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The Twelfth Law Of Hacker News: Any reference to Betteridge's Law will have at least one reply referring to the unreliability of Betteridge's Law.

I'm so sorry tome, but this is actually the Fourth Law of Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4722251

This predates tome's law by 3 years.

would you consider a book reviews website a profitable niche? seems like it'd be a gamble in terms of effort vs reward given that most books are pretty inexpensive

both of these require very large audiences to make money, the amazon affiliate program pays very poorly and people hate & block ads. Not saying it's impossible but the days of slapping a few ads and affiliate links on your website and expecting to make decent revenue are long gone. Especially if you want to offer a good UX

a thing a I tried, and ran out of steam with, was writing SQL queries in my client side code but statically extracting them with babel, so you have some code like this:

    const users = await sql.query`select * from users`;
    console.log(users);

and in production this becomes something like

    const users = await fetch('/query?id=19a1f14efc0f221d30afcb1e1344bebd');
    console.log(users);

and the query itself stays on the server so you don't have to deal with the problem of unbounded complexity / DoS.

This is the same approach Facebook uses for GraphQL. The only reason I gave up with this idea is that getting the developer experience right is hard work and it does introduce some very tight coupling!

I agree, one very concerning trend I've seen on Twitter (and it's probably seeping into other online spaces too) is that merely following or engaging in discussion with someone whose ideas are controversial can be grounds for a blocking or pile-on.

Another quote I saw today: "90% of the internet is just people imagining a guy, tricking themselves into thinking he exists, and then getting really mad at him."

I saw something earlier today that said (inelegantly paraphrasing)

"developers read articles as if they themselves were a compiler, immediately stopping as soon as they reach a sentence they disagree with and then throwing a syntax error"

I think the same thing applies here

I'm surprised to hear this description of Ukraine. I'll agree that their economy is not particularly strong (although it is recovering), but it has historically been an agricultural powerhouse and is still one of the world's largest grain exporters. Famine in Ukraine in the last century was a direct result of the collectivisation policy of the USSR, not an intrinsic inability to feed their own population.

The message I'll take from our exchange here is that what you and I know to be true is a result of the culture and media that we've been exposed to throughout our lives, and that objective truth is hard to determine, even for well educated people. Less well educated and informed people stand little chance of discovering the true-truth in this environment.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. It does seem that "better than Yeltsin" is a running theme in this discussion, so in turn I wonder what "better than Putin" would mean to you?

With regards to tensions around the border with Russia and Europe, Putin is firmly seen as the aggressor from here, especially after the annexation of Crimea. To us it seems that Russia is testing the water, with the full knowledge that essentially everyone in Europe wants to avoid an outright war.

You say that you can blog freely without consequence in Russia, but I wonder what the effects of publicly disclosing e.g. homosexuality would be? The impression I have is that it would be analogous to admitting to racism in the US or Europe.

I do appreciate being able to have a reasonable conversation with someone who literally sees the world from a different angle to myself!

it's not as simple as that - poisonings, beatings, imprisonment etc have a chilling effect. We have no idea which leaders would step forward if it weren't for the effects of intimidation.

That is to say, someone smart enough to become a political force to be reckoned with is probably smart enough to realise that they will be faced with some terrible consequences for doing so. Their chances of success are extremely small and the chances of punishment is high. The smartest move is not to participate, and so this filters out all but the most principled or naive and foolhardy.

the perception from the west is that corruption in Russia didn't go away but was simply hoisted up to the level of government. How do you feel about the level of wealth that Putin and his associates have accumulated during his reign?

It is interesting that you talk about different metrics and different words meaning different things to Russians compared to those in the west. If we can't use "left" and "right" as descriptors, and you don't place much emphasis on "freedom of speech", what _are_ the values that you think are important? (I suspect, from what you say, even "freedom of speech" means something different to you than it does to me)

Which politician(s) do you favour if not Navalny?

The book covers both techniques (though not in great detail), Memory Palaces are another term for Method of Loci[0] - in my experience it is actually much better and faster, but requires habitually revisiting rooms in order to remind yourself of their contents (this is as quick as mentally walking through a door into a room and glancing around it from left to right). This is easy and fast but it's also easy to forget to do it and then the contents do start to fade. I use the layout of the first house I owned as my "palace", so it's a real place but no longer somewhere I actually go to in real life which helps avoid confusion.

