And then some genius will decide to bring Opium into the game. : (
661 karma · joined January 16, 2015
It'll 'disrupt' a LOT of very well-funded services in the field. If Google extends this to social media (and optionally, 'non-serious' news sources), this will be a truly global-level intelligence system available to everyone!
This will also make a LOT of lower-level 'defense/intelligence analysts' defunct if more work is put into it.
Ah, to be able to write like that. Was that his only more-popular book, anyone know (wiki's not helpful)?
If anything can teach us anything, any kind of identity is a ridiculous contrivance.
But. We're humans. Our different identities make us feel the 'special snowflakes' that we really aren't, to allow us our sanity to get day-to-day job done. Regional identities are PARTICULARLY useful, as they help unite groups of people who share a common history, traditional, and cultural memory. Not to mention, them having a common identity creates peace and harmony within a geographical region and lets them work as a team [with people who perhaps don't share ANYTHING with them except the geography].
Any of the identities you have (religion? 'technie'? some sort of sci-fi fan?) can be just as equally attacked, with equal pointless gains. Of all your identities, I would argue your geographical one would STILL be the strongest/be benefitting you the most, regardless of how much an irrelevant contrivance you consider it to be.
Communication/technology has not erased geographical boundaries: it has just made more people desire the same boundaries (ie, shown how some places are more desirable). Discounting 'the specific patch of ground you were born in' is an incredibly privileged and individualistic way of seeing things.
Your words reek of the techno-liberto-utopianism that completely disregards history and social context, and discounts the fact that we are, after all, humans, not ideal machines who ought to not get carried away by those dang namby-pamby emotions.
Talking of nudity, to all those 'those dang young people' arguments: how does one reconcile young people are getting more comfortable with ONLINE nudity, but less with offline.
We ['millennials'] get hated on either way. There's news of snapchat and sexts, and we're told 'those damn millennials, strutting about their stuffs like they invented sex'. We get shy about nudity, and we're told 'those damn millennials. So precious, can't even stand to be naked in front of other people'. Give us a break, Olds.
Comparing Apples to Oranges is exactly what's needed here. By doing so, I'm helping isolate the variable OP suggests affects Apples is not so. Imagine he'd claimed that Apples are suddenly brown because of 'those damn young trees'. If I show that those darned young trees elsewhere don't have the same issue, then there'd be a greater need on the OP's side to actually provide the proof that it's those darned precious young people.
OP needs to provide a greater proof that it's because of those 'precious youth'. I might argue that it's due to increased cultural influence of more body-conservative cultures, or because (ridiculous as it may sound) online nudity is now so common, people don't want their online versions to be identified to offline bodies [which is VERY different from what OP argues].
For example, people in India are generally opposite of what you might call 'precious'. Parents will very openly call out their kids on their body size, their appearance, there whatever. Young men and womanly will openly (and sometimes, far too much) discuss relative attractiveness of persons -- often admitting that while they themselves are not that attractive, so and so is even uglier, etcetera. They are, I would imagine, not in any sense of the word 'precious' or coddled. The South Asian cultures are also the epitome of what might be considered 'collective' culture, versus the more American individualistic, 'me-me-me' culture.
And yet. People never ever ever get naked. Ever. Not even when they shower. In their private bathrooms. With no one watching. There's joke about how South Asians don't get naked even when having sex (which, I'm told, appears to reflect reality). You would imagine, with people so comfortable with friends and families (note South Asian men have traditionally been verrry comfortable being physically close to other men, including holding hands, frequent hugs, etcetera), they would not be as shy about nudity. And yet they are.
Here's another datapoint: the Japanese, who are still culturally very family-community centered, will get naked at a drop of a feather.
Use your 'precious generation doesn't want to get naked' theory to explain these, and your theory will pass the basic test.
In college at one point, I was drinking soda almost every day. It was bad for me and I knew it, but couldn't help.
So one day, I froze a bottle of some soda, and then let it thaw, sipping it after. It was the nastiest, sweetest, most awful-headaching thing I've ever put in my mouth. Having discovered what soda 'really' was, I stopped drinking it. I drink it maybe once in a year at most, but that's about it.
Ohh, what I'd give for full(even extra!) fat yogurt with not a lot of sugar. : (
The best yogurt I have had, by far, far, is Juju Dhau, from Nepal. It's so heavy and creamy, it feels like a meal in itself.
Hey investors, ya hear me? Juju dhau might be the next Chobani!
http://tasteofnepal.blogspot.com/2012/02/juju-dhau-king-of-y...
> This required placing the probe into "hibernation" or safe mode to prolong its life beyond the original 4.5-year design. JAXA expressed some confidence in keeping the probe operational, pointing to reduced battery wear, since the probe was then orbiting the Sun instead of its intended Venusian orbit
>At a press conference on 10 December, officials reported that Akatsuki's engines fired for less than three minutes, far short of what was required to enter into Venus orbit
>Three peri-Venus orbital maneuvers were executed on 1 November,[11] 10 and 21 November 2011 using the RCS thrusters. A total delta-V of 243.8 m/s was imparted to the spacecraft. Because the RCS thrusters' specific impulse is low compared to the specific impulse of the OME, the previously planned insertion into low Venusian orbit became impossible. Instead, the new plan was to place the probe in a highly elliptical orbit with an apoapsis of a hundred thousand kilometers and a periapsis of a few thousand kilometers from Venus.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akatsuki_(spacecraft)#Orbit_in...
