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Is fact checker an actual job?

In serious news organizations, absolutely. Journalists write the stories, fact checkers make sure every claim is backed up by evidence before it gets published.

To describe their job poorly, they're there as a way of reducing odds of a lawsuit. At one of my previous jobs, there was a whole fact-checking team that wrote no stories themselves, but every story had to be run through them as a part of the publishing pipeline.


I see errors all the time in mainstream media. Sometimes these appear from some kind of info file that they raid every time they have to look up a subject, so the same information is quoted again and again (even if inaccurate). A lot of things in life are subjective and open to interpretation, especially when it comes to politics and culture.

Mainstream != serious. In fact it's quite the opposite, as serious news organizations cannot match the output of mainstream news. Even one story per month is a success for many.

In serious news organizations, there's quite a few steps between a journalist writing a draft and that draft being published. Fact-checking is one of them, having a competent "boss" (called an editor) is another.

Most news orgs have both a "serious" department and a "publish as much as possible" department, with far different requirements. In general, if you're publishing something along the lines of "X said Y", you don't need a rigorous process. If you're doing an investigation in which you're accusing someone of doing something illegal, then you need a far more rigorous process, otherwise you'd be sued out of existence pretty quickly.

Of course, having a rigorous process doesn't mean you won't get sued at all, but there's a term for that: SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation). In those lawsuits, the goal is not to prove the story wrong, but to just waste news org's resources on defending their reporting in front of a judge instead of doing their job.


I'll use a non-American example. Such outlets present themselves as more serious than they are, particularly the BBC. The BBC presents itself as neutral, for example, when it is no such thing in many areas. When it comes to British foreign policy or the Royal Family, its biases are clear. The BBC tried to bury the Prince Andrew story repeatedly.

I pointed out to someone that the BBC was institutionally biased against Scottish independence, just by the nature of its funding. The BBC is funded by the TV licence, and if Scotland became independent, then the BBC would immediately lose 10% of its potential funding.

Other media outlets are the same. The question is who owns them, and how are they funded. State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble (as happened in Israel a few years ago when Netanyahu shut theirs down). Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners. We have seen unions play less and less of a role in the political arena, probably partly because large profit-making corporations don't want them to be publicised.


I don't know how any of that has anything to do with what I explained to you. Two completely separate topics, I'm not here to indulge your every gripe you have with news.

You wanted to discuss so called fact checking and we did discuss fact checking. It is not always about facts, but projecting a narrative.

No "indulgence" whatsoever.


I think what you wanted to do is to rant.

Not what I was thinking, but thanks anyway, pal!

> BBC

> State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble

Very good example, BBC has criticised the government many times, and even did embarrassing investigations and fought in courts to get to publish them. A very good one is them fighting like hell to publish that MI5 are shielding an informant who is a pedophile. And they got to publish it, and directly say that MI5 tried to stop them via the courts on the grounds of "national security", but the courts disagreed.

So yeah, no.

> Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners

Depends. Le Monde is a French left-wing newspaper (top 2 in France alongside the right-wing Le Figaro), which is majority owned by a holding company majority owned by one of France's premier tech billionaires (Xavier Niel). But everything is structured in such a way that he barely has any control (he can't even sell the holding company without approval from the remaining owner of Le Monde, a representative body of the journalists, staff and even readers). It has full editorial freedom.


The people doing that job are not the ones being targeted here.

> It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

Not only are they targeted, but so are many more.


You're quoting the NPR article, which misleadingly conflates the people we're talking about (who work for news agencies to verify their stories before publication) with social-media moderators, not the State Department directive, which (if we can believe the Reuters reporting at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-orders...) is fairly clear that it's only talking about the second.

How do you know?

Please link it if you have found it, because as far as I understand this story, the directive was sent out as an internal memo and therefore neither you or me can simply read it. Plus the Reuters story you've linked also has an almost-identical paragraph:

> The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.


Yes, there are many situations where it would be illegal or detrimental to publish falsehoods, so people are implied to check facts.

Now it's turning into a situation where it's illegal or detrimental to publish the truth.

Big press outlets have been publishing fibs of one kind and a other since as long as I can remember. A certain Australian's newspapers have had problematic statements in them for decades.

> problematic

This is so vague as to be meaningless.

Like, of course it's "problematic", that's why you're talking about it. Be more specific or it sounds like an applause light.

