Like everyone else, HN has been on a political binge lately. As an experiment, we're going to try something new and have a cleanse. Starting today, it's Political Detox Week on HN.
For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens.
Why? Political conflicts cause harm here. The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control. Our values are fragile—they're like plants that get forgotten, then trampled and scorched in combat. HN is a garden, politics is war by other means, and war and gardening don't mix.
Worse, these harsher patterns can spread through the rest of the culture, threatening the community as a whole. A detox week seems like a good way to strengthen the immune system and to see how HN functions under altered conditions.
Why don't we have somepolitics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time.
A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don't want that to happen, so let's all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.
Have at this in the thread and if you have concerns we'll try to allay them. This really is an experiment; we don't have an opinion yet about longer-term changes. Our hope is that we can learn together by watching what happens when we try something new.
I'm a junior dev and have been employed at my current work place for over a year. I love technology and code, less so humans. A lot less. If I had to guess I would say that I probably have some form of social anxiety/autism that makes it really painful/difficult/demanding for me to interact with other people, so I usually try to keep these "interactions" to a very strict minimum required to achieve the tasks I am attributed.
Now, recently, I've come to realize more and more, how much trouble this actually causes in the end for me, as I am perceived as that "odd" guy, that never says a thing, never hangs out at work place events, that you simply give tasks to, and ultimately the job gets done.
As I was searching to limit human-human interactions as much as I could, I ended up being treated like a machine, go figure... I get attributed tasks almost exclusively by sales/marketing people with absolutely no understanding of anything appart from the end result they want. Sometimes that ends up being a 2 word "spec", an unachievable task, some month long back and forths where they realize every other step of the way that what I implemented, which was what they asked, was not what they wanted, etc. So I am starting to get a little fed up by all of this and am at quite a loss when it comes to actually addressing these issues. I try, but I figure that I might as well document myself on the process instead of the usual trial and error one could go through.
Anyhow, as stated in the title of this Ask HN, does anybody have any ressources to recommend to someone that just started his carrier and has a demonstrated history of complete lack of such skills ? Anything is welcome really, books, documentaries, blog post, whatever you might have come across.
I read the 'Kill Hollywood' RFC, gave it some thought and came to a conclusion that killing Hollywood is not a Value Adding Intention (tm). I understand that the RFC is a response to SOPA&co which is obviously pushed by Hollywood.
My thoughts went: "Should we-the-people retaliate against some influential business (sector) every time they successfully lobby for their own interests against the interest of the wider public?"
On which I concluded: "No we should fix politics instead, that's where the problem originates, that's where we can fix it once and for all."
And the most obvious fix I see is to criminalize lobbying (= power to the wealthy) as it is against democracy (= power to the people) in its very nature.
Just to name a few sectors that successfully lobbied for changes that (imho) harmed the wider public: banks, car industry, big-oil, big-pharma, big-food, military contractors.
Some simple math: if business (sector) X puts in 5M for a lobby on issue Y; the probability of success on their lobby campaign is 0.5; then the payoff of the campaign is at least 10M. Now where do those 10M come from? From everyone that is not X. In other words: the honest people --who do not try to influence politics outside of the public discussion-- lose from the wealthy mega-corps.
Lobbying is currently a fast growing industry itself:
For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens.
Why? Political conflicts cause harm here. The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control. Our values are fragile—they're like plants that get forgotten, then trampled and scorched in combat. HN is a garden, politics is war by other means, and war and gardening don't mix.
Worse, these harsher patterns can spread through the rest of the culture, threatening the community as a whole. A detox week seems like a good way to strengthen the immune system and to see how HN functions under altered conditions.
Why don't we have some politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time.
A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don't want that to happen, so let's all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.
Have at this in the thread and if you have concerns we'll try to allay them. This really is an experiment; we don't have an opinion yet about longer-term changes. Our hope is that we can learn together by watching what happens when we try something new.