Twitter to remove 'like' tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/28/twitter-remove-like-tool-bid-improve-quality-debate/ <comment><USER2> There's some doubt about this:

[https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273](https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273)

[http://fortune.com/2018/10/29/twitter-like-button- staying/](http://fortune.com/2018/10/29/twitter-like-button-staying/)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, there's no reason to believe that the Telegraph would have the exclusive scoop on this. Even in the few sentences shown in the paywall preview, it's clear how thin the sourcing is:

> _Founder Jack Dorsey last week admitted at a Twitter event that he was not a > fan of the heart-shaped button and that it would be getting rid of it > "soon"._

That's the only news or "fact" in the lede -- the content that immediately follows is boilerplate:

> _The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace "favourites", a star-shaped > button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later. Similar buttons > to "like" or show appreciation of people's status updates, pictures and > videos have become a central function of every popular social media service > since Facebook introduced them._

> _But psychologists have suggested that they may be causing social media > addiction._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think quality of "debate" on Twitter can be salvaged. Everything was designed for "engagement" and turned out to be rage-inducing machine.

Quote-retweet is used to send followers to harass the person responsible for the awful tweet. RT is choir-preaching (you're a monster if you don't RT that kicking babies is bad), and replies to twitter-celebrities' tweets give everyone their 15 minutes of fame to post the most idiotic meme.

And the only time when someone tries to make a coherent argument, it's a "Tread (1/50)" with a total mess, and every single sentence has buttons for taking it out of context.

They've optimized for engagement, and they're getting a _lot_ of enragement.

<comment><USER5> Due to debate getting worse and worse I left both Twitter and Facebook (they both became completely useless and just a waste of time); now it looks like most of low-quality "I am here too doing trivial things, applaud me!" posts moved over to LinkedIn, so I put my account to "passive" state there as well and am considering removing it altogether.

Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions? Reddit recently ramped up "moderation" and now feels like a mob mentality everywhere with prolific ban give-aways if one's opinion doesn't align 100% with the one of moderators (who sometimes fight with each other); alternatives are full of extreme content that got banned on the mainstream ones, and *chan was always a stable full of manure with some pearls hidden very very deeply for one to waste time finding them.

<comment><USER6> _> Are there still some places left on Internet for high-quality discussions?_

Web forums. There are good ones. They are independent of one another. Most forums I visit are centered around some subject, so people are bonded enough to be reasonably civil even if they disagree. Most aren't big enough to require much moderation. The best one have zero rules and very little trolling, but those are usually completely devoid of political stuff, since no one wants to spoil the good thing.

I think web forums are the best discussion medium developed so far. They support long-format content. They support hypermedia. They allow for offline conversations that don't get "dated" in 2 hours. They don't put thread authors on pedestal, unlike blogs.

I've heard there are mail/news groups out there too. Haven't used one aside from newsgroup for D Programming Language, though.

<comment><USER7> I've always found forums to be really helpful when searching for a topic but these days when compared to a voting system, forums feel dead or slow to update. I get that the voting system of get to the top is toxic and typically produces poor content but it does seem to work to an extent (for example HN).

I guess maybe forums feel a bit too heavy duty with all of the additional user stuff built into the stream of replies instead of having to click them.

What if HN didn't show a number of votes and all the topics ranked based on invisible votes? I wonder if a system that's more simple like that would carry over to forums to make them feel more modern but true to their roots?

<comment><USER6> _> I've always found forums to be really helpful when searching for a topic but these days when compared to a voting system, forums feel dead or slow to update._

Voting systems create a lot of bad incentives. They encourage groupthink and filter bubbles. They discourage long-running conversations. I haven't felt that boards are "slow" if there is reasonable amount of new threads and posts per day.

The usual trouble with forums is that a lot of admins don't understand how to split one up into boards. They either create way too many, and those sit empty, or not enough, and then it's hard to keep track of conversations.

Maintaining the optimal number of boards and optimal average thread size are keys towards a healthy forum that doesn't seem empty, or overwhelming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They should do like HN: keep the button but remove the counter visibility. I would like to see this generalized to all social networks actually. You still get to do an appreciation gesture but without entering the popularity contest. Maybe the author of the post could still see the total.

YouTube "dislike" button on comments also works like this, you can dislike but it's not counted. In this case it's a bit stupid since the likes are counted, but I feel it's still an improvement.

<comment><USER9> I've often thought only being able to down vote with a comment would be a positive. There have been times where I have had posts down voted to hell, and legitimately have no idea why.

I think having to tell someone why you were down voting would be an improvement.

Maybe even work at so down vote comment doesn't count if it it self has negative karma.

<comment><USER10> That's a very interesting idea. Force constructive feedback.

<comment><USER11> To downvote, please tell us what you don't like about this comment > asdfasdfasdf

<comment><USER7> Make it multiple choice not free text. Limit to a few basic reasons. Make that thing pop up for every downvote and watch downvotes reduce over time. Also, maybe assign weights to how often one downvotes. So say you are someone who disagrees often, your downvotes become less and less potent the longer you are in session.

<comment><USER11> Honestly my post was mostly a joke, but I don't think mandating a rationale is a good idea, and I give a rationale for ~85% of my downvotes. Probably a third of those don't deserve rationale--I'm responding to someone who is pretty overtly trolling or otherwise trying to incent a flamewar. Beyond that, I will occassionally not leave an explanation because

1\. I don't have time to type out an appropriately nuanced comment, and an un- nuanced comment is hardly better qualified than a driveby downvote.

2\. No matter the quality of my explanatory comment, it will only be a target for partisan downvoters. I don't care much for my karma, but I do care for my time and I don't want to waste it so trolls can give my view an air of illegitimacy.

Besides, while it is annoying to be downvoted anonymously, no one owes me an explanation. It's a courtesy at best, and any attempt to regulate it will be defeated by insincere feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me that Kierkegaard seems to have written about social media:

"Man, this shrewd being, ponders day and night how he can invent new means to amplify the noise and how he can spread the sound and the empty talk as hastily as possible everywhere. What one achieves in such a way is probably soon the opposite: the message is soon brought to its lowest level of fullness of meaning, and at the same time, conversely, the means of communication in the direction of hasty and all-flooding distribution have probably reached their maximum, for what is more hastily circulated than gossip?"

<comment><USER13> I'm guessing this was about newspapers/journalists which probably isn't the message people around here would like.

"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist'. If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I should despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up." \- Soren Kierkegaard

<comment><USER14> Given the extreme anti-tech sentiment and inaccurate reporting pervasive in among journalists. I think many here would totally agree with this statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a massive mistake to me.

I have 300ish followers. I'll spend 5 minutes or so crafting a Tweet. If it gets one or two likes, that's positive reinforcement, it feels worth my time.

It's rare I'll get replies unless I said something someone else vehemently disagrees with. So you're leaving all my reasons not to use the platform, while removing my reasons to use it.

So now best case scenario is a retweet? Meh. This feels like a huge miss-step from a company that doesn't understand why people use their platform. Honestly, this seems like how you kill a platform.

<comment><USER15> Why bother with only 300 followers? It feels like twitter is only useful if you have several thousand followers, otherwise there's so much noise that you're just talking to empty room.

<comment><USER16> Everyone with several thousand followers had 300 once.

<comment><USER17> Yeah. Plus once you get over 700 followers things kinda tip and it's MUCH easier to get to 1000 followers than from 400 to 700. Each follower is a potential retweeter. It's the nature of the platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use Twitter a lot (90k Tweets, 2.1k followers, my account is 8 years old), the best thing about the like is being able to end a conversation without saying anything. Liking a reply to is a great way to say "I've acknowledged your tweet with a positive connotation". I think Twitter forgets that the vast majority of content on the site isn't heated political debates but instead small communities of people who treat the website as a microblog.

</comment><comment><USER19> If Twitter genuinely wants to improve the quality of debate online, perhaps they should consider shutting it down.

<comment><USER6> Pretty much. Their design isn't just bad, it's _perfectly_ bad.

No content structure. No context. No sense of "discussion spaces". No way to post longer, more nuanced messages. Encourages garbage in messages. (Tags, emojis, @something should be external. The more stuff like that you put in message, the less they look like actual statements made by people. This dehumanizes authors in subtle but extremely important ways.)

People always underestimate the extent to which UI design and content structure drive communication tone. Sure, just because some website is messy doesn't mean it will immediate make everyone a jerk, but this stuff has cumulative effect. As a way of example: try to write a long paper letter to someone by hand. You will immediately see how that changes the way you think.

Also, people should check out Jaron Lanier's talks on why everyone should delete their social media accounts. He doesn't talk about UI, but he makes some great points about economic incentives, behaviorism and emergent properties of ad-driven online economies.

<comment><USER3> I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality -- I rarely find myself bumping into the limit, and I find that threaded tweets can read as well as short articles. A good use of the format can be found in the BBC's "Anatomy of a Killing" investigation into a military killing in Cameroon: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060709)

I enjoy and have learned more from the discussions on HN than on any other platform. But what Twitter lacks in quality it more than makes up for in diversity and quantity. There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk to randos in Indiana and India all in the same thread. As crappy as the discussions can get, I have a hard time imagining how much better any such service could be without making tradeoffs on audience and ease of engagement. Mastodon, for example, seems to have limited scope and scale inextricable in its design. Which is not to say that that makes it a worser service -- just one that is inherently different from Twitter's model.