The linked list idea works well and arguably lasts longer, but it's also much more time consuming to "set up" (for me at least), and suffers from O(N) time complexity just like a real linked list (i wonder if it would be possible to construct a mental skip-list!) and if I forget a single association then the whole remainder of the list is forgotten.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

No, it was great, but BNC / Coax ethernet was awful and horrible and an absolute nightmare to debug. I probably still have a drawer full of terminators somewhere

I used to be a big fan of Derren Brown when I was younger, and I do still like a lot of his work, but he readily admits to deceiving the audience, and the deception includes the explanations he gives for his techniques. The video you linked to was part of a longer show (The System) which gives an explanation for how this trick was done - he says they kept filming take after take, for 9hrs, until they finally got ten heads in a row.

I think that kind of brute force approach would have been excessively boring to him, and it's much more likely that he switched to a gimmicked coin to get the ten heads in a row, then filmed a few shots of throwing tails for the "explanation".

So that all the employees and major stakeholders don't dump stock on day 1 and tank the price, often permanently affecting the company's perception in the eyes of investors

Also, from the user[0] that posted the original Spectator article:

> Automation tends not to take five minutes, edit people's comments to remove publicly available information on public figures(in this case a passing one sentence mention that did not even mention reddit or admins), make typos on that edit, re-edit them again later to fix the typos and then permanently suspend posters with still no reply on their appeal after almost a day.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/mbytxw/daily_me...

The difference is that in the 80s the few people that believed this nonsense were unable to instantly find hundreds or thousands or millions of equally deluded people to reinforce and amplify their beliefs and subsequently amplify the harm they can cause.

Because otherwise you end up with thousands of incomplete and incompatible implementations all fighting to be the best or running out of steam after a month or two. Node is a hellscape from a db perspective

if there's an interesting conversation to be had it's about governance and transparency in how online spaces are moderated, given the depth of their influence, the broadness of their reach and the relative power wielded by those who control the platform (hello there!). Unfortunately that conversation is mostly absent from these threads.

The original link was to this story in the Spectator https://archive.is/OqCr0

No, thanks, I appreciate your response.

Perhaps, but I'm surprised given the level of influence Reddit has these days. Reddit reaches about 500 million people per month, probably more. It's not "just a silly message board" anymore.

They have a comparatively tiny number of employees and those people have a very real power to control narratives. We're seeing just the tiniest glimpse of that here because the employee in question has done so in an incredibly egregious manner. The question this whole incident should raise is "what else is going on, that we haven't yet seen?". The specifics of this particular example are uninteresting.

Yeah it's nothing to do with their gender status, but someone reading those threads now might draw the conclusion that the stories were flagged or penalised due to the transphobia, which is not the case - the penalty came before the hate.

HN is also penalising threads that discuss this. This post has 74 upvotes in 27 minutes and 11 comments at time of writing. Ordinarily it would significantly outrank most of the other posts on the front page, but it doesn't seem to be able to break past #15. Either this is because HN users are flagging it, or because something else is going on. As Reddit is a YC company it'd be really nice to hear an explanation.

This exact same thing happened with the previous threads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554697

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556187

There are some awful transphobic comments in those threads, but they appeared _after_ the threads had been penalised.

they're angry with her over her actions, it's separate from her father's crimes.

Another post appears to have been suppressed in the same way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556187

This thread (23 points in ~30 mins) has disappeared from the frontpage, exactly as the previous, now flagged thread did at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554697

Dear HN users, if you flagged this or the previous thread, what was your reasoning? I'm curious about what's going on.

Given the clear conflict of interest at play here (Reddit is a YC company and are seemingly preparing to IPO in the near future) this post would be a great candidate for additional transparency from dang

I'm not sure I want to list the reasons it is bad here because the subject has been painted as a conspiracy theory and YC is obviously interested in Reddit. But the gist is that they knew who she was,she used her substantial mod power to bury news related to herself and JE, and then when her identity was exposed Reddit used Reddit to bury that story to prevent a scandal.