To show the outside view: I'm thinking of a recent (pointless) discussion I had, it's akin to when people who hate asylum seekers say most of those asylum seekers are "fighting age": of course most of them are, very few others are fit enough to make the trip.

(If I judge you right from a very short comment, you'd describe the phrase "fighting age" as itself "problematic"?)


That isn't "vague", it's a way that I can express disdain without opening myself up to legal repercussions. A lot of dubious content appears in mainstream media, usually to push people in whichever direction that media desires. I catch YouTube doing it all the time, it's always trying to pull me in one direction or another (often ones I disagree with or am not interested in).

American mainstream media focusses far too much on personality politics rather than substance. It rarely questions the political binary either, and offers only tokenistic representation to any positions outside it. There are many issues and debates which are simply not mentioned on it.

On the migration issue, I have found that coverage tends to one extreme or the other — i.e. the open door or the closed door — when the probable solution is somewhere in between IMHO.


Can you point to a law that states it's illegal to publish the truth?

Only the wrong sort of truth.

It"s a stepping stone on the way to make it illegal to refuse to publish the "right" sort of lies.


I learned today that you can install vscode via winget now lol

Yes but winget is not the Windows central package manager. Actually, Windows does not have one but for some reason you have enforced updates from a central source.

Why does Windows not have a formal source for safe software? One that the owner (MS) endorses?

One might conclude that MS won't endorse a source of safe software and hence take responsibility is because they are not confident in the quality of their own software, let alone someoneelses.


I believe that MS wants that to be their own MS Store, though I don't know of a single person who actually uses it as their preferred way to manage software. For what it's worth, VS Code is available there: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/xp9khm4bk9fz7q

I am in the process of building myself a cross platform GUI for network monitoring.

Simply because I need one for non-critical stuff and things like uptime robot are enterprise geared and too expensive for me to entertain.

I wish there was an uptime robot for like 25 cents a monitor a month.


Uptime Kuma is FOSS, not sure if it is missing any features you might be expecting. Very easy to set up as well.

https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma


When a ocaml maintainer took the time to give you real feedback, all you responded with was:

"Thanks X Person"

You're the direct cause to open source burn out.


I hate these comparisons because it's not apples to apples.

The entire point of AWS is so you don't have to get a dedicated server.

It's infra as a service.


I don’t understand your complaint.

The point of having a private chef is so you don’t have to cook food by yourself.

It’s still extremely useful to know if the private chef is cheaper or more expensive than cooking by yourself and by how much, so you can make a decision more aware of the trade offs involved.


The problem with this discussion is that a lot of people on these threads work as overpaid assistants to the one private chef, but also have never cooked at home.

Translating:

A lot of people work with AWS, are making bank, and are terrified of their skill set being made obsolete.

They also have no idea what it means to use a dedicated server.

That’s why we get the same tired arguments and assumptions (such as the belief that bare-metal means “server room here in the office”) in every discussion.


> such as the belief that bare-metal means “server room here in the office”

I remember the day I discovered some companies, and not just tech ones (Walmart, UPS, Toyota,…) actually own, operate, and use their own datacenters.

And there companies out there specialized in planning and building datacenters for them.

I mean, it’s kind of obvious. But it made me realize at how small a scale I both thought and operated.


Walmart does not want to use AWS because they are in direct competition.

I worked for a company that was attempting to sell software to walmart.


Yes, but if that was the only rationale, couldn’t they have opted for GCP or Azure?

Check out how Wikipedia and the rest of the wikimedia universe is run.

One of the least insightful comments I’ve seen in my 16 years here. “it’s because everyone here is dumb and knows it, and they are panicking and lying because they don’t want you to blow up their scam.”

I'm not calling anyone dumb. It is fine to not have experience with Hetzner or to have only with AWS. It's fine for someone to not know how to cook at home.

About people who work with it, I'm just alluding to the famous quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".


The motte:

- "I'm not calling anyone dumb."

- "I'm just alluding to the famous quote"

The bailey:

- "A lot of [Them] are making bank [and are] terrified of their skill set being made obsolete."

- "They have no idea what it means to use a dedicated server."

- "[They believe] bare-metal means “server room here in the office”"

FWIW, it definitely plays great: we all love to believe everyone who disagrees with us is ignorant, usually I'd upvote something like this and downvote a reply like mine, but this was so bad it hit an internal tripwire of "This is literally just a bunch of comments about They, where They is all the other comments."

