Comment unrelated to the article: I knew I know that blog theme from somewhere, turns out it is my own https://github.com/oltdaniel/dose theme. Thanks for using it. Hope you like it.
Comment related to the article: I always wanted to dive deeper into functional programming languages. Especially, because I more and more run into stuff, that is just simpler to model in a recursive pattern. Maybe I'll give it the a new try within the next weeks and see how far I come.
this is not a visitor tracker, just a hit counter (page view). I did start writing a parser for the server logs to have a more robust statistics for my website, but there are plenty of good options out there, awstats for instance. this is not it.
the person spamming the counter war trying to corrupt the counter.txt file and reset the counter.
Finally. Really happy with it, except that the explorer/trending and trending page hasn't been updated yet. I hope that will follow to protect my eyes from that brightness contrast at night and in the morning.
I wouldn't see a good point for this. HN is focused on these counts, because only they allow you to identify the "importance" and "discussion size". Would be like twitter without a like and retweet counter. How do I know its important? Is it something I support and give a like, to boost its rank?
Something like [1] is more useful than hiding information.
This is an interesting topic. I’m working on a new discussion site (sqwok.im) and I explicitly opted to exclude voting. Instead to determine importance I’m using a combination of signals like live activity, publish date, etc, with plans to include further ones at a later time. I echo the sentiments from other commenters and even pg himself in regards to groupthink, and I feel that there’s room for exploration on other alternatives.
Thanks I appreciate it, and hope to chat with you on sqwok! It's amazing how much the state of online discussion is being surfaced on HN and elsewhere lately... I don't have all the answers, but I believe we need more options and different perspectives to hopefully open the door to a better state of discussion online. cheers!
It's true that upvote count and comment counts are the best way we have to quantify the quality of a submission. That's why I still browse the top posts page and will still upvote a post that I think is high quality.
But for me, upvote and comment counts bias my perception of a post. I'm choosing to hide these counts so I can read articles uninfluenced by the number of points they have relative to other posts on the front page.
Thats why I read the title first, decide whether it is important or relevant to me, if so I check it out. If I like it, I upvote it and if I have something to throw into the discussion I add a comment. Personally, I use the numbers to indentify "quality" and "valid facts". Invalid posts have a large number of comments and less upvotes.
Because they are recommended or have been explored by a lot of people. Would you buy a product off Amazon without seeing the number of reviews? How do you know it is "quality content".
More votes than comments = something worth reading and seems to be valid content.
Less votes than comments = seems to have invalid points with a big dicussion.
HNs "quality index" for each post can be "calculated" by everyone. Without these numbers you don't know these kind of informations. The title of a post should always be in the focus, thats for sure. But thats why it has a larger font.
With posts, I mostly skim the titles for what looks interesting. I take fewer comments as a bonus but I can't say exactly why (less noise?). I don't look at the votes (though it obviously contributes to what I see).
With books, I mostly read based on individual recommendations (or references). It's more natural to me than going with what's popular though it doesn't exclude it. It has the bonus of being an imperfect quality filter which mixes the good (as determined by people I trust) with the unusual.
To be honest, when I have read books based specifically on popularity I've been thoroughly disappointed. Reading Thinking Fast and Slow was mostly challenging with a mixture of bad examples and bad terminology ("systems 1 and 2"). I enjoyed the book a whole lot more near the end when it was discussing the incompleteness of/problems with economics. Some of my distaste for the earlier parts possibly comes from exposure to critics beforehand (e.g. Gerd Gigerenzer) and to the optical illusions. Similarly Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman! can be amusing but a lot of the stories boil down to "aren't I clever?".
Quick note on this one. ETags have been used for years, but there is a court case from 2011 and before, speficaly noting this ETag technology as undeletable cookies. Was just a click away from the Wikipedia page. So I think anybody using it, would have an huge issue with the laws. Personally, I think the tracking pixels are more interesting to look at.
Personally I think it is connected to adding more features to GitHub. Microsoft is rolling out more and more small but also big changes, and as everyone knows, this always can have a few minutes downtime for each update.
I think, the core system isn't thought through correctly. I mean, as I have see clicking on different facts that habe been checked, I can place one or dozens of votes for my opinion. What if there is a user thaz gained so many vote tokens and just outvotes other opiniond on something?
A vote should be binary. I can or can't vote. Summary: The main idea is kinda ok, but the system to solve it isn't something I would trust.
I want the staking mechanism to incentivise truth. Binary votes don't provide such a system. Binary votes (aka polls) can be useful to gauge opinions, but are insufficient to aggregate knowledge, and can easily be manipulated. Take for instance the stock market. If all a trader could do was make a binary decision of "Is this company good?" and they only get one vote, that doesn't generate any useful information. But instead ask them how much they're willing to pay for a share, then now we have high quality data about the value of a company, and that is hard to manipulate.
The point is, that there are so many different standards that allow you to pay with one thing everywhere. And I personally need to pay a fee for a credit card, which is the usual case in the EU. And there are not many uses cases or advantages I have for a credit card over a free debit card. The thing is just, that I want to point out in the article, that the systems we have all want to solve this but always fail. Its 2020, not 1990, We have so much tech on our hands and banks still fail to implement it.
Our banking system here is backwards in many ways, but the rigamarole described here just doesn't happen. US companies are much better about separating people from their money efficiently, I guess.
Fair enough. But I don't pay 2€ per month for a credit card from my local bank to buy stuff from a vending machine. The overall point is, that I have not enough use cases to make resonable use of it in the real world over my current free debit card.
I'm curious if there's anywhere else outside the US where "building your credit rating" by accumulating debt history from e.g. credit cards is a thing and makes a difference. I haven't heard it mentioned as a US-specific thing, but I've also only ever heard Americans talk about it.
The cost of rigorous consumer protections is sometimes monetary.
I have this discussion with European friends regularly: No, I don't automatically get a three-year warranty on everything I buy. I don't even want such a thing, sometimes. And in return I pay much less for everyday items.
The parent comment and the one it's relying to are about keeping a credit card to build credit history. I don't see what your comment has to do with that. Am I missing something?
Did you think they were still talking about paying a fee for credit cards? Typically in the UK there's no fees for credit cards, the cost is just in the interest if you don't pay it off in time. In fact there are usually less fees for financial services in European countries e.g. checking accounts and ATMs usually don't have fees. (I mean there isn't usually a fee just for having a checking account, but there are of course fees for doing certain things with it such as a CHAPS transfer.)
I have not heard this be a factor when people get mortgages or loans. So "because it doesn't matter".
But apparently in the UK it does! So if I understand right, not having a history of debt can be a problem when getting a mortgage or loan simply because lack of data for them to make any assessment?
If anything having a credit card works against your credit - you could decide to take on debt at any moment, so they assume you already have that debt, and have less capacity to take on more.
In the Netherlands with my bank at least, yes there is a fee. There is also a fee for having a bank account with its included debit card, but you can't do without. Credit cards are of very limited use.
Comment related to the article: I always wanted to dive deeper into functional programming languages. Especially, because I more and more run into stuff, that is just simpler to model in a recursive pattern. Maybe I'll give it the a new try within the next weeks and see how far I come.