<comment><USER6> _> I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality_

280 is a far more reasonable limit than 140, but it's too little, to late. The Twitter "mindset" has already settled and it's not pretty.

 _> There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk_

In most cases it's an illusion of a discussion. You think you're being heard, but for a person with as many followers as Musk you're just an ant in an anthill.

If you think Twitter has discussions, you haven't seen actual discussions online.

I've visited some message boards where the same core group of people participated for years. We did elaborate projects together. The discussions of some subjects there fundamentally changed my outlook on things. Some of those people became my actual friends I keep in touch with. "Social" media has almost none of this. People can cite counter-examples, but those are one in a hundred thousand and could be easily replicated without social media anyway.

<comment><USER3> To be clear, I agree I and everyone else is just an ant in Musk's anthill of followers, but there's no disputing that he has directly replied to and argued with me, as he has with dozens/hundreds of other random users. Of course, Musk is an outlier in that respect. Twitter's more day-to-day benefits is the serendipity of finding others interested in the same topics as I am. Most of my personal network is not on HN nor Reddit (or working in tech, for that matter), but more than a few are on Twitter, even as just lurker accounts.

You're mistaking tweets as being the only form of discussion on Twitter. What starts as tweets can go into a private discussion or email. My biggest project came from me tweeting about a data-scraping exercise I did -- turned out someone at a major news org was doing an investigation into the topic, and we ended up collaborating instead of competing with each other. I can't think of any other way we would've found each other, because I was only tweeting to show off something I did, and news orgs don't talk about investigations in- progress.

The other form of content on Twitter is the non-discussion -- i.e. when someone goes on a long tweet thread, and isn't particularly interested in debating with every reply. This is very similar to an old-fashioned blog post -- but the engagement experience is much different. Random people from all walks of life may publicly respond with personal stories to a trending topic (e.g. mental health), in a way that feels much more natural and frictionless than creating a blog post, if you even had a blog to begin with.

<comment><USER6> Most of the benefits you ascribe to Twitter aren't exclusive, are far more likely to take place on other media and are, in fact, slowly being eroded by the global and noisy nature of Twitter/Facebook.

On the other hand, Twitter created a new set of serious problems that didn't exist before. Heck, Musk was in court and lost a portion of his control over Tesla because he was on Twitter.

<comment><USER3> I agree Twitter's low-friction nature has led to reckless and/or inappropriate usage -- Musk isn't even the most egregious case by far, compared to President Trump using Twitter (instead of the traditional longform mediums) to disseminate his thoughts, or colossal mistakes by people like Rep. Anthony Weiner.

But Twitter's benefits do not have to be exclusive to it for Twitter to be a unique service, just as Google and Facebook were not the first or only in their respective categories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Like" was ruined when Twitter made it republish tweets, making it practically identical to retweet. It had been useful to mark posts for later review. Without it at all, there will be no way to "save" a tweet.

<comment><USER21> There's an option to bookmark tweets. They then show up in your bookmarks section.

[https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/...](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/an- easier-way-to-save-and-share-tweets.html)

<comment><USER22> Wasn't "Like" originally bookmark? Have we gone full circle?

Edit: I was thinking of favorites. I used favorites as bookmarks, so I got it mixed up.

<comment><USER23> You were essentially correct - the Favorite button in third party apps got rewired to the Like heart button. Favorites were previously only visible to yourself, the person whose tweet you favorite, or anyone who specifically went looking for your list of Favorite tweets.

(I think making Favorites/Likes act like retweets was a terrible idea - thankfully I never saw them in third-party apps, but it made the website a horrible experience when you see what the people you follow were liking.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's a radical departure from their 2015 stance[0]: "The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it."

I wonder when they're going to start testing this and what the results are. I hope they share what they learn, this could be an interesting experiment given how core a part of Twitter the like/favorite button has always been!

[0]: [https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/hearts-on- twi...](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/hearts-on-twitter.html)

<comment><USER8> But removing a feature doesn't have the same weight as adding a new one. Most probably the people that got accustomed to it will be very vocal about the removal, while nobody ever cries over a new feature they don't like, they just not use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Twitter doesn't work if you want to know what's hot out there, because lack of threading, awkward interface, no possibility to organise by subject. Finally the need and concept of "following" people, but by default you don't follow them since you only see a subset of their tweets, only the ones that are popular. If this is what you are looking for, use reddit.

Twitter works fine for it's original purpose, follow a few people and wanting to know what they post. You have to tweak a few settings:

      • Disable "Timeline: Show the best Tweets first" (in "Account")

      • disable "Quality filter" (in "Notifications")

      • "Turn off retweets" for people you follow who tweet interesting stuff but retweet garbage

      • stop following people who tweet more than a few times a week (nobody has that much interesting stuff to say!)

</comment><comment><USER26> Not sure about likes but Twitter without retweets is a much better place. The people I follow rarely say something with their own voice, and I was tired of the "outrage" tweets for every new social issue. my feed is not much quieter, and when my Tweeps _do_ say something, I pay attention.

<comment><USER27> When you're following artists reetweets can be useful to discover their fellow artists. Not all of twitter is about debating current political events.

<comment><USER26> True. It's why I'm happy they allow it per-user. Some users retweet great stuff, it's the political/social outrage of the day I'd rather not have rammed down my throat every day (I'm perfectly happy with _pulling_ my doom and gloom)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How can debate on Twitter be good when they limit the length of the arguments that you can make to two or three sentences?

<comment><USER29> It can't. Twitter makes people unnecessarily simplify arguments.

Unnecessarily simple arguments -> People get upset because you're misrepresenting them -> essentially screaming at each other instead of discussing.

The fundamental nature of the platform is bad. It's basically arguing in clickbait form.

<comment><USER30> Speaking of which, I've found this particular platform the best for rational debate: [https://www.kialo.com](https://www.kialo.com)

We once actually used it to have an internal debate about development processes and effort estimation techniques.

<comment><USER31> I don't like that it encourages short "bullet points" rather than more involved discussion.

<comment><USER32> If it required you to make arguments in the form of First Order Logic statements and then did automated validation of them, then I would use it. I'll grant this is probably a niche use case. With the power of modern automated reasoning, and maybe automated fallacy detection, it seems a shame not to use that. Computer assisted argumentation would be a great forum feature.

<comment><USER31> That makes no sense in practice. The reasoning you employ on a day to day basis is completely outside the realm of what you propose. Realistic everyday reasoning is too complex; it is not satisfactorily represented by first-order logic.

Also, even mathematical proofs are cumbersome to state in a purely formal way. Moreover, many of our arguments hinge more on things like accuracy of assumptions, informal inferences, disagreement on "axioms" and goals, etc, not on formal validity of arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wrote a firefox plugin that removes likes/follows/upvotes/hearts style vanity counters from a bunch of websites. It absolutely makes them better to use. This is a good change.

I had a middle-of-the-road idea in this area too, which is to replace the number with the magnitude. So you still get the feedback from the vanity metric, but it happens with logarithmic decay.

A more detailed write-up (and repo for the plugin) for those interested: [https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/wiki#replace-vanity- count...](https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/wiki#replace-vanity-counters- with-their-magnitude)

</comment><comment><USER34> Twitter suffers one simple problem: it conflates engagement with quality, and rewards people who create "engaging" content, rather than people who create "quality" content. So the problem isn't in what the users do; it's how Twitter filters the algorithmic feed to bring quality content to the top.

<comment><USER35> Unfortunately in the ad age this is the same for everything. It's the reason you see posts like "Have scientists discovered proof of an alien megastructure?" instead of "Light dimming from distant star system defies conventional explanation." even though I think the later headline is also still quite enthralling.

Things that get people clicking and active is what makes the money and so it's what gets optimized for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> IMO, "Like" is just one of the ways for users to express themselves, you remove this tool, they'll find other ways, e.g., flood with one-word replies.

Account with huge number of followers that can block counter accounts could create an echo chamber, which is rather poisonous to a healthy debate.

That being said, I don't think twitter should be used as an debate platform, and there are some online tools trying to solve the problem already, like Kialo. They perhaps are not good enough, but still better than twitter.

</comment><comment><USER37> This story is not true.

[https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273](https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1056913093471670273)

<comment><USER38> Where does that say it isn't true?

> "As we've been saying for a while, we are rethinking everything about the > service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation, that includes > the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to > share right now."

<comment><USER37> They are not removing the like button.

<comment><USER38> Typically when one makes an assertion and has a link following it, one assumes that link backs up that assertion. But in this case, I guess you'll just repeat your original assertion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Isn't there a documented phenomenon that attaching praise or compensation (likes) to a behavior people would do anyway (tweeting) will essentially grind that behavior to a halt if the compensation is removed?

Intuitively I can't imagine twitter's numbers are going to fare well if they're handing out a third of the dopamine hits that they were previously.

</comment><comment><USER40> 1\. You cannot argue faithfully with 140 characters. 2\. Isn't a "like"/upvote tool necessary for debates? There isn't a formal judge to rate comments/arguments. Who "wins" is decided by the (very) biased community. This is obviously a bad idea as most communities aren't open to unpopular ideas. However, if you trust the community as a whole you can expect general consensus about sensitive topics such as gay rights, immigration etc.

