The advice has been written and uttered in various forms for millennia.
> If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications.
> But I read the quote as essentially saying: "You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
How many of your personal experiences are you reading into a context-free aphorism of the ages? Friendly suggestion: you may be making this same mistake when interpreting words in other situations.
"Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications."
What meanings or implications does the aphorism have other than "some people (fools in this case) shouldn't ever talk?"
We've established you think I've misinterpreted the aphorism and that you suspect there's something socially off with me, but we haven't established what you think the aphorism means. Go on, educate me.
> - ideally, the backup process on the home server side should not be more difficult than a cron job running "rsync -avz --delete /mnt/raid user@server:/mnt/storage"
> IMHO, space is big + satellites are hard to track, if they're highly-maneuverable or designed to be stealthy = possibility of launching untracked microsatellites that couple with space assets and wait for activation
From what I've read, I understand it to be more of the opposite: there's nothing to hide behind in space, and NORAD and NASA track nearly every piece of debris in orbit, not to mention satellites. So it would be hard for an adversary to do anything like that sneakily, even if there might not be any countermeasures (unclassified ones, anyway). I'm no expert, of course.
Well its pretty apparent in the state of American society today, and exemplified by companies like Facebook and Tesla flagrantly and repeatedly violating the law without substantive consequence
I like serif fonts, but on page 31 of that document, "List of Design Recommendations," it says: "Sans-serif fonts are usually more legible than fonts with serifs."
At the same time, we may ask why American society seems to be more ideologically polarized now than at various times in recent decades. If the root cause is natural human failing, what is the second-level cause? Could it be that American society has been under a form of ideological siege and sabotage for many years, that is now coming to fruition?
For example, it's documented that, as far back as the early 20th century, the USSR funded programs to demoralize American society through means as seemingly innocuous as making public art and architecture uglier. As well, Marcuse's "long march through the institutions" has now had 50 years to take effect, and polls have shown that American academia is much less ideologically diverse than in past decades, now being nearly entirely formed of those who vote for one party.
There are elements of history that seem like weather, coming and going in cycles, but there are also parties taking active roles to effect certain ends, and we would be wise to be aware of their influence.
Here's what should be an obvious one: any time I see communism criticized, the comment gets downvoted, and often flagged. Even comments written by people who lived in communist states, offering first-hand accounts, without breaking any HN guidelines, get downvoted and flagged.
In the same threads, "conservatives" and "conservatism" and Republicans and "liberty" are freely condemned, mocked, and accused of all sorts of evil behaviors and intent, without even being downvoted, much less flagged.
This happens regularly, any time these topics come up in a popular thread. So it's hard for me to understand how you could be unaware of this de facto community bias.
> Here's what should be an obvious one: any time I see communism criticized
The active ingredient here is the phrase "I see". What you're seeing feels obvious to you because you feel strongly on the topic. People who feel differently have very different "obvious" perceptions. (Edit: like here, which was just posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30351063.) These perceptions are entirely predictable from the passions of the perceiver, and I do mean entirely—it is probably the single most consistent phenomenon I've observed on HN.
Because these perceptions are predictable from the passions of the perceiver, it follows that they don't tell us anything about the community. They only tell us something about you—namely, which position you personally favor or disfavor, and how strongly. That's why other users perceive the opposite bias to what you perceive. Their passions are producing their perception the same way that yours are—they just happen to have opposite passions. Consider these gems:
There are reams of this stuff, coming from all ideological tribes. Same community, incompatible perceptions—why? Because they're not actually incompatible. They only appear so if you take them as objective claims about the community. As expressions of the preferences of the perceiver, they're not only compatible, they're isomorphic. Whatever mechanism is producing these nearly-identical comments, it can't be "political skew on Hacker News", because the claims are coming from all factions.
Usually at this point someone objects, "so you're just claiming that HN is perfectly neutral in every way? the community has no biases of any kind?" No, that doesn't follow. I'm only saying that comments like yours and the 3 I just linked to don't contain any signal about this, because the feeling of bias tells us nothing about the actual statistical and demographic situation. (Well, it tells us that HN produces enough data points for everybody to run across some that rub them the wrong way. But that's not enough information to conclude anything about HN as a whole.)
