errantmind

You ever just put a show on or pick up a book spontaneously, without really having a particular show or book in mind before you started?

This is kind of like that, call it 'directed spontaneity'. You open the app to see interesting stuff, but you don't know what exactly that might be in advance. The app learns some basic stuff about you using your interactions on content then tries to guess. You either like the stuff the app shows you or you don't.

The hashtag system was very good at filtering content to what you generally like in your feed and the Explore view, but it wasn't set up for you to fully guide your own experience in search of very particular content using individual hashtags.

Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery to the level you are describing.

To your second point, every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN). You have to outrun the noise, as you described in your #gothgothgoth example

Isolated hashtags on IG were often not useful for finding specific content. To find what you want you'd need an interface to a page that showed posts across multiple hashtags which they didn't provide.

For example, posts that contain both #jenniferlawrence and #hoodedeyes would be what you are looking for, and if you interacted with enough posts containing both of those tags you would end up seeing the content you want, you just can't do it directly by navigating to those hashtag pages individually.

I used to provide this in my free hashtag suggestion app (which I kept online because it was, IMO, the best at what it did and still gets 500k hits a month). The app allows users to iteratively navigate the hashtag graph to a final set of tightly related tags. Anyway, during this refinement process users would see a grid of post thumbnails where the posts contain the desired hashtags. Facebook eventually tightened access to IGs API and blocked my ability to provide this thumbnail grid, but the rest of the app is still standing

Would have been great if the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were also blocked, they were both anticompetitive and quickly degenerated in quality post-acquisition

Instagram's tagging system was actually really effective at categorizing content and discovery because each hashtag was treated as a node in a (giant) graph, where each node has multiple properties, including post count (number of posts using a tag), 'velocity' (number of posts using a particular tag per unit time), etc. I could write up a big post about it as I made a study of it in when I created a web app for finding the most relevant tags a few years ago.

All that to say there was a lot to their system and it worked because users became aware that they were rewarded for using the most relevant tags. Using irrelevant tags was punished. This guided users towards using a mix of relevant popular and niche tags to maximize their reach, which, in turn, further improved the tagging system.

Instagram's tagging system isn't as important anymore as their algorithm has deemphasized it, in favor of other methods for classification and discovery, but there were a couple of golden years where it worked very well. Most users still look back on those years as the 'good times' even if they don't know exactly why. I'd go so far as to say they ruined the app after they deemphasized tags (and added way too many ads)

Absolute free speech platforms don't work for the majority of people because they have no way of constraining participants to the Overton Window.

It may be hard to understand for some, but there are topics that make people highly uncomfortable. These people prefer an environment that 'protects' them from fringe ideas.

The issue is, the 'Overton Enforcement' doesn't work when a large minority (say, 30% of users) has ideas considered highly controversial to the majority of users. Most people actually do want to live in a bubble most of the time so being exposed to these opinions undermines their sanity.

A 100% free speech platform could work fairly well though if it was sophisticated enough to understand what a user does and doesn't want to see and then only occasionally expose them to controversial content. Kind of like TikTok's 'for you' page but with less censorship. Or, perhaps, let users control their exposure directly. Twitter doesn't have the technical capability to pull this off though so they are stuck with occasionally infuriating large minorities of users.

Thanks, just installed it and it has what I need in a weather app

Yes, non-notability decreases SNR because it ends up crowding articles into disambiguation pages which makes it more difficult to traverse related articles on the site. It is generally preferable not to stumble across non-notable articles when browsing Wikipedia.

It is also more work for editors to 'maintain' non-notable articles over time. Having notability standards significantly reduces this burdain.

SNR is important for information sources. If people don't meet the notability standards of Wikipedia they need to be removed.

> Older people in this category are now reluctant to say that they have accrued some useful knowledge to share and wisdom to impart

> Other cultures figured out that older people are generally wiser. The more days you live, the more things you know. When you’re young you have beauty and when you’re old you have wisdom. Only this dumb country wants to posit wisdom and beauty in youth.

Being old doesn't guarantee a person has any wisdom, likewise being young doesn't guarantee beauty.

Ironically, I think the assumption of wisdom in the old is the reason so many old people lack it, because it encourages them to think that aging is enough to gain it, instead of actively cultivating lifelong habits of: going outside their comfort zone, reflecting on their experiences, articulating and organizing those learnings, etc.

I know it is harsh to say, but whoever approved this should probably be sacked. This is really obviously a poor decision with respect to preserving/growing the userbase and will actually decrease privacy overall when fewer people are using Signal.

