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> During an argument I think it actually benefits all participants to stick to a consistent viewpoint and defend it as strongly as possible to make sure that its strengths and weaknesses are fairly represented.

My feeling is that a "debate" format — under which we can include online comments and replies — is actually one of the worst ways of informing people, and vastly inferior to other educational methods. I was serious when I said "go offline and read a good book".

Debates almost invariably become a show. It's about entertainment, about "scoring points", winning and losing. But the biggest loser is always the truth, which becomes lost in the back and forth. Debates encourage taking sides. They encourage the mistaken view that there are only 2 sides to every subject.

You can try very hard to avoid these pitfalls, but it's important to note that they come with the territory. Debates inevitably fall into these pits without very hard work. It's just not a great format for information and education. But a lot of people enjoy them immensely, which is why they happen, regardless of value.

> I didn't mean celebrity but more like knowledgeable people.

That's my point though. A celebrity like Torvalds will likely get upvoted, but in my experience, non-celebrity knowledgeable commenters often get downvoted by people who are much less knowledgeable.

> A random system, just like random election, does not guarantee best or betterness in any form.

I don't think any system guarantees betterness. :-) But random seems to be at least pretty fair and least subject to abuse.

> Assuming some part of twitter tweet section is random, does that inspire confidence that such a system might work.

There are different parts of Twitter. The Twitter timeline is definitely not random. It's either reverse chronological or "algorithmic", depending on your settings. But any given tweet can have any number of replies, and I don't know how Twitter determines the order of display of replies to a tweet. But it's overall a very different format from HN, so comparisons are difficult.

> Virtually every stable system humanity has ever devised is stable precisely because that stability is adversarial.

Where's your argument here?

> Your argument against people becoming hostage negotiators relies, as far as I can tell, on this being an extreme state for humans, and therefore totally unsustainable, but like... why?

No, my argument against people becoming hostage negotiators is that it sounds very stressful, unpleasant, and dangerous. I simply don't want to do it. Kudos to professional hostage negotiators, to be sure, but it's not a job most people want. At least professional negotiators get paid, I assume.

> It's like arguing that bridges can't stand up because they are subject to extreme forces from all sides.

Why are you comparing people to inanimate objects? I'd rather not be walked on, thank you.

> Sustained human existence is work, your proposed sanity preserving option is just nihilism, and it is unsustainable

This is a weird attitude. Humans have existed for thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years. All without online social networks. We could ditch them all and be fine. Arguably better than now.

> Imagine a discussion on Linux and Torvalds comments on it.

This seems like a rarity. The vast majority of HN discussions don't have this situation, and it seems odd if the only purpose of HN voting is to upvote "celebrity" comments. There are much better places to follow the comments of celebrities than on HN.

> the alternative of randomly selecting people to govern also has its problems.

I strongly believe this is actually the least bad form of government, and vastly superior to elections, which are glorified high school prom royalty pageants.

> Do you know any platforms which have successfully done the randomisation thing?

No, though I have no idea what "algorithm" Twitter uses to determine the order of replies in a thread. (Probably not totally random.)

A really great app for this is Suspicious Package:

https://www.mothersruin.com/software/SuspiciousPackage/

> HN discussions very often have input from experts.

Who are predictably downvoted!

I think the upvoting/downvoting mechanism by itself makes discussions unnecessarily competitive and hostile. Here's a crazy alternative: make the order of comments random and rotating. Of course you could still have flagging and moderation to remove bad comments, but otherwise get rid of the voting. You could still have nested conversations (though the UI for this is really bad on HN when the conversations become long), but the comments at each level would also be randomly ordered.

The theory is that the "best" comments rise to the top and the "worst" to the bottom. In reality, that rarely seems to be the case. It's typically a combination of popularity, controversy, accidental timing (some variation on "first!"), and the existence of replies to the comment.

PROTIP: Select your LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons folders in /Library and ~/Library, select Folder Actions Setup in the Services menu, and enable folder actions. You can use "add - new item alert.scpt" to be notified whenever a new item is added to those folders.

For even more protection, I flat out locked the folders ~/Library/LaunchAgents and ~/Library/LaunchDaemons in Finder, though this could interfere with some software you use.

> and everyone learns from it

Do they?

> where both sides end up arguing the same philosophical issues over and over again

Funny, I would describe HN as the same.

I'm on HN because the topics interest me as a computer programmer. But I don't share the common HN conceit that commenters on HN are better than elsewhere. IMO there's no evidence of that. Some of those within the HN bubble think very highly of themselves, but they may not be aware of the utter contempt that many outside the HN bubble have for "the orange site". (By the way, I could share a little CSS to add dark mode support and a few other tweaks to HN, if anyone is interested.)

> You've crossed the digital divide here and misused the word "bubble" in the process.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.

> Thanks for helping me realise this mistake and gain a better understanding of the issue.

Are you on Twitter? I'd like to follow you. :-)

> Over time, these add up into real change, even if you don't see it happening in the course of a single thread.

Without evidence, this is a difficult claim to accept.

> the author is right that conflict is also productive

Could you explain why?