If you would throw out any evaluation tool then extremist options have the same visibility as any other comment. Meaningful rejection would then be only possibly by 'spamming' a similar counter argument.

I think it's pretty much impossible to create a meaningful rating system because of the said biased 'judges' \- removing the like functionality doesn't seem like an improvement though.

<comment><USER41> > You cannot argue faithfully with 140 characters.

Most people couldn't make a coherent argument even if you gave them 100,000 words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace "favourites", a star-shaped > button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later.

I have been using "favourite"/"like", like a bookmark, so am I going to lose all those now?

</comment><comment><USER42> Imagine how better Twitter would be have they had a "downvote" button like Hacker News!

I mean how many times getting downvotes taught you how to behave on HN?

Long time ago I once posted a joke; it was good and funny joke even somewhat related to subject. I got downvoted into oblivion. I scratched my head for a while but then realized I do the same thing - even if I chuckle at someones good joke, I cast my vote of thumb down to remind them in order to keep quality engagement on HN, don't post jokes! I eventually figured out it was a venue thing. You may be the funniest guy in the word, but if you go to church people expect you to remain in silence and/or pray, not make jokes.

Twitter used to be really great and then few months ago I just gave up on it. I follow few people that spew hate rhetoric. I watched them posting their stuff about Clinton's emails over and over again. Sometimes getting stupid answers, sometimes being ignored and sometimes actually seeing people putting time and effort to answer and explain. These individuals were not interested in your response! They were there just to post their rhetoric like a contest who scream louder in empty echo chamber! I know that HN downvote button would help cleanse Twitter because with few thousands posts per second, obviously nobody will decide manually how valuable the tweet is.

Being downvoted on Twitter would mean first your posting frequency goes down. Then it could mean your post is sliced to 210 char (half of original 420). Finally you could be jailed automatically for 3/7/14/31 days. I mean there is so many ideas to get folks post quality content or GTFO that its surprise management allowed Twitter to slide this low. I am sure I am not the only one who gave up on Twitter, or perhaps to Twitter bottom line (ad $), it doesn't even matter.

</comment><comment><USER43> Everyone is just accepting the article's weird premise that the purpose of Twitter is to argue and have debates?

<comment><USER44> Top comments here don't accept that, so I'm not sure who you mean by 'everyone'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I've seen some interesting uses of this where eg. liking a specific Westworld tweet would have them message you about new episodes, and liking an Apple event ad will have them message you when it's about to start. I wonder whether they'll have a replacement for that sort of use case.

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't think likes are the problem, I think twitter surfacing tweets based on likes is the problem. Replace them with a bookmark button that doesn't effect timelines at all, and imo that's a real improvement right off the bat.

</comment><comment><USER47> The idea that you _can_ have a quality debate in 250 chars or less is fundamentally what's wrong with the quality of debate.

The format itself encourages people to gloss over nuance, ignore complexity, and simply declare a position which anyone who disagrees is at least wrong and very possibly evil, depending on the topic.

Twitter is a great platform for shooting the shit, rapidly conveying breaking news, and snappy one-liners. It's actively bad for any kind of in-depth analysis. Twitter should focus on improving the patform's natural strengths, not trying to make it into something it can only ever fail at.

</comment><comment><USER48> Honestly, I can't think of any suggestion coming from Twitter execs that would actually solve its usability issues, because they are still approaching it from the POV that Twitter is "bringing humanity closer" or serving some other kind of higher purpose.

When all you have to do is spend 10 minutes on Twitter to realize it's full of political bots, crypto scam bots, humans with short fuses, and celebrities shilling their snake oil products.

</comment><comment><USER49> I never used 'like' button in the sense of upvote or 'like' in Facebook. I always used it for 'bookmarking' purposes.

Though Twitter added bookmarking feature, it is somehow useless for me as I can't undo this bookmarking operation for individual tweet but I can simply unlike a tweet.

Personally I think Twitter is just not suitable for debating. I mean you can't articulate your view in 280 charscters. Facebook is better suited for this.

</comment><comment><USER50> So I guess I'll have to retweet things now to bookmark them.

It'd be nice if Twitter could reconcile it's shitty RSS replacement and crazy- drunken-uncle-shouting-into-the-void halves into something coherent.

<comment><USER51> There's actually a "bookmark this tweet" option under the more options menu for the tweet.

<comment><USER52> I don't have this option on tweetdeck, only a add to collections, gives me a popup with no content. Nice.

<comment><USER51> It's on the official site, I'm not sure of 3rd party app support. To view your bookmarks, [https://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks](https://mobile.twitter.com/i/bookmarks)

<comment><USER53> I only see it on the mobile site.

It's found to the right of the heart button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Yeah, removing a "like" button will really improve the "communicate-by- fortune-cookie" quality of academic discourse on Twitter.

I'm not a huge fan of Twitter, so I'll admit bias, but 140/280 characters really isn't enough to construct a proper argument, but it's the exact space to come up with some some witty truism. I seriously doubt that the "likes" were the problem.

</comment><comment><USER55> Jack constantly and consistently proves how out of touch he is with his own company and has listens to the worst advice from those activists he meets.

</comment><comment> shady-lady Good.

Please remove retweet count as well.

Maybe Twitter can become a social network without herd mentality.

And then facebook(incl. instagram) can also remove their 'reaction emojis'

<comment><USER56> If that happens, then the herd will just move on.

<comment><USER57> And nothing of any value is lost

<comment><USER15> except millions of $$$$ of revenue

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Twitter is just not a platform for discussion. It was (and is) useful as a smart link finder because interesting people post about stuff.

</comment><comment><USER59> Twitter is like a free lifetime supply of the alcohol of your choosing. Yeah, some people can handle it just fine and not turn into full-blown alcoholics, but for many people there's just no way to not give in and have their lives ruined. People are really the problem more than Twitter, but man Twitter sure does enable mental dysfunction awfully efficiently.

</comment><comment><USER60> I always thought that the dismal number of likes tweets usually get is a sign that nobody actually reads tweets.

On Twitter, I regularely see accounts with tens of thousands of followers. Yet their tweets get less then 10 likes. So a like to follower ratio of 0.1% or so.

On Instagram the situation is pretty different. Like to Follower ratio is more in the 1% range.

What is the reason for this difference?

</comment><comment> village-idiot Honestly, I gave up on twitter. Changed my password to something random and long and locked myself out.

At this point I have 0 faith that Twitter can or wants to clean up the mess they've made. It's been obvious for years that Twitter is trending in a dark way, yet it seems like corporate likes to pretend that they're back in the happy early days.

</comment><comment><USER61> Does a platform originally developed to post every random witty thought you come up with on the loo really need to improve the quality of debate? I feel like it would be better to acknowledge the fundamental design is incompatible with serious debate and try to steer it back towards the place for frivolous shitposting

</comment><comment><USER62> I use 'like' as a sort of bookmark, rather than to tell someone I like their tweet. For that reason it's rare that I 'like' a tweet. I can review my likes as a refined timeline, greatest hits. Guess I'll have to use the bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER63> That's a shame, because I use it as a "save for later" function.

I've got hundreds of links to side projects, tips, advice, and inspiration stored in there. Hopefully they give us some warning before it happens so I can scrape them all.

</comment><comment><USER64> So if you want to interact, you have to formulate a thought in an elegant message? Most wont pass the barrier of having to think hard about something. (ie. thinking fast and slow / switching from system 1 to system 2 is _hard_)

</comment><comment><USER65> I use the "like" button a lot but mainly because Twitter doesn't have a read later or save function. I don't necessarily like because I enjoy the content, I like because I want to digest it at a different time

<comment><USER31> It's a tweet. How long can it take to read that you have to save it for later?

<comment><USER65> If you think it's only a tweet, you're naive. It's the discussion and mainly it's also links to the content. Just because it's 140ish characters doesn't mean it takes an instant to read and move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> +1

</comment><comment><USER67> Awesome hopefully stop seeing random "liked" tweets in my feed. Now if only they fix tweets resurfacing when replied or retweeted then I might actually enjoy standard Twitter apps

</comment><comment><USER68> Seems like they should add a visible toggle switch that allows user to decide if they want the timeline algo to weight likes or not.

Hey Twitter, it's not bad to give users a little choice.

</comment><comment><USER69> What does that actually mean. I use likes for kind of a reading list. Will I have to use an external tool now to manage that? Without likes, twitter is useless to me.

/edit spelling

<comment><USER69> Ah, I see the bookmarks now. But it's two taps instead of one :(

<comment><USER38> I had no idea it existed until this HN discussion, and I have a feeling a lot of other people are in the same boat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> People love to rail on twitter, but where's the movement to leave? It's hardly a necessity for life in 99% of use cases, They're a company with arguably questionable morals, and their current resurgence is predicated almost entirely on Trump (make of that what you will).

Just quit it already.

</comment><comment><USER7> As a person who never uses twitter, I tried using it one time and found all of the functions very confusing. Do people really find twitter useful?

</comment><comment><USER71> It's curious such a simple thing (a heart or like button) causes addiction. Social acceptance must be deeply wired in to our reward system

</comment><comment><USER52> is that all twitter is now? a debate site? Starring items has been a stample of both bookmarking content, as well as showing appreciation for anything on the platform.

