There is a saying that if everyone you encounter seems to be unreasonable, maybe it isn't the other people that are being unreasonable.
This isn't to say that social media is fair, or that people vote properly or that any ranking system based on agreement by readers is a good one. However, generally when you are getting negativity communicated to you and you are seeing consistently poor results around actions you take, it is going to be useful to examine the possibility that there is a difference in how you perceive what you are doing vs how others do. In that case spending time trying to figure out ways in which you are being wronged so that you can continue in the same manner is going to be time wasted.
You seem to be assuming that everything is organic and above board on here. That it's all just user/community stimuli, and if someone flies high well clearly it's great content, from which we can infer the reverse as well.
We don't have the source for HN, nor do we have the obvious bias metadata that the moderators have put in place, but simply paying attention betrays that manipulation mechanisms exist and are heavily utilized.
For instance I clearly have a "bad guy" flag on my account, and frequently see my highly rated comments sorted below literally greyed out comments. Comments older than mine, so it isn't just the normal "well newer comments get a boost", it's just that there is a comment "DEI" in place where some people get a freebie boost and some people get a freebie detriment. It's why often mediocre content and comments by the core group is always floating high.
And let me make it very clear that I do not care. I don't harbour any delusions about some tight community or the like, and HN is not important in my life or my ego. I also know that it's basically a propaganda network for YC (I mean...it's right in the URL), and good for them. It's their site and they can do anything they want with it.
I only commented because some people really think this place is a meritocracy+democracy. That isn't how it works, even if they really want people to think that.
No one is under the assumption that any social media space is going to be meritocratic or democratic. The assumption is that some percentage of users are manipulating it and the backend and admins are doing the same. It is an attention economy. I don't think anyone is naive about this. My comment was merely a take on the 'the video game controller is broken' excuse that everyone has when they need to cover for their ego. Sometimes the controller is broken, but it almost never is.
How are you getting persecution complex from what I said? If anything, your comment might be feeding that delusion. :)
My point is that HN definitely has certain weights associated with accounts, which control the karma, visibility, and ultimately discussion of certain topics.
This problem doesn't affect only negativity or downvotes, but upvotes as well. The most upvoted comments are not necessarily of the highest quality, or contribute the most to the discussion. They just happen to be the most visible, and to generally align with the feeling of the hive mind.
I know this because some of my own comments have been at the top, without being anything special, while others I think are, barely get any attention. I certainly examine my thinking whenever it strongly aligns with the hive mind, as this community does not particularly align with my values.
I also tend to seek out comments near the bottom of threads, and have dead comments enabled, precisely to counteract this flawed system. I often find quality opinions there, so I suggest everyone do the same as well.
An essential feature of a healthy and interesting discussion forum is to accomodate different viewpoints. That starts by not burying those that disagree with the majority, or boosting those that agree. AFAIK no online system has gotten this right yet.
It stretches your imagination to conceive of a financier chasing short term gains over the long term stability of the investment bank they are part of? I seem to recall an event back in the late '00s that you may want to look into.
It is, however, in the interest of the American public not to have a corrupt justice system. Thus, we should not rely on far fetched assumptions instead of investigating corruption where it appears.
Because GPUs require a lot on the software side, and AMD sucks at software. They are a CPU company that bought a GPU company. ATI should have been left alone.
They address this specifically and hand-wave it away:
Moreover, both random and all other experimentation strategies we examined require constructing a bounded experimental space, a challenge that lies beyond the scope of the current work (see Almaatouq et al., 2024, for further discussion).
I think their conclusion is still important to consider, though. It makes a point beyond the practicalities and more towards the philosophy of approach.
That is an unrelated problem, that usually is not even a problem.
For molecules, 10 Armstrong away is probably as good as infinite.
For how many bananas should you eat per week to become the chess world champion, you can ask Wolfram Alpha to convert 2400kcal * 7 to bananas and get an upper bound.
I think everyone agree that with infinite time a resources a brute force search is better in case there is a weird combination. But for finite time and resources you need to select a better strategy unless the search space is ridiculous small and smooth.
Imagine finding the highest point on Earth. The bounded space is easy to find. 5E8km^2.
How many points do you need to find it by brute force searching all of them? It looks like a 10m*10m square is good enough, perhaps 100m*100m is enough. That is 5E12 or 5E10 points.
Anyway, you need all of them to detect all the mountains and oceanic trenches.
Most of the times, the terrain is quite smooth and you can interpolate like in their example with the Gaussians. Well, except the Colorado Canyon, the Niagara Falls and a long list of sharp features.
Also, if you want to detect also buildings, you need like x100 more points.
And this is just a 2D problem. When you add dimensions, the problem grows like grid size ^ dimensions and the brute force approach is not feasible. There are a few ideas that are very nice in 1D, but in 100D they are just impossible in a sensible amount of time.
But by saying 'on Earth' you have limited the space already. Why didn't you say 'the Universe'? So go one more step 'what is the tallest mountain on Earth'. We have then limited the space again by a couple orders of magnitude.
That you think technology is going to save society from social issues is telling. Technology enables humans to do things they want to do, it does not make anything better by itself. Humans are not going to become more ethical because they have access to it. We will be exactly the same, but with more people having more capability to what they want.
> but with more people having more capability to what they want.
Well, yeah I think that's a very reasonable worldview: when a very tiny number of people have the capability to "do what they want", or I might phrase it as, "effect change on the world", then we get the easy-to-observe absolute corruption that comes with absolute power.
As a different human species emerges such that many people (and even intelligences that we can't easily understand as discrete persons) have this capability, our better angels will prevail.
I'm a firm believer that nobody _wants_ to drop explosives from airplanes onto children halfway around the world, or rape and torture them on a remote island; these things stem from profoundly perverse incentive structures.
I believe that governments were an extremely important feature of our evolution, but are no longer necessary and are causing these incentives. We've been aboard a lifeboat for the past few millennia, crossing the choppy seas from agriculture to information. But now that we're on the other shore, it no longer makes sense to enforce the rules that were needed to maintain order on the lifeboat.
This isn't to say that social media is fair, or that people vote properly or that any ranking system based on agreement by readers is a good one. However, generally when you are getting negativity communicated to you and you are seeing consistently poor results around actions you take, it is going to be useful to examine the possibility that there is a difference in how you perceive what you are doing vs how others do. In that case spending time trying to figure out ways in which you are being wronged so that you can continue in the same manner is going to be time wasted.
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