There seems to be a bug that sometimes it responds with an empty page (0 content length) with a 404 code, and sometimes it responds with a full 404 page.
There are couple different kinds of "controlling the content". Facebook does want to promote certain things, i.e. make them easier to find, but it doesn't really want to delete or block things entirely, which is what I think GP was talking about.
It's your computer which store cookie and localStroage data to the local storage. It' your computer which execute JavaScript program to retrieve that data.
For example if your partner has a chronic illness, you can never say you felt their pain, but you can say you know what it's like to live with it. You felt the impact of the illness on your shared life, and you shared the emotions it caused, which are lessons that no amount of reading, listening, or watching can instill in you.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's somewhere between being a first-hand and second-hand experience, because of the notion of a "shared life".
> Companies are hardly going to make tons of money on unapproved therapies anyway, because the word will get out if x patients tried it and had no benefits.
That seems wildly optimistic to me. Companies, especially pharma, will always find ways to 'make tons of money'. The second part of the sentence assumes a level of disclosure (from the companies) and rationality (on the part of average people), that I don't believe exists in the world. There are plenty of examples to back that up, especially people's willingness to believe self-serving 'facts'.
IIRC WhatsApp also cared a lot about making the app available on all kinds of phones. Not just iOS/Android. So all those people in the rest of the world could start using it and bring their families on board.
As I mentioned before, I've haven't read any of their stuff. All of my questions are 30 years old, and only thought to ask this here because I didn't even know there was any controversy on this subject.
But I guess asking logical questions is frowned upon if someone else disagrees with the establishment and if you even ask the same questions is automatically guilt by association.
> But I guess asking logical questions is frowned upon if someone else disagrees with the establishment
Yes. Challenging accepted knowledge on HN is a quick way of getting downvoted to oblivion and, in some cases, shadowbanned. (I've seen a couple of examples of the latter.)
> (e.g., consuming Y is safe only to find out it causes birth defects, cancer,etc.) Science blames the customer/consumer.
It feels like there's a conflation of science and science reporting in here somewhere. Most of the actual research output makes measured claims but the journalism around it ends up being sensationalised (yes, some researchers also participate in that but not as a rule).
Science is science reporting. Normal people can only understand what is reported. If you want to read the actual papers, prepare to spend a couple hours to barely understand what is going on. Most people aren’t able to do that for all of the hundreds of papers published each year that could be relevant to their lives.
I wish scientific journals would start encouraging “human language”, as opposed to impenetrable thickets of mathematical gobbledygook. When I was still in academia, reading papers germane to my field was a chore. It would take considerable time to decipher a complex looking mathematical equation, only to go, “oh, they just mean X.” Basically as soon as I saw a \Sum sign, I knew the equation was pointless peacocking.
This is something I hope to see gain traction with the new gust of open wind blowing through scientific reporting. Open results, accessible results, means more than just the accessibility of the PDF, if you ask me. Publicly funded research has a duty to be readable and understandable by the public, who paid for it.
Or, at the very least, not more opaque than strictly necessary.
I completely understand your frustration, but let me offer somewhat of a different view.
Try reading Euclid's Elements. It was written before equations had been invented and is for the most part "plain language". However, it reads as vastly more obtuse than an equivalent modern formulation of the same facts with symbols and algebra.
The nice thing about mathematical notation is that a simple, one line equation can express relationships and detail that what would otherwise take a full paragraph to unpack. Personally, once I'm familiar with the symbols and underlying concepts, an equation is much easier to hold in my head than a long jumble of plain language explication.
I think most researchers aren't simply pomping up their paper with obtuse symbols. Mathematical notation is both compact as well as a common language, so why not use it? As a side benefit, we also get to lean on the vast background of mathematical research which offers potential precision that would otherwise be completely lost.
The problem is that using 'human language' is inherently hiding complexity by using an abstraction. You are going to lose information, and that information is probably important to fully understand the thesis of a science paper.
Academic papers are written in a difficult to read style. It's more than being precise, the use of jargon, and latex at work. It's a deliberate process of puffing up the difficulty of the work by making it hard for someone else to understand. Part of this is the nature of scientists - they are not educators, nor do they worry about teaching others (ironic given the roles of professors in universities).
A well written paper takes a sympathetic view of the reader and helps guide them to understanding. This is not how academics are taught how to write. It's like a form of handed-down abuse.