> The actual Greek meaning of the word idiot is 'private person'. Someone who had withdrawn from the life in the polis, the political community.

The Greeks put Socrates to death, so call me skeptical.

If you state your opinion in a room with 3 other people, the chance that at least 1 of those people vehemently disagrees with your opinion are probably low. Especially since people self-select who to congregate with in rooms.

If you state your opinion in a virtual "room" with 300 million other people, the chance that at least 1 of those people vehemently disagrees with your opinion is a certainty.

Conflict is almost unavoidable on mass "social networks". Some people claim that you shouldn't live in an online "bubble", but I, uh, vehemently disagree. The only way to keep your sanity online is to live in a bubble, just as you do in real life, self-selecting which people to congregate with in rooms.

You may ask, having said that, why am I here in the HN comments? That's a good question, and the answer is obviously that I'm insane.

Does anyone find it weird that the author of the article claims that we actually need online arguments to "hone our thinking" or some such nonsense, but then immediately goes into an extended analogy about hostage negotiations? I don't know why we all need to become online hostage negotiators. If you want to learn something useful from a different perspective, go offline and read a good book.

The author says, "Taking a disagreement offline can work, but it should only ever be seen as a second-best option." Why???? Everything else the author said suggests it's actually the best option. I really don't see the point in online arguments. Do they ever get resolved? Not in my experience. In fact I fully expect the same (non-)outcome in any replies to my comment.

Daily news needs easy reliable filler material, and sports provide that.

Another commenter mentioned the stock market report. Again, easy reliable filler material. Despite the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has a tenuous effect at best for the vast majority of people, and despite the fact that it's not a great overall economic indicator, the news media report it because it's easy, and it changes daily.

Truly "newsworthy" stories are not guaranteed to happen every day. But the news media still need to fill space regardless. That's why they love things that reliably change on a daily basis. "Team A beat Team B" is such an easy story to write. It practically writes itself. Compare with true investigative reporting, which is extremely difficult, may take months or years, and may or may not have publishable results. How much investigative reporting can you do and still have a daily news report?

Why does the news media always cover elections as if they were horse races (and inevitably lament that in retrospect with crocodile tears for exactly 1 week after the election before forgetting and doing it again the same way the next election)? Because it's easy. You could say lazy. Candidate A is up in the polls this week, Candidate B is down. Such an easy story to write. You can keep taking polls, and keep publishing polls, and you've filled a bunch of news space cheaply.

Don't even get me started on how the "news" is now largely publishing tweets written by other people. The ultimate in journalistic laziness.

> Also a surprising number of people in the US believe that poverty is a moral failure of some sort.

Yep, there's a marriage in the US between business and religion that seems contradictory until you realize that these people believe the "invisible hand" of the market is God.

> For me, if I actually skip 2 nights sleep (e.g. travelling) I'm barely able to speak in coherent sentences or make decisions, my vision blurs, I feel derealization etc.

Then do an all-day on-site technical job interview.

This submission should be labeled (2016).

My whole brain is awake the first night in a new place. I just can't sleep.

D'oh, right. A good test might be difficult. In the absence of that, I guess the safe bet is just to count every Swift binary as a false positive for ObjC, though that's not quite fair, since you can mix the two in the same code base.

Fair criticism. I'm not sure why the author didn't try to detect the use of objc_msg functions, for example. So the ObjC binaries may be overcounted a bit.

Still, the test for Swift binaries seems accurate, and if you look at iOS 13.1 vs 14.0, for example, according to the chart there was an increase of 157 Swift binaries and 446 Objective-C binaries. If we assume there are 157 "false positives" in the ObjC binaries, that's still an increase of 289 ObjC binaries that don't use Swift at all.

> The number of binaries of _all languages_ in iOS increases year over year

This is not true either. "the number of binaries written entirely in C is now stagnating"

> the number of Swift binaries in proportion to the number of Objective-C binaries is increasing year over year

This is true. But it's a much weaker claim than the one I was replying to.

In other words, the reports of Objective-C's death have been greatly exaggerated. ;-)

> there's every indication that all new Apple frameworks are being written in Swift

There's no such indication. "The number of binaries using Objective-C is still growing with each iOS release." https://blog.timac.org/2020/1019-evolution-of-the-programmin...

This is missing the broader context: workers are competing with each other for jobs and promotions.

If one worker finds that they can achieve a competitive advantage by working more hours, then other workers will copy that strategy. They may have to copy that strategy whether they want to or not, just to get jobs. Suddenly, working overtime is no longer the exception, it's now the norm, expected. And in that situation, the workers don't benefit, only the employers benefit from the expected overtime work. And then you have a culture of overwork and burnout in the industry. Employers may not care, because they can exploit you for a few years, until you burn out and are incapable of working any more, at which point you quit or get fired, and the employer moves on to the next employee. This situation is not to your long-term benefit at all, because you have to take a lot of time post-burnout making no money.

This is why all workers need to take a stand and not allow employers to exploit them, not to agree to work unreasonable hours. Your career — indeed your whole life — is a marathon, not a sprint. Trying to run a marathon in a series of sprints is not an effective strategy.

