Ask HN: Teaching Python to 16 yo as their first PL. Fun projects to get started? - <AUTHOR> This year, I have a class of 12 kids in eleventh grade (in French, we call them "Première") to whom I'm supposed to teach this new "Numerical and Computer Science" class [0].
The program is actually pretty interesting (by school standards). The course used to be in Java, but switched to Python two years ago. It's intended for complete beginners and aims at explaining basic CS concepts through Python.
I'm supposed to give them both individual and small group assignments in Python. I found some stuff on the Internet of course, but do you recommend any website, resource, idea for young newcomers?
[0] https://eduscol.education.fr/cid144156/nsi-bac-2021.html <comment><USER2> My younger brother is in the same age range. He was interested in programming, so I pointed him towards _Automate the Boring Stuff with Python_. He has done well since, with his latest project being a simple mouse-wiggler script that sets his status to "online" for his school's mandatory online attendance checks.

Looking back at the learning process, the most useful parts of _Automate the Boring Stuff with Python_ were the mini-projects: web scraping, GUI automation, and other immediately visible tools that helped a student to build tangible things. Once he had those, my little brother could figure out his own projects, like automating redundant tasks in the video games he plays.

Conversely, the least useful part of the book was its fundamentals. In retrospect I should've started him on a different tool like Codecademy. The instantaneous "correct/incorrect" feedback was a better fit for clearing the initial hurdle in understanding syntax.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Automate the boring stuff_ is definitely great stuff; I started my web scraping through it. However, I feel it may be a little too much for the 12th grade; again, it may be just me, with very late into the programming interest. My experience when giving recommendations is not to make multiple things learn in parallel. It is always easier to start with a project which we routinely do. The idea is to be clear on the process and outcome, and then achieve it in a non-routine process, programming. The approach will help not easily give up the task, and also brings interest. So, maybe you to list out the tasks that the kids usually do or even ask to list down their favorite/routine tasks and guide them through the programmatic approach.

</comment><comment> t-vi Given the societal impact, I think a simple recommender system would be really important. Recommender systems literally shape the world we see.

Poll anything they might have a preference on (and not all the same) - movies, music, internet celebrities or what not - and build a system that asks someone's opinion on 5 things and then outputs suggestions.

I don't think you need anything fancy, but just counting "same entries" in the preference matrix would work to get basic collaborative filtering. Depending on the depth allowed, you can cast that more mathematically and maybe even discuss the idea of rank 1 factorizations (i.e. assign each person / thing a vector and attempt to approximate the matrix entries as scalar products) or optimization of that stuff.

As outlook, you have word2vec that works similar but has the added complication of the matrix being huge. Use that for a information retrieval or toy chat bot or whatever.

I did teach this to non-experts, but not high school kids. I imagine it would work similarly. Unfortunately, I don't know of a website that covers this for school kids.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your reply. I had never thought about that, and never done it myself, but it definitely sounds doable as a final group project!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like to see physical results.

I have a Pi Zero with an environment that can give you temp/pressure/etc and blink LEDs. I also have an automation hat that provides the ability to interface with stepper motors or other things. They use Python. There are quite a few projects related to these online, covering various domains and skill levels.

</comment><comment><USER5> Take a look at using the microbit

[https://microbit.org/get-started/user- guide/python/](https://microbit.org/get-started/user-guide/python/)

Having a hands on project is pretty cool for kids.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have a look, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The course used to be in Java, but switched to Python two years ago.

Why? Are they all comfortable with the english language? Why not find a french language PL and teach them that?

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

I'm guessing all the libraries, documentation, etc would be in french.

> It's intended for complete beginners and aims at explaining basic CS > concepts through Python.

Why would you use a programming language to teach basic CS concepts? Also, does it have to be fun? Must we be having fun at all times?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it doesn't _have_ to, but fun is surely easier! Also, I'm sure there are PL in French but they are a niche, which means less choices, less examples, etc. Plus, it isn't that much of a barrier in Python. In the end, it's easier to find French documentation for an english PL than find a French PL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps a simple website with flask: [https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/1.1.x/quickstart/](https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/1.1.x/quickstart/)

<comment><USER8> But that requires a bit more knowledge beyond just Python, it is not necessarily bad and they can learn a lot from it but it might be to complex.

<comment><USER9> "Hello World" in flask is barely more lines than "Hello World" in the console. If anything it's a good on-ramp for webdev.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My favorite project to give kids who are just dipping their toes in the water is a Madlib. It prompts you for the blank words, then prints out the complete story with the blanks filled.

</comment><comment><USER11> Text adventure! Graphical adventure with PyGame! Program a robot! (My 11yo nephew has decided that his future career lies in programming Mars rovers.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Text adventure could definitely work well! As soon as I talked about the input() function, they were kind of doing that already :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> implement a casino game, roulette or blackjack or guess the weight of the pound cake

<comment><AUTHOR> Very nice idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A text based maze game ala Zork

<comment><USER14> Compare it to Minecraft, not Zork, if you want to capture current 16-year- olds' attention :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A scientific calculator.

<comment><AUTHOR> What functionalities are you thinking about? Proper float handling to prevent the '0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000004' bug? Manual computation of square roots/sinus functions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why not ask the kids?

<comment><USER8> From my experience they don't know where to begin and would come up with suggestions that are way too complex and big

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. However, showing them different projects and ask to pick some of them could work well.</comment></comment></comment>


Intel Kills Larrabee GPU, Will Not Bring a Discrete Graphics Product to Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/3738/intel-kills-larrabee-gpu-will-not-bring-a-discrete-graphics-product-to-market <comment><USER2> ... "at least in the short-term".

As noted in the comments, Larrabee hasn't been killed and I'm not sure there's even any new news about it in this.</comment>


Check out google fast flip - <AUTHOR> http://www.loudable.com/flip-latest-updates-with-google-fast-flip.html

<comment><USER2> The page images are a little too small so it's not very useful in it's present form. However if they made the images expand with a mouseover it would be pretty cool.</comment>


Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-07/it-s-like-reddit-without-the-trolls <comment><USER5> I am staggered by the amount of people here who object to Imzy's "Be Nice"-policy on the basis that it limits free speech. To me that seems to be a rather flawed argumentation:

a) The First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, explicitly does so in a political context ("Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech"). Imzy is not the US Congress, they don't have jurisdiction over anything but their own little niche of the Internet (which absolutely _nobody_ is forcing you to visit if you don't want to) - <USER2> why are you upset when they ask you, within the bounds of their community, to be nice?

b) Why does free speech mean that we get to insult and demean each other, even going so far as to sending death threats? I think the German constitution (the _Grundgesetz_ ) has a point when it says in Article 5, §2 that the right of free speech is limited, amongst others, by every person's right of dignity ("Recht der persönlichen Ehre" \- a hard to translate concept).

c) On Reddit and like sites we see behaviour that we would never tolerate if we saw it in real life. Why do we not only tolerate it online, but suddenly elevate such antisocial behaviour of the extremest kind to a mystical status of "expression of free speech"? There is a reason we are taught "manners" as children: without a minimum of politeness, societies cannot function. Politeness and courtesy have to do with respecting another's person even if you don't share his (or her) opinions, with tolerating people who are different from you. And is that not the very epitome of freedom?