You can easily play it off with "I didn't call other commenters DUMB, I just said they don't know a server is just a computer and they don't have to be in your office or in Amazon's data center to serve things!"

To riff on the famous quote you "just meant to allude to": "It is difficult to get an [interlocutor] to understand something [about their argumentation] when [they're playing to the crowd and being applauded]" I hope reading that gives you a sense of how strong of a contribution it is to discussion, as well as how well-founded it is, as well as what it implies.


You are the one who called them "dumb". You are the one making the judgement call here.

And I stand by what I said: lots of people don't have experience with non-AWS setups and are going around repeating AWS salespeople cliches.


My feeling is that a more apt comparison would be "cooking yourself vs. ordering Doordash all the time" (aka "a taxi for your burrito)

Yes

Getting a chef would be hiring your own devops team

But the point of AWS is that you can buy these services with very fine granularity


Sure, that might be a more appropriate comparison.

The key point is that being aware of the cost trade off is useful.


>The point of having a private chef is so you don’t have to cook food by yourself.

With cloud, you hire a private chef and ALSO have to cook the food by yourself.

You don't hire a team to maintain the server infrastructure, but you hire a team to maintain cloud infrastructure.


Havibg a private chef is more like havibg hired people to manage your own hardware. Doordash is aws

it's not interesting as a standalone question indeed. The question is, what do you enable by having a private chef?

Is it the fact that you don't want to spend the time cooking? or is it cooking plus shopping plus cleaning up after?

Or is it counting the time to take cooking lessons? and including the cost of taking the bus to those cooking lessons?

Does the private chef even use your house, or their own kitchen? Or can you get a smaller house without a kitchen alltogether? Especially at the rate of kitchen improvement, where kitchens don't last 20 years anymore, you're gonna need a new kitchen every 5 years. (granted the analogy is starting to fail here, but you get my point)

Big companies have been terrible at managing costs and attributing value. At least with cloud the costs are somewhat clear. Also, finding staff that is skilled is a considerable expense for businesses with a more than a few pieces of code, and takes time, you can't just get them on a whim and get rid of them.


> The entire point of AWS is so you don't have to get a dedicated server.

Yet every company I've worked for still used at least a bunch of AWS VPS exactly as they would have used dedicated servers, just for ten times the cost.


Then why does EC2 exist?

Same here. Gemini just rips shit out and doesn't understand the flow well between event based components either

I got this on the dominos pizza app recently. I clicked the bread sticks by mistake and clocked out, and a pop up came up and offered me the bread sticks for $1.99 as well.

So now whenever I get Dominos I click and back out of everything to get any free coupons


It’s retargeting and it happens much more often than you think.

Try the same thing at pretty much any e-commerce store. Works best if you checkout as a guest (using only your email) and get all the way up to payment.

A day later you’ll typically get a discount coupon and an invitation to finish checking out.


Ya if you ask them to make it too, they just make math based ones lol

If the only restriction on reverse engineering is their cloud SaaS, why was everyone up in arms?

Or is this Arduino trying to save face?


Their definition of "the platform" in the TOS is verbose and has weird grammar. I can see how people came away with a different understanding.

> User shall not translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform’s operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements;

> The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”).


I can only read this as the entirety of "Arduino open source ecosystem" being part of "the Platform".


I'm pretty sure that is the point. Legal ambiguity to say whatever they can vaguely in public but in court they will make it encompass the entire world.

Large companies have repeatedly demonstrated that they will pick whichever interpretation is most convenient at the time. When there are pitchforks they will claim that you are confused and misinterpreted the writing but when you get poisoned by food in their restaurant and try to sue them they will point at terms of service on their online video streaming service that your spouse agreed 5 years ago as if that's relevant (not a joke Disney tried that one). These things are supposed to be written by proffesionals, I dont think Hanlon's razor sufficiently explains it, terms of service are at least partially intentionally written as vague and unclear as possible for benefit of one side.

That's called motte and bailey.

u/healsdata already gave a good answer to that. I may only add that this could be the first step of increasing restrictions made by qualcom. The future will show. If it happens, some who warned about that may wisely nod their heads then, whereas others will be very confused about "this sudden change" ...

> why was everyone up in arms?

Engagement farming, clout chasing etc.


Check out the new grok 4.1 graphs. They're even worse


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