> If Michael Jordan wasn't such a workaholic would he still have become 'The' Michael Jordan.

1) Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls (for the second time) at age 36. I suppose in tech with rampant age discrimination, that's also when you're expected to retire after burning yourself out...

2) Michael Jordan made enough money that he could have retired even earlier. No employer was forcing him to work. He did it "for the love of the game".

3) None of us here are or ever will be Michael Jordan. Either in talent — arguably the greatest of all time — or in financial security — one of the highest compensated athletes ever.

You say you're not comparing yourself to Jordan, but why even bring him up? He's not only the world's greatest basketball player but also the world's worst analogy for comparing with normal people working at a job.

If you're in control of your own destiny, then by all means, do whatever you like. But a lot of people are busting their butts just for their current employer, and eventually you're going to find out that you actually mean very little to your employer, who will drop you at the drop of a hat and not give a damn about your fate. Your family and friends are the only ones who will stick with you and care for you in the long run.

> So lets say each person can be productive for X hours per week.

I don't think productivity is the right way to frame things. This makes it sound like a human is nothing more than a tool. The reason people should work fewer hours is so that they can enjoy life outside of work, remain healthy, spend time with family and friends, etc. Not to maximize productivity for the stockholders.

Even if some person is capable of being productive working 80 hours a week, it's not clear that this is good for the person, either in the short run or the long run. Workaholism can be a bad habit.

> Welcome to agile?

Agile is not essential to software development. IMO Agile should be thrown in the trash heap of technology history ASAP. Does Firefox even need a "release schedule"? Why? There's rarely a good reason for fixed software schedules.

It's funny, Google had a pretty tight software schedule... until it came time to publish their App Store privacy details, and then they decided they didn't need a release schedule after all. Except it backfired because their software just assumed there would be frequent updates, and now the apps are showing warnings because they haven't been updated.

Death to schedules. Yes, there's always work to be done, but it doesn't have to be done by an arbitrary deadline.

> This is almost a natural law of wealth.

The article is about how the post-1975 period differs from the pre-1975 period. So it's demonstrably not a natural law. Natural laws don't change over time.

> I'm making no claims about Apple's behaviour on any other issues and I'm not going to be derailed on a tangent.

It's strange that you think this issue can be discussed as if it's sui generis and completely unrelated to anything else. What you call "a tangent", I call the broader context. So I guess we are done.

> You ignore their existence and role implicitly without the slightest consideration; their right to choose is _the_ consideration here.

This is silly. I said, "Apple takes away choices from users in many other areas". iPhone is an extremely locked down device. Users do not have the right to do what they want with it. (Which I complained about earlier, not being able to install software like Little Snitch on iPhone.) I've been a Mac user for a long time, since before the App Store, before the iPhone, before Gatekeeper, even before code signing existed. I'm very aware of what user choice is about, and iPhone is definitely not at all about user choice.

So, please start over without the fake moralizing, which cannot be taken seriously in this case. The right to choose is almost never Apple's consideration nowadays. There's currently legislation under consideration in North Dakota that would give users the right to choose, but Apple is complaining that it would "destroy iPhone as we know it". Exactly. iPhone is not about user freedom. Everyone knows that... except apparently you.

> so you can point the finger unerringly at Apple

The funny thing is that a lot of iPhone users would praise Apple for banning the SDKs. Only you seem to think that the iPhone is all about user choice. The majority opinion seems to be that Apple's lockdown is good, for the user's "protection". So I'm still puzzled why you even think using the word "ban" is a criticism of Apple.

I can speculate that perhaps an explicit ban would get Apple into antitrust trouble, which may have been what the article author was referring to. But if your argument is, "It's not a ban, because a ban would be legally problematic for Apple", that would not be very convincing argument.

You avoided my question: from your perspective, why wouldn't Apple ban them if it could?

What's wrong with banning? Why is that such an inconvenient narrative for you? Why is it inconvenient for Apple? This feels like just a game where Apple is trying very hard to avoid personal (or legal?) responsibility for its choices by pushing the choice onto users. It seems to me like a cop-out. Again, Apple takes away choices from users in many other areas, so why give the choice here, knowing what choice almost everyone will take?

I'm not. I'm complaining about the claim "It's not a ban! It's not a ban! Apple isn't doing anything!"

This whole argument seems like a variation of "Guns don't kill people, [X] does." If Apple puts a (metaphorical) gun in every user's hand and points them at the analytics SDKs, it seems ludicrous to claim that Apple has nothing to do with the analytics SDKs getting killed. Regardless of whether or not they deserve to be killed. At the very least, it's passive-aggressive, if not incitement to "violence".

Now, the article says, "Apple did not – and from a legal perspective likely can’t – explicitly ban the Google Analytics, Flurry, Facebook, and Firebase SDKs." I'm not clear on what legal perspective the author means. Antitrust? In any case, from your perspective, why wouldn't Apple ban them if it could? There are plenty of things that Apple does ban in the App Store, without giving the user a choice. I still don't get why you think "ban" is a dirty word.