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KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: On All That Fuckery

All of those harassments and trolling mainly happens as a back and forth between two streams of culture within the USA. And typically revolves around the topics of: "Black lives matter", "Racism", "Sexism in tech", "Transphobia" - all these things are internal US politics stuff.

From the perspective of where I live (Eastern Europe):

"Black lives matter" - We have very few black people living here. And very few problems with police in general. When something bad happens it typically happens to the police, not by the police.

"Racism" - we have no history of slavery nor racism, except being subjected to it. Even more - originally the word "slave" was derived from the word "slav".

"Sexism in tech" - there is no sexism in tech here. Tech is not even a prestigious field. People want to work in law, medicine and finance. Some can even be quite ashamed to admit they work in a technical field.

"Transphobia" - even such things as thinking about "sex" and "gender" as different concepts are quite US specific. i.e. where I live we typically refer to people by their sex, and don't even have a term for a separate concept like gender.

Yet these things are so pervasive on the internet. People even post their pronouns on twitter and (in this case) fill their GitHub profiles with that stuff. They can do it of course, it might even be a good thing to do. But I do not think this deserves a front page of HN. Hence why I am glad it was flagged.

KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: On All That Fuckery

I am glad it was flagged.

People are mainly talking about US politics here. And look at the discussion. Every different opinion is downvoted and dead.

KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: Oh Shit, Git?

Maybe you can expand a bit on this? Or point to a resource for learning the concepts?

I've tried a few tutorials about git internals before, but always get confused in the middle for some reason. I go just after git being a list with pointers where each element having a hash and what not. But still something seems to be missing in the end to make it all coherent.

KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you have any kind of “strategy” for StackOverflow questions?

I no longer contribute, but when I did my most upvoted answers were the ones I wrote on old and very popular questions. So one strategy is to order questions by the number of votes, go through them and see if you have an alternative answer that is not yet posted on the question. Doing this you will not have to rush writing your answer. Your reputation will start increasing at a slower pace, but the increase will be more stable as there are lots of people that get referred to the most upvoted questions over and over again.

For new questions there are two strategies. First is to post a sketch of an answer first, and then edit and edit and edit to add more content to it. This way OP will see the core of it quickly and can upvote and nobody will "scoop" you on it. Second strategy is to write detailed and elaborate answer so that when your answer appears it will outshine the rivals by being the most comprehensive and most deep.

But frankly, nowadays, I feel like 95% of newly posted questions are duplicates and should be closed, yet aren't because even high rep users prefer to post a quick answer for some points, instead of going through the (as of yet unrewarded) effort to close the answer properly.

Also a lot depends on the tag.

_fnhr | 5 years ago | on: GitHub isn't fun anymore

You don't really need to experience it to see how this one day might happen to you. Here is a recent example with RuboCop: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091

"Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or what have you. The same kind of people will then come to your repo and harass you and your unpaid work.

KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: Let's stop using iris dataset

No one associates Fisher with iris, he is better known for maximum likelihood, ANOVA, design of experiments, and the idea of random sampling.

So here is a proposal: in protesting Fisher let's stop doing randomization.

KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which books have you read more than once?

"The problems of philosophy" by Bertrand Russell. ~8 times.

"The abolition of man" by "C.S. Lewis" 3 times.

"The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times" by René Guénon. 3 times, and planning to set a weekend for another re-read soon.

KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: Largest Known Maya Structure Found

I am not sure if you are aware, but you replied to one of a few HN moderators.

> You make it sound like posters should write some epic multi-paragraph thumbsucker

He doesn't 'sound' like it. He enforces the rules about how it should be. And I agree with the judgement - the comment he replied to had no real substance. It's a kind of thing you post on a reddit meme thread as a first comment in order to accumulate "likes".

KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: Da Vinci – Overrated?

I read the post and appreciate the perspective but disagree so strongly with this that cannot pass without leaving a comment.

