moves when they get mad in comment sections. I also think that tech people have a lot more job options and freedom of movement between companies than other careers.
Sites like reddit that gather karma also create a "reputation" scenario for users, yet it still contains trolls, so I don't think it's that either, but it may be a contributing factor. That combined with the broken windows theory and the very specific target audience may be what make the comments mostly civil but certainly not immune to parody.
My political comments are some of my most popular ones I've made. I think it's more about saying something that's actually constructive or different. I think also the fact that hackernews is not ideologically segmented has to do with it, too. We're here for programming and decent, thought-provoking reading, not having people tell us we're right. You can get away with being political if you're genuinely trying to contribute to the conversation.
> actually constructive or different.
> not ideologically segmented
i dont think that's really the case. HN is full of middle/upper middle class programmers who works in well-developed countries. This is definitely a segment on the political spectrum. This is why you don't see many trump voters here, or bigots or the very conservative. Anyone who attempts to bring discourse with such an undertone will get downvoted.
I'd say HN has more groupthink than the people here would care to admit.
> HN is full of middle/upper middle class programmers who works in well-developed countries. This is definitely a segment on the political spectrum.
No, it's not. While class and profession have some loose correlation to ideology, the class/profession combination you describe includes people from all over the political spectrum, including all of the ones you say are excluded from HN for this reason (whuch, contrary to your description, seem to be well represented; well, not overt bigots but HN moderation is aimed pretty directly against that, and perhaps merely Trump apologists, who may or may not be Trump voters.)
Sounds like an empirical question to me. I'd ante a moderate sum though that @chil's assessment is closer to the truth in terms of homogeneity of political leanings on HN and, if you could somehow measure it, that there is "...more groupthink than the people here would care to admit" on HN.
I don't think career correlates quite so closely to the liberal-conservative spectrum as you may think. Yes, there are a lot of liberals, but I get the impression that libertarians are over-represented as well. And there may not be as few Trump voters as you think ;)
I say fairly political things all the time -- roughly 10% of my comments, I think -- and they generally stay positive.
Politics and economics and ethics are inextricably intertwined with technology these days, so it's usually on topic to comment about the political aspects of a situation.
(1) The culture started by Paul Graham, back when he used to write lots of essays, emphasized a certain "hyperrationality" and attracted a lot of super-logical people in the beginning.
(2) Heavy moderation to keep things from deteriorating and discourage overly polemical debates.
The bottom line is that people quickly get an idea of what is tolerated and what is not tolerated so they work to stay in line which doesn't seem to happen as much on other websites.
The mods here do an exceptional job, but it was also like that before there were active moderators (though it was a much smaller site). I think it's largely the culture here that keeps it civil - commenters that aren't civil get trained to do better by swiftly being sent to the bottom of the comments in an unreadable shade of gray.
General interest news cannot do commentary. People literally believe that they are fighting some sort of war with people over political nonsense.
I saw a piece yesterday that claimed that a woman was flagged for suspicious activity on Twitter because 98% of the 5,000 accounts she followed were Russian troll-bots. The lady spent hours arguing with these bots.
Twitter's bot problem is largely imaginary. If actual humans are acting "bot like", given the fact that nobody has made a bot that passes the Turing test so far, perhaps that means these accounts and tweets are actually human and being mis-classified for political reasons.
It's all about clear standards and strong moderation. I visit another forum that has a great community. No karma, no voting, just those two things. I've also run a large community in the past that I believe was successful for those reasons.
The moderation is strong but not heavy-handed. The clear standards allow commenters to understand why they get downvoted or flagged which is nice. I have seen nitpicky over-active moderators on a different forum site effectively wipe out community engagement over the course of a year and it wasn't fun.
I'd probably just abolish downvoting entirely: rely entirely on upvoting. There's already a bias towards upvoting in the system due to the min cap but not the max cap.
You make it sound like voting-as-disagreement is rare but in my experience it's by far the most common way downvotes are used. I have showdead switched on and I keep toying with the idea of finding an extension to un-grey comments, because over and over I find comments in grey that are well written, erudite and merely express an opinion that goes against the current startup-culture HN zeitgeist. They aren't actually bad comments though.