But as well as when they started merging liked posts into the content feed on the main apps, it did remove the critical thing if it being an option for feedback to a post, without sharing the content to your own timeline (a retweet).

I don't understand any logic behind this change at all, and if there is, there's a paywall. But twitter is for everything, not just politics. If you're using politics to drive your platform, it's a shitshow for anyone else that uses the platform for more recreational purposes

<comment><USER72> I think it's a good thing if they get rid of it and not just replace it with another symbol as they did with the favorites.

Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.

<comment><USER73> > Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.

Eh not really. Consider my use case. I don't tweet, retweet or anything. My profile is set to private. I mainly use Twitter for updates on the local public transport (and sport scores). Last week for instance the metro system had a really bad failure. At the end of the day, their Twitter account posted a big apology and you could see whoever was manning it had played a blinder by helping as many people as they could. So I "liked" it as a form of appreciation. I do that a lot.

I don't think I'm alone on this either. I know lots of people who use Twitter for practical things (traffic updates etc.), I honestly can't think of anyone who actually tweets though.

If like goes, I'll just use retweet as a replacement to show the same emotion. Except I'll be retweeting to an empty audience deliberately.

<comment><USER72> If there are no likes, then shares are the new likes.

If you share to an empty audience, it will still be added to the share count.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I've been using the 'like'(heart symbol) to bookmark tweets and tweet threads.

Sigh, I would be losing a lot of my book marks.

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm pretty sure the 240 character limit and the way Twitter handles threads precludes any quality of debate.

</comment><comment><USER76> Not that one can have much of a "quality debate" in 280 character bites, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER77> What 'debate' are they talking about? It's a free for all shouting match.

</comment><comment><USER78> There is no way to have a meaningful debate, much less a quality one, in a completely public forum. Half the time, participants don't even agree on the definition of words. Think "privilege" and "rights" for easy examples.

Then quality goes out the window when anybody from the mob can jump into your thread at any point, quibbling with words, accusing you of being Hitler, etc.

To have meaningful debate, you also need people who are seeking truth and are open to having their minds changed. Twitter (or modern politics in general) does not incentivize changing your mind, since anyone can screenshot some old Tweet, and now you're a flip-flopper. As if you're expected to emerge onto social media with a fully-formed worldview.

But it's not like politics has ever been a thoughtful, measured process. There are no good ol' days. The ballot box is a proxy for the musket and bayonet. When you vote, you are literally making an attempt to force the other half of society to do what you want. Life, liberty, and property are on the line, so politics will never be anything but conflict.

</comment><comment><USER79> I simply use Twitter as a news feed now and mostly ignore any replies to posts.

</comment><comment><USER80> Whether this is good or bad, I think it's cool that Twitter are still willing to make profound changes to their service. The last was switching from 140 to 280 chars. Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER81> Sigh... It was my bookmarking tool. :(

</comment><comment><USER82> When we get to 'Twitter to remove "Twitter" in a bid to improve quality of debate' then we might get some progress.

</comment><comment><USER83> It would be interesting to see how well upvote/downvote would work.

<comment><USER84> Just like here, it would quell community taboo opinions.

If you want to be downvoted to oblivion on HN, just try pointing out potential moral issues with a new technology.

<comment><USER84> ...and the above was instantly downvoted. Communities that use downvotes become blind to self-criticism.

<comment><USER85> Watch people here flock approvingly around a PG thinkpiece about the value of "unsayable opinions", though. It's like grappling smoke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> There must be a non-paywalled version of this announcement on some other site.

</comment><comment><USER87> I think it's a great idea, but maybe not for Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER88> they could add some filters to prevent randos from appearing in your replies

</comment><comment><USER89> Reposted every time it's relevant: [https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170...](https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170?lang=en)

"USERS: we love twitter but it has problems

TWITTER: great we'll fix them

USERS: do you want to know what they are

TWITTER: absolutely not

USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product

TWITTER: likes are now florps

USERS: what

TWITTER: timeline goes sideways"

(The irony is that likes _used_ to have a clear, simple use: bookmark something for your own reference while also telling the poster that you liked it. Twitter ruined this by injecting "liked" tweets by people you follow into your timeline, collapsing the distinction between like and RT.

Retweet is actually a user-originated function, people used to manually retweet by pasting and putting "RT" at the front.)

<comment><USER90> Here's what I'm thinking when companies remove votes or scores or whatever: They're just _hiding_ the problem. Like, people _still_ like the stuff, it's just no longer tracked. They sure as hell won't stop tracking views or whatever. Which are likely (heh) just a factor removed from "likes".

The problem is that you're giving fake news the power to dominate million's of people's twitter feeds if you're just ruthless enough.

<comment><USER91> This isn't a sarcastic question nor an attempt at snark: have you ever moderated a message board, forum, subreddit, facebook group, etc. with decent post traffic? It's tough. Even something that has a hyperfocused topic (e.g. a subreddit for dogs with sunglasses riding skateboards) will have naysayers of what should and shouldn't be allowed. Someone posts a pic of a dog. It doesn't have sunglasses, but it does have on yellow-tinted glasses for reducing eye- strain on monitor. Oh and it's not riding a skateboard. This dog is on a self- balancing scooter.

Most of your users won't care. They'll enjoy the content. Someone chimes in that the sub or forum is no longer pure. The content is similar, but it's off- topic. The board is going to devolve into just pics of dogs (which is a legitimate concern). Other people defend that the board needs content, and that computer glasses and a scooter is similar enough to be inclusive. So where do you plant you flag? Will there be a zero-tolerance policy for anything that isn't a dog wearing sunglasses riding a skateboard (OMG mods are literally Nazis!!!), do you allow users to flag posts for review on a case-by- case basis (need more mods), or do you relax the content restriction (this board is trash since it lost its focus!)?

Twitter has no focused topic. The platform is for anyone to communicate whatever they want within reason. With disparate cultures than span every corner of the globe, how do you stop the problem from existing in the first place? Not everyone has the tolerance for scathing, brutal honesty. How do you draw the line between that and bullying? How do you differentiate between well-intended people who are misinformed and people spouting propaganda? I don't have the answer, but my time moderating forums about topics that have no impact on society has taught me that it's pretty much impossible to create a perfect platform that appeases everyone.

<comment><USER90> >This isn't a sarcastic question nor an attempt at snark: have you ever moderated a message board, forum, subreddit, facebook group, etc. with decent post traffic?

I actually have! I definitely don't think there's currently a good solution to this problem. But removing likes is ridiculous, too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> The fav button was a useful tool back when it meant "fav" as in "bookmark" and not "like". Maybe they should go back to that? I know they've recently added a "bookmark" button as well, but I hope they don't keep it hidden the way it is now.

On the other hand: Twitter does not have to be a debate site. You can surely debate using it, but it's just a website where you can post short messages and follow your friends. They shouldn't screw it just to cater to a certain part of their user base.

<comment><USER93> I've always been confused about this change. I was using the "fav" exactly to bookmark tweets rather than approve their content.

<comment><USER94> +1. I've since switched (grudgingly) to sending myself DM's of Tweets that I want to "save for later". A poor substitute, but easy to reach for from the UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Paywalled. If HN had downvotes I would give one.

<comment><USER96> I was wondering why the throw-away account, this could be a reason

</comment></comment><comment> andrew-dc I was going to suggest that anyone interested in quality of debate unplug from Twitter entirely and go meet up with some folks for coffee. Or Tacos. Or go on a hike together. Or have them over for board games. Bonus if these are folks you don't entirely agree with on everything.

<comment><USER97> That doesn't scale at all.

<comment> andrew-dc Tough sell for investors.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: B2B Partnerships Search Built with NextJS, ELK and GCP - <AUTHOR> https://www.partneroid.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, we work with a lot with companies and brands on analyzing their partnerships and built a version of this search tool internally and thought thought it'd be really useful for other people to use.

So what does this do? Well, you can find and request information on company partnerships as well as other data such as competitors and customer demographics.

The front end is built using NextJs, the search is backed by Elasticsearch (ELK stack) and we manage our containers using Kubernetes and all of this runs off GCP. Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack in this thread.

This is an early v1 that's free to use and we'd love some feedback.

I've also added the product hunt link below. [1]: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/partneroid](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/partneroid)

<comment><USER2> In your "Sentiment" graph, dont you think `negative` should be red?

<comment><AUTHOR> You know, I actually don't have a good answer why it's not. That is a great suggestion.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I wrote a Haskell program that does my intro logic homework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JacksonGariety/derivation-machine <comment><USER2> For context a link to the homework (or similar) on the web would be good for those who haven't studied this stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> I updated the README. Thanks!

Link: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus)</comment></comment>


Was Tim Berners-Lee's Web inventive enough to be patented? - <AUTHOR> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2377666&cid=37075852 <comment><AUTHOR> (assuming the USPTO was doing its job properly)</comment>


A major flaw in Klout's social media influence service - <AUTHOR> http://life.icrontic.com/article/a-major-flaw-in-klouts-social-media-influence-service/

<comment><USER3> As troublesome as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus can be, some of their epiphytes are just terrible. Personally, I harbor a surly attitude towards Klout because there's no opt-out option - there is no way (that I could find) to say to them, "count me out." I realize that they have a lot of number- crunching to do, but not having an opt-out mechanism makes them look skeezy. If they fear that too many people would use an opt-out mechanism if it were available, that in itself is a problem! They should provide the mechanism and be honest to themselves about whether their business model is viable - <USER2> if they get a lot of opt-out responses, they should probably quit or pivot.

