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Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly is the distinction between hn and social media? Is it the personalization that distinguishes the two? Does "social" mean "feed depends on graph neighborhood"? So collaborative filtering + ranking algorithms + moderation is not social media until you add graph neighborhoods?

I think the distinction is pretty easy imo. HN is topic centered, Social Media is person-centered. Before MySpace there was a pretty big proliferation of forums and other topic centered discourse. The profile was such a minor part of those tools.

When MySpace came out, the profile was the home page for a lot of people, and the content orbited around that. Coupled with the mass movement to represent oneself faithfully online as in the real world, (maybe for banking, maybe for surveillance), I think social media sort of operates as a trap. On facebook, you are encouraged to upload your real photos of drunken night out, family vacation, or whatever IDs you in life. On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self. I have a lot to say on this, but I think I'll just leave it at topic vs profile.


>On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self.

Huh? On LinkedIn, the only thing that's mandatory is to have a profile that maybe looks like your resume, and that's about it. A photo helps too. Lots of people do nothing more with it than that, and use it to find jobs.


https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement

8.1. Dos

Use your real name on your profile; and

8.2. Don’ts

Create a false identity on LinkedIn, misrepresent your identity, create a Member profile for anyone other than yourself (a real person), or use or attempt to use another’s account (such as sharing log-in credentials or copying cookies);

But profile pictures are here >

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1377087/profi...

> You can use an illustration, caricature, or other artistic rendering of yourself, but your profile photo must reflect your likeness. We may remove profile photos that don’t comply with our User Agreement and Professional Community Policies, including images that consist solely of the following:

I'm pretty sure even this has been updated to accommodate all the Ghibli AI avatars that people use.


That'd be the thing indeed.

hn is largely a technology oriented link aggregator with discussions, and probably some would also classify it as a forum. Or as social news site as goes on wikipedia among fark, slashdot and reddit. But beside a voting system, simple profiles there's nothing else - this is nearly an experience unlike anything large social network services offer.

A typical social media platform mainly exists around main stream/feed, sharing content and building profile or groups dedicated to particular topics or around known brands. That's of course the perfect unstained image because everything falls apart when we start getting into the details, such as algorithms in the work, content quality and moderation and so on.


There's a somewhat silly sense of superiority on this site over itself along with a deeply held belief that social media is bad, which makes commenters here try IMO in vain to distinguish HN from other forms of social media. After all, if you are the bad thing, how can you not fall prey to the same problems of the bad thing?

I think in reality "social media" is a set of properties all of which lead to different effects in the discourse on the site. This site may not have individualized ranking algorithms but it has open registration and crowdsourced ranking which gives it a lot of the same benefits and failure modes of Reddit. Unlike Reddit, HN has a professional (meaning: paid) mod staff, which leads to different behaviors than Reddit.

It's all just a spectrum and I think it's more rigorous to think of these things as a spectrum rather than trying to play this silly intellectual game of defitinioneering to make the social media you don't like sound bad and the ones you like sound good. Focusing on cause and effect can be a more effective way to craft intentional social spaces rather than finger pointing.


I would say yes, that's a good way to make the distinction. It's even more than that: the feed is different for every single user.

With a site like HN, everyone sees the same front page at a given time. What makes it to the front page is primarily determined by all users voting up articles or moderating them. Yes, there's some algorithmic sauce behind it that weights votes and flags differently based on some other criteria, but the dominating factor is user votes and flags. And, again, everyone sees the same ordering of articles if they load the page at the same time.

HN is centered around topics and articles. Social media is centered around individuals and what they personally choose to post and promote.


A big difference is that its culture comes from shared public experience. Everyone sees the same front page not a curated one.

well moderation is ubiquitous , but yeah -- personalization/targeting/social graph are essentially the things that people expect out of a social media platform.

I do personally think the karma thing is an aspect , because it's gamed everywhere to huge advantage -- but the altruistic view is that its a branch of moderation, an effort to democratize the removal of obviously bad actors while still facilitating dissenting or contrary speech.

I also know that's a naive view.


In social media the algorithm determines what you see. On forum boards, everyone sees the same set of posts. I do think it is an important distinction but I understand if others don't. At least we are all in the same reality on a forum board when we post. On a social media site, we see different sets of posts.

> In social media the algorithm determines what you see. On forum boards, everyone sees the same set of posts.

Isn't there an algorithm on HN to boost and downvote? It might be a different algo but there is one.


I've also seen a glue-less paper binding trick where two pieces of paper are finely crimped together with some high pressure tool in alternating v^v^v^ patterns, actually making tiny tears in the paper. Does anyone know what kind of tool does that?

Possibly this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NeGah4YJg0

It's a bit hard to search for, because they make one that punches a hole too (shows up in the video).


The problem with these staple-less staplers is that they permanently damage the paper. With a regular staple there are two tiny holes and that's it. You can bend open the staple to get back your individual sheets (e.g. to scan a particular page) and if you want to put them back together you can push the same staple or a fresh one back through the existing holes and bend it close.

You can repeat the process as many times as you want and there won't be any new damage to the paper. With a paperless stapler you would have to do new damage to the paper each time. Also, a regular staple is pretty much forever while these crimped folds can eventually come loose again.


This is meant for disposable packaging

That's a lot of words to explain a simple concept

Kokuyo Stapleless Stapler

In US, you can find it on Amazon for 15-20 bucks.


Harinacs stapleless stapler?

Muji stocked a stapler like this for some time.

ELI5 what is a harness?

EDIT from https://arcprize.org/media/ARC_AGI_3_Technical_Report.pdf:

> We seek to fight two forms of overfitting that would muddy public sensefinding:

> Task-specific overfitting. This includes any agent that is created with knowledge of public ARC-AGI-3 environments, subsequently being evaluated on the same environments. It could be either directly trained on these environments, or using a harness that is handcrafted or specifically configured by someone with knowledge of the public environments.


Sounds like her first thought was, "I'm talking to a manic guy, and I can use him to make money"

Wait, is 474 a number or a proper noun?

Whoops, I assumed it was a proper noun the way I read it. Like a company that does data collection or something. Whatever, I'm not gonna bother to look at it again, I'm quitting the internet.

They're private, that's the beauty. Code is so cheap now, we can ween ourselves off massive dependency chains.

200 years ago text was much more expensive, and more people memorized sayings and poems and quotations. Now text is cheap, and we rarely quote.


Those business goals will soon realize they need more electricity. More brains will be devoted to power generation.

The same could be asked about people. The answer is social intelligence.

By that logic, best fridge is no fridge at all ;)

Cup Noodles FTW

Thank you, I was so confused by the obvious clickbait! I love Grady's videos, but yikes.

I said this in another comment, but I feel it's edited to look like water he uses in his garage demos with that blue glitter.

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