Is there any sense that your view of what HN "has always intended to be" needs to be updated in the face of changing relationships between tech and politics? Any reflection on the role this moderation policy has had on the broader world outside of tech?
I regularly see positively rated HN comments that are indistinguishable from stormfront posts 20 years ago. The main stream of tech leadership is directly involved in eliminationist & unconstitutional policies in the US and elsewhere, and uses their authority and influence within the tech industry to promote these racist political platforms.
Any reflection on how HN's moderation policy has allowed them to do so, the impact it has had in providing such fertile ground for them to work in? It seems that what HN was "always intended to be" has turned out to be an effective propaganda tool for one of the most destructive political movements in living memory. I wouldn't feel good about staying the course here.
> I regularly see positively rated HN comments that are indistinguishable from stormfront posts 20 years ago.
This is the kind of comment that is only ever made without links that would enable the claim to be evaluated by others.
And the rest of the comment that seems to assert that the political craziness in the world is the fault of HN is pretty wild, but is perhaps an assumption that explains why some people think this is an important place to conduct ideological battle.
We’re a tiny site in the scheme of things. None of the tech leaders who are influential in politics have been active or popular on HN for years, if ever. The HN audience has always been distrustful of big tech and the relationship between corporations and politics. The core HN audience is people who work in tech (mostly employees or freelancers) who are interested learning new things and like to work on interesting projects.
We know we are not - and cannot be - a bubble that’s isolated from the rest of the world. But it’s a mistake to think that HN has any significant influence on politics or the tech leaders who are active in politics.
I am suggesting HN change its moderation policies in light of having been inadvertently and effectively used for far right propaganda and your rebuttal is along the lines of "no, because it wasn't effective." Do I have that right or would you like to clarify? It seems like my position is that I believe HN has a greater reach and impact than the editorial team of HN itself does?
Here are a few comment examples that it took me not very much time or effort to find. I hope seeing them changes your mind somewhat.
These aren't stories, they're random comments on random threads over the past two years. Some of them, had you flagged them and mailed hn@yc about them, likely would have gotten moderated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41658850, for example). But moderators don't see all the comments, so if you want something done about them, you have to help make that happen.
Most of them, though, are simply comments you and I disagree with. It's an open-access site, people are going to write things you disagree with, and there isn't going to be a moderation rule saying, for instance, that only anti-carceral comments are allowed on the site.
I spend a weird amount of time watching for specific patterns of nasty shit on HN (use the search bar to see if I've missed a race/IQ in the last year) and my experience has been the moderators are as repulsed by toxicity as I am, and they're quick to act.
You're not the first of us to express concerns that the specific moderation principles HN uses are too accommodating to toxic edgelordism (another long-timer once noted that they appear to function as a kind of grooming academy for hateful rhetoric, allowing in almost any sentiment expressed coolly and without vitriol). But improvements aren't as easy as they look. A good exercise: if you think comment moderation is failing because the rules aren't right, propose the next guideline that would fix it.
I've been doing that for years, and some of my guideline proposals have made it in (can't see everyone else's comment scores: you're welcome). Most of the ones that haven't, though, I've come to see would have been unworkable.
Thing is, that kind of vitriol is the whole point of hateful rhetoric, by and large. It's what occasionally makes "hate" appealing to some people in the first place - see your local hate-filled social media network for evidence of that. Posting "hateful rhetoric ... coolly and without vitriol", intentionally or not, is an excellent way of unpacking it for everyone else and showing just how pointless it really is.
Sure; the system we have in place is rather good at handling overtly vitriolic comments (my experience is generally that user flags kill them before emails to the moderators land). I'm just leaving open space for critiques of HN moderation; those are a fine thing, but they're really only meaningful if you can write the moderation guidelines that fill the gaps you're worried about.
> The main stream of tech leadership is directly involved in eliminationist & unconstitutional policies in the US and elsewhere
This 100%. I would add these tech oligarchs and their captured employees are the users here.
>It seems that what HN was "always intended to be" has turned out to be an effective propaganda tool for one of the most destructive political movements in living memory. I wouldn't feel good about staying the course here.
Perfectly said, if this is what HN wants to be (another propaganda arm of the regime and oligarch mouthpiece) I'm not sure there's a future here.
HN has no interest in being a mouthpiece for the rich and powerful any more that we want to be a venting space for people who push the same ideological rhetoric no matter the topic.