</comment><comment><USER4> Klout is a real slave-driver. If you spend a few days away (on holiday or busy doing other things) it doesn't matter how engaged you are during your regular social periods, it penalizes you. That really annoys me.</comment>


Ask HN: Any recommended PR firm for (cash-strapped) startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm seeking PR service to generate awareness for my social/shopping startup at under $1000<p>Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> That's not enough money for a anything worthy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. So what should the budget be for something worthy?

<comment><USER3> From my experience working for a web design company that also does PR, $1000 certainly won't get you much. A cheap PR firm will charge you at least $100/hour which affords you ten hours. Once meetings, planning and strategics are through, you won't have much left at all. My recommendation would be to learn some basic PR yourself and implement it that way.

I'm guessing by PR you want marketing, and it would be far cheaper and more valuable reading a bit up on it to get a grasp than hiring someone else to do it. Read FastCompany or Inc., they regularly post great articles on that sort of stuff that you can read quickly to learn some valuable base strategies/ideas.

And if you think you don't have time, remember that a PR firm isn't just going to open your website and work magic, they're going to want to spend hours going over your brand, your goals and more. You'll have to have meetings and explain a lot to them. In that time you could easily learn an adequate amount of PR strategies to at least implement something decent.

And I'm guessing if your budget is $1000 you don't need anything major to begin with, which means doing it yourself makes even more sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great info.

prserve.com just quoted me sub-$1K for one story on a major tech media news site, pay only after the story goes live.

What I read from here so far makes the prserve deal a pretty good one, isn't it?

<comment><USER3> Hmmm,that sounds tempting. I suppose it depends on the type of story and the site it goes on. A reputable site would (ideally) publish stories based on the newsworthiness of a product (meaning they'd publish the story even without the PR firm being the middleman), but I'm sure whatever contacts they have with the news site probably help a lot. Getting on a major, widely read tech news site for a startup I'd say would be worth that easily. I'm not going to guess how they do it, but if they can do what they've promised for the price they've promised, and it's all risk free, I'd say give it a shot.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Xbox One re-overtakes PS4 on Amazon bestseller charts in UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/xbox-one-re-overtakes-ps4-on-amazon-bestseller-charts/0117431

<comment><USER2> I think Microsoft's change has actually made me more likely to purchase the PS4. Before, the differentiating features of the Xbox One (sharing, cloud availability, possibly lower new-game pricing) were enabled by the DRM. Now, the Xbox One is just a more expensive, less powerful PS4 with a management scheme identical to the 360. Meh.

</comment><comment><USER3> IT'S A TRAP!

</comment><comment><USER4> Always check the chain of links... the sourced article is this:

[http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/xbox-one-re-overtakes- ps4-on-...](http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/xbox-one-re-overtakes-ps4-on- amazon-bestseller-charts/0117431)

Which simply states that the Xbox One is now above the PS4 in the 'best sellers' list, which implies little to nothing about total preorders.</comment>


Microsoft: entertainment overtakes multiplayer gaming on Xbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/27/2905923/xbox-live-entertainment-overtakes-multiplayer-gaming-stats <comment><USER2> Their Trojan Horse is working out. I wish them all the success in the world, if only to coax Apple into making the iTV.</comment>


Find something morally sickening? Take a ginger pill - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/find-something-morally-sickening-take-a-ginger-pill <comment><USER2> Seems more like things that feel "gross" vs. immoral.</comment>


An Emacs extension "rainbow-fart" for programmers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stardiviner/emacs-rainbow-fart <comment><AUTHOR> It's just for fun and interesting. Might someone would like it.</comment>


WebSocket disabled in Firefox 4 - <AUTHOR> http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/12/websockets-disabled-in-firefox-4/

<comment><USER2> The paper (<http://www.adambarth.com/experimental/websocket.pdf>) describing these attacks also describes attacks on Java applets and Flash.

That any application that can make outgoing TCP connections can poison these caching proxies/firewalls, and break security for all users sitting behind that firewall, suggests that the problem is with the firewalls, not with Flash or WebSocket per se. Anyone running these firewalls is exposing their users to a severe security problem whether WebSocket is included in browsers or not.

I'm not sure if there's any kind of "TCP appliance test suite" that could be used to catch horribly broken and insecure proxies and firewalls, but in addition to changing the WebSocket spec, someone should really set up some Flash-based tests that exploit this and tell those users/network admins whose firewalls who are vulnerable that they should do something about it.

<comment><USER3> That statement seems simultaneously accurate and unfair.

It's true that the "fault" lies with the crappy proxies, and it's true that the fault is exposed by things other than WebSockets.

But it's also true that for more companies, the Java applet plugin and the Flash plugin are the only two components that give attackers enough control over a victim's computer to coerce it into confusing the proxy. Think of them as having been grandfathered in; security teams already watch them closely (they also happen to be security nightmares).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Posted yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1980963></comment>


Sparking a myth about a man who could not forget - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mystery-of-s-the-man-with-an-impossible-memory <comment><USER2> The whole article is fascinating, but this part was very surprising:

> Shereshevsky avoided such things as reading the newspaper over breakfast > because the flavors evoked by the printed words clashed with the taste of > his meal.

I've heard of synesthesia, but I never knew it could have real-life consequences like this.

Unrelated: That's the first time I've seen the word "reëxperience" with an umlaut. Wiktionary has it as an "alternative form" [1]. And I found this Wikipedia article [2], which says you can use it in other words, like: coöperative, daïs and reëlect. And apparently it's called a "diaeresis". So that was interesting to learn. It's also interesting that the New Yorker must follow a style guide that requires diaereses.

Oh wow, I just found the New Yorker article specifically about their usage of diaereses. [4]

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reexperience](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reexperience)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical_marks#Native_English_words)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_\(diacritic\))

[4] [http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse- of-t...](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the- diaeresis)

<comment><USER3> Worthless trivia time! Diaereses are very popular in the Dutch language, because the language is full of consecutive vowels, which have a distinct sound. We're just not trained t guessing where to break syllables without help. If "cooperative" was a Dutch word and spelled like that, we'd say coo- perative, get confused, backtrack, oh wait co-operative ahyeah.

For example, "ie" in "fiets" (bike) is pronounced like English "ee". But now imagine you're a sixteen year old deejay with big ambitions and you want a name people can remember you by. You come up with "Tiesto" which sounds cool, but all your friends would pronounce it "Teesto". Ok no biggie, "DJ Tiësto" it is.

Another public favourite is the plural of sea (zee): zeeën. Leaving the dots, "zeeen" would make people very nervous - is it "ze-een" (she one) or "zee-en" (seas)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read about this case several times; these are the facts that stuck out the most for me from the long article.

S actually studied to become a professional mnemonist, after leaving journalism, and learned from circus people how to make his performances more engaging. He didn't actually have 100% recall: "His uncle, Reynberg said, could be forgetful. If he didn't consciously try to commit something to memory, he didn't always recall it later."

"Reynberg told me that his uncle trained hours a day for his evening performances." "Luria doesn't deny Shereshevsky's use of mnemonic devices, but he maintains that these came later, and that they merely complemented Shereshevsky's immense natural abilities."

"The strength and durability of his memories seemed to be tied up in his ability to create elaborate multisensory mental representations and insert them in imagined story scenes or places; the more vivid this imagery and story, the more deeply rooted it would become in his memory."

"Instead of burning memories on scraps of paper, Shereshevsky found a different kind of erasure in his final years, according to his nephew: he turned to drinking."</comment>


Genetic Algorithm 2D Car Thingy - <AUTHOR> http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/ <comment><USER2> This is brilliantly cool, and utterly hypnotic. I still always wonder about implementations of genetic algorithms, though. In real life, from which inspiration has been taken, the phenotype is often radically affected by small changes in the genotype. In computer implementation of the concept this is rarely the case. The computer versions are small, clean, spare, and nowhere near as messy as the real life version.

I wonder if the messiness actually matters. I wonder if "optimization by genetic algorithm" would be significantly improved by using a more faithful algorithm.

</comment><comment>==

Anyway, here's a previous discussion of this particular toy:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5942757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5942757) (169 comments)

Other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10596079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10596079)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10134390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10134390)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5952145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5952145)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2226137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2226137)

Also, genetic development of walkers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911719) (74 comments)

<comment><USER3> Genetic algorithms aren't really that brilliant. They are simple, and that's what makes them popular among researchers. There's no formal science behind them.

I bet that thinking about the problem more would allow you to find an algorithm that works better than genetic algorithms all the time.

Just look at travelling salesman problem, or vehicle routing problem. Smart heuristics beat these hybrid-genetic-memetic-algorithms all the time.

<comment><USER4> > There's no formal science behind them.

I'm not sure what that means. Science is empiricism, and genetic algorithms are a wide field of research with a lot of experimentation behind them. There are many hypothesis about how they work, why they work and what their limitations are. These hypothesis are tested through experimentation, just like in other scientific fields.

> Smart heuristics beat these hybrid-genetic-memetic-algorithms all the time.

Sure, this is almost guaranteed by the "no free-lunch theorem": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem)

There might be some exotic cases where genetic algorithms are actually the best solution, but nobody knows that.