I think science journalism is what was meant. Obviously scientists communicate the results of the science they do, but there's a very big difference between a scientist failing to communicate well and a non-scientist failing to understand and adeptly communicating something not supported by the science (e.g. sensationalizing some minor/tangential/wrong idea).
Most people didn’t read Jon Postel’s papers but they enjoy the internet. Same with pharmacology, semiconductors, radio comms, etc. Science is mostly reporting to other scientists and to engineers that turn it into usable stuff.
Popular science writing is very important, but it’s just a small part of the practice. Doing more of it would mean less actual research unless funds and bodies are added for it. I'd like to think that as a
community we servo around the sweet spot given the resources.
No, it is not. This is why I drew the distinction in the first place.
> Normal people can only understand what is reported.
Which backs up my point that sensationalised reporting is a problem. Peer-reviewed, scientific papers are written for other scientific researchers — that's as it should be.
> However, Science makes no effort to own those mistakes.
That sounds ludicrous to me. The entirely of the scientific method is about generating hypotheses, testing them out, finding out you're wrong, and then refining/rewriting those hypotheses and trying again, ad infinitum. Plenty of scientists have been 'wrong' for years.
I'd argue the problem you're trying to highlight isn't about 'Science' per se, but the fact that people/the masses/etc like to have just one immutable 'answer' for something. They find it difficult to cope when new results point to different answers. Is that really the fault of 'Science'?
The scientific method is such that Science is never wrong. It's god-esque.
There's no step in the process - a la 12 Step Process for example - that acknowledges past transgressions. It just hypes up the glory and ignores the mistakes.
> The scientific method is such that Science is never wrong. It's god-esque.
This is wrong.
> There's no step in the process - a la 12 Step Process for example - that acknowledges past transgressions. It just hypes up the glory and ignores the mistakes.
This is also wrong.
Wrong as in factually incorrect.
You're seeing something in science that doesn't exist.
> * The scientific method is such that Science is never wrong. It's god-esque.*
You've misunderstood my point. The scientific method is such that 'Science' is always wrong. It's a method to continually try to become less wrong about how the world works.
I don't even know what you're referring to when you capitalise 'science' the way you have been. It's not like there's a single entity called 'Science' that issues proclamations.
Except that’s not what happened here. In this analogy, that engineer made public statements before the investigation was completed and then the investgating group told them to leave.
> "Respondents were asked to score how each of the social media platforms they use impact upon issues such as anxiety, loneliness and community building. The site with the most positive rating was YouTube, followed by Twitter. Facebook and Snapchat came third and fourth respectively."
YouTube had the most positive rating!? I'm honestly not sure what to make of this. The experience of 14-24 year olds must be vastly different to the comments etc I've seen there.
Most people probably don’t interact with the comments. Most probably just watch the videos, ignore the comments, or glance at the comments and never venture back due to the toxicity of it all.
Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content. Instagram/Snapchat is the same, except now the comments are pictures with a whole lot of body shaming thrown in.
> Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content.
Much of it, yes. But 1) tailor your Twitter stream to your (professional) interests, 2) ignore any trending news, 3) unfollow people who tweet random stuff or have too much Trump (or any current politics) in their mix and it will provide useful. I follow mostly computational neuroscience / machine learning scientists, and have heard much about recent research, summary articles or conferences first on Twitter. On an evening just two weeks ago I glanced at my list and saw a poster about one of the most intriguing research findings I've yet seen. Without Twitter I would have had to attend the conference or waited for the paper. Science Twitter is active and growing, and as scientists are busy people for many it has become a popular and low-effort announcement platform for new work (much better than university blogs or press releases and such).
I see much more toxicity glancing on any video's YouTube comments than on my Twitter stream.
I find it pretty hard to curate even interesting lists of researchers on Twitter without running into too much fluff or political tweets. I don't blame them for using the medium as it might be intended and of course they are free to share their personal opinions, but in my experience even just a handful of people who tweet a bit too often can pollute your stream enough to make it annoying to follow along.
Maybe Twitter should just let you filter posts based on content. (Maybe it's already possible, I'm not a big Twitter user.)