What we are here for is to find and share interesting new ideas, including/especially ones that can help address the biggest problems in the world (rare as they may be).
My neighborhood is like this. It's been underresourced and neglected for decades, but is well connected to transit and is adjacent to more prestigious neighborhoods.
The buildings being bought are 2-4 unit apartment rental buildings, and quite old, so 300-500k is typical. Then they're downzoned into single family homes or possibly two condos and resold for about double the price I think.
Obviously the ones using (and then losing) them as rental housing and the ones buying are completely different groups.
Shit even if not something like that, 5 homes in the middle quintile in my city would be around 2.4 million dollars. That's the entire net worth of a middle class family at the end of their earning years, including their house. The only people whose mom and pop have that kind of money to invest are rich folks. It's just as much a problem as the other thing in practical terms.
8 years of full time professional lua development experience here and unfortunately I agree with all of this. I use fennel when I can; it doesn't improve any of the library or tooling problems but it doesn't make them worse either and addresses several of the problems with the language semantics itself.
I believe so yes. They tracked hours of light exposure at night over a week, and found this result in the 90-100th percentile. The 90th percentile here is pretty much going to be people working at night yeah.
The percentiles of 50-60, 60-70, 70-80, and 80-90, however, are obviously not shift workers (unless they're shift workers working in the dark); you compare the lowest percentile of daylight light exposure to the highest percentile of nighttime light exposure, and see that there just aren't that many shift workers present in the study. About 13% of the UK population is considered to be nighttime workers. We can safely assume nighttime workers aren't represented in the 50%-90% percentile, because there simply aren't enough of them to go around, and would not be statistically significant.
Yes they tracked hours of light exposure (above some threshold? I don't see that they say.) and found this result in the 90-100th percentile. So almost certainly night shift workers.
They grouped the population into percentiles with 0-50% having quite low exposure (0.62 lux median, range of 0-1.21) vs the 90%-100% percentile being 105 lux (range of 48.3-6400). You can compare the daylight light exposure to the nighttime and basically see what a shift worker would be.
But they already deconfounded for shift workers, so that's irrelevant. And they also showed the amount of light exposure for both night and day.
Western classical music had a strong tradition of taking advantage of cutting edge technological advances, especially in metallurgy but also advanced woodworking techniques like lamination making large soundboards possible and pushing the bounds of acoustic amplification.
It wasn't until I think around the advent of recorded music and electric amplification that it settled into a fairly stable set of instruments & sounds produced by them.
Settled, or ossified? Sure, there’s modern classical with more adventurous instrumentation, but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear.
The music of the classical canon is unbelievably fantastic, and it deserves respectful treatment, but the genre has lost the audience for cool new sounds. It’s very unfortunate.
Yeah I actually used that word as I wrote it, and then switched it so I wouldn't come across as judgmental or anticlassical or whatever. I think it's a valid view of it. But my perspective here is that this kind of music is basically german-french elite traditional ethnic music. And as I don't negatively judge for example gamelan or carnatic or gagaku music for being settled/ossified I shouldn't judge traditional european music for that either.
It's simply not the role of any one musical practice to be at the forefront of experimentation forever. What we now call classical passed its torch on generations ago, and rock & jazz have now settled in too. We have hip hop and electronic music taking this role now, and eventually they will bind up into their own conventions and some descendant of theirs will push on.
I have this same ontological debate with myself, I settle it by having a rather stricter definition of classical music. Classical music is popular music that has remained popular for longer than two generations of listeners. Music that follows that certain large scale form is orchestral music.(or whatever sub genre it is)
This annoying behavior does not win me any friends but remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.
> remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.
I don't have a source for this but I hear it a lot and I strongly suspect it is a historiographical myth. Pretty much only a very small minority urban (relative) elite had access to live professionally performed classical music during most periods when it was being composed. This is also the group whose writings form most of our current knowledge base about these periods, and whose writings are of course focused primarily on their own interests. We can't really see what they didn't see, or didn't care enough to write about.
But contemporaneous with this elite music there were european folk music traditions, taught and performed ad hoc by individuals or small ensembles in homes and gathering places of the vast majority of "normal" people (peasant farmers, later urban laborers), and including some traveling performers who were known by reputation.
So yeah the great classical composers were wildly popular among the people who listened to the kind of music that they composed, but that was an extremely small part of the population. We don't have very much information at all about what was going on musically with the greater part of the population, but it appears to have been a completely separate thing, it's doubtful the great composers had any name recognition among the vast peasant masses.