But that's not the point of genetic algorithms. The point is having a generic solution that can be applied with some success when you don't have the time or the resources to find those "smart heuristics". And there might be cases where we are just not smart enough to find them. Some of these cases might be related to the effort towards developing generic AI. You can also claim that it is always possible to write a more efficient computer program directly in machine code, if you ignore time and resources.

Another interesting property of evolutionary computation is enabling some form of artificial creativity. Check out this antenna, created by NASA using evolutionary computation:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna)

Also, if you will forgive me a bit of self promotion, check out my own work on the discovery of complex network generators:

[http://www.nature.com/articles/srep06284](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep06284)

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't say genetic algorithms are generic solutions. I have to try really hard to implement efficient operators that would allow me fast optimization.

Scientific contributions are mostly in operators, I guess. I can't think what else can someone working with genetic algorithms contribute because adding elitism, or 3-way crossover isn't really the solution to a problem, it's just metaheuristics jibber-jabber.

<comment><USER4> I find the situation a bit similar to neural networks. It's a bio-inspired model, and we know from nature that it can work spectacularly well. The actual algorithms that became popular (both in neural networks and evolutionary computation) are extreme simplifications of the biological reality.

So a lot of the research goes in the direction of finding the "missing ingredients". On the evolutionary computation front, one of the topics I find the most interesting is the genotype-phenotype mapping. Naive genetic algorithms have genotypes that map directly to phenotypes (e.g you are evolving some vector which is a direct solution to a problem). More complex mapping (like what we see in nature) encode a generator for a solution.

On this note, exciting stuff happens on the genetic programming front (where you are evolving computer programs, commonly Lisp-like trees).

It really is a vast field, ranging from direct engineering applications to artificial life simulations aimed at theoretical biology. Like everything else, you have to be familiar with the literature.

<comment><USER3> I'm familiar with the literature.

I do not like the research. It is bad, it's rarely reproducible, source code is almost never public thus time/convergence measurements are meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a very beautiful illustration of a woefully outdated algorithm. Its proportional selection operator was superseded in 1994 (at the latest) when Bäck published his comparison of selection operators. Its approach to crossover looks like an ad-hoc extension of binary crossover, which Deb improved on in the same year. It's using uniform mutation, although better options have been demonstrated by Evolution Strategies since the '70s, if not earlier.

But it's really fun to watch. I'll give it that.

<comment><USER6> I researched GAs / GPs back in the mid-90s (but then went in a different direction).

Is there a paper/presentation that embodies the current best practices/thinking that you could recommend? I'm not trying to be lazy, it's just that there is clearly a lot of retro thinking among the top search results on the net, and it's difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff...

<comment><USER5> With the disclaimer that there are different schools of thought, I can give a basic outline, and provide some references. This pertains mainly to optimizing engineering models, which tend to be continuous or mixed integer. GAs are just OK at combinatorial optimization (although GP is pretty nifty, from what I hear about it).

* Steady-state: pioneered to the best of my knowledge by Deb's epsilon-MOEA, steady-state algorithms use function evaluations as soon as they are received, rather than waiting for a whole generation to complete. [1]

* Multi-objective: Pareto ranking as dominance relation lets us have multiple objectives [2]. This is good because it gives us a whole bunch of solutions at once and lets us decide which one we want, instead of tweaking objectives and constraints to get an idea of the tradeoffs involved.

* Epsilon resolution: comes from an idea by Laumanns et al. [3]. We can have more objectives if we don't care about differences below a certain threshold. Otherwise the Pareto front explodes in size.

* Restarting: Proposed by Coello-Coello [4] and demonstrated by his micro-GA, restarting helps you get out of local optima.

* Better search operators: Binary crossover doesn't work so well, especially for real-valued decision variables. It took some fancy theoretical footwork involving schema theory and domino convergence to support it. There were a lot of new search operators proposed in the late '90s, the best of which seem to be simulated binary crossover (SBX), and polynomial mutation (PM). [5]

* Alternatively, the Differential Evolution search operator [6] works really well too.

* Better selection operator: tournament selection beats the pants off of the alternatives [7].

Resources:

* Dave Hadka's MOEAFramework [8], which includes open-source multi-objective evolutionary algorithm implementations.

* Dave Hadka's dissertation [9], which describes a (regrettably patented) MOEA that's kind of a greatest-hits of good MOEA ideas.

* Deb's website [10], which includes questionably-licensed algorithm implementations, as well as a number of technical reports.

Links. I'm posting raw bibtex because I'm lazy.

[1] @article{deb_2005_emoea, author = { Deb, K. and Mohan, M. and Mishra, S}, year = {2005}, title = {Evaluating the $\varepsilon$-domination based multiobjective evolutionary algorithm for a quick computation of Pareto- optimal solutions.}, journal = {Evolutionary Computation Journal}, volume= {13}, number = {4}, pages ={501--525} }

[2] @book{goldberg_1989_book, title={Genetic algorithms in search, optimization, and machine learning}, author={Goldberg, D.E.}, year={1989}, publisher={Addison-Wesley Professional} }

[3] @article{laumanns_2002_combining, title={Combining convergence and diversity in evolutionary multiobjective optimization}, author={Laumanns, M. and Thiele, L. and Deb, K. and Zitzler, E.}, journal={Evolutionary computation}, volume={10}, number={3}, pages={263--282}, year={2002}, publisher={MIT Press} }

[4] @inproceedings{coello_2001_uga, author = {Carlos A Coello Coello and Gregorio Toscano Pulido}, title = {Multi-Objective Optimization Using a Micro- Genetic Algorithm}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2001)}, pages = {274--282}, publisher = {Morgan Kaufmann}, address = {San Francisco, CA}, year = {2001} }

[5] @techreport{deb_1994_sbx, author = {Deb, K. and Agrawal, R. B.}, year = 1994, title = {Simulated binary crossover for continuous search space}, number = { Technical Report IITK/ME/SMD-94027}, institution = {Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur}, address = {Kanpur, UP, India} }

[6] @article{storn_1997_de, author = {Storn, R. and Price, K.}, year = 1997, title = {Differential evolution --- a simple and efficient heuristic for global optimization over continuous spaces}, journal = { Journal of Global Optimization}, volume = 11, number = 4, pages = {341--359} }

[7] @inproceedings{back_1994_selection, title={Selective pressure in evolutionary algorithms: A characterization of selection mechanisms}, author={B{\"a}ck, Thomas}, booktitle={Proceedings of the First IEEE Conference on Evolutionary Computation}, pages={57--62}, year={1994}, organization={IEEE} }

[8] [http://moeaframework.org/](http://moeaframework.org/)

[9] [https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/](https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/) You'll have to search for it, I'm afraid. The site's not responding for me right now. But his dissertation is publicly available on Penn State's ETD site.

[10] [http://www.iitk.ac.in/kangal/deb.shtml](http://www.iitk.ac.in/kangal/deb.shtml)

edit: formatting

<comment><USER5> Here's a better link for [9]: [https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/search/1/50/31/author/term=ha...](https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/search/1/50/31/author/term=hadka)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's my version from a decade ago:

[http://peteshadbolt.co.uk/ga/](http://peteshadbolt.co.uk/ga/)

It's so old that it's written in Flash! One of these days I will port it to canvas, I swear...

<comment><USER8> I remember this when it came out! I was so fascinated I wanted to write my own, but I didn't have the programming skills back then...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a little dead, but there's a few more similar natural selection simulators over at [https://www.reddit.com/r/NSIP/top/?sort=top&t=all](https://www.reddit.com/r/NSIP/top/?sort=top&t=all)

</comment><comment><USER10> It would be cool if someone added a car designer to this. I wonder if I could design a car based on intuition that would perform better than the algo could generate.

<comment><USER5> This is a frequent request. It can be very interesting to see how professional designs stack up against algorithmically generated ones. I'm a proponent of multi-objective algorithms, so it tends to be the case that professional designs are at least close to Pareto-optimal. Pros are pros for a reason. But they are often unaware of nondominated alternatives. For really hard problems, problems that evolutionary algorithms are bad at, experts can still come up with better alternatives than algorithms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would be cool to display the current world seed somewhere if it isn't explicitly entered.

I was going to paste an example track I came across that seemed literally impossible to conquer within the constraints of the mutations, but I can't grab the seed.

In any event, would love more depth to the mutations. Longer/taller cars, etc. Maybe even other things like randomly firing after burners, wings to let it glide, etc.

Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER12> I keep looking for the version of this simulator where _you_ get to draw your own car, and then you run it and see how well it handles the terrain. played with it many years ago, never found it again. maybe someone here can help?

</comment><comment><USER13> Bizarrely, I seem to get much better performance in safari than in chrome with this, which runs contrary to my expectations. I wonder why that is.

</comment><comment><USER14> OP, please append "(2012)" to the title.

</comment><comment><USER15> So how long do I have to leave it running before the cars create art or try to figure out who I am?

</comment><comment><USER16> What does "Floor: [fixed / mutable]" mean?

<comment><USER17> You can have each generation always run on the exact same terrain, or the terrain can be randomly generated on each iteration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does the best one look like a Strandbeest?</comment>


The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/the-dangers-of-certainty/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 <comment><USER2> I thought the science culture wars were over, but apparently people are still pushing them.</comment>


Google Search Referrers Disappear In iOS 6 - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/ios-6-removes-all-google-search-referer-data-134560

<comment><USER2> I would assume this is caused by the search bar now using the SSL version of Google.

