We didn't see it or demote it—it set off the flamewar detector. I've turned that off now, in keeping with the principle described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41511529.
p.s. @dang is a no-op - I only saw this thread because I was doing our standard review of the flamewar detector. If you want guaranteed* message delivery, hn@ycombinator.com is the only way.
* Well, mostly guaranteed. I assume there are a few that fail to get noticed in the spam bin, though we check that pretty carefully.
It has one public-facing moderator (and apparently a few others who don't post publicly on the site). HN's own mods see very little of the total site content. Automation and member votes, flags, and vouches, as well as emails to the mods, are what keep HN humming. Not perfectly, but quite frankly one of the better-run online discussion sites, and one whose quality has remained remarkably steady over nearly 20 years.
If you see something you think isn't right (bad content not flagged, good content flagged, whatever, email the mods, and they'll take a look. I do this a lot myself, usually with positive results.
TFA? No, it’s a C / Bourne shell polyglot where the shell part compiles and runs the C part. I’ve also used this technique when I needed to post self-contained examples (e.g. to mailing lists), but I don’t know if people actually appreciated it.
Honestly not sure why these aren't. Surely there are no observable differences at such tiny scale and using human cells just makes you a target of wrath.
While human brains are
probably just scaled-up chimpanzee brains, individual primate neurons are significantly more sophisticated than other mammalian taxa, particularly with epigenetic changes: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34800-w But also the plain structure of the dendrites and how they form connections: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22230639/
Now: I don't think wetware computing is actually sophisticated enough to leverage primate-specific advantages. But 10,000 primate neurons would probably be "more powerful" than 10,000 pig neurons. (OTOH it seems like corvid neurons are even more powerful than primates, maybe we should use crows.)
Oh, didn't know that! Thought the human advantage was mostly just balancing cancerous growth to get really big or something. And yeah, we should be studying bird brains, they are so smart in such a tiny package!
Yep ants really are quite degenerated individually, compared even to Wasps they evolved from. I have a persistent fear that this is the fate of humanity and that we're already halfway there.
The article is currently not responding so I can't see if this is covered, but a bigger problem is the volunteer answerers. Some left when the site was sold, many remained with a wait-and-see stance and are going due to licensing changes (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401324/announcing-a...).
Obviously people asking LLMs instead is an important factor, as are unverified (often not entirely correct) answers from those using LLMs to gain Internet points.
The diamond-symbol moderators are masochists or flagellants.
Fortunately community-moderation works well - for the most-part - on SO/SE; not to say SE is anything like Reddit (e.g. the impotent protests over “Monica” which feels like it happened over a decade ago - and people still reference that episode in their display-names).
If I ever become a moderator on SO it’ll be because I want to bolster my resume (I did get to interview at BlueOrigin on the basis of my SO karma score - so it has value; certainly more than LinkedIn, ew)
All that the mods seem to do is stir up meta drama and they treat the paid SO employees horribly. You're right that community moderation is great on SO - users with certain amounts of karma can close questions, and downvotes are a powerful tool. I don't really see the purpose of the volunteer diamond mods.
> I don't really see the purpose of the volunteer diamond mods.
They do a different kind of moderation. For example we community moderators can't delete posts unless certain conditions are met (a certain number of downvotes). And we can't send warnings to user when such a warning is warranted.
Also I think they have access to some somewhat sensitive information that you may not want the whole community of high-score users to see without making everyone sign some sort of nda first.
I don't want diamond users having access to any of my information that a public user wouldn't. I haven't voted for them and I generally don't trust anyone who wants that kind of power online for no compensation.
Other users did vote for them. There are actual elections for diamond mods. The fact that you didn't vote for them doesn't mean they don't have legitimacy.
> I generally don't trust anyone who wants that kind of power online for no compensation.
As a community moderator I have a lot of power over certain things (I can unilaterally close Java questions as duplicate, I can edit questions, vote to close, vote to delete...) and I do it because I like the website to stay clean. Why would you doubt their motives just because they can do a bit more than what I can do? Do you distrust forum/subreddit/discord moderators as well?
> Other users did vote for them. There are actual elections for diamond mods.
I don't like the idea that I have to be on board with a website's unvetted volunteer moderators in order to use it.
I agree with SO but I don't agree with its power mods. The power mods are constantly at odds with SO's policies. Therefore it's a power mod issue and not mine.
> Do you distrust forum/subreddit/discord moderators as well?
Absolutely! Why should I trust these people? Some subreddit moderators for specific smaller niche subs can be ok, but a lot of questions should be asked of large subreddit moderators.
Who are these people who spend hours a day working for free for a billion dollar company? Why do they do it? Why are they moderating 100+ subreddits? Why do all of their posts automatically go to the top of the Reddit front page even if they get relatively few comments?
Reddit seems extremely easy to astroturf and it's very clear to see during US election periods like we're in at the moment.
"why don't you use a fancy electronic tuner for this, and just have a table to look up the frequencies for each string, and tune it that way?"
"..."
There just aren't tuners fancy enough IMO. Make one with a high resolution spectrogram, I think the piano tuner person would actually appreciate that. So much subtle detail in a spectrogram.
edit: there's a discussion below the essay on some just such very fancy tuners.
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