Free speech is perhaps the most fundamental right of any democracy that must be protected at all costs. It is vital for the continuation of a free nation. However, Imzy is not a nation. It is a little website on the Internet. And it doesn't ban dissenting opinion (the real reason why we need free speech) - <USER3> merely asks you to remain polite while stating your's. So what is your problem with it?

<comment><USER6> Well, lets say you know someone who is a legit flat earther. You're not going to change their mind, because such a belief is unreasonable, but if you attempt to reason with them you elevate their social status and accidentally lend credence to them. This is the Fox News "fair and balanced" model -- if you give equal time to both viewpoints, even if one viewpoint is nuts, people will assume that there's a rational debate being had.

HN, for all its good parts, tends to be humorless. I would argue that humor can work as an immune system to bad ideas. When someone says something really stupid, often the best response really is mockery. You wont convince the person you're making fun of, but it can settle a debate pretty fast. Humor doesn't have to be mean to be funny, but sometimes it is. "Be Nice" policies tends to lead to communities that lack this useful sociological immune system, and it can drive out the smart people, to the point where you have a lot of "nice" people arguing some very dumb points.

<comment><USER7> What would you do in real-life? Would you make a mockery of them? Or would you simply ignore them?

I find a lot of people (on both sides) will do things online behind the shield of anonymity they wouldn't otherwise in real life.

I find this behaviour cowardly.

Would you confront these people in real life, and mock them to their faces? I suspect a lot of people who do it online wouldn't in real life (if for no other reason than they'd get punched in the face).

I'm not saying we can't argue with people, or be direct - however, there are lines you don't cross (and I feel Reddit often crosses those lines). You can be upfront, and honest about your beliefs without being a jerk.

<comment><USER6> > What would you do in real-life? Would you make a mockery of them? Or would > you simply ignore them?

I guess it depends on the context right? I remember in college there used to be these religious fanatics that would loudly berate strangers in the plaza; whenever someone would walk up and try to "debate" them, it would just make things worse, but sometimes someone would just say something really funny and the mood of the whole crowd would change and the extremely aggressive obnoxious fanatic would end up packing it in early or going for a new tactic. (Maybe not immediately, but it did seem to have an impact overall)

My point isn't like, go pick on people, that would suck, I'm just saying that humor is a really useful tool sometimes. Self-serious "be nice" policies can remove those tools and give some unreasonable people a nice cloud of cover to haunt places.

Maybe a different metaphor is better. A good community is like a garden. Nobody likes pesticide, but sometimes if you have a pest problem... It's all a judgement call right. "Be nice" policies only work if you can assume the other people you're interacting with are reasonable, and that's not really always true.

<comment><USER8> It all makes sense, however i don't like metaphors that compare people with opinions to pests (insects don't have opinions afaik), a metaphor like this is dehumanizing your opponents - it is a very bad metaphor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lot's "but this isn't free speech" in here, but that's exactly the point, free speech has been tried and it leads to shit holes like reddit and voat. Places you might visit, but wouldn't recommend or even admit to using in a mixed group.

People talk about free speech like it's some goal, but in reality all people seem to do with it is make fun of fat people and post stolen naked pictures of celebrities.

When confronted with the fact that this isn't acceptable behavior, even if you specifically don't ban them, they will threaten you with death and ddos your site.

"Voat has been under constant DDoS [distributed denial of service] attacks almost since Day One. At one point, our servers were shut down by our ISP without notice. We even received death threats."

Instead of lowering the bar and getting surprised when people fling shit, Imzy is trying the opposite.

Will it work, no idea, but free speech as much talk as it gets doesn't work out as well as some people like to pretend it does.

<comment><USER10> > People talk about free speech like it's some goal, but in reality all people > seem to do with it is make fun of fat people and post stolen naked pictures > of celebrities.

All people do in reality ... if for some reason you choose to disregard the huge number of fairly autonomous communities on Reddit?

If I used that ultra-broad brush for HN, I'd say that all commenters here seem to do is post links to xkcd 927 and the wiki page for ad-hom.

<comment><USER11> The problem with Reddit (the company) is that it chooses to _represent_ its service as a single community, and thus allows all of its communities to be tarred by the same brush.

If Reddit was more like, say, StackExchange, or Wordpress.com, or Discourse—a _hosting site_ for "communities" which happened to use the "Reddit engine"—then it wouldn't have nearly the PR problem it has now. Nobody blames Wordpress.com for the content of somebody's blog hosted there.

<comment><USER12> I think reddit accurately represents the fact that _both_ factors are present, lots of specific communities and also a larger reddit-wide community. At least I was never confused about that.

<comment><USER11> Right, it's clear enough "from the inside" as an experienced user. But from the _outside_ , people (e.g. journalists) just talk about "Reddit" as one place. Reddit Corp issues administrative policies for the site as if in complete ignorance of this public perception.

There is a reason WordPress has the .com/.org split, and it's not just that large customers demand to self-host. That could have resulted in something more like GitHub Enterprise, but instead you see a well-supported FOSS offering. Why? Because this split allows _WordPress.com_ to maintain a very strict TOS that disallows many types of content, while still allowing other people who don't want to adhere to those policies to "run on WordPress" easily by using the WordPress.org software either directly or through third-party hosts.

If Reddit was smart, the "Reddit engine" would be a well-supported, easy to install FOSS offering like WordPress.org, and there would be a healthy ecosystem of third-party hosts running that software. Voat would just be "Yet Another Reddit-as-Service Provider", instead of a competitor and political statement.