So why not just let good comments rise to the top.
Perhaps you are right. I have experienced downvotes primarily in semi politicized discussions like automation, economics blockchain, diversity discussions. Most technical posts seems fairly balanced.
Perhaps yeah abolish downvote and only have flag for admins and people with high karma is a good idea.
That seems like a decent idea but a bit tedious for the voter. I also like the Stack Overflow model where each downvote costs 1 of your own karma points.
CBC in Canada made commentors use their real name and disabled comment sections on particular stories that would normally incite a lot of uncivil behaviour.
I'm not sure if things got better as I left and never looked back.
Yeah, IMDB was my top 10 site for 10+ years back in the days of the boards and i had 2-3 visits since the removal. The fun part is that i had 0 posts and used it only to find recomendations / plot explanations. It's beyond me how you can remove the killer feature...
We lost so much behind the scenes history/trivia with the removal of IMDB comments. Some frequent users migrated their comments to www.themoviedb.org but it's nowhere near the amount of what was there from what I can tell. Top movie listed has 1 post, Shawshank Redemption has 11.
I haven't even bothered to visit since they removed the forums.
I understand why they did it, the racism and trolling was ridiculous there, but there were some good comments, especially on the forums for the less popular movies.
I wonder if a big part of the difference is that HN has only one stream of postings. If there were a HN-politics, HN-tech, etc. each may end up as an echo chamber like reddit.
I participate on HN but only lurk on reddit due to so many upvoted garbage-comments on the latter. I don't much care if reddit posts/comments in futurology are always "woo! yay technology! future!!" and everyone in babyelephantgifs is just celebrating baby elephants all the time, with no dissent.
I do care about endlessly repeated/upvoted noise in comments. Puns instead of topically relevant comments, political sniping completely unrelated to the story, catchphrases from the poster's favorite movies/TV series/games, and basically everything from reddit site:knowyourmeme.com. Yes, I know, smaller subs and content that never makes it to the front page don't suffer in the same way. I do enjoy reading the rust, programming, and AskHistorians subreddits.
My experience is that you can speak about nearly everything here if you keep it civil, relevant, and substantial. Being nice and polite helps as well. There are exceptions of which I sadly have made my share of experiences (and my own mistakes!), but I still consider HN to be a remarkable place.
I wonder to what extent you've tried arguing positions that are unpopular with the San Francisco set.
Yes, HN has good comments on average. But my experience of moderation has been that it often seems wildly random and can be very politically biased. There was a story some time ago about the Guardian and when I first looked at the comments section, it was full of comments describing disappointment or mocking what sort of paper the Guardian had become. A few hours later it was a morass of greyed out, flagged and dead comments ... apparently some voters can't take criticism of that paper no matter how civil. One of my own comments on that thread got downvoted to the min and it consisted only of links to stories the Guardian had actually published, so was pure fact!
Perhaps it got a bit better lately, it's hard to tell, but HN's community is not a representative slice of opinion around the world and it's kept that way deliberately. This is especially true of anything that crosses into criticism of modern identity politics or feminism, even if the contents of the comment criticise ideas and not people.
Indeed doing a Damore on HN is a fast way to get lots of min voted or dead comments and a ticking off from the moderators for "engaging in ideological battle", although of course people posting the opposing ideas are never "engaging in ideological battle". The politeness, civility or level of research involved has no impact on this: it's purely about position.
although of course people posting the opposing ideas are never "engaging in ideological battle"
To me this bias is quite evident, although the mods certainly don't see it that way.
E.g. I once tried to submit a story from Breitbart. It had to do with soon-to-be-laid-off US workers being replaced by H-1B. But of course the hate here for Breitbart is strong, so my non-political story couldn't even be submitted. Breitbart is shadow-banned in its entirety. Submissions don't appear in "new" except to the submitter (and maybe if showdead is on?).
Fine and good. Their web site, their rules. But at the same time, the mods were cool with allowing submissions linking to rt.com. The hate for conservatives / right-wing is so strong here that mods were more accepting of stories coming from Putin's government-funded international propaganda network.
I haven't seen any submissions from RT lately, so I think it has now also become shadow banned. C'est la vie.