Apple has finally lost touch, it was bound to happen eventually. Ads will seriously hurt their reputation as a premium product. The ads will metastasize and spread from product to product, tainting everything they touch.

This will make a good case study on why a company shouldn't get too greedy about 10 years from now.

> When healthcare CEO Martin Shkreli increased the cost of his company’s antiparasitic drug by 5,455 percent (from $13.50 to $750 per pill) in 2015, many were outraged. But Oshmyansky acted, because that’s what he does.

I guess Shkreli was good for something after all.

Software patents, and patents in general, are a plague on the industry and should be abolished due to a lack of empirical evidence to justify their existence. As a thought experiment they make sense, but thought experiments often diverge from reality.

The Case Against Patents:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035

I commented on the github issue a while back as I was frustrated with this.

I originally looked forward to splitting my projects between Zig and Rust depending on the project parameters, but because of this one seemingly small issue I will never use Zig.

That's ok, I respect them having the right to do what they want with their language but it is a little sad because I liked pretty much everything else about Zig.

This is affiliate blogspam. Why is this on HN?

This is the final form of rent-seeking.

There was nothing slow about society in that period.

Keeps the fan clean and extends its life.

Thinking app ideas are worth anything is naive. The nuance encountered while 'executing' dwarfs their significance. Anyone who has built anything knows this.

The faster we collectively realize this, the faster we'll be able to reign in the excesses of IP law.

The mean is attracted to quality, but doesn't 'get it', and drags it down. So you end up with regression to the mean. It happens to everything 'cool' everywhere, all the time.

When a community is young and niche, it only attracts those who seek it. These seekers get it, but they have that 'je ne sais quois' that is often envied by people whose motives have no resemblance to the theirs. Once the second wave hits, it is downhill from there.

tldr hipsterism.

Who said anything about rolling your own? I'm talking about writing your data models directly to disk, the serialization and deserialization are done for you with a simple annotation.

And in most applications you don't ever have to deal with locks as most applications don't need multiple threads writing and reading, that can be done with a single thread and a lockless queue that multiple threads write to. You would need a lock for making backups of the files themselves but this is trivial and takes the form of error handling. The OS itself handles the lock, you just need to handle the case where you can't open the file for writing.

This approach is not all that rare, lightweight, and very useful for minimizing latency. Why would you ever use a database if you don't actually need the features? It is much simpler to immediately have access to all your data in your application's data models.

It is too late for that.

Just wait until (some) devs realize they don't even need sqlite, and can serialize their data directly to binary flat files with simple locking synchronization for backups.

I'm half joking but I've witnessed many devs use databases when a binary file will do. I've done this personally for years for most of my 'fits-in-RAM', non-transactional, denormalized datasets, which is almost all of them.

Better yet, use both if you have both types of data. The performance benefits are enormous and well worth the complexity tradeoff in my experience.

For most applications, developing quickly is more valuable than correctness. That is why formal methods will likely never have widespread adoption.

As for law, a judge always makes the final decision and they are not a formal method. It doesn't matter how tightly the law is worded if a judge is in the loop evaluating intangibles like intent.

It won't even do that. I live in Houston and there is no amount of security footage that will get HPD to investigate a crime if they aren't inclined. This has been proven to me on multiple occasions.

I think the acronym gained prominence before Microsoft's recent 'commitment' to open source. Netflix also seemed to be doing really interesting things scaling out 'disruption' to video delivery at the time. It stuck

Because sellers cannot always raise prices to cover the fee increase. Demand is varying degrees of elastic

Live below your means and you will rarely, if ever, have financial issues. This requires a different perspective on 'having money'.

For this you have to ditch the idea of signalling your wealth to your friends and colleagues and, instead, be content to be seen as poorer than you are. Perhaps you don't buy a new car (ever). I'm still driving the car I bought in ~2010. Perhaps you live in an ugly/old building.

You also have to be willing to continually trim spending to exactly what you value. For example, I personally value eating food made with high quality ingredients, so I'm willing to spend more on these ingredients, but this also means I need to spend less elsewhere so I stopped going to bars and cut down on my eating out.

The upside of this approach is being able to do the things I really value while still having a large buffer of funds in case something happens to me or the economy as a whole.

The end result is total financial peace of mind.

While a part of me would be pleased if social media companies went to oblivion, practically, I don't think large states can operate totally truthfully without collapse. Running a state is sometimes messy and most people have a very simple morality (reinforced by years of superhero media) which is incompatible with international statecraft. That said, I don't think this excuses constitutional violations, but those of peoples generally held (lowest common denominator) morality