It's incredible how deeply these feelings go and how convincing they are, so the mechanism is probably hard-wired into all of us. My hypothesis, which I call the notice-dislike bias (a terrible name), goes like this: because painful experiences make a deeper impression than pleasurable ones, we're all more likely to notice the data points that bring up dislike/disagree reactions in us (i.e. give us pain) than we are to notice the kind that we like/agree with (i.e. give us pleasure). Not only that but we weight the painful ones much more heavily. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
This leads to false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), in which people are convinced that the community (and usually the moderators too) are overwhelmingly stacked against their particular views (for example, your view that communism is bad). It's easy to see that these generalities are false, because the opposite side has exactly the same feeling—they just perceive the bias the other way around, like the other 3 I linked to.
Usually at this point someone objects, "You haven't proven anything—just because somebody else has a wrong perception, it doesn't follow that mine is". Yes, a perception of this type may happen to correspond to the real situation, but only by accident—like a wrong solution to a math exercise that ends up at the right answer, but is still incorrect. What matters is how the answer is derived. The perceptions we're talking about are derived from the perceiver's internal pleasure/pain experience, and that mechanism is not capable of assessing reality accurately. Essentially, we are all projecting the inverse of our own preferences onto the outside world, and then feeling surrounded by hostility.
Normally I don't offer a verdict on particular claims about this, but I feel pretty confident in saying that there is no pro-communist bias on HN. The comments that you see getting downvoted are, in many cases, downvoted because they're breaking the HN guidelines. Any comment that makes grandiose, repetitive ideological claims is already breaking the site guidelines, and when people go after each other about communism (or any other $classic-ideological-flavor) they're nearly always doing that. I have to ask commenters to stop doing this all the time on HN—not because I'm a secret communist or secret-anything-else, but because these discussions are not interesting in HN's sense of the word. We want curious conversation here, and people bashing their $other-side with well-worn talking points (be it "communism killed x-hundred-million people!" or anything else of that nature), they're not having curious conversation.
Thomas Ptacek and Don Hopkins are two examples of very high-profile users who routinely post guidelines-breaking comments without being downvoted, flagged, or chastised by mods.
Even if you were to concede that, you'd probably counter that you can't read all the comments. And, of course, that is so. But that is beside the point that I have made many times before: the community's bias allows such users (and those who espouse certain views) to break the guidelines without penalty, while heavily penalizing others and those with contrary views.
Every time I see you tell someone that moderator bias is an illusion, I can't help but think that you are talking past each other, because the elephant in the room (which I have rarely seen you even acknowledge) is the extreme bias in the community's downvoting and flagging behavior, which naturally results in the official moderation actions being biased toward what is flagged, which amounts to a de facto official moderation bias. (If a community only calls the police when certain groups of people break the law, the police's actions will naturally be biased toward enforcing against those groups of people, because they aren't omniscient.)
> It's awfully hard not to see this as the commenter just taking this as a stalking horse to bring up an opinion they already held.
Isn't this what happens on every HN thread, people expressing opinions relevant to the topic? Or is it only forbidden when criticizing descendants of the Frankfurt School?
I originally wrote a snarkier response to this in response to your snark, but I'm to just gently note that my contention was that the opinion was not relevant to the topic, and it seems to me you're demonstrating exactly what I was complaining about: you didn't actually respond to what I said, you just said, "Ooh, here's an opportunity to snark about something I consider snark-worthy." So, uh, go you.
No, your premise is flawed. You jump to the conclusion that he made that claim based on a single data point. Just because he illustrated his point with one example does not mean his point is based on one example.
In any case, this is not a statistical argument, and your comment adds nothing but noise to the discussion.
The advice has been written and uttered in various forms for millennia.
> If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications.
> But I read the quote as essentially saying: "You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
How many of your personal experiences are you reading into a context-free aphorism of the ages? Friendly suggestion: you may be making this same mistake when interpreting words in other situations.