Wow, so this comment just got me more karma than any other comment I've ever made in almost 7 years on HN!
I honestly didn't think anyone would read it, the article was already several hours old when I wrote it.
It's obviously not because it's a brilliant comment, probably a combination of timing and of saying something that "struck a nerve" with enough people.
> In simple terms they couldn't keep up with comment moderation and were not able or willing to invest in enough moderators.
Has nothing to do with that. It's because their comment section gets no activity to merit investment. Instead they are investing in "managing" social media via twitter, facebook, reddit, etc.
> So I have to give credit to HN to having one of the most civil comment sections on the internet.
It also has the worst and most biased comment section. It's why traffic is down and hardly anyone uses HN.
> So, keep it up, dang and sctb!
Only on "hacker" news would someone support censorship.
I find it bizarre to see people equating forum moderation with some sort of freedom-bashing censorship. Does no one remember Usenet? Active moderation is essential for discussion forums, even if only to clean out spam and trolling.
There's just too many people on the internet, and only so many are housebroken.
I am not sure if the article addressed this model in particular, but I found it compelling.
(2) It occurred to me that most of us don't fear death as much as becoming increasingly useless as we become older due to ill health and physical weakness.
It would be not much fun living to be 200 if the last 120 years were spent in a bed or wheelchair.
So what we want is not to increase the lifespan but to prolong the amount of time we can spend in relatively physically prime condition. I am sure this is not an original thought, but something worth mentioning.
> It would be not much fun living to be 200 if the last 120 years were spent in a bed or wheelchair.
While I agree (and while I additionally think any plausible advancement of that degree would necessarily need to increase healthy lifespan), I'd also say that it'd be inherently preferable to dying, and it would give 120 more years to solve those problems. We can come up with a lot of medical advancements in 120 years.
I remember reading and commenting on this same article when it was posted a few years ago.
I agree with most of the comments posted here.
In a certain sense making friends is really very simple.
But, to paraphrase one of my favorite quotes, that does not mean that it is EASY.
It just requires CONSISTENTLY spending A LOT of time in a collegial atmosphere with someone. If you do that, assuming you have a few things in common and don't annoy the heck out of each other, you will inevitably become friends.
This is why people make such good friends in college or in the army.
But consistently spending a lot of time with someone you just met is not easy for most adults outside of a romantic relationship or a work thing.
It's the paradox of choice, we have so many activities going on and different options on ways to spend our time that we have a hard time being consistent with developing any one specific relationship.
The author does not offer ANY evidence for Amazon's supposed "dominance".
How exactly is Amazon dominating?
What percentage of online retail sales does Amazon have? What percentage of TOTAL retail sales (online and offline)?
And more importantly, how is Amazon's market position harming consumers?
It's remarkable that Tim Harford wrote this entire article without citing a single figure or statistic.
What seems to be going on is that there is a PERCEPTION that Amazon is totally dominating and monopolizing retail, but retail is so big that you can grow massively and have revenues of a $100 billion without coming close to being a monopoly.
Points to note:
(1) Amazon has no MOAT. Anyone can set up shop and start delivering things to people. There is no switching cost.
(2) Amazon has MASSIVE well-funded competition in all of its areas: online retail (Walmart), Cloud (Google), video streaming (Netflix), Books (the big publishers who own the content)
(3) You can live quite comfortably and cheaply and conveniently get almost everything that Amazon has to offer without having to use Amazon if you don't want to (books, retail items, cloud services, etc.). This is not the case with pure monopolies like utilities, or monopolies like Intel or Microsoft where completely avoiding them is a big pain for the average person.
Data. Amazon has a lot of data on consumer buying patterns
I have a folder of screenshots I keep of hilariously bad Amazon product suggestions. I have been a regular Amazon customer since the '90's and I can say with a high degree of confidence that their consumer data isn't that valuable. All the recommendations that make sense are directly off products, if I buy one flavour of food for my cats it will suggest another but hell, anyone can do that. It's not even smart enough to suggest other cat-related products.
It's not even smart enough to realise most items I buy are items you only need one of. E.g. if I buy a screwdriver set, or desk, or frying pan, I'll keep getting recommendations for other similar products. I'm pretty sure a random product suggester could do better.