Link rot is only going to get bad from now. It's real, and it's awful.
It's not even random websites. NYT will post a link to a popular Youtube video, two days later the video gets pulled, and one week into the article, the links are already stale.
As Wiki gets more 'reputable', newspapers will posts links to it. Wiki being what it is, the reference to the page will go stale.
So here's an idea for a service: hash all the outgoing/inside pages on a website. If they change, either 1) give options for users to review, 2) update the link 3) delete the reference. If the original website 404's, change the link to the archive page. If a video link is outdated, provide tools to search for similar videos to link, from inside the dashboard. For Wikipedia, automatically link to a certain version of history of a page, not the general page. This is different from the idea posted below because it integrates with existing publishing systems, so it'd be more b2b, and one would start cashflow right away.
For links to social media, use a 'photo snippet' tool that looks to check if the link is valid, and goes to the image version of the link if validity is dead.
I'm certain people would pay GOOD MONEY for this service. I know I would if I were running a publication.
Give me some spare change if it succeeds. : )
I'd like the subscription, as you mention too!
What I'd like even more (for voluntary payment) is a subscription that divvies up my monthly 'budget' according to the % of the time I spent on different sites. Say I spend 50% of my browsing time on Nytimes, 30% on HN and 20% on New Yorker, and my monthly allocated budget is $20. Then NYT gets $10, HN gets $6, NYer $4, etc.
Or perhaps, a monthly budget where the money is deducted for subscription sites, per article/time whatever. Once my budget is finished, I see 'normal' web like everyone else does.
I don't really care about ads, but maybe people who don't want to see ads could pay like, 2x as much, etc.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of innovation in this field. Perhaps it's the difficulty of integrating everything in one place?
Edit after reading the comments: Google contributor just removes ads instead of getting you 'special pass' right? Do the site owners get paid for the 'eyeballs' from the subscribers?
Perhaps Google contributor et al. could implement paying publishers based on '% of total time spent on the site' metric.
I bring this up because these things are really entertaining, and with a bit of witty commentary and nice graphics, I would probably end up spending hours watching these. Like all stories, you have to have an 'arc', themes, etc, but these come later.
In college, I must have spent thousands of hours watching let's play for SimCity and Minecraft. My friends were always amused how I enjoyed watching the gameplays more than actually playing those games.
On the other hand, you don't need me at all.
Edited for clarity.
>Maybe not knowing more about our cousins or our friend's friends is a sort of social lubricant. It's easier to be polite to my bigoted grandfather at Thanksgiving if I don't have daily reminders of his racism and homophobia
This has actually been how I connect to my friends lately, haha. I ask them what they've been upto, and they mostly go "you know, the same thing on facebook". And then they remember I'm not on facebook, so we go on hours and hours of heart-to-heart bringing up one another up to date with our lives.
As the resident twitter fanboy (most of my karma comes from one pro-twitter comment), I couldn't agree with you more. To be fair though, twitter can be sometimes toxic too, but then I just mute the people and they fade from memory. Twitter feels more like the community I _want_ to be a part of, and facebook used to be the kind of community that I didn't particularly like (i.e, the facebooked version of my friends and family). I'll repeat what I say often on HN: the Twitter network/community makes me feel smarter and more excited about things in life. Facebook... never did. It made me want to gain the 'likes' (I wish they'd rename it to something less emotionally attached).
I left facebook late in 2011, for various reasons, but mostly because it was making me sad and depressed. I was an extremely heavy user before that. I can say for sure that leaving facebook has made me objectively happier and less sadder.
I remember that XKCD comic about social network effects. Our minds are 'trained' to 'compare' ourselves with 10-15 of our friends, and assert that we lie around the 'average'. When we look at facebook, where everyone puts on their best (and in the hundreds) our brains 'think' we're doing a lot worse than the average, and we feel bad about ourselves. I've heard a lot of people talk about not comparing to people on facebook, but... you really can't help it.
Full Disclosure: I opened a different facebook account. JUST for family, because my mom didn't _believe_ that I didn't have a facebook. I open it maybe once in a couple of weeks, and have gone for many months without logging in.
Here's something I'd tell to other people: if you feel depressed after using facebook, delete it. Forget about 'not keeping in touch', 'being a loner', etcetera. Your mental health is way, way, wayyy more important than knowing what your freaking high school acquaintance's third child had for lunch on a random day. Have a small group of close friends, and call them, hang out with them. Your larger group of friends will always be yours. If you need social networking, get snapchat (I'm a critic turned fanboy). It's fleeting, so you don't feel as bad about yourself, and people are not as annoying.
Addendum: Here's how people make non-FB friends. A friend of a friend wanted help with grad schools, so I agreed to talk to her. We chatted on Skype (second encounter, EVER), and we ended up talking for an hour. She wanted someone to talk to and asked if we could talk again soon, and I didn't mind one more friend so we're skyping again soon. You make friends out of nowhere; don't need facebook for that. Facebook gives you the illusion you're 'in-touch' with everyone, when all you're doing is gathering 'intelligence' on their lives.