Claiming da Vinci is overrated to Jobs because Jobs shipped more is on the same bar as saying Beethoven is overrated because his music is not suitable for a disco club and is less profitable.

kkoncevicius | 5 years ago | on: Avoiding the Global Lobotomy

The optimist in me thinks this problem with corporations and addiction will soon pass. And my reasoning is two-fold: 1) all addiction is "accelerating", 2) social media is ripe for parasites.

First about accelerating addiction. There is a know phenomenon: the more drugs you take - the more is required to reach the same high. Same happens with porn: the more porn you watch, the more depraved varieties you look for in order to replicate the experience. Well, same happens with "clicks" addiction. At first a simple "Today I Learned" post gets you going, but as you indulge more and more the more depraved content is needed to sustain the interest. Soon it turn to memes, then to politics, then to actively looking for "other group" to hate on. And at this stage the same user base that was once "addicted" are no longer profitable. They manifest themselves as racists or anarchists or whatever gets them the same rush as they once had from a "TIL" post. But in either case they are no longer profitable for the corporation. Maintaining and policing everything becomes more and more expensive. The company begins introducing various "changes to policy". They try to sell those changes as "better thing becoming even better", but in reality they only try to combat the natural consequences of their own platform.

Second thing - currently the corporations themselves are an untapped resource in the market ecosystem (so to speak) and other companies will feed on them. We already see some forms of this happening. Take reddit for example. It thrives on addiction, but is also speedily acquiring parasites that, in turn, feed on reddit. Bots, ad farms, vote manipulation. Reddit wants to sell ad space, but how can other companies trust the metrics, when bots abound. How many of those "clicks" are actual people? Reddit tries to put algorithms in for bot detection? - old users are start selling their accounts for real money. It is an arms race. While at the same time new competing platforms also advertise themselves via reddit.

So those two observations, taken together, suggests that the profit part of the social-media corp is slowly decreasing, while operation costs are increasing. Sooner or later they will die. The new ones will spring in it's place. However the acceleration in new corps will be a lot faster. For one, the "parasite" companies now have experience and they won't wait until a platform becomes popular - they will jump on the host a lot quicker. And the users, coming from a dying platform, will demand memes, porn, and hate almost immediately.

Hence there is no real cycle here. Just one dying idea of a social media. At least that is what I like to imagine is happening.

KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: The U.S. Military Is Monitoring Protests in Seven States

As they should.

Those protests are ripe for foreign influence escalating the situation. USA knows this best of all with its history of amplifying civil unrest abroad in order to advance its geopolitical goals.

For USA the most recent were the Honk-Kong protests which it used to try undermining China. So wondering how China will respond now. Russia might try promoting Black Lives Matter again to escalate the tensions. Then there is Iran too. Would be interesting to somehow get the list of all the players.

KKPMW | 5 years ago | on: Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

With free speech it gets interesting how you interpret it. One interpretation, which I think Trump is using, is that "laws come last". There is a principle that says free speech should be protected and laws only come to cover the cases where the principle can be infringed. So twitter, in this interpretation, would be correct according to current law, but would stand on the wrong side with regards to a higher value of upholding the principle.

However there is another interpretation which says that ability to remove someone from your private business is also an expression of free speech. And that private companies as well as individuals are free to choose who they do business with. But there is one nuance here - this is better served under another principle which is "freedom of association". Freedom of association states that you can refuse to deal with anyone you don't like. However in USA this principle recently lost its value after certain group of Christians were not allowed to refuse baking a cake for a gay couple. So it seems there are certain protections.

But then there is a third thing which is that in some countries (and I am not sure here about USA) the president has the right to send a message using any media channel he sees fit, and the media channel cannot refuse. Informing and communicating with the public is one of president's duties and refusing to send his message infringes upon it. If USA has such a law and if Twitter could be interpreted as a media platform then it could be against the law for Twitter to do what it is currently doing. Unlikely thou, as twitter has a team of lawers and likely they were consulted beforehand.

> Zooming all the way out I don't see why Twitter really care about such a fight

Companies are ran by people and those people take political sides. Twitter is on the democratic party side, and the election season is coming. I predict we will se a bigger coordinated effort spanning Google, Youtube, and Twitter, and some other big corporations as we get closer to USA president election date.

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