> I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry.
There are many places that focus on, allow, or encourage political content. Hackernews is not one of them, as by express design, it deems politics as off topic:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Professors being told they can't teach some parts of Plato in philosophy class because the ideas are too dangerous is indeed an interesting new phenomenon.
We have always discussed politics here. I agree with your point that HN shouldn't just be a forum for political content, I regularly flag posts about 'President posts insane thing on Truth Social' or 'Congressperson votes in ways people don't like,' but the intersection of economic, technological, intellectual, and political power is always going to throw up challenging ethical issues.
I think people's definition of "politics" aren't universal. And a lot of people just take all the things they don't like and say "well they're 'politicial' therefore they aren't allowed here." Using the site guidelines as their own personal eraser.
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
...
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.
> Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.
Well, even Republicans accepted that an insurrection was a bad thing:
> There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill. This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.
Typical paulg overgeneralization from his bubble. Just because many political opinions are legitimately debatable doesn’t mean that every opinion about every topic you call political is equally valid. That’s just silly.
I don’t see Paul acting like every opinion is equally valid when it directly affects something he cares about. He seems to happily participate in “useless” political discussions when he has a strong opinion.
My read of it isn't about if it's legitimately debatable, but if it's productively discussable (in an online setting).
Topics about someone's identity aren't things that one can easily change - and certainly not from text on a screen from some stranger on the internet.
Discussions about things that are core to someone's identity (in that setting) aren't useful.
Religion and politics in that context extend beyond one's claims about a soul or which end of the political spectrum is more soulless. Asking about how to maintain an F150 in /r/fuckcars is similarly not going to be a useful discussion since the identity of the people in that subreddit is in conflict about something that is quite legitimately discussable.
Keeping one's identity small (and topical to the subject matter at hand) given that it isn't in conflict with one's identity makes for a place that is much easier to moderate and keep a civil discussion.
One can discuss the impact of Section 174 or ZIRP without invoking politics. However, once politics (or religion) is involved in a comment everything downthread of it becomes more difficult to moderate.
So it's not the "ignoring politics" that's at issue - many topics in today's world are intimately intermingled with politics. However, discussing that politics directly makes this an environment that people tend to not want to participate in.
Turn on showdead and look at the comments in this post to see the types of things people don't want to participate in... and how much worse the site would be if those were acceptable topics.
There are many places where one can discuss those topics. Not every site has to be all things for all people. This one is thankfully one of the places where discussion on politics and the related identities doesn't happen.
I don't know what site you're thinking of that avoids politics...maybe lobste.rs? Here are some of today's top HN stories that I would certainly categorize as "discussion on politics".
There is a difference between discussing politics and political discussions. Things done by political bodies that have impact can be reasonably discussed.
Yes, DanG has written a lengthy, nuanced piece on the subject, because he has to deal with the reality that there is in fact no bright line between discussing politics and political discussion.
PaulG simply asserted that "no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid". Which is neither true, nor useful.
Also, some of us are amenable to changing our opinions when presented with strong evidence/arguments. I suppose the larger questions ("what do we want society to be like", "which values are most important to us") tend to be baked into ourselves so there's a limit to how much someone will change. However, there's examples of people leaving cults etc. and dramatically changing their opinions and personality.
> There are many places that focus on, allow, or encourage political content. Hackernews is not one of them, as by express design, it deems politics as off topic:
That's all very fine and well in theory, but it's like saying the topic of the ship taking on water is not allowed to be discussed when you're on a Star Trek cruise:
Sure: a gash in the haul doesn't cover things like Kirk, Picard, Sisko, or Janeway, but it's kind of a prerequisite that nothing is happening to hull integrity before the others topics can be entertained.
You cannot isolate technology from forces that shape and harness it. It is fine to restrict political discussion lest it overwhelm other more fruitful discussions, however burying one's head in sand while the society is being "engineered" is not the mark of a curious person.
> Gemini lowered its grades by an average of 2 points after seeing Claude's and OpenAI's more rigorous assessments. It couldn't justify giving 17s when Claude was pointing to specific gaps in the experimentation discussion.
This is to be expected. The big commercial LLMs generally respond with text that agrees with the user.
> But here's what's interesting: the disagreement wasn't random. Problem Framing and Metrics had 100% agreement within 1 point. Experimentation? Only 57%.
> Why? When students give clear, specific answers, graders agree. When students give vague hand-wavy answers, graders (human or AI) disagree on how much partial credit to give. The low agreement on experimentation reflects genuine ambiguity in student responses, not grader noise.
