skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am genuinely surprised at the comments in this thread. This article starts "That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about", which is immediately making this a partisan issue.

Secondly: "The internet makes me better informed". This is his perspective. Many people are not actively looking for information outside of their own biases. Thirdly: "Cranks often know a lot"... Should be titled "Cranks often think they know a lot". Just because someone can state a fact does not mean they are sufficiently educated to analyze that fact. Saying that there are "vaccine side-effects" (stated in the article) does not mean that Joe Rogan is able to weight the information in totality with other information from the studies. After this, the article got into a bunch of "whataboutism" and doesn't really compel me to believe that misinformation is not a problem. I agree with polarization getting worse, but could that be a symptom/signal of misinformation, is there a cause/effect relationship?

My thoughts:

There are multiple categories of false information spreading on the internet right now. I honestly believe that there is manipulation of the public happening on all sides of this problem, the thing that is still unclear is whether there is a coordinated source of this manipulation or if it is organic.

I disagree pretty strongly with the "misinformation problem" being misinformation. Anecdotally (yes, I know it's not scientific but it is the same information the author is giving) the amount of things shared on social media that are demonstrably wrong has increased over the past couple of years. There are people who truly believe that Trump was going to rally the military on January 20th or whatever date to "take back the white house". This got shared to numerous social media sites and was reposted that the "true president" was coming back. This is one explicit example, but similar things have been popping up for the past couple of years and spreading like wildfire. 5G vaccines, QAnon, flat earth, and many other fringe movements exist and ARE misinformation, the questions is how broad these movements are.

If you claim that misinformation is just "information that is partisan" or "wrongthink" I would urge you to dig further into some real, damaging examples. I think there are times when the term is weaponized, but there is a serious increase in how easy it is to spread words in this day and age. The internet, social media upvotes and shares, and other technological tooling has made the problem worse by letting people feel validated by opinions and "likeableness" of something versus things based in facts.

Real people are dying because of perpetuated information on social media and "news" outlets. Yes I understand that "individualism" should let them decide whether to make that choice, but there is a public health issue here when people are basing that choice off of Facebook memes and shared content that has no basis and gets 100k shares because it sounds cool.
> Hard problem is who should pay for what work which a blockchain is not solving

Yes, this is one of the many hard problems.

I would be 100% behind MA if he used his influence, wealth and power to fund solving these hard problems.

Unfortunately, his and most of current funds are building Managed Blockchains that's just needless complexity where federated databases would have sufficed and been far more efficient (perf., cost, complexity)

That said, Decentralization is the future and will happen with or without him. Unfortunately he's going down in history as one of those who slowed down progress to make monetary gains.
EU law draft aims to ban anonymous crypto payments and donations over €1000
Oh, forgot about that... Thanks

Are they still under them?

regardless, what is reddit's current value? (I've been on reddit for 15 years - but I have recently deleted my accounts due to censorship and ban-hammering for the most ridiculous reasons.)
Not all contradicting points of view are created equal. Just because someone can make up a contradicting position doesn't mean it's got any relevance or merit. Couching a meritless position in pseudoscience doesn't make it any better.

The problem we too often see is people, mass media especially, trying to appear "fair" by airing statistically unrepresentative positions just because they are contrary to some mainstream position. There's not two equal sides to all positions. Even when there are two (multiple) sides not all of them have statistically significant representation or are equally rigorous.

Just because I'm not seeking out arguments claiming COVID vaccines have 5G or the Earth is flat doesn't mean I have a lower ability to seek out contrary opinions. It just means I've got some basic scientific literacy and a bullshit filter.
Hah. Why would I bother spinning some fantasy about Kraken's terrible support? Sadly, it's all true.
Which bad actors? One way MA manages at least some of them is by not investing in them, and instead investing in high quality teams. That’s a large part of the value-add of professional VCs, be it in blockchain/web3 or any other domain, that they have the expertise to discern legit teams from scam ones.
> "These are typical, HN-esque responses that may get upvotes online, but they hurt personal relationships."

As a regular, I disagree completely. Comments that point out that something is wrong and have the empathy to try to help and identify a solution are much more upvoted that cynical ones that just point out that something is wrong without much caring for the other part.

If you dig up HN only paying attention to potentially toxic comments, you will find them. It doesn't make HN toxic. If you create the habit of reading yesterday's posts, giving them enough time for the best comments to be upvoted and settle at the top, you will see much much less toxicity.

