Job ads being one. Also, HN has behind the scene deals to peddle certain news organizations ( nytimes, wapo, wsj ) and certain ngos with certain agendas.
What do you think HN is? What do you think dang, sctb and the mods do?
Simple. By exposing yourself to a variety of ideas, opinions, viewpoints.
>Whether it is curating the subreddits you see, or selecting the news sites you visit, you are only ever going to see a tiny fraction of what's going on in the world.
> Not only that, but the US government is neither as aggressive nor as forward-looking about such partnerships
What? The chinese modeled their economic system after the US. We love to portray ourselves as having a separation between the "private" and the "public". That is absolute nonsense.
The chinese, like the US and europe and japan and south korea and all major world economies, are corporate mercantilists. When the railroads, mining corps, oil corporations, etc needed the natives to be "gone", it was the US government that exterminated the natives. When US corporate interests needed access to central america, it was the US government that cleared the way. When US corporate interests wanted access to the middle east, east asia, south east asia, etc, it was the US government that lent a hand. The US has always been and always will be a mercantilist nation.
> preferring to let market forces have their way.
You are buying into the propaganda. All "market" forces are human forces. After all, there is no market without humans.
> China is tilting the playing field in its favor, while the world's sole superpower is hobbled by clowns and criminals in the executive branch, and corrupt prime contractors pretend to supply the government with tech that they neither understand nor make themselves.
Oh ye of little faith. China has destroyed its environment and sold its people as slave labor to the west for development. If you look at US-china trade, 80% of the wealth is in US hands and 20% of it is in chinese hands.
Take the iPhone as an example. It sells for $800. What percentage of $800 do you think the chinese gets? What percentage do you think US shareholders gets? Almost all of the iPhone's values goes to US based shareholders. The chinese get peanuts.
> If you write code on .NET, you should adopt this release ASAP.
If you require the new features maybe, but if you are writing enterprise code, you shouldn't rush into things.
> Doubly so if you care about runtime performance.
Everyone cares about runtime performance, but if your software isn't experiencing performance issues, there is no need to rush into things. Or at the very least, reach out to your clients to get a feel about their schedules and expectations.
> Colon and rectal cancers have increased 51% among adults under age 50 since 1994, the cancer society said.
Percentages can be deceiving. 51% off what base? Was it 100 people in 1994 and now it is 151?
> Preventative medicine is cheap.
Sure, if the odds of you getting it is high enough. If the odds of getting it is low, does it make sense for tens of millions of adults to get invasive and potentially dangerous check ups?
Not everything is a conspiracy, but we do know that "institutions" love to fear monger to get more money, funding and exposure.
> If you want your conspiracy to hold some weight, they would be pushing the age in the other direction.
Not necessarily. Collecting $200 from 10 million people each for an annual checkup vs the cost of a few thousands with colon cancer. There is a reason why businesses ( like nflx and amzn ) love the subscription model.
> Are you referring to the missing warrant canary?
That's certainly part of it. But even before then, reddit was sharing data with the authorities. Just like google removing "don't be evil" didn't mean that they weren't evil before they removed it. It just made it "official".
> I think OP is talking about all the now banned subs:
Right. And reddit was monetized while those subs were around.
> I don't use Reddit anymore, except for local subs sometimes.
The only time I check reddit is if there is a major news event, but the news and worldnews subs are now run by the news media employees, so it's all links to bbc, cnn, nytimes, etc, so even those subs are pointless now.
> I am a heavy Reddit user and I don't notice any of these things
You don't see politics related content on reddit daily? I used reddit since reddit was days old ( years before the digg migration ) so maybe we visited different websites.
> Curate your subreddit list and unsubscribe from all the default subs
That defeats the point of reddit doesn't it? Or what made reddit great. I never used reddit to be part of a bubble. Not only are default subs a bubble today, reddit itself is a bubble.
> and that isn't even Reddit's fault, it's just inevitable once they reach a certain size.
Actually it is reddit's fault. When they allowed and encouraged censorship, it allowed a small faction of political and news media/ngo affiliated mods to turn subreddits into their propaganda platform.
> Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free.
Reddit is none of those now. It's not anonymous ( they track your identity and feed it to the government ). You may be "anonymous" to fellow users, but not anonymous to authorities. It isn't information dense. It's propaganda dense. Almost all the content there now is government, media, ngo, etc propaganda. As for ads, check out the videos, movies, music, etc subs when a particular movie, album, etc comes out. The frontpage will be littered with ad-like submissions ( aka ads ).
Reddit is 80% government, politics and news propaganda and 20% ads ( movies, music, etc ). I think you are confusing the reddit of 2011 with today's reddit.
> It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom.
Actually reddit could and did monetize "toxic content". How do you think reddit has been around for nearly 13 years? And once again, you are confusing reddit of 2011 to reddit of 2018. Today, reddit isn't any more "toxic" than twitter, youtube, facebook, etc. Reddit is heavily censored. Besides, on social media, you don't monetize content, you monetize eyeballs/clicks/data points.
> I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit.
Do you really think reddit is unprofitable? Let me guess, you think that youtube is not profitable right? You think these companies have been around for more than a decade because they are not "profitable"?
Their "hollywood" style accounting may make it seem like they are not profitable, but these companies are incredibly profitable. It's why youtube has a valuation over $100 billion and reddit's valuation is in the billions.
> But as a community platform it’s the best out there IMO.
Have to disagree with you there. Any garden variety forum is better than reddit. Also, reddit stopped being a community a long time ago.
I've stopped using it because it's all political nonsense or advertisements.
A couple of us got flashlights and went to the main street and it was pitch dark and quiet and eerie. That was fun. Other than that, living without power got real boring, real quick.
So you want a link snope or politifact link? Even if people provided citations, wouldn't you reject them because it isn't snopes or politifact ( the approved "fact" finders )?
The fact that much of the liberal media and institutions have rallied around snopes should indicate that snopes has a left bias. The fact that you ( likely a left leaning individual working in the media ) support it probably indicates it as well.
> And if you know of a fact-checking resource that has less bias, please share.
Everyone is biased. Especially when politics, money and propaganda is involved.
The issue with news media isn't facts. It's the spin on the facts.
Look at Trump backing out of the NK meeting last week - which is a fact. But look at how CNN and Foxnews spun that.
CNN : "Trump is backing out of NK meeting because he is a bumbling fool failing at NK negotiations"
Foxnews : "Trump is backing out of NK meeting because he a deal making genius who won't let NK screw over the US again."
Same "fact", but wildly different spin. Fact checking is never going to solve this issue because "facts" are only a small part of the news industry. The core of the news industry is to push propaganda and to influence the people to think a certain way.
Also, propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing. Every country needs propaganda to exist.
If you are interested, here is a former TIME magazine editor speaking on the topic of propaganda, history and news.
Reversing engineering cracks, visiting porn sites just for warez passwords or just wasting time reading 2600. It was the golden age for young kid with a passion for computers.
> Amazing how, a decade or more after the python-perl skirmishes, some still ... still ... cannot give up their attacks on perl, using the mask of accounts created in the last day.
I'm a fan of perl. I'm old school. I like C, perl, etc. I wasn't attacking perl. Just pointing out REALITY.
> Haters gonna hate, and one should generally avoid feeding the several hour old trolls. Their trolling notwithstanding, rumors of perl's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
I'm a troll because I pointed out facts?
Listen, nobody wants perl to succeed more than me. Stop calling people trolls just because you are upset about what has happened to perl.
awk is a fundamental part of the unix ecosystem. It's in the hall of fame of utils along with the likes of grep. If you use unix or linux in any semi-serious capacity, you are familiar with awk.
Monitoring heavy trafficked interstate corridors is one thing. This is entirely a different. Amazon/tech is at a point where we could get blanket surveillance on most streets, in our homes, in our offices, etc. It's the difference between monitoring areas/locations and monitoring people ( us ).
But I agree that the pandora's box has been opened and there is no going back.