Why? Says who? Historians find that our understanding of the past is never complete, and always open to reevaluation based on new information or techniques. I agree with them.
Neither, I’d argue. The greats that we look back at were the outliers, the madmen at the fringe. For every Beethoven or Mozart there were a thousand thousand nobodies cranking out the same stuff that their grandfathers wrote. Rachmaninov was seen as nouveau trash in his time, Holst derided, Gershwin hackneyed. Eno perhaps falls into the same category.
Hell, in a century you’ll see string quartets banging out Aphex Twin at elegant soirées. The real connoisseurs, of course, nod knowingly and mutter that drukqs is “early period”.
Similarly, plainsong was seen as “classical” music for many centuries, and was also a largely rigid form, but there exist some absolute bangers in the canon, mostly unattributed because monks.
It’s hard to see the sweep of history from within it.
Classical and jazz just stopped trying and standardized the instruments. Other types of music are more open to incorporating new instruments. At least that's how I feel.
FWIW the jazz tradition is still alive and well, it just isn't normally called that in the interest of not being confused with the still-extant "traditional" jazz and because many of the musicians consider themselves to be primarily part of some other community.
But there is an absolutely thriving collaboration- and improvisation-based music form grounded in jazz but open to novel & experimental instrumentation and ripe with influence from other contemporary forms like pop, hip hop, funk, reggaeton, metal. I'm thinking of people like thundercat, kamasi washington, nuclear power trio, tigran hamasyan, robert glasper, sungazer, domi & jd beck, louis cole etc.
If you like the sound of old school jazz, the standup bass the piano the brush drum shuffle, this stuff will be alien and hostile and won't feel like jazz to you. But if you like the musicianship of jazz, watching masters collaboratively invent new music in real time, this is where that ended up.
Except that it's a different ingredient, that tastes different and works differently. I still use cayenne for some things even though I have fresh chile peppers I don't put fresh ginger in ginger snaps etc.
I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well.
That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully formed syncretic religion at the time of acculturation of the greek gods into it, having regularly adapted to & adopted nearby belief systems as it encountered them.
Some of the greek gods were fully syncretized with similar-enough roman gods, some only partially, some greek gods were adopted more completely because there was no near enough equivalent, and then some roman gods continued in more or less their previous form, for example janus who the greeks had nothing comparable to. But even a lot of the pre-greek exposure "roman" gods were themselves adopted from other cultures, and/or already syncretized with indigenous ones. In any case it wasn't "mostly" stolen from any one place, it followed a pretty typical pattern for syncretic religions. The acceptance & merging of the greek gods was only one event in what was at the time already a venerable and dynamic religious system.
You also need to be careful about timelines. The greek cultural influence here is at like 800bc, predating the roman republic much less the empire. It arguably predates anything you could reasonably call rome at all, this is in the distant past that was already mythological to the roman republic. This was always part of their cultural essentially.
Some of the parallels between the Roman and Greek pantheons are also because they derive from the common Indo-European root. e.g. Jupiter, Zeus pater and Dyaus pitr being the sky father
Mark S Smith has written pretty persuasively about history of the Jews as El worshipers. See eg Abdeel, Abiel, Adbeel, Amiel, Ariel, Azarel, Azareel, Aziel, Asael, Ashbel, Adael, etc. Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Not to mention, the Bible flat out states as much “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the LORD (YHWH) I did not make myself known to them.”
Many of the biblical names ending in "ah" are YHWH names. This includes many of the prophets. So Elijah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Micaiah, Isaiah, for instance are all "ah" ending names that have a meaning related to YHWH in the same way that the "el" ending names are related to El. And then Joshua (and, hence, Jesus) is also a YHWH name.
You just have to go to any place where dairy isn't part of the typical diet and people don't usually like either on first exposure. Cheese is an acquired taste for sure, we just live in a place where nearly everyone has acquired it. Not a global norm, however.
I regularly see positively rated HN comments that are indistinguishable from stormfront posts 20 years ago. The main stream of tech leadership is directly involved in eliminationist & unconstitutional policies in the US and elsewhere, and uses their authority and influence within the tech industry to promote these racist political platforms.
Any reflection on how HN's moderation policy has allowed them to do so, the impact it has had in providing such fertile ground for them to work in? It seems that what HN was "always intended to be" has turned out to be an effective propaganda tool for one of the most destructive political movements in living memory. I wouldn't feel good about staying the course here.
reply