As it is, the Reddit engine is an effectively-unsupported blob of code that needs tons of other heavy dependencies to get it running. The only site I know running a copy of the Reddit engine is LessWrong—and they've heavily forked it for their own purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I signed up on their website, went through the onboarding flow and joined a couple of communities. Without them knowing anything about my political leanings they suggested a bunch of anti-Trump communities. I guess they're not trying to solve the "filter bubble" issue, but rather becoming the Reddit for liberals? I mean it's their business for them to run as they like, but I hope somebody can take us past the Breitbart vs Huffington Post dichotomy.

<comment><USER14> It sounds like a fair amount of statements directly made by Trump on the campaign trail (mocking a disabled person, telling people to check out the "sex tape" of a former Miss universe he didn't like, many other statements) would themselves not be allowed on this site, so it's not surprising it would be naturally anti-Trump. I highly doubt it would have any such attitudes towards people like Jeb Bush or Rand Paul who are decidedly not liberal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand how commenters generalize about Reddit: the is no Reddit, only subreddits - each of which is moderated in a different way. I moderate /r/Africa we deal with speech mercilessly. /r/askScience or /r/askHistorians have even stricter policies. On the other hand, there are subreddits which are most definitely hateful... But I never go there. In the middle, I'm still subscribed to /r/Europe which is a battleground... I won't give it up and I do not see how any amount of moderation could make it better: politics are all about conflicting ideas !

<comment><USER16> > the is no Reddit, only subreddits - each of which is moderated in a > different way

I was banned for 2 days on the whole platform for following a link to Voat, another link back to Reddit and downvoting a guy who was copy/pasting the same comment all over the thread. (Reddit is surprisingly link-sharing adverse for a site based on link sharing)

Reddit exists through the abuses and policies of its administrators. It's not a generic forum platform and I don't think it ever was.

<comment><USER17> Voat is where the groups who were kicked off of reddit (pizzagate, jailbait, c --ntown and the rest of the "chimpire", fph) go to organize brigades off-site. It doesn't surprise me in the least that reddit bans people participating in off-site brigading activity, especially from Voat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been using imzy since very early on, and I have to say, I really like the idea of it. The basic premise is basically: "do whatever but play nice". And if you don't play nice you get modded and eventually kicked out.

I can get behind that TBH.

Also, to be sure, they do have some growing pains to go through. There are too many empty communities at this point (they should've started with fewer high- traffic ones). And the website perf isn't as fast as Reddit or HN. But I'm sure that will get worked out over time...

<comment><USER19> I didn't see this as their basic premise. Their basic premise seems to hinge on the idea of "tipping people's niceness". If I am nice and helpful, then I should expect to earn a penny. And I should do the same to others.

That's actually very similar to the plot of Black Mirror's Nosedive episode.

I tried to hang on there but I didn't find much motivation to "earn anything". I am not even sure why I should reward anyone there.

<comment><USER20> >Their basic premise seems to hinge on the idea of "tipping people's niceness".

This isn't actually true. Some news article decided that was our basic premise because it made a good clickbait headline. Our tipping system is the beginning of a larger business model that we hope to implement in the future.

[https://medium.com/imzyhq/why-imzy-doesnt-have-ads-and- what-...](https://medium.com/imzyhq/why-imzy-doesnt-have-ads-and-what-we-re- doing-instead-ff3f1cb8c3c4#.998jlpam4)

We don't want to have advertisements on the site, and the tipping system is part of our strategy to avoid that.

<comment><USER19> Isn't the business model the real premise? Without which, you won't be able to self-sustain, which then renders any other supposed premise, useless.

<comment><USER21> I think for more community-run sites, the business model is not the real premise.

No one would say that the real premise of Wikipedia is collecting donations.

<comment><USER19> But Wikipedia proves that the real premise is not sustainable if they don't collect donations.

So whether one defines the hierarchy of premises or not, the fact of the matter is that the intention matters. The intention of Imzy seems to be that they want to stand against Reddit, and their stand out qualification is for people to be nice via reward-system. Now here I am not going to go into the argument of whether reward systems should be used for adults...but it is one of their premise for sure.

<comment><USER20> I'm saying that literally no where do we say that people should "tip each other for being nice", nor do we have some sort of reward system based on that. That is entirely a thing invented by clickbait headlines.

From the medium article I linked:

>Most of you know you can tip posts, comments, and communities on Imzy. It was important to us that we include our payments platform in some way from day one, and this was the simplest way to do it. You can give any community, post, or comment a reward for great content that you really appreciate. But that is just the tiniest little seed of what's to come.

That is what got misconstrued into "tipping people for being nice."

To use something you might be familiar with, reddit has reddit gold. It gives some minor perks, and you can gift it to other people. Reddit calls this "gilding". People gild some pretty ridiculous and even awful content all the time. The idea that we would institute a tipping system (which in some ways could be seen as analogous to gilding, except with real money) and just magically everyone would use it for "being nice" simply doesn't make sense, and would have been a pretty odd idea on our part.

A lot of times folks want to tip content creators and others. We wanted to give them a way to do this. We have a bunch of other stuff planned for the payment system in the future, as outlined in that Medium piece.

Hopefully this clarifies some.

<comment><USER19> So I am not really a regular Reddit user, nor do I even participate there (I subscribe my selected content there via RSS).

When I joined Imzy, the very first thing I was told, was to use this reward system. But you are saying that it is just a tinniest part of the whole. To me, it seems contradictory because otherwise a tinniest part wouldn't stand out up front.

I am not necessarily against this system (tiny or otherwise), but Imzy clearly seems to have an issue establishing its narrative properly. I recently read or heard somewhere, that it is psychologically proven, that if you tell someone what to do, they won't like it (or they'd do the opposite). You give people unconditional choice, and they won't go home regretting, even if they'd do what you want them to do anyway.

<comment><USER20> >I recently read or heard somewhere, that it is psychologically proven, that if you tell someone what to do, they won't like it (or they'd do the opposite).

Have you found stop signs working that way? There was a crash at a stop sign near my house tonight. Perhaps the people were just psychologically driven to ignore the stop sign because of science.

I don't really understand what you're talking about with "unconditional choice." Yes, you have a choice to run a stop sign. That choice has the consequence of potentially killing you or other people. Yes, you will get your drivers license taken away if you are constantly driving around yelling "screw the man!" and running every stopsign you see because of some strange notion of "unconditional choice" to run stopsigns.

No you can't start a racist hate mob on our platform. That should go without saying, but for some reason that is considered "novel" to some folks on the internet.

Regarding the tipping system, we're not forcing anyone to use it. Only a small amount of our users use it, and that is totally fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The only internet community that I've ever seen achieve a set of rules that are followed by the community has been somethingawful.com. And while there's lots of criticism you can lay on them, they've maintained a culture and community for nearly two decades.