But any business has the opportunity to smart small and grow organically. Nothing has changed about the market since Amazon started, as far as barriers to entry. In fact if anything, in some sense barriers to entry are lower because it's easier than ever to make an ecommerce website.
While google is a cloud competitor, azure remains a larger competitor. Regardless, AWS is positioned to hold the large majority of the cloud market for a while. Not to say that any of this is unhealthy.
That graph seems to be from this Techcrunch article: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/30/aws-continues-to-rule-the-.... It also has another graph showing the growth of Azure and Google being much higher than AWS. AWS has a head-start, but others are driving pricing down. Yay competition!
With 30-35% of the market (if that graph/article is to be believed), it's not even really fair to say AWS has a majority (majority being usually used for >50%).
The graph I posted shows Azure and Google growth being much higher as well. Think of it like this though: if you have 100 pennies and your growth rate is 75% then next year you will have 175 pennies. If you have 700 pennies and your growth rate is 35% then next year you'll have 945 pennies. Amazon offers a stronger product and just isn't going to "lose" market share at any point soon. I'm surprised IBM is even on there - I'd guess 90% of their cloud revenue is current customers that they converted over.
IBM acquired Softlayer, because otherwise their "cloud" offerings were basically marketing wank. Softlayer offered dedicated hardware, which a few years ago might have been appealing because of compliancy issues or lack of beefy machines on other cloud providers. In classical fashion, IBM snoozed and the competition has caught up (<insert IBM being morons rant here>). Great post if you want more detail: https://thehftguy.com/2018/01/15/the-inevitable-demise-of-ib...
Fully agree to all but (3). From personal experience (here in Spain), every year it is getting more difficult for me to not buy from them (yes, I "religiously" avoid giving companies I consider harming society a dime, if I can...)
How is Amazon harming society? I don't see how they harm consumers since either way, consumers are the biggest winners of those low prices.
If you are referring to self-published authors distributing ebooks being forced to take 35% on < $3 sales and 70% on > $3 sales on their platform; or merchants leveraging their reach to sell to a larger audience being undercut by Amazon on price then yes, they are harming society in some way.
But even their "harm" is as debatable as the "harm" of Henry Ford's mass produced cars displacing horse-drawn carriages mostly because they were more efficient at transporting people over the same distances as horses.
- Nice jobs with plenty of human interaction at local stores get replaced by low-wage, brain-dead jobs in sweatshops (distribution centers) and employees get replaced with self-employed gig workers (transportation services)
- Amazon makes huge profits it immediately keeps reinvesting, so it pays no taxes on gains, reducing the redistribution of wealth
- Of the taxes that would apply, Amazon, like all multinationals, makes use of legal loopholes only the privileged can "access"
- Amazon's data-centers are probably one of the world's largest consumer of electricity - which in turn mostly comes from fossile fuels and atomic energy, therefore polluting the world and driving global warming
- Having a large, controlling piece of the "job pie" means such companies can push wages and prices down, ultimately eliminating the middle class, that was built around SMEs
>> Nice jobs with plenty of human interaction at local stores
- Cashiers and other such store jobs are nice? Most such jobs at least here in the US are minimum wage, dead-end jobs which includes having to deal with rude customers and managers who would replace you in a heartbeat with two others for half your pay. What may be 'nice' to you the customer isn't necessarily 'nice' for the employees. Amazon offers convenience and time savings instead of human interaction. If this niceness of human interaction was that important or valuable to everyone, they would have voted with their wallets and gone to the stores instead of shopping on Amazon which means they value convenience and time more than the niceness of human interaction with strangers. So Amazon's popularity means capital is just being redirected to the most valuable actions.
>> self-employed gig workers (transportation services)
- I believe it's the lack of healthcare and good social security (more so a problem in the US) that is the main 'problem' or 'risk' with the gig economy. Otherwise I am hard-pressed to see why people working on their own terms is really not better than long-term employments especially for commodity jobs like driving and transportation.
