throwaway0255

The behavior and displays in these ideological flamewars have gotten so much worse over the last year, and the pace of that change seems to be accelerating.

There seems to be a demographic shift happening on HN, away from rational and genuinely interested technologists and business people, and toward college kids who haven't done anything and don't know anything, trying to sound smart and then throwing a temper tantrum whenever anything political comes up.

How a community in aggregate behaves when certain topics are brought up is more than just an isolated event, it's a litmus test for what kind of community it is and the kind of people it is attracting. I think I'm done participating entirely.

I'm referring to the kind of vilification that would cause brand damage for Tesla, so consumer-facing vilification.

Consumer-facing vilification in US media isn't really about what the person has done or what kind of person they are, it's more about what form of caricature can be depicted of them based on racial, gendered, and political stereotypes.

Denholm doesn't fit into a category of race, gender, and political affiliation that easily lends itself to a villainous caricature, and to the contrary does fit into such a category that would make it broadly unacceptable to consumers for a media company to create a villainous caricature of her. In other words, if a media company attempted to do so, it would damage the media company's consumer brand instead of Tesla's. This creates a disincentive protecting Tesla from attacks from media companies (all of which have a great financial interest in oil and legacy automakers, and very little financial interest in Tesla).

This is an increasingly common consideration for organizations responding to or seeking to preempt PR issues, especially for publicly traded companies with consumer brands, and other frequent targets of the media companies (such as police departments, private health insurance companies, and educational institutions).

> The rest of the board, and supposedly Musk is being replaced to get a little bit more financial responsibility in Tesla.

He’s being replaced as consideration for a settlement agreement with the SEC.

It seems likely Tesla chose Denholm because they have a bad PR problem, and it will be difficult for media companies to portray her as a villain.

I always thought distributed systems weren’t necessarily decentralized systems. Is my understanding of the terminology wrong?

For example a system that uses distributed algorithms for performance improvements, or a system that is distributed by design and necessity to retain the benefits of redundancy, could be considered both centralized and distributed.

Yeah, I’ve always had the same thought.

Another musical pet peeve of mine is when, usually during the intro, a song doubles the number of bars for a sequence, basically repeating itself for no good reason.

My ear is ready for the song to kick in, but at that moment it just repeats the previous 8 bars. Every time I think “really, we need to do this 8 more times? Can’t we just get on with it?”

It’s like the musical equivalent of waiting in line.

Your comment post-edit is pretty much the reason I read HN.

This model of geopolitics as an ungoverned society of nations is something I’ve never considered.

Then, the natural tendency of people within governed societies to analyze geopolitics as if governed social dynamics applied to it could clearly lead to some disastrous conclusions.

It also illuminates the tension between people who greatly value our military, and people who are just frustrated with it and casually declare from their bedrooms and TV studios that we should cut spending in half because it’s all such a waste. As if nations are nice people, and as if a weapon provides no value unless it is used.

Both groups mostly want the same things: a safe place to live, explore, work, have friends and family, and enjoy their lives. They just have a different model for how they understand geopolitics and the state that it’s in.

Lately I’ve noticed an increase in politically-motivated downvotes on HN. I think that’s really unfortunate. This was probably comment of the year for me.

Looks interesting. Can you go into some detail on what your workflow is like? Is your dev environment pure Linux then, able to install everything in aptitude, etc?

How does using an IDE like IntelliJ work?

I'm not aware of any paid news sources that fit my needs, maybe you can recommend some.

I agree that headlines are bad, which is why I discount them almost entirely, as I mentioned in my original comment.

I'm not sure why you don't think it makes sense for me to trust my own independent research over everyday news sources. I think it makes a lot of sense.

I never said anything about comments. HN is the only place I read them, and I'm not treating them like they're a news source. It's just an online conversation happening among people in tech.

I haven't expressed an opinion about this Guardian article, or the root commenter's assessment of it. But if the numbers are higher in the private sector, that would suggest top UK universities have a bullying rate below that of the general population and comparable populations, which would suggest that those institutions do not have a bullying problem.

It looks like the root commenter is saying that the Guardian article is suggesting the opposite, and based on those statistics, the Guardian article is wrong. The root commenter is additionally claiming that this is consistent with a pattern they've noticed of The Guardian writing skewed articles to fit a narrative of institutional injustices.