They did this by making accounts to comment cost money, a one-time $10 fee. If you troll, you get banned and you need to pay $10 again to get your account back. It's a simple and brilliant solution- those who are good members of the community pay the least and those who make the community worse pay the most.

<comment><USER23> Most of the early Somethingawful community is long gone, broken into splinter sites that look more like SA did in its early days. It's now populated with people who are ok with the heavy handed mods enforcing their views through bans. It's also a mostly irrelevant site now, when compared to how fundamental it was to early internet culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Internet has such an enormous potential in terms of fostering cross- boundary communication, the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, and all the rest of it. It makes me sad to see once again that the greatest thing preventing it from really fulfilling that potential is that we can't stop adults from behaving like kindergarteners. Why is it so difficult to get people to abide by the basic rules of human decency and civility?

<comment><USER24> And yet, whether you realize it or not, you learned things from people that are "behaving like kindergartners". It might even be as basic as seeing examples of how not to behave.

Censorship is not the answer.

<comment><USER5> I learnt how not to behave because my parents taught me that everybody deserves at least a minimum of respect. How is it censorship to ask people to behave themselves?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know some subreddits have "be kind and respectful" built into their rules, but this is often gamed by some redditors who will make carefully worded passive aggressive statements at ideological opponents and then quickly call for banning them when they react. There are also moderation issues with volunteer moderators sometimes using different standards of "kind and gentle" based on whether they agreed with the views of given posters. It seems hard to maintain standards like "kind and gentle" in any objective manner.

<comment><USER26> I think you've hit on the core issue here. Whilst I abhor some of the hatred and viciousness posted online, and think it's absurd to try to turn it into a free speech issue, I can understand the benefit of no censorship: drawing the line, consistently, is very, very difficult - maybe impossible. But even reddit draws a line (US law?), so there's no getting away from it.

Does anyone here advocate 'free speech' so strongly that they wouldn't mind someone posting their personal details or naked photos online? I'm sure _some_ people are so thick-skinned that they could handle that, but I certainly couldn't.

<comment><USER27> Non-consensual sexualization (like upskirts, revenge porn, kiddie porn) gets rationalized as free speech by assholes for whom it is personally self-serving to do so.

Free speech is about being able to have and communicate about ideas that may be against the status quo. It's not about harming people. It's a clear boundary that has been held up both judicially and culturally time and time again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Am I limiting free speech if I kick out some racist, hate spewing bully from my house because I don't want to listen to their nonsense? No. It is just common sense and how the 'real' world works. Why should the online world be any different? If there are a few destructive people affecting the experience of the majority lets just kick them out and not deal with them anymore. Problem solved. They don't have the right to ruin the experience of the majority in the name of free speech.

<comment><USER27> Free speech just for white men isn't free speech at all. When you don't kick out the racist bully, they turn your space into one that is exclusionary toward minorities. Do you shut up some idiots who have nothing but purely harmful things to say, or all people of color?

<comment><USER29> > Free speech just for white men isn't free speech at all.

What you're describing here doesn't exist on any mainstream websites. On the other hand, there are plenty of women-only or PoC-only subreddits, for example. So while what you're saying is true, I'm not really sure why it's relevant.

> exclusionary

You're creating a false equivalence between two different concepts of "exclusion"; one is actual enforced exclusion (like banning people whose opinions you don't like) and the other is when someone gets their feelings hurt because they don't like what's being said on a website.

> Do you shut up some idiots who have nothing but purely harmful things to > say, or all people of color?

You're doing it again. "Shut up" means, in one case, banning people, and in the other case, when they (hypothetically) choose to leave of their own accord because they don't like the community.

<comment><USER27> There are a number of subreddits for women or people of color that have been very articulate about precisely this problem. They are assaulted on an ongoing basis in a way that most communities full of white men never have to worry about. That is an affront to free speech.

It's not about feelings. People don't tend to swim upstream when searching for community. Why should they? If a platform demonstrates over and over that it lacks both the will and means to protect marginalized communities from personal and private abuse, then its demographics will remain significantly white and male, and they will set the tone for what is normal and permissible rather than the people who are at risk.

Choosing to favor no one is not a choice that's available to us, because it's effectively choosing the most exclusionary voice.

<comment><USER30> TwoXChromosomes deals with this a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hate speech, bullying, none of that shit needs to be protected speech. It's not as delicate or complicated as people who generally aren't on the receiving end of it try to make it out to be.

<comment><USER25> You're right, in many cases, hate speech and bullying are obvious and can be easily spotted. But there are always grey areas and disagreements where eradicating hate speech and bullying can also end up getting rid of speech with valid political dimensions.

One sort of obvious case where important speech was classified as harmful is facebook's recent spat with the prime minister of Norwary over them censoring the famous photo of "Napalm girl," a young, naked Vietnamese girl running naked in the streets from a Napalm attack.

<comment><USER27> The presence of grey areas does not invalidate the entire concept of "fuck off, nazis."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >Zork created an Imzy community about debunking falsehoods, mostly political ones. It's got 3,000 members and no trolls.

This just seems like a way of saying "people who agree agree with me." In any controversial topic determing who is a troll at the margins of discussion is very difficult.

<comment> nommm-nommm Yeah, its impossible.

Say I post "black people are subhuman." I could be trolling (intentionally provoking emotional responses for the lulz) or that could be my _actual honest to goodness opinion_. You just don't know. There's also no polite way to express that opinion and that's the same for many, many opinions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Somehow I think an open community can't be nice if it's anonymous. Not that all communities have to be anonymous (far from that), but if you want self- restraint then you need to revoke anonymity. I don't see how else that would work. At least a semi-anonymous system. For example one where a seed pool of people are chosen to be a part of the community and have them invite and be responsible for a certain number of child/invites. If one of the invites and their invites screws up, whole branch suffers or something.

<comment><USER33> > Somehow I think an open community can't be nice if it's anonymous

Facebook comments have demonstrated that having your real name attached to your internet comments does exactly nothing to stop people from saying awful things. It's a moderate deterrent at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's interesting what a difference there is in people's perspectives. To me, Reddit seems excruciatingly polite and well-mannered, often to the point of dishonesty. This is probably because I've been to 4chan and similar places.

<comment><USER35> As a frequent channer I find Reddit a hugbox of insulating opinions and gaming the karma system (To the point where commentary can be as trite as shitty dad- tier jokes). The benefit of 4chan and company is that once the identity is stripped away (and a filter for callous remarks created) a user is actually free to speak their mind.