The "fix" is "easy": If you want referrer data, offer your site over SSL or use the Google Webmaster tools (I don't know whether there is an API to get to that data).

Browsers don't send a referrer header if the referring site is SSL and the target site is not. This has always been the case even on the desktop.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly what's happening - though the author seems to think differently.

This isn't a huge deal as you can still get details of Google Queries using Google Webmaster Tools: <http://www.google.com/webmasters/>

<comment><USER4> It is a huge deal and has been since Google stopped passing referrers for signed-in users last October. That's because...

1) If it's a privacy thing, then Google is happy having a leak by giving these terms to advertisers

2) The data is not provided in a way that can be used by third party ad retargeting terms, giving Google a competitive advantage

3) Publishers can't use the data to better target with landing pages

4) Google Webmaster Central data only goes back for a short period of time, and if you haven't constantly been downloading your data, all your historic traffic information related to a term has gone poof.

<comment><USER5> Does it create a monopoly situation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From my iOS6 4S p:

<https://www.google.com?q=referer> and then click to www.whatismyreferer.com- _no referer_ as expected.

<http://www.google.com?q=referer> and then click to www.whatismyreferer.com - _a valid referer_ as expected.

Nothing to see here folks.

<comment><USER7> ironically if you follow this path in a desktop browser it bounces you through an HTTP url so the referrer is set.

Contrary to the article it looks like Google is doing something different to iOS 6 users, not Apple. (note I have no idea if this is something _specific_ to iOS users, it could be happening on Android as well - I'm not trying to attribute this to malice)

EDIT: Just tried this on my nexus 7 and it also skips the http referer page, so I get the "no referer" message. it seems like something they do for mobile browsers?

<comment><USER6> I think you missed the point of the above demonstration a bit. It was meant to demonstration that iOS6 is acting completely normal. No referer is sent for https, and that is expected behavior. Google even went so far as to send out emails, blog posts to the analytics and the webmaster tools blogs, and G+ posts about it a while back so GA users would not be surprised as there referrer data decreased. For those missing refers we now have to use the Webmaster Tools and try to piece the data together a bit.

<comment><USER7> I think you missed my point.

If I go to the https link above via a desktop browser, and see the results page (also https) with "What's my referrer" on it and click the link Google doesn't take me directly to the site, the link for "What's my referrer" is (not https)

[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...
Which then redirects me to whatismyreferer.com so that whatismyreferer gets a google referer. Apparently for whatever reason if you do that on iOS6 the search results takes you directly to whatismyreferer.com without the redirect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unrelated but I just learned that "referer" is a misspelling of "referrer" but we still use the former term as it is set in stone by the HTTP standard. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer#Origin_of_the_term...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer#Origin_of_the_term_referer)

</comment><comment><USER9> The last line of the article:

> However, it does seem like this issue is specific with Google. So I suspect > it is either a bug on Google's side (or a feature).

If this is what he suspects, why does he phrase the title as if it is something in iOS 6 that is causing the issue.

<comment><USER10> If it's new to iOS 6 vs iOS 5, then it's clearly something that changed in iOS 6.

<comment><USER11> Default search site changed to be SSL. Are we really complaining that's a bad thing?

<comment><USER12> Lately if its anything Apple related it seems to be interpreted as a bad thing. It is getting tiresome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Referrer data still seems to be sent when I go to <http://www.whatismyreferer.com/> from the SSL version of Google on my desktop.

In fact, I did the exact same thing but with the User-Agent set to iOS 6. No referrer data.

This is a problem on Google's side.

<comment><USER14> That's right and while it's up to google - there is an unfortunate consequence that a very large analytics industry exists and funds thousands if not millions of jobs - not saying this won't have an impact on that industry would be short sighted - I am of the belief that if you don't want to be track there is one very simple solution turn off your computer.

<comment><USER15> Think of the children too.

Personally I couldn't care less if some people lose jobs.

SEO in general is all about gaming the algorithms of search engines to gain an unfair advantage. A search engine that needs SEO to get to the front page is a broken search engine. And because Google has the incentive and the resources to constantly improve it, an industry built around the deficiencies of a search engine is doomed for extinction from the start.

Of course, SEO is not the only reason for why some companies need analytics. But for all the other reasons, they should do what good businesses have always done and actually talk to their customers or potential customers, instead of looking in the records of their referrers, which often contains the deepest desires of people without them realizing that the data in question will be released.

        if you don't want to be track there is one very
        simple solution turn off your computer.

These kind of statements kind of make my blood boil and I'm trying really hard to contain my anger.

As to your statement, you're saying it like it's an option to turn off the computer. Well, that's not an option anymore for many people, and it's increasingly clear that we're going to depend on computers connected to the Internet for everything, like for doing our shopping, for paying our bills, for communicating with others and for being able to do our jobs.

It's enough to say that privacy is a fundamental right that people should always keep fighting for and for which eternal vigilance is required. And if there ever was a time in history when people truly had privacy, that was only because some people fought for it.

Totalitarian states never needed high-tech, like interconnected computers or street video cameras with face recognition and GPS chips implants and all that crap, all they needed was for people to turn on each other, so the Internet is not even a prerequisite, but human stupidity and shortsightedness is.

<comment><USER4> SEO is not about an unfair advantage. If that were the case, then Google itself wouldn't offer a free guide to SEO.

That's simply an unfortunately common and ignorant misconception. It's like saying that knowing HTML design requirements is an unfair advantage in making web pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They updated the bottom of the article to read _Postscript: At about 12:15pm EDT I now see referer data being passed from mobile Safari on iOS 6 via Google either signed in or signed out. I am not sure if this was a bug or something else but it does now seem to pass referer data. It even passes query data if you are signed in._

</comment><comment><USER7> This appears to be a mobile browser thing when searching google with https.

Search <https://www.google.com> in a desktop browser and you will get a results page where the links don't like you directly to the result page, they actually take you to an http redirect page which then forwards you to your final destination (which now gets a "google.com" referer.

On my iPhone and my Nexus 7 if I do a search on <https://www.google.com> the results page does _not_ have the http redirect link. So the final destination does not get a referer.

This seems to be a behavior on Google's side that is different for desktop and mobile browsers, there's nothing specific to Apple here.

</comment><comment><USER17> This will badly reflects on analytics softwares if you have a heavy mobile website.

</comment><comment><USER18> As someone who spends a lot of time working on internet marketing, not getting the search terms due to this and all the other changes really stinks!

</comment><comment><USER19> it will possibly affect registration wall publishers who are open to google referals (like WSJ, NYT, etc.).</comment>


The Last Scan: Keeping old TVs alive - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16973914/tvs-crt-restoration-led-gaming-vintage <comment><USER2> Reluctant CRT owner here. I have one because it was cheapest and easiest way to get a low input lag display for speedrunning. I paid $30 for my 27" Trinitron on Craigslist and had to drive a bit to pick it up. It's a monster of a TV, requiring a sturdy rack to sit on and a couple strong friends if I want it somewhere else. The picture quality is great and the scanlines definitely add an old-school feel but it doesn't look better than my SNES Classic on my generic HDTV.

It's not that you CAN'T speedrun on LCD displays, it's that it's expensive and inconvenient. Connecting a retro console like a SNES to a modern display requires converting one of composite/S-video/component/RGB SCART to DVI or HDMI, and most of the devices that do that aren't designed with latency in mind. If you search on Amazon you'll find a bunch of cheap knockoff upscalers that, if they even work, add 50ms+ of latency. The cheapest acceptable option is the OSSC, a custom-made upscaler for retro gaming that costs about $200. Many people who built their setups before OSSCs were easily available use XRGB Minis/Framemeisters, which run about $320 and add very slightly more lag. Both the OSSC and Framemeister expect SCART input, so there's some extra cost there for cables/converters.

After you buy an upscaler, you'll still need a monitor with acceptable latency after all the extra image processing is disabled. The Melee community uses particular models of Asus monitors that people have checked, but it's difficult to find good information on input lag in general because it's not something manufacturers care to advertise. If you're buying new, figure about $200 for something like an Asus VG245H.

Lastly you'll need DVI/HDMI capture and splitting/passthrough. Not an issue if you're already capturing modern consoles, but S-video capture for retro hardware is dirt cheap. A good 60fps HDMI capture setup is easily $100-200.

So, overall it costs $500-600 to replicate the CRT experience from a retro speedrunning perspective and the results are a mixed bag - slightly (although imperceptibly) higher latency but higher video capture quality and some space savings. For comparison, my CRT setup cost $30 for the TV, $35 for a GV-USB2 capture dongle and $20 for a S-video/composite splitter, under $100 total. Unless something happens to make low input lag HDMI more cost-effective, expect retro speedrunners to continue using CRTs as long as they're viable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there an international effort to document and preserve human knowledge so if/when disaster strikes, we can get back on our feet sooner rather than later? In this case the simpler technologies need to be documented with more importance because they will be far easier to reconstruct than more advanced ones.

This might seem like a frivolous effort, but this, along with documenting and conserving the planet's biodiversity are honestly two of the most valuable things humanity can do. We musn't recklessly rush ahead without even planning fallback scenarios or preserving valuable buffers that will cushion the impact of potential setbacks.

