Can you please make your substantive points without name-calling or personal attacks, and please not post to HN in the flamewar style generally? We're trying for something very different here:
I read this comment three times and it does not include any name-calling, although in 3 places the argument is characterized as garbage. Some people might feel that '????? LMAO' is overly dismissive, but given that the comment addresses the whole argument of the article, I don't mind that some refutations are long and some pointed. I was more annoyed the the GP's failure to to use italics or some other delimiter to separate the quotations and responses.
I don't care for your tone-policing practices Dan. If someone is making a habit of it or trying to steamroller a thread by replying to everyone in such a way, fair enough, but neither condition obtains here. You cut off a lot of worthwhile contributions this way, chastizing people for a 'flamewar style' when no flame war is taking place. I found this contribution substantive and thought provoking and almost missed sseing it because it had been unfairly flagged.
"sure be writing a whole lot of cope" counts as name-calling in the sense that the HN guidelines use the term*, and that was just the beginning of a lot of that. It was snark, too, of course, which is also against the guidelines. And don't get me started on the shallow dismissals and the slur about age. Perhaps you're right that the comment contained substantive points, but there's no reason not to convey the substance thoughtfully, and that's what the site rules call for. (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
> I don't care for your tone-policing practices Dan.
You've said so many times. I appreciate that you believe it's possible to maintain discussion quality on a forum like HN while still allowing the GP type of post. I have a more negative view of what's possible. I'd rather you be right than me! But I'm not willing to run that experiment, when the price of being wrong is death.
* Actually the example given in the guidelines ("When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.") is precisely about an argument not a person.
As I said, if there were a pattern of behavior here I'd disagree. I'm taking issue specifically with your pre-emptively shutting the down some comments citing the risk of flamewars. The price of being wrong is an occasional flamewar, not the sudden death of HN.
And don't get me started on the shallow dismissals and the slur about age.
Those abound on any thread about the Supreme Court or Congress interpreting or making laws about technology and I can't recall your ever intervening. I have brought the issue up many times because your moderatorial interventions seem very partial, not to mention the fact that you're addressing a 10-year participant in the HN community like a new arrival.
Hmm. I'm well aware that you've been here for many years! In fact I kind of referenced that in my comment ("You've said so many times. I appreciate that you believe [etc.]")—so I'm not sure how I gave the impression otherwise. But I certainly didn't intend to and I'm sorry.
I don't know what to tell you about "moderation interventions seeming partial". I'm basically just responding to people breaking the rules where I see them breaking the rules. It isn't a matter of what people's views are—at least I don't think it is, and I can tell you FWIW that I'm frequently scolding accounts whose underlying views I happen to agree with, as well as ones I happen to disagree with.
As for slurs abounding—if you're seeing comments like that not getting moderated, overwhelmingly the likely explanation is that we didn't see them. I don't see anything close to even 10% of what gets posted here.
Dan, the person you originally replied to has been here for 10 years; I wasn't taking offense on my own behalf. I know you're busy, but I'm surprised that you wouldn't glance at the account status of to see who you're dealing with, or indeed have some sort of admin console that makes it easy to see.
As for slurs abounding—if you're seeing comments like that not getting moderated, overwhelmingly the likely explanation is that we didn't see them.
Statistically, this seems improbable, especially given the existence of your flamewar detector. It's super-easy to measure which threads are 'hot', and not much harder to guess or mechanically infer what the content/quality of the discourse is going to be on many hot button issues.
> I don't know what to tell you about "moderation interventions seeming partial".
I've been here for some years now, and I can say weirdness that seems partial, continually happens. For instance, all site submissions that I've made for the last 2 weeks appeared shadowbanned/ghostbanned. They are not "dead", they simply don't show to the public.
When such things happens, it can leave users wondering if there is something going on with moderation, which is linked to the type of views expressed.
People are far too quick to jump to sinister conclusions when usually the phenomena are mundane and/or random. We're always happy to answer questions.