Sometimes this develops into meaningful posts, othertimes it ends up as a mess of shitposting. But the freedom is there and it is wonderful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Just one question: If a muslim says gay people should not be allowed to be married or a teacher or whatever, is this allowed?

<comment><USER37> What does being Muslim have to do with it? People of any religion are free to express their opinion on gay marriage. Now if they said all gay people should be stoned, that would be another thing.

> You are still welcome to express your opinions, even if they are offensive > to some users. We want honest and open discussion to happen on Imzy from all > sides. However, these opinions cross the line into malicious speech when > they specifically incite violence or hatred, or make people fear you will > act against them in a violent manner. We reserve the right to remove > anything overtly malicious.

That said, each community has its own moderation policy on top of it. So people expressing an opinion the community leaders deem unacceptable may be banned from the specific community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > It's like Reddit, without the trolls

That's HN.

<comment><USER39> Reddit definitely does not have the tech focus hn does. Maybe it did in the long past, but not anymore. Definitely not a substitute for Reddit content without the trolls.

<comment><USER40> It makes no sense to talk about Reddit and HN as if they had the same scope. It would be more appropriate to compare HN to a particular subreddit.

<comment><USER41> There was a time when Reddit did not have subreddits (or even the ability to comment). During this time, Reddit's community was very much like HN is currently. It was mostly techy people who found Digg was getting a little too "low brow". It may not have been explicitly tech focused, but it may as well have been.

<comment><USER42> HN was delibrately set up to be "what reddit was at the start"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's a neat site. First thing I noticed when I made an account was that they already have a place to setup a Payment method. Is it just me or is that a bit strange?

<comment><USER44> One of the features of Imzy is that you can "tip" other users. If someone creates something that you like, posts a good link, or makes a great comment, you can tip them.

You can read more about that here: [https://medium.com/imzyhq/why-imzy-doesnt- have-ads-and-what-...](https://medium.com/imzyhq/why-imzy-doesnt-have-ads-and- what-we-re-doing-instead-ff3f1cb8c3c4#.5uhs7i9yl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Imzy sounds interesting. The questions is how well the rules are written and enforced. If the rules are just "be nice," then the community may be pleasant, but it will be rife for censorship of any sort of dispute, establishment of "safe spaces," etc.

I've been through reddit, usenet, and the _chans, and I 'm part of the programming culture (one perhaps more acidic than most), so I do detest censorship. (ie, you can't say that sort of thing/express that sort of opinion here). But that doesn't seem to be where Imzy is coming from. The use of a _chan/usenet style most recent system as opposed to reddit-style voting also shows that Imzy seems to have a good understanding of how corrosive "internet points" can be.

Community moderation can be a good thing. HN and 4chan are living proof. And if your criticism is "but my freedom of speech," xkcd.com/1357/ gives the explanation for why that's wrong.

Basically, I think that if Imzy is well-run, it could be a very good site (just like the good parts of reddit). However, if it's poorly run, it will end up as an endless cycle of agreement, with any dissent leading to an immidiate ban. Time will tell.

There are plenty of sites out there for those who wish to express themselves freely. Well-moderated sites are considerably rarer, and we could use another one.

But hey, maybe I'm crazy.

<comment><USER37> Well here are the rules: [https://www.imzy.com/community- policy](https://www.imzy.com/community-policy)

I think those are fairly clear. Granted there are always going to be grey areas. I agree that effective moderation is hard. I'm sure the site admins are cognizant of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Hmm, perhaps the intent is noble (or not, depending on your perspective), but historically products like this have failed in the past (and I am not trying to be needlessly critical, but just provide some feedback and perhaps a warning). "I want to make product X, but with different ethical standards" is not enough of a selling point for most people. It is hard enough to entice people away from a popular platform even when you are adding new, desired features. Happy to be proven wrong here.

As I have said many times before, I have found EVERY form of feedback to be valuable, even the most seemingly poisonous feedback. A simple 3 line response to any of your harshest critics will often turn them in to fans, or at least neutral, if you approach them with humility and respect (i.e. admit that their criticism has some degree of truth, and try to explain to them how you are attempting to work around the problem).

The internet is not a good place to be emotionally fragile, especially when you are willingly putting yourself out there. I am not expecting human behavior to change any time soon so I'd rather help people understand that they are talking to real people on the internet, instead of just filtering them out. Of course, that is strictly a personal preference, I would not blame others for thinking differently. :)

As for all the trolls and nasty internet content, I have no problem with it to be honest. It will exist somewhere if not on Reddit, and I never encounter it on Reddit anyhow (within my subreddits at least). Moderators tend to do a pretty good job of keeping their respective communities clean. On the rare occasion where I do encounter it somewhere, I just ignore it. Why waste my mental energy?

</comment><comment><USER47> 37signals did research on this. For a respectful community, start with a difficult-to-attain, invite-only profile where a person has to show a real, verified profile pic and post their also verified name. More like ASW. Anonymous positing is useful for exposing misdeeds of power or be more honest than one would otherwise self-censor; anonymity is no panacea either.

"Safe-space" utopias never scale: there will be SJW bickering and whining and/or extreme self-censorship which will lead to an extremely boring (and irrelevant) platform. Plus, online platforms never have to guarantee free speech... they're businesses and organizations which can choose to do just about whatever they like within various, regional legal limits.

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't think this would be a really successful model.

For one, once this scales, it's either gonna cost a ton to moderate unless you have it do people voluntarily, in which case you'll get moderators that don't care or alternatively you won't scale.

On second, I'm having serious doubts if such a community could grow a honest and public forum wherein opinions and statements are calmly discussed and properly evaluated.

Especially the second one is a huge problem, it makes any discussion platform essentially worthless, no matter how hard you try to be nice.

</comment><comment><USER49> Which of the following are considered "free speech"? The term means different things to different people.

Some examples: (The first 3 are material-based, the last 3 seem are person- based (is there a better word for that?))

* State an opposing/unpopular view

* Refute a forum posting with facts

* Refute a posting with lies (a recent hot topic)

* Insult a specific person, libel, defame their reputation

* Death threats against "enemies", inciting a mob against a person/business/group

* DOXing your enemies or opposing moderators, hacking their accounts, destroying data.

</comment><comment><USER50> But that's the part of Redditch that makes it awesome... It's unfiltered.

</comment><comment><USER23> So what they really mean is "Reddit without anyone who will disagree with your sophomoric views on politics" it seems. It's people's choice if they want to dig into a non-threatening bubble, but it's fairly sad. You don't grow by surrounding yourself with people just like you.

