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You're ignoring shaping effects though. Nobody prefers living in a deeply divided society. Instead, filter bubbles help bad actors (including foreign adversaries, disgruntled losers, political opportunist, and garden-variety edgelords) accelerate fractionalization. Moreover, social media deliberately elevates incendiary content because outage drives engagement.

These social media sites could be designed for consensus-building and we would see very different outcomes for society.

It's not hypocritical to want the democracy that works instead of the one that self-disintegrates.


I'm not sure I understand. How do you square "nobody prefers living in a deeply divided society" with "outrage drives engagement"? This is the hypocrisy I was describing. Aren't people, including you and I, choosing this willingly, every day? What is more democratic than that?

And having to listen to disgruntled losers, political opportunists, and garden-variety edgelords is democracy in practice. I do agree with you that foreign adversaries are a huge issue with democracy, with regard to the internet specifically.


At the same time, I think you are ignoring how diverse people really are. There's no consensus to be had when dealing with mutual exclusives, no matter what method is chosen.

Perhaps the solution is to lean further into fractionalization, but in a peaceful and constructive way. That might mean the destruction of democracy, but I think this just points to democracy not being a good inclusive system to begin with.


It's the "your choice" that's the problem. The quality of a society is dominated by the choices that other people make.

Well, it's not yet monetized by YouTube hustle bros, for one thing. :D


I hate to break it to you, but Buddhism was commercialized by Western grifters decades before YouTube!


In a similar vein, HTTP header smuggling attacks exploit differences in header parsing. For instance, a reverse proxy and a web server might handle repetition of headers or the presence of whitespace differently.


This is the Hacker News community. Let's be constructive and civil. Your comment would have more interesting and relevant if you had explained why this trading strategy is a bad idea instead of just labeling it as "idiotic".


I'll bite, I guess:

* In deferrence to Boglehead philosophy, hedging bets is a fool's errand because the idea is you lose your money the more you touch it. Make a plan, invest, and then hold hold hold staying the course come hell or high water.

* If you truly want to reduce or eliminate risk, the best way is to simply cash out. A $1 bill will always be a $1 bill with absolute certainty.


As a boglehead... that's just not how it works in the real world. Some people would treat the loss of $X worse than the gain of $X is good. Thus, they don't have linear value for money (no one really does... if you lose 90% of your bank account, you still have dinner tonight; if you lose all of it, you might not).

Some people want to come out neutral or lose a guaranteed small amount, rather than the chance to lose or gain the same amount. I'd pay $5 to avoid having to flip a $10k +/- coin. Thus, if I knew I would lose $10k if X got elected, I could place a $10k bet for Y to win.


> Some people would treat the loss of $X worse than the gain of $X is good

Most people. "Loss aversion refers to a cognitive bias in which the same situation is perceived as worse if it is framed as a loss, rather than a gain" [1].

> I'd pay $5 to avoid having to flip a $10k +/- coin

Risk aversion. Seemingly related, but in fact quite rational.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion


There are bad hedges and good hedges.

It is commonplace to take various financial positions that limit downside. It is one of the primary uses of options and futures.


>I'll bite, I guess:

> In deferrence to Boglehead philosophy, hedging bets is a fool's errand

The flagged comment didn't say that hedging was idiotic, but implied that the specific hedge mentioned was idiotic, yet didn't give any reason for calling it such.

>$1 bill will always be a $1 bill with absolute certainty

This is money illusion.


Hmmm... I nominate Mortal Kombat (1995) for the cringiest title drops. Instead of being used once for a climatic fight scene, they keep dropping it over and over (10 times according to the article).


I don't know the law, but "build it yourself lol" is hardly easy, especially for software that needs to be constantly updated for security.


Alternatively (or at least additively), most C# developers don't really need all the new ref/Span features. They're writing line-of-business apps and garbage collection is a fact of life, not some burden to be avoided.

Microsoft probably added these features to push the language into new niches (like improving the story around Unity and going after Arduino/IoT). But it's of little practical appeal to their established base.


As far as I'm aware, it's the development of Kestrel which pushed the introduction of ref/Span etc. Due to it Kestrel has seen quite a large speedup, it being one of the fastest HTTP servers nowadays. ref/Span allowed them to make the core almost allocation free, together with using vectorized operations (SIMD ) for parsing the request.


Heuristics don't have to be perfect to be useful so long as they improve the efficacy of our attentions. Once that breaks down society must follow because thinking about every topic is intractable.


My cynical take (as an American) is that anything but the previous design would have been subject to politicization and protracted decision-making. Donors would have been more fickle, stakeholder groups would have mushroomed, and reconstruction probably wouldn't have even started yet. From a project management standpoint, the decision to keep it the same was as absolute win.


Yes for sure, I never had much hope for any kind of change because of the reasons you gave. I think it's quite telling of our time how we cling to some idealized idea of the past.


would you apply the same logic to the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Taj Mahal or any of the other treasures of the world’s heritage?


I find interesting that both the example you gave are places for the dead. In contrast Notre Dame is still an active place of worship, and it would shock me less to see change to it. A similar but more secular example would be the glass dome on the Reichstag building in Berlin.


Today's Great Pyramid is much different than what the Great Pyramid looked like when it was first built, according to the TV programs I've seen. There used to be an outer layer of white limestone on the pyramid.

see https://www.livescience.com/how-egyptian-pyramids-originally...

I'd be more impressed if Egypt restored the Great Pyramid to something close to how it looked when first built.


Relatedly, when I was young, Notre Dame was black from years of pollution from the industrialization period. They cleaned it up and restored its original stone color.


but like, couldn't they put some nice gardens or maybe a shiny glass pyramid on top to improve it for modern tastes? I think it could be really cute


The Ancient Egyptians were also like us in that they were into architectural bling and greenery, so I'm not actually sure they'd be complaining that much. They were into materials like gold, electrum, and polished stone, but I'm sure you could sell them on modern glass.

That said, the Great Pyramid is a historical site, not an active worship site, and modern archeological sensibilities prioritise conservation. A restoration like that might make it hard to answer future questions about the pyramid.


I’m not worried about offending the ghosts of the ancients. Let’s try another analogy: if the Mona Lisa were damaged, should we “improve” it with “modern bling”?


> Yes for sure, I never had much hope for any kind of change because of the reasons you gave. I think it's quite telling of our time how we cling to some idealized idea of the past.

Or perhaps leave old things as they were and build new things according to current ideals?


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