>> Amazon makes huge profits it immediately keeps reinvesting, so it pays no taxes on gains, reducing the redistribution of wealth
- It keeps reinvesting its profits which means the money and capital is going back into the economy - in the means of cheaper prices, more services that startups and businesses be more efficient which means a whole order of more people than just the shareholders, benefit in some way from this capital. How is this reducing the redistribution of wealth? In fact companies who take and store profits (like Apple) and/or use them for share buybacks (like Google) are using this money less efficiently by returning it to only a small number of people who are Apple/Google share owners.
>> Of the taxes that would apply, Amazon, like all multinationals, makes use of legal loopholes only the privileged can "access"
- You mention that all multinationals do this and that these are 'legal'. I really don't know why only Amazon is the one harming anyone here. I agree that everyone, including Amazon should pay their fair share of taxes. I am not a tax expert, but I just think that the fact that these 'legal loopholes' exist means that in todays world of global economies and multi-national companies, defining 'fair taxation' is very complex and not a simple black and white decision.
>> Amazon's data-centers are probably one of the world's largest consumer of electricity - which in turn mostly comes from fossil fuels and atomic energy, therefore polluting the world and driving global warming.
- I can actually argue that Amazon's cloud would be a net positive for world pollution and energy consumption. Amazon's cloud data centers pack multiple millions of customer workloads from what would have been many, inefficient data centers into smaller number of very large, but also highly efficient data centers. Amazon has whole teams working on green/renewable energy sourcing for their data centers as well as designing more efficient hardware which means millions of businesses are automatically gaining the benefits. This is an important business effort for Amazon too because of their scale and visibility. I doubt that smaller businesses running their own hardware or data centers would ever care about their efficiency and/or the cleanliness of their source of their power.
>> Having a large, controlling piece of the "job pie" means such companies can push wages and prices down, ultimately eliminating the middle class, that was built around SMEs
- Most if not all of Amazon's services have been built up on enabling others to do business and create more value - be it authors, sellers, or tech companies. Plenty of SMEs have leveraged and built on top of Amazon's services and had access to opportunities that they could never have. The SMEs that are getting 'eliminated' (like bookstores and such) need to adopt to the new situation where the value/services they provide are simply not in demand or the market has moved on and they have not adapted. Yes, there is a risk of having a large number of businesses depending on a single company but that is not the same discussion as Amazon being harmful.
I think this expresses everything that's wrong about a lot of other companies. And if they can't figure this out, they deserve to fail. How this can even be considered a "moat"? You'd think customer trust/experience should be at the root of good business, especially repeat business.
(1) I don't think this is necessarily the right place to ask this. HN is not particularly known for mathematics, it's better to ask at a math focused site like https://math.stackexchange.com/
(2) My generic answer to the question is - NO. You can be a good quant, engineer, etc. without having the knowledge of how to prove the theorems in a real analysis undergraduate course. However, knowing the proofs may be helpful if you decide you want to do write theoretical research papers in a particular area, even just for the sake of "mathematical maturity".
I understand that people are reacting to the "missed expectations", but the reality is that everyone knew that their original production goals were very aggressive.
Here's the bottom line: If Tesla originally planned to produce 250,000 Model 3s in 2018 (5,000 per week * 50 weeks) and only ends up producing 150,000 (1,000 per week for 6 months + 5,000 per week for 6 months) I don't think that's going to be a problem in the long run.
Their only real competitor right now is the Chevy Bolt.
The Bolt has similar range and price to the Model 3 but it has at least 2 disadvantages:
(1) GM is not really aggressively pushing the Bolt, allegedly because it is selling them at a loss
(2) Tesla has the super charger network.
Conclusion: These delays don't like they will have any long term impact.
Their constraint is not competition but cash. They already have a lot of debt. If they cannot ramp up production as forecast, future cash injections could be hard to get.
(2) Going to college is like joining a gym. Some people go to the gym every day, seek out the in-house trainers for free tips, study fitness YouTube videos in their spare time, maybe even make a ton of friends at the gym. Other people pay the same monthly fee but can never seem to find the time to actually go to the gym yet they find plenty of time to play video games and eat junk food. My point is that you can't blame the gym if you don't get in shape. Students have to actively participate in the process if they are going to get the most out of it and unfortunately many do not. I don't think that's entirely the responsibility of the college.