<comment><USER51> I've used reddit for around 10 years now and the past 3 or so it has become a seriously hate filled place full of awful people. It makes me a worse person when I interact regularly there these days so I rarely do.

If people on the other side of the political spectrum to me can't express their views without being rude or mean than honestly I don't care about their opinions. Is that living in a bubble? No it is choosing not to interact with people that I consider to be jerks. It's only living in a bubble if you let some social network define your life.

What I find sad is how upset people are getting here at the idea that not everyone wants to deal with them. It's like there is a surprise that there has been a backlash against jerks and all the jerks are sitting around complaining about no one wanting to be friends with them anymore and how the other people are jerks for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The site attracted Lena "kill all white men" Dunham. Ooohkay...

</comment><comment><USER53> Random question, what does it take to get an advertisement in a major paper? I suppose as long as you are part of the "in" crowd, any site/app/service you build will garner a free article for publicity?

<comment><USER54> Send a press release with a compelling story. Make it something they can use more or less verbatim. Phone to check they got it, try to find out who to talk to about it. Ideally know an insider who can help you. Repeat for other major papers.

It probably doesn't hurt if your story is that a major competitor to the mainstream news orgs is run for the benefit of misogynists and paedophiles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> 'Imzy', the name is a bit hard to pronounce.

<comment><USER56> That's what you get when you name with this criteria:

 _the name means nothing; it was an available URL without copyright issues_

<comment><USER57> That said, it sounds very appropriate a name for an IM service, and if people were asked to guess without knowing about the site, that would probably be their first guess.

<comment><USER58> I think I'd guess it's a mixture of "image" \+ "etsy", or maybe a pinterest clone (image-zy).

To me an issue with the name is it has no obvious non-awkward member name: Redditor sounds good; Voater quite reasonable; but is it Imzer? Imzier? Imzy- er? none of which trip off the tongue.

<comment><USER51> Could be like SA where it isn't made of up the name of the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Why can't a forum cater to everybody? E.g., you could hide troll comments using a filter.

<comment><USER60> I'm wary of any type of moderation. I don't know how it can be done, but it's very apparent that reddit has lots of moderation _(within subs)_ and it seems to heavily promote echo chambers.

I fear we won't make any major advancements until AI can accurately measure our intent, snark, etc. Because we need to not be echo chambers, imo. Unpopular opinions are amazing and needed. But the assholes, for any cause, only serve to detract from the discussion.

I really dislike echo chambers.. and it's all i see these days.

<comment> nommm-nommm >I'm wary of any type of moderation.

Even moderation that only removes spam? How about off topic posts?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> The original has a hell of a linkbait title (at least when it comes to audiences with ardor for internet fora) so we changed it in accordance with the HN guidelines.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment><comment><USER62> Curious why this was flagged.

<comment><USER61> Users flagged it. They don't tell us why, so we don't know why. It may have been the title, so we changed it to the subtitle.

<comment><USER63> _It may have been the title, so we changed it to the subtitle._

Switching titles based on flags doesn't sound like a very efficient approach. Maybe you could add a text box or a pulldown for a private comment to the moderators when flagging? Requesting a reason for a flag doesn't seem like too much of a burden, and seems like it would make you much more productive when reviewing. And as a user, it would be nice to have a way to clearly flag "dupes", "broken links", "typo in title", etc. without worrying about being misinterpreted. Would also be nice to be able to suggest alternative titles or URL's in some easy "out of band" manner rather than in a comment or email.

<comment><USER61> We bat that idea around from time to time and may try it. If we do, though, it will be a way that preserves the option of rolling it back if it doesn't pay for its supper. I fear increasing complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This story got flagged off the front page of HN. Strange?

<comment><USER65> HN is doing some "no politics week" to "cleanse themselves".

<comment><USER5> "No politics week" is over ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I'd say censorship is a bigger issue than trolls. Creating safe spaces to protect you from other views isn't going to make them go away.

<comment><USER67> I am not a user of Imzy, so I don't know how they choose to censor, but I don't see how censorship necessarily means living in a bubble.

Take a look at Reddit, where the /r/The_Donald, is just spam, shitposting and fake rumors, nothing to learn. On the other hand, there are subs like /r/AskThe_Donald/ which are very interesting.

IMHO banning communities like /r/The_Donald while encouraging the ones similar like /r/AskThe_Donald, would create a much better place, where you don't live in a bubble, without having to deal with people that just want to spam, shitpost and "trigger".

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I guess most of the world could live in safe spaces like this?

But for the creators and doers it's horrific.

We move forward by being challenged. That includes everything.

(until AI has the ability to filter out things that challenge but don't move us forward)

<comment><USER69> If by safe spaces you mean places where people of colour aren't subjected to racism, gay people aren't subjected to homophobia and women aren't subjected to misogyny, then I fail to see how any of these types of attack would help anyone "move forward", even "creators".

<comment><USER13> A safe space was originally a place where you could have a discussion about anything. A transgender individual could sit down with say an evangelical pastor and have an honest discussion about issues they disagree on without ad hominem attacks, fear of saying the wrong thing, etc. Somehow Safe Spaces came to be regarded as a place safe from anything remotely controversial, which hinders having conversation with people on the other side of the divide.

<comment><USER69> The problem here is that we don't have a fixed definition of this relatively new concept. Your description here of safe spaces as places devoid of controversy does not match up with my experience of encountering the concept in the world and online. As I said, for me it means a place where prejudices are not expressed in (in your words) ad hominem attacks, not a place where complex, innovative thinking is forbidden. I'm not saying my experience of the concept is right and yours is wrong, but the fact is this discussion is bound to end in mutual confusion from the get-go given our differing understandings of 'safe space'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This is the opposite of why people are leaving reddit. Neat idea, but misguided.

<comment><USER37> It's the opposite of why some people are leaving Reddit.

But judging by the number of people who have come to the site from Reddit, it's clear that it is the reason a lot of people are leaving Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Boy, just what I wanted, another hugbox where I can feel good about my views without someone challenging them. Sign me up! /s

</comment><comment><USER72> Places like this tend to show the hypocrisy of the average leftist when it comes to free speech, though. When free speech benefits them by weakening social norms (especially religious ones), they champion it, but the moment free speech starts to subvert the new liberal norms they put in to replace it, suddenly we get arguments about how free speech is a limited concept and pleas to rediscover civility and tolerance.

