94 karma · joined June 27, 2017
It seems to me that yes it doesn't do much to reduce the use of patents by Big Tech that they are actually commercializing. It would be nice to solve all the problems but it seems like it solves some of the problems that almost everyone but NPEs can agree on in a neat way without too much collateral damage.
I think it is instructive to ask "why doesn't this mention guarantee downvotes?" because I don't think it's just cargo-culting. I doubt that many of those objecting to blockchain are objecting to byzantine fault tolerance, DHT, etc. Very high resource usage in the cost function, the ledger being public and permanent (long term privacy risk), negative externalities related to its use in a currency... These are commonly the objections I have and hear. And they are inapplicable.
Extending what the Wikipedia article says, it's basically glorified database replication. But it also replicates and verifies the calculation to get to that data so it provides far greater fault tolerance. But since it is private you get to throw out the adversarial model (mostly the cost function) and assume failures are accidental, not malicious. It makes the problem simpler and lowers the stakes versus using blockchain for a global trustless digital currency so I don't think we should be surprised that it engenders less controversy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27608838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27608964
[Edit]
I wish I didn't have to continually edit myself but originally I used the term "editorialize" and I thought it had a more broad meaning of "exercise editorial discretion". While there is still an opinion involved in the edit. Something along the lines of "users of this site will already know X so it isn't part of the diff" I don't think it meets the stricter definition of editorializing. "Not part of the diff" is still cited as a justification for editing the title that I don't see covered in the current site guidelines.
Not to put words into anyone's mouth but if I imagine what dang or someone else with a similar position might think in response to my post above:
The goal with the title of a post isn't only to accurately convey what the linked content is, but also why it is interesting and belongs on Hacker News and do both of those concisely. And while both the title and content of the article might wander into cliché, framing everything in the context of change, some things that are just plain interesting are included and those are the main reason for it being posted here. I think it is easier for me to recognize that when the post title adds to or modifies the original, pointing at what makes it interesting rather than removing something. But I can see how in this case removing from the article title achieves the same goal so it seems in keeping with the goals of this site.
Oh, and finally I misunderstood the comment about "not part of the diff". I thought dang was pointing at a history of edits to the post title showing he merely chose not to alter the original post title which already differed from the article. I should have followed the link which I appreciate. Though it also makes me concerned about how we can fight the novelty bias it introduces which I think our society and the tech industry in particular suffers from.
This is about accurate labeling. If we want cliché articles to have less prominence on this site, it is a matter of moderation, not editing.
[Edited because I got a little off-topic.]
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gaudy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gaudy
I couldn't help looking it up because the idea that a single artist could stand out so much to be singularly associated with that term was tempting. I expect that is why such a false association persists.