Same here. I only follow graphics programmers and game developers. The graphics people are ok, but a few of them tweet a lot of politics in addition to content I wouldn’t want to miss. And game development is thoroughly saturated in The Culture War, so there’s no practical way to avoid that except to ignore it.
There is word filter feature, but the UX is a bit clunky and you cant subscribe / paste a big list of words you would like to filter.
A future feature I would like to see in social networks is automatically generating tags for posts and letting people filter out the posts based on that.
With that, I can just choose an automatically generated US politics filter for example and not have to maintain a mute list.
The evanescent nature of Snapchat is probably what's making it less harmful than the others. Though disappearing content probably just introduces different issues.
YouTube is pretty great. Even the comment sections arent that bad from my experience. Youtube has a big 'celebrity' factor but unlike FB, Instagram and Snapchat those 'celebrities' are not your friends. If Logan Paul posts a vid from Japan that does not make me envious but if a friend of mine does I'm more likely to become jealous.
Youtube also has a great utility factor, you can learn a lot from youtube.
I love Youtube. All of the videos by Brady Haran are worth watching, Numberphile, Periodic Videos, and Sixty Symbols. There’s just a ton of great content, but of course there’s also a screaming pit of nastiness, politics, and conspiracy. The good news is that it’s incredibly easy to avoid the bad stuff, and easy to find the good stuff. YouTube is very much what you make of it, while Twitter is mostly toxic unless you curate aggressively.
Youtube (because it's video) is a way more open-ended platform allowing for deeper engagement with any subject matter vs the purposefully restricted medium of twitter or instagram which boxes you into to eye-catching photos, and overstimulating anxiety inducing rapid fire feed scrolling. It's mindless and unsatisfying.
Youtube has almost limitless niches of hours of content.
Definitely crazy depth of content. I’ve spent hours watching someone shoot novel shotgun loads, and that channel took me to another all about how to program and operate a CNC mill, and I spent hours there. I remember being home sick as a little kid, and daytime tv was a nightmare of talk shows and things like The People’s Court. If I was too tired or sick to read, I’d just watch that stuff and wish something else was on.
Now, with YouTube you could watch absolutely anything at all. Physics lectures, classical concerts, or just cute cats and JPop, whatever. I realize people like to most about “the youth of today,” but for the right kind of kid, the world is their oyster. All of the encyclopedias and libraries are online, all of the education and entertainment is right there. It’s incredible. You can learn to cook everything from fried cheese to haute cuisine, learn to play an instrument or just watch a guy acapella with himself, and everything in between. Whatever you want to see is just a click or two away.
YouTube isn't some tiny niche, it's a huge sprawling expanse of content. You may be shocked to learn that what others view on youtube is completely different from what you watch there, and that leads to different experiences. Not just in the details, but in character as well.
Lots of videos on youtube have comment sections that are just full of people who like the content positively discussing it. Usually not the kind of content that makes top trending.
For example, I enjoy the videos of PeterDraws. Just now, I went to his channel and checked out one of his most recent videos. All of the comments are positive.
The comments are overwhelmingly positive. His videos are very popular, with quirky titles because of his limited english, no soundtracks, and daily kind gestures feeding starving cats. Just plain positive content.
Re: PeterDraws.. I don't think I've ever seen such a high "thumbs" up ratio with that many total votes.
One thing Youtube allows for, and I see it in both the video you linked as well as the cat video.. is ASMR-type content which serves as a strong antidote for the type of anxiety-inducing social media interactions we see with Instagram and others. I think it's because Youtube (and long form video in general) is a much more expansive medium. It allows for more focused, and slower, engagement vs rapid fire feed scrolling like twitter and insta.
> One thing Youtube allows for, and I see it in both the video you linked as well as the cat video.. is ASMR-type content which serves as a strong antidote for the type of anxiety-inducing social media interactions we see with Instagram and others.
Yes, absolutely. YouTube has it's own anxiety-inducing features, but you're right that this kind of content would never really truly succeed on Facebook or Instagram in the same way it has on YouTube. Peter's videos would probably have to be sped up and edited into something like the art equivalent of those Buzzfeed "Tasty" videos.
Thank you for sharing Robin's videos, I love this kind of content. It reminds me of another channel that I like, which is also very positive: please enjoy "James Blackwood - Raccoon Whisperer," a man from Nova Scotia who feeds Raccoons.
https://www.ft.com/thispagedoesnotexist