So much of discourse honestly is bullshit, and no, this place isn't immune either. Replace "free speech" with "disruption" to get this place's hypocrisy too. Oh, let's trumpet the sharing economy, whose purpose is to disrupt and ignore law in order to give urban programmers benefit, but when some employer decides to disrupt employment law by discriminating against older techies or native born ones, and the same thing happens.

It's all about self-interest in the end. I'd rather a reddit style community that tolerates all self-interest than one that claims to be encouraging civility when it's really something else.

<comment><USER73> There is just about nobody anywhere on the political spectrum that believes in absolute free speech, people simply support speech that falls within their ideological boundaries. The criteria for obscenity on the left is sexism and bigotry, the criteria for obscenity on the right is blasphemy and criticism of traditions. If someone takes a knee during the national anthem conservatives will say that person should be fired and naturally liberals defend that as free speech. If someone addresses a transgender woman as "he" liberals will say that person should be fired and naturally conservatives defend that as free speech.

When it comes to the selective protection of free speech, accusing any particular side of hypocrisy only reveals the bias of your particular political perspective.

<comment> nommm-nommm >If someone takes a knee during the national anthem conservatives will say that person should be fired and naturally liberals defend that as free speech. If someone addresses a transgender woman as "he" liberals will say that person should be fired and naturally conservatives defend that as free speech.

Isn't it possible to defend it as free speech AND say that person should be fired? Something like "its their right to say it/do it but it shows their "true character."? You can both support free speech and also want a person to accept the consequences of what they do or say.

I mean, I wouldn't personally fire anyone for those social transgressions but I can see how if I had certain world views I would see each person as less trustworthy or less desirable as an employee or coworker.

<comment><USER73> Threatening someone's livelihood based on their speech is about as antithetical to the idea of free speech as you can get (short of suggesting they should be arrested or killed for it).

It might be different in a situation where the speech reveals a critical incompetency for an important job (like a judge who suggests certain races deserve harsher punishments or an MD that suggests homeopathy is a viable alternative to chemotherapy etc), but in the general case, if we accept loss of livelihood as a consequence for uncomfortable speech it is a tacit endorsement of censorship.

<comment> nommm-nommm Oh give me a break. It's free speech to be rude to other people. Being rude to customers and coworkers will get you fired. Censorship! Being in the news for being a huge dick outside of work, like the ESPN reporter was (she was caught on camera berating a clerk) will get you fired. You cannot have some sort of meaningful distinction. You MUST own up and take responsibility for your actions. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from responsibility and accountability. It doesn't mean freedom from any and all consequences.

This entitlement BS really annoys me.

<comment><USER73> > _Being rude to customers and coworkers will get you fired._

Being fired because you're rude to customers or coworkers is obviously not a free-speech issue, that is a "disruption to the work environment" issue.

> _Being in the news for being a huge dick outside of work, like the ESPN > reporter was (she was caught on camera berating a clerk) will get you > fired._

Once again, not a free-speech issue. If your job is to represent an organization as a professional public figure and you tarnish your public image by acting like a dick in public, that is clearly a situation where you cannot do your job effectively and so it makes sense that you might be fired.

> _You MUST own up and take responsibility for your actions. Freedom of speech > doesn 't mean freedom from responsibility and accountability._

That's an oft repeated platitude that doesn't really add much to the discussion because just about everyone agrees with that statement. If one's actions are causing a disruption at work or bad publicity for one's employer, it's natural that those actions might jeopardize one's job. What I'm talking about is calling for someone to be fired after they say things you disagree with as punishment for saying those things; the distinction between that and the former is that the employer's actions can be justified without taking into account whether or not the employer agrees with the employees speech, at the end of the day if you're bad for business the employer is not obligated to endure the burden of your choices, however, when individuals seek to get others fired because they dislike their speech or ideas, _that_ is antithetical to the notion of free speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I will probably try this, out since Reddit seems unwilling to address corruption in its management.

Wondering how free speech issues will play out here.

<comment><USER75> free speech is moving to voat and gab this site is not advertising itself as a free speech zone more like a polite speech zone

<comment><USER40> Voat does not really support free speech, as per their user agreement:

        You may not use Voat to break the law, violate an individual's privacy,
        or infringe any person or entity's intellectual property or any other
        proprietary rights.

(...)

        You agree to not post anyone's sensitive personal information that relates to
        that person's real world or online identity. Do Not Incite Harm: You agree
        not to encourage harm against people. Protect Kids: You agree not to post
        any child pornography or sexually suggestive content involving minors.

No site which recognizes the authority of laws prohibiting content or expression of any kind truly supports free speech. When most people say free speech it seems what they really mean is a degree of censorship that doesn't interfere with them personally.

<comment><USER76> Free speech doesn't mean "anything goes even if illegal"

<comment><USER40> To me, it does. Free speech is an upper bound on human expression - <USER4> less than absolute is something less than "free."

I'm not advocating for this - sites should police certain illegal and immoral activities. Doing so is clearly in the benefit of society and the quality of any online community. But accepting this is subjugating free speech for the sake of cultural norms and legal necessity.

<comment><USER5> That is an _extremely_ loose definition of freedom. Ever heard the dictum "One man's freedom ends where another's begins"? Or, as somebody once put it: "My freedom to swing my fist ends where your face begins."

Liberty for all is only attainable when all restrict their individual liberty to accommodate others. If that isn't the foundation of your society, "homo homini lupus" is what you get.

<comment><USER77> > "My freedom to swing my fist ends where your face begins."

Ever heard it? How could we ever escape it? I've been reading this smug, patronizing sentence on the Internet for 20 years. I've come to believe that this formulation is so important to the people who say it, because they know they're exceptionally punchable.

<comment><USER5> Hm, you have honestly intrigued me. How is that a "smug, patronizing sentence"? Could you imagine any society worth living in that is not based on this rule?

To me, respecting another person's freedom is the only way to ever get anywhere close to a society that offers "liberty and justice for all". Can you offer an alternative approach?

<comment><USER77> I don't disagree. But it suggests an extremely low opinion of the intelligence of the audience to point it out. There's no need to point out to a civilized adult, especially professional, educated adults prevalent on a site like this, that freedom doesn't include violating others. And it's a strawman, because nobody is ever arguing that freedom includes violating others. What's usually being argued is whether a specific action _should be considered_ a violation of others' rights, as opposed to those others being e.g. oversensitive, controlling, or intolerant.

<comment><USER5> I was not addressing the audience in general, but the user whose comment I was referring too, specifically this statement:

> anything less than absolute is something less than "free."