The disagreement between the LLMs is interesting. I would hesitate to conclude that "low agreement on experimentation reflects genuine ambiguity in student responses." It could be that it reflects genuine ambiguity on the part of the graders/LLMs as to how a response should be graded.
Intuitively, it seems like the Correct™ feature to handle the concepts of "issues" and "discussions" would be to have only one place to go to comment on a project.
There doesn't seem to be enough of a separation between the concepts of "issues" and "discussions" to support separating them into two features.
Given that discussions seem more general, it seems like the right path forward would be to have only discussions. Sub-features of issues could be added to discussions.
It’s minor but can improve user experience if implemented well. I know several people who scoffed at the “need” for automation in car locking and unlocking. It just feels like the obvious way now.
Another use case would be access control in buildings. There are millions of insecure iClass type cards securing doors and elevators that would be easily and securely replaced by tech like this.
Another scenario is getting census/surveillance capability for security and evacuation.
Another is emergency response. If the tech was in a phone, integrate with 911 to find where a cell call originated within a campus or facility. I worked a project in an office complex where we worked with the fire department to improve response time. The Fire Department response was 5 minutes, but locating a caller in our facility could take 7-10 without a guide. In some cardiac scenarios, every minute without treatment reduces survival probability by 10%. You can easily cut that time by 50-75% if you know exactly where you are going.
In the case of that project, we deployed AED devices, created and drilled procedures for reporting emergencies (with a bias for using house or desk phones) we also required a buddy system for most after hours access. I think it lowered the average drilled response by 30-40%. That paid off when a vendor CE had a heart attack during a service event. Without that system, he would have almost certainly died. Very few companies have that kind of safety culture and budget so tech can have a huge impact.
> There are millions of insecure iClass type cards securing doors and elevators that would be easily and securely replaced by tech like this.
Those cards could be replaced, even more easily, with NFC cards with better security properties. ISO 14443-3A is a perfectly adequate protocol and has the nifty added benefit of not needing batteries in the card.
Even secure ranging is doable at NFC frequencies — all it takes is a vendor who is willing to do the work as well as customers who will demand it. I think I even saw papers about this years ago: the reader and the card can securely negotiate a request that the door will send and the card will reply to, and then the door sends the request and the card validates the request (against precomputed data) and replies. It’s okay if there’s delay due to the limited computational power of the card as long as the card knows what the delay is and can report the delay to the reader. This will give ranging precise to a bit time or better, which is nowhere near the 10cm precision that UWB offers but is a whole lot better than anything anyone has actually deployed in an iClass-style device.
But customers aren’t even demanding cards that are immune to trivial UID cloning.
That being said, most users can’t set up home assistant. But the reason for that is that HA lacks the funding to do the insane amount of work required to offer a near zero touch setup process, and other vendors have no incentive to play ball with them much either. (Computers are very hard to use and making them easy is a giant tar pit of grueling work.)
Going full circle, this is because the lock in and double dipping via surveillance is what subsidizes all these other products so they have the funding to make themselves this polished.
This is why ad and spyware encrusted smart TVs are so cheap, sometimes even sold as loss leaders.
It’s very hard for privacy respecting user empowering products to compete with the gigantic subsidy you get from being user hostile and privacy invasive. If consumers actually cared about privacy and companies that are not user hostile and were willing to pay anywhere from 2X to 10X more for these things, this would be different.
This economic dynamic is why we can’t have nice things in consumer tech.
It’s a variation on a well known economic issue with hidden subsides. Let’s say there are two pizza places. One sells pizza. The other sells pizza and meth under the table with a code word, like Los Pollos Hermanos from Breaking Bad.. Which one dominates the local pizza market? Obviously the one selling meth. They have a hidden subsidy, so they can either undercut everyone else or offer a superior product at the same price point. It’s almost impossible to compete with this.
I have had zero problems connecting pretty much all hardware to Home Assistant. But yea, if you have zero technical skills it is hard to self-host anything.
I always have the cynical take that the real feature is “more spying on users and more opportunities to make features pointlessly require a subscription.” The seemingly minor or pointless benefits are just to get the stuff out there.
It took a bit of digging but it looks like the ship can operate for 90 minutes without recharging:
> ... the batteries will power eight axial-flow water jets driven by permanent magnet electric motors. These will be able to keep the ship going for 90 minutes before needing to be recharged.
> The ship’s permanent home will be the Rio de la Plata estuary, where it will travel between the ports of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. The two cities are 60 kilometers apart, a distance Hull 096 is expected to travel in 90 minutes. Direct-current charging stations will be installed at each port and will draw energy from the two countries’ grids. A full charge is expected to take just 40 minutes.
https://www.aclu-il.org/en/campaigns/biometric-information-p...
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