It seems to me that the author is trying to get away from a certain behavior and, in the process, everywhere they look they just fit what they see in that exact behavior. Like when Woody Woodpecker is hungry.
how to use blood to get stains out of my heart, I had hoped I'd at least find a country song with that as a lyric.
Transformative Experience and Pascal’s Wager
I assume this is exactly how they come up with the descriptions on most wine bottles
Not OP but the obvious use case for Wordpress is the install directory itself. Deploy to one server and have all servers sharing the EFS get the update at the same time.
Benford’s law is something that’s not the most obvious why but I’ve tested it myself on even small sets of numbers like 1 years worth of transactions at a small company and it comes out really really close to shaping that curve. I’m was kind of surprised because it’s supposed to work on large datasets but I’m talking literally under a few hundred transactions where it’s often the same vendors repeating and the curve was still pretty close. So looking at this article I do believe something odd is likely going on where indicated.
Judge throws out Sarah Palin libel case against New York Times
This seems to be because management doesn't know what they're doing and assuming that the younger generation is 'better', trying to be more redhat than IBM. This is their fedora wearing neckbeard m'lady phase. Maybe if they stopped buying back their own stock to keep the price inflated, they'd learn to focus on core strengths and work on those rather than micromanaging.
You can enable Instant Answers in the settings, it is not as complete as other search engines yet, but it is improving :)
Housing costs tend to go up with economic development.

I had a discussion about this with a Portuguese guy once: you have the lazy communist bastard who wants everything to stay the same, and you have the smart entrepreneur who makes lots of € selling overpriced coffee to the pale hordes from the North.
I think the author makes some valid points, but I don't think he makes a good argument for hn being "toxic". The headline comes off as hyperbole (but not, in fact, as "toxic").

In my experience the vast majority of negative comments on hn tend to be well founded, and mostly well intended. Contrast this with a happy photo sharing site that seems optimized for teaching body shaming and inducing self-harm, depression and suicidal tendencies... That's the kind of social media I think of as "toxic".

Or as Webster's say in part:

> 1: containing or being poisonous material especially when capable of causing death or serious debilitation

> toxic waste

> a toxic radioactive gas

> an insecticide highly toxic to birds

> 3: extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful

> toxic sarcasm
I would like to highlight Moxie Marlinspike's counterargument [1] in particular. Ostensibly web3 allows you to truly own digital assets, with ownership records being stored on an immutable distributed blockchain, verifiable by anyone. In practice, however, the seller (i.e. the person who created the digital asset) or distributor (e.g. OpenSea) can swap out what you own, at any time, for any reason, with little or no legal recourse on your behalf. That was borne out by the experiment that Moxie did, where he minted an NFT that linked to a site which displayed a certain abstract art image when viewed on OpenSea, but displayed a poop emoji when viewed in a crypto wallet (thus demonstrating creator control). When OpenSea discovered this misrepresentation, they removed the NFT from their service, rendering it inaccessible not only to new purchasers, but also to everyone who had purchased it in the past (thus demonstrating custodian control). And what legal recourse does a buyer have to combat either of these moves? Nothing.

Web 3 takes us from a world where "possession is nine-tenths of the law" to a world where possession is the only thing that matters. Having a title to a particular (digital) good is worthless when you have no way to enforce that title against repossession. Having a title to a digital good is worthless when a seller can deliver something completely different and you have no recourse to get your money back.

Can Web 3 solve these problems? Yes, but the problem is that the solutions will require interacting with existing messy real world legal systems and social norms. The initial promise of Web 3, a world governed entirely by immutable smart contracts, where "code is law" seems as far away as ever.

[1]: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
The other day I was trying to find a good website for MTG deckbuilding on google.

It was so astrotufed. I could not find anything other than blogspam.
>Terraria was released in 2011 and is still getting updates.

Yes, it was a runaway success. Terraria is a huge outlier in the indie scene for lasting so long. But my point is that the creator almost certainly was not planning to be maintaining this code 10 years later when he wrote it. And so it was written for speed and simplicity, not elegance and maintainability.
Exactly.

It's entirely possible that it's correct depending on the specifics.
Say for example one is trying to install MySQL 8.0 on a laptop with Catalina, which is still supported by Apple and getting security updates. This is actually unsupported and won't work. A somewhat unlikely situation but definitely not impossible.

https://www.mysql.com/support/supportedplatforms/database.ht...
In many countries the first time offender 20-something would spend a night in jail, be arraigned the next day, and likely enter a diversionary process where they need to face up to what they did. Perhaps a conference with the victim. Do some community service. Etc. 9/10 this will give someone the chance to seriously rethink their behavior.
> What, specifically, about this protest is not peaceful - in the context of protests?

Semi trucks blaring their horns at 3am in the middle of a city for a week straight.

> If you only protest so long as people are willing to tolerate it, I don't see the point of protesting at all.

You have to expect that after 2 weeks of constant disruption, something has to give. Despite the fact that blockades are illegal, I supported the protesters’ right to protest regardless. But my good will
has run out. Their demands aren’t reasonable and their methods are not proportional to their grievance. Nobody wants to be wearing masks, and at this point I’m pretty much over them, but if Health Canada thinks it’ll help keep cases low enough to keep hospitals from overflowing then we can keep them for a couple more weeks. Whether or not this is the case is not for me to make a determination about. It’s been clear for about a month now that mask mandates would be lifted soon anyway.

> If being disruptive isn't the point of a protest, what is?

The protestors target for two weeks were random residents of downtown Ottawa. If you’re going to disrupt something, make sure you’ve got the right target. Otherwise you’re just an asshole with a horn.