> all site submissions that I've made for the last 2 weeks appeared shadowbanned/ghostbanned. They are not "dead", they simply don't show to the public.
That's not true. What made you think it was?
2 your submissions were killed because the sites are banned; one of those submissions was vouched for by users, which is fine. Another 2 (the youtube ones) were killed by a spam filter which might have been buggy - I need to dig deeper into that. All your other submissions of the last 2 weeks were fine. Also, the ones that were killed were marked [dead] the normal way.
Well, any link that I have tried to submit, still doesn't show publicly. The latest doesn't show dead either, just doesn't show period. You are saying it's a possible glitch, but this glitch has been 100% at stopping the public showing of any submissions for going on 3 weeks. Most people would think something odd is going on.
Two were killed because the sites are banned. The remainder were all youtu.be links - that's still part of a spam filter because for many years those shortcuts were posted mostly by spammers. Our software converts them to youtube.com now because it follows canonical URLs, but it doesn't unban them. I need to look at the data to decide if we should change that or not. In the meantime, if you post youtube.com links directly they should be fine.
To put this in perspective, in terms of defacto banning or shadowbanning. After 5 days, still can not submit anything. Any attempts to submit a link, results in "You're posting too fast."
Blocking any submissions for 5 days or more, on top of glitches, is just about the equivalent of a ban. The reasons for it can be glitches, censoring, subjective administrative prerogative, etc... But from the user perspective, it's hard to see it as just "random" occurrences.
The rate limit works at the "all posts" level, so it doesn't distinguish between submissions and comments.
I looked at your recent comment history and it doesn't look to be breaking the site guidelines, so I've taken the rate limit off your account To prevent it kicking in again, please remember that on HN the idea is to value quality over quantity, and be sure that you're up to date on the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Something else to possibly consider, is the submission rate restrictions, on top of glitches. Like blocking people from submitting a link based on frequency. An example is I submitted 1 link 2 days ago, and an attempt to post a new one gets the "submitting too fast" type message. Possibly some ongoing punishment that was handed out in the past, but appears to have no time limit.
This can arguably be seen as a defacto ban or even censorship if a person is opposed to the reasons for the punishment. 1 submission per 2 or 3 days, is such a reduced frequency of posting level, that the person may not bother anymore. As it is, I don't come around here too much anymore.
I see. Actually, there are some other sites that don't accept youtu.be links as well. For some reason, didn't remember it being an issue here, but I guess so. That should explain why they don't show as dead, but also don't show publicly.
quote:
"Lol. This is ENTIRELY conjecture. Given that we solved protein folding via machine learning sounds to me like this is just straight up cope. We'll have a model that given our experimental data that we cannot fully interpret will come up with a better approach.
"“The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking."
Yeah this guy is speaking completely out of his depth here.
"The crux of machine learning is description and prediction; it does not posit any causal mechanisms or physical laws. Of course, any human-style explanation is not necessarily correct; we are fallible."
Have you ever thought that given that machine learning algorithms have far surpassed humans at any computable games in terms of strategic depth that they may not also be able to do this for explaining variance in experimental data? It's really not much of a logical leap at all to make that conclusion."
end quote:
What do you see? Do you see the word LOL at like 72px font and the rest at 1px font? Because that's the way what you're saying comes across to me.
What you said seems extremely unfairly dismissive.
>What you said seems extremely unfairly dismissive.
Did you even read those comments? The vast majority are actually addressed in the article. It doesn't engage with the Op-ed at all, just lists things he says and provides facile rebuts. You think some random poster saying that Chomsky is "this guy is completely out of his depth here?" The poster doesn't even understand what he's saying. Sorry it fooled you too!
I am being honest. If it had only been 'LMAO' you would have a point, but it included lots of substantive response to the article content, and is the only comment that attempted to address the whole article from start to finish. I already noted this and you chose to ignore it and focus on a single line out of about 20 that the commenter wrote.