As an experiment, I read the body of this article and did a bit of research, and I would agree with the root commenter. Within the opening paragraph, I'm already losing confidence in the article:

> "Hundreds of academics have been accused of bullying students and colleagues in the past five years, prompting concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."

Citing population sentiment is a common form of misdirection in journalism. "People are concerned that ...", "we're receiving emails that say ...", "people on twitter are ...", these are all just misdirection. There are billions of people in the world, there are people concerned about everything. Twitter has over 300 million active users, every point of view on every topic is being tweeted by everyone all the time.

Citations of unquantified population sentiment are factual in all cases and for all arguments and all narratives. Journalists do this to give support and credibility to their narrative (which is often skewed), and to make it appear that they aren't the drivers of that narrative (when they often are).

As an example, Wolf Blitzer can point to a scrolling list of tweets that are all unified in any point of view on any subject at any time, based purely on Twitter's broad demographic and volume of tweets. It doesn't actually mean anything at all, other than that Twitter still exists and people still communicate.

Wolf Blitzer pointing at that list will increase the prevalence of tweets reflecting that unified point of view. This Guardian article stating that their FOIA findings are "prompting concerns" is in itself what will prompt those concerns. "People are concerned" actually means "we are telling you to be concerned." It's all just misdirection and deception, there's no honest reason for a journalist to cite sentiment in this way.

A more honest writing of that opening paragraph would be something like: "Academics in UK universities have been the subject of complaints at a very low rate. I am trying to prompt concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."

Reading through the rest of the article, the bias in this case is quite blatant:

* 135 UK universities became: "top UK universities"

* A filed complaint became: conclusive proof of bullying

* 294 complaints at 135 universities over 5 years became: hundreds of presumably recent complaints at "top universities"

* Less than 1 complaint against an academic every 2 years per university became: "a culture of harassment and intimidation in Britain’s leading universities"

To me it seems that The Guardian told their journalists to leverage FOIA requests for news stories. So their journalists try to think of a FOIA request that might get dirt for a good story, then send in that FOIA request, and then when the FOIA is fulfilled they just write whatever story they were hoping to write when they originally thought up the FOIA request.

After reading the article, the headline itself actually appears to be an outright lie. It says "hundreds of complaints at top universities", but they only found 294 complaints in total from all UK universities. Unless every university in the UK is a "top UK university", the headline is a lie.

The Guardian also leads the article with a stock photo of people wearing academic regalia with their heads down and backs to the camera, which paints an image of guilty and shamed academics.

Relating this all back to how people consume news:

* Reading only the headline, and believing it, would've made me very misinformed

* Reading both the headline and the article, and believing them both, would've made me the most misinformed

* Reading both the headline and the article, believing none of it, and doing independent research to disconfirm all of it made me slightly more informed on this subject (if you can even call it that) than the average person, and took 20 minutes of my time

* The approach I detailed in my original comment, which would've been to read only the headline, recognize that in this case it bears no consequence for The Guardian whether any aspect of the headline is true or not, and therefore ignoring it completely, would've had a neutral effect on how informed I am, but would've only taken 1 second of my time

In this case I regret reading the article at all, and I think I would've been better off just reading the headline, recognizing that it can't be trusted, and ignoring it like I normally would.

There is still utility in headlines though, which is why I still read them. If the story is, for example, that someone won an election, or that a proposition passed, or that someone died, or that a hurricane is coming, or that a company was acquired, etc., then that will be stated in headlines and you can confirm almost immediately that it's factual.

The large majority of important news events are in that category.

From there, if the subject is important enough to me, I'll do independent research. That research usually won't involve reading news articles, because I've found them to be extremely inaccurate in almost all cases.

So "advocacy journalism" is basically a form of journalism wherein all the statements are technically factual, but the journalists intentionally and transparently ignore all other ethics and standards of journalism.

I understand why this will outcompete real journalism, but I don't see how it serves anyone.

It also saddens me that this practice has attained a degree of general acceptance that it's referred to as a "genre of journalism." I would refer to it as a more insidious and enduring form of propaganda.

> At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem.

I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I’m aware of) in journalism.

Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can’t have been a mistake.

The way I consume news these days isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did.

I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don’t read the body of the article, because it’s usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non-expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story.

If there’s an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it’s relevant to my interests, I research it independently.