<comment><USER4> > Is there an international effort to document and preserve human knowledge so > if/when disaster strikes, we can get back on our feet sooner rather than > later? In this case the simpler technologies need to be documented with more > importance because they will be far easier to reconstruct than more advanced > ones.

This is one of the things I have been thinking about lately a lot. Our current society is very fragile because of all the high tech.

If there is a single large disaster we can be easily thrown back a few decades from a technological point of view because the knowledge of high tech (e.g. creating computer chips, hard drives, ...) is concentrated in a few places. If those places and people are gone then we will have a serious problem.

We are not even able to produce solar cells after a disaster but we have to go back to burning coal and wood for electricity.

There needs to be some sort of book series which teaches our basic knowledge (medicine, electricity, math, physics, ...) in a way that it can be restored rather easily after a large disaster.

<comment><USER5> Physical chips would be a huge starting point to redeveloping computers a second time. The population loss associated with that kind of knowledge loss seems like a much bigger issue.

We need vast economies of scale to continue current chip production. A world population at say 1% our current size would have issues building and maintaining modern equipment.

PS: Also, with a smaller population hydro power would easily meet our energy needs. Long enough to bootstrap wind / solar again.

<comment><USER4> > We need vast economies of scale to continue current chip production

They don't actually need current chips, but recreating something along the lines of an early Z80 would be an enormous win for a society which is rebuilding itself from scratch.

> Long enough to bootstrap wind / solar again.

wind power might be actually better for local development. You just need some magnets and some coils and you have electricity to power a few lightbulbs (well, actually someone has to build lightbulbs or leds...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would suggest that the biggest group to mourn CRT technology would be our feline overlords. I had several cats that used to perch themselves atop a screen, trying to capture my attention and keeping warm but blocking an air vent in the process.

The switch to DVB-T from PAL saw us recycle our last CRT telly. I threw out my Trinitron computer monitor some years earlier. Its sharpness had deteriorated over time. Text became too fuzzy, perhaps something to do with electrons mentioned in the article.

I miss the vertical pixels - 1600x1200 was a standard but LCDs embraced 1080 panels from the Blu-ray craze. Luckily I have a 1024*1280 LCD (rotated) for A4 documents.

<comment><USER4> > I miss the vertical pixels

This HD craze (especially for notebook displays) was one of the worst mistakes in recent computer history!

If I use a computer for reading and writing then I need a lot of vertical space and pixels! I don't care about the width at all!

I own a bunch of old IBM/Lenovo notebooks and I am convinced that a 14" display with a 4:3 aspect ratio (for example 1400 x 1050) is still the best type of display for a portable developers notebook.

Newer Microsoft Surface devices go for a 3:2 aspect ratio but if I would design such a device I would make the screen even more square.

<comment><USER7> Agreed about the "HD craze", _especially_ because of the following facts:

\- "HD" in the context of laptop screens means "1366x768", which is unusable. It's funny that "high definition" means "the lowest resolution available on a PC". It makes explaining to family members which monitor is right for them very hard, because of course "HD" must be a good thing, right?

\- Most entry level laptops come with said resolution (this may be starting to change in the past few years).

\- Businesses, even software development companies, have a hard time understanding that higher resolution monitors are not for gaming or watching movies, but for actual work. In fact, they are _more_ useful for working, because for watching movies a standard "HD" monitor is enough.

<comment><USER8> > "HD" in the context of laptop screens means "1366x768", which is unusable. > It's funny that "high definition" means "the lowest resolution available on > a PC".

Unmodified HD (without "full") generally means 720p for other screens, that's not a "laptop screen" specific quirk. (Well, I guess it is, in that 720p is 1280×720, but you aren't complaining that 1366×768 is a higher resolution than it should be for the bare "HD" label.)

(Also, 1366x768 is not "unusable", and I say that as someone who was habituated to a 1600×1200 desktop display for years before starting to use 1366×768 laptops a lot in parallel with it.)

<comment><USER7> You're right, unmodified HD is 720p for all screens (you have to admit it's funny "HD" means "low res"). It's just that I first encountered this annoying resolution in entry-level laptops. Even more irritating, if you wanted higher res you had to buy a "gaming" laptop, which is ridiculous since for gaming a 720p screen is more than enough.

I'm glad you don't consider it unusable for work, but you're in the minority[1]. The resolution sucks and there's no excuse for it. You can barely work with an IDE and it forces you to use an external monitor -- and I say this as someone who finds the Jeff Atwood "I can't work without 3 external monitors" kind of snobbery irritating.

[1] Likewise, there always used to be someone who didn't mind flickery low refresh rates in CRT monitors. Their opinion can be ignored since pretty much everyone else cares, even when they don't know what's happening and they just know their eyes and head hurt after a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember my parents bought a 32" widescreen CRT HDTV (1080i) back when HD was first becoming a thing. That was the heaviest TV set I've ever had to move in my life.

They offered to give it to me a few years later when they upgraded to an LCD... wish I would have taken it (no idea what happened to it now). It took me forever to find a decent CRT on craigslist for retro gaming :)

<comment><USER10> My brother was a bit of a home theater enthusiast when we were growing up and he bought a widescreen CRT HDTV and you aren't kidding about the weight. It took three of us tumbling it up the stairs just to get it up there (nearly killing us twice). It was a beautiful set he gifted it to me when he upgraded to an HD projector. Used it until I moved out. I wasn't moving that battleship any further than the street by that time LED panels had started coming out.

In retrospect I wish I had hung onto it but with the size and weight it just wasn't possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am surprised that an article on CRT displays mentions John Logie Baird but not Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin. Baird's TV was electromechanical, whereas the Farnsworth/Zworykin designs (the two were competitors) were all- electronic. Zworykin, in particular, is credited with coining the name "Cathode Ray Tube."

</comment><comment><USER12> Will we someday see some low-latency, low-persistence TV screens, like the panels we can find in VR HMDs? These could easily replace most uses for a CRT TV.

What I miss the most on a modern TV or computer screen is the low persistence. Just look at some moving sharp edges on a CRT versus an LCD screen (glxgears, for example). The difference is striking, as you can follow the edges on CRT TVs, but not on a regular screen.

I actually suspect that the 144Hz gaming craze has more to do with persistence than framerate!

<comment><USER13> OLED displays might be the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I miss most about CRTs are accurate light gun video games. I tried Overkill on PS3 and while it was fun, the crosshair positioning was terrible. Rail shooters seem to have vanished into history (much like Ruby on Rails) (I kid! I kid!)

<comment><USER15> The Nintendo Wii's cursor positioning was perfect, and was as intuitive and direct as using a mouse. Instead of having to move a joystick to move your entire view, you just point the remote at an enemy and shoot. I wish the Wii was slightly more powerful so that its FPS games were taken more seriously

<comment><USER16> I'll agree that it's as intuitive as using a mouse. I'll strongly disagree that the cursor positioning was perfect or that "you just point the remote at an enemy and shoot".

Point the Wiimote generally at the screen, waggle it around a while to figure out when the sensor bar is in view, and then use mouse-style relative motion to get it pointed where you want. If I just point it at the TV, I don't know where the cursor will be, but it won't be exactly where I pointed.

A CRT with a lightgun is _much_ more of a point and click situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I still keep a CRT around for my C64 - a little 13" Sony Trinitron. It might see more use once I get around to replacing the electrolytic caps in my SNES and getting it working again.

</comment><comment><USER18> Similar niche business keeping monitors going (catering to contemporary art) in London: [http://www.the-block.org](http://www.the-block.org)

</comment><comment><USER19> Critical for Atari-fans. Some of the old systems, without mods, need cable input or antenna screws.</comment>


I assume I'm below average - <AUTHOR> https://sivers.org/below-average <comment><AUTHOR> Shoot ... I submitted this because I thought it would show me previous submissions. But the last (only?) submission was 10 years ago, so I guess it's OK to have another.

In case you're interested in the discussion from then I've got a link to it, but maybe you'd like to think about it for yourself first.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480002)

</comment><comment><USER2> It's a sane approach, but I forgot who said "even if you know about your biases you're subject to them" (or something along the lines). That's very true IMO.</comment>


Language ⇔ Language Matrix: Compilers to other programming languages - <AUTHOR> http://langlangmatrix.com/

<comment><USER2> No love for clojure?

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't that fall under Java? I think these are all looking at the JVM bytecode (<http://nestedvm.ibex.org/>)

<comment><USER2> It has a column for clojure...</comment></comment></comment>


The Finest Computer Audio Known to Mankind: Motherboard with Vacuum Tube Audio - <AUTHOR> http://rocknerd.co.uk/2002/06/04/the-finest-computer-audio-known-to-mankind/ <comment><USER2> 4 June, 2002

I haven't found one for sale.

someone in 2011 found one in a junk pile

[http://freegeekvancouver.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/audiophile-s...](http://freegeekvancouver.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/audiophile- silliness-now-on-motherboard.html)

You can find USB tube amps in the far east

[https://www.aliexpress.com/tube-sound- card_reviews.html](https://www.aliexpress.com/tube-sound-card_reviews.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, yes, forgot the (2002)!

Yeah, I always figured this terrible idea (it does appear to have been real) never did go anywhere.

I am not surprised you can find any dubious idea on Alibaba ;-)</comment></comment>