Now maybe I misunderstood the poster, but that does sound pretty much like what I was talking about... If you felt patronized, my apologies, but my remark was not aimed at you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Kudos for Imzy but unfortunately (imo) these kind of initiatives are accompanied by attacks to websites that don't further restrict their users speech in a manner that is more savory for the media or politicians in question.

These discussions about free speech always remind me of an event of the movie Amistad, which I will surmise very briefly:

A number of people are sold into slavery, and in attempting to free themselves they kill their captors, being imprisoned and put to trial shortly after.

The movie raises some very interesting questions (and the story it is based on many more I bet), but what I find relevant here is that one person may say that homicide is the ultimate crime, and the next that freedom is, instead. One may argue that since the law of the land allowed for slavery, supported by the majority of the population, it then supplanted their right for freedom.

I think the moral of the event was that the slaves rights were inalienable. They were not to be given or taken away. Freedom of speech can also not be legislated upon, you can ban people but they will just move on to exercise it some other place or way. And freedom to insult or berate or "troll" is still speech, it conveys meaning, it cannot be stopped from human spirit no matter how much the majority deem it bad taste.

You can down vote now.

<comment><USER37> > Freedom of speech can also not be legislated upon, you can ban people but > they will just move on to exercise it some other place or way. And freedom > to insult or berate or "troll" is still speech, it conveys meaning, it > cannot be stopped from human spirit no matter how much the majority deem it > bad taste.

Sure, and Imzy believes that you may exercise that right on some other site and not theirs.</comment></comment>


Getting started on Twitter as a scientist - <AUTHOR> https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007513 <comment><USER3> As a scientist I have a strong aversion to getting on Twitter, and this article isn't helping. All my experience with Twitter has told me it's a concentrator for hot (i.e. wrong) takes, snarky dismissals, and sloganeering, to a greater extent than any other social media platform. It seems to degrade thoughtful people into ordinary ones and ordinary people into monsters. I'll take even HN flamewars over that any day.

<comment><USER4> _> It seems to degrade thoughtful people into ordinary ones and ordinary people into monsters._

In my experience that's about 90% true, but there's a small minority of people who remain thoughtful and insightful even in 280 characters. If you can find them and mutually follow each other, and then mute or block all the blowhards, tryhards and self-promoters, you'll have cultivated a useful network of colleagues beyond what you might otherwise have via work and conferences.

And if multi-disciplinary perspectives are valuable to your own research, then that Twitter network is especially valuable in that regard, as it's likely to be at least as multidisplinary as your day-to-day work environment and more-so than your usual conference circuit.

That said, it does take some work to cultivate that graph. May or may not be worth the time and opportunity cost.

<comment><USER5> I tried blocking the blowhards, but it didn't work. Problem was retweets and the 10% of the time someone sane decided to tweet something insane. Hard to counter that. My feed was just too leaky. So I quit. Things seemed to change around 2016...

<comment><USER6> You can turn off retweets on a per-user basis, if someone is prone to retweeting nonsense. My answer to the 10% insanity has been to ruthlessly unfollow.

Using the Twitter website is still madness, though. The only way I can survive Twitter is with an app like Tweetbot or Fenix, that doesn't show what other users Like & keeps everything chronological. They're still around from the days when Twitter was designed to be used by third-party client apps, ala IRC.

<comment><USER4> *>My answer to the 10% insanity has been to ruthlessly unfollow.

Second this, absolutely necessary. You don't need many connections to make it worthwhile, just ones you wouldn't otherwise connect with in some other way besides Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing that this article misses about twitter is that you carry your followers around with you. So if you have 1000 followers and you tweet at someone, whatever you're saying, you're saying in front of 1000 of your fans. So if you disagree with someone not only are they going to get your criticism, they're likely to get 1000 people piling on behind you. There are lots of things I can say to you one on one that are suddenly basically bullying if I've got a mob behind me.

Equally, if you draw attention to someone, even if you aren't disagreeing with them, you have to be aware that you're likely subjecting them to a level of unwanted attention from your audience.

<comment><USER8> If you reply to someone's tweet then mostly the people who follow both accounts will see the reply, in addition Twitter's algorithms will opaquely decide whether to show the reply to your other followers. If you want to ensure that your followers see the reply you can use Retweet with Comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > There is no single guideline on when to block somebody—some may only support > blocking trolls, and refrain from blocking other scientists who may be > critical, while others believe it's perfectly fine to mute or block any > account... A good rule of thumb might be to block somebody if they have a > repeated negative effect on your Twitter experience

> It is perfectly okay to not look at Twitter for hours or even days.

> Do not worry that this might be confusing: Twitter users can easily skip > over tweets in languages they are not proficient in...

Who is the target audience of a text like this? Do people feel they need someone's permission to block someone, or to skip Twitter for a while, or to write in whichever language they please? Honestly!

<comment><USER10> The point is to commoditize yourself so that's not unexpected. The brand (you) has to get good at targeting the audience they are selling product (yourself) to and avoid interacting with the competition or getting run over by trolls.

Protecting the brand (yourself) is important.

To distinguish the brand (yourself) from others, the brand (you) has to set something people can look up to as a way to differentiate their experience with them (you).

What the brand (you) likes, follows, engages with etc defines the image of them (you) and the right market fit (their feed).

Accessibility is a huge factor for a commodity (sellable parts of you as a whole) whilst some blocking may be necessary for setting the cultural expectations for the brand (you).

If the brand (you) block people from certain group and it is public, that might work as a signal for what the brand (you) stands for.

Let's suppose the brand (I) blocks a mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, then that works as a signal for that the brand (I) cares about privacy and against people who exploit that.

If the brand (I) only uses English to tweet, then that might be a signal for which audience product (I) is made for.

If the brands (yours) block list isn't diverse, it might signal as a racial/ethnic/gender/sex bias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One becomes so caught up in the fear of becoming obsolete and the dopamine- fueled satisfaction of staring into a screen that we fail to make simple evaluations that are right in front of us. Is a thumbs up emoji posted by someone with whom you shook hands at a conference six months ago while he sits on the toilet going to give you any real value or are you just succumbing to social pressure?

In the thousands of hours that users sink into social media in a year one could instead read, learn to code, learn an instrument or learn anything at all. Who is more interesting, a biologist who plays the mandolin and is semi- fluent in a second language or a biologist with lots of Twitter followers?

</comment><comment><USER12> Within my field, it looks like science twitter is useful, but only up to a limit. The primary use derived from it is a list I found myself added to. It actually contained people who were only peripherally related to the research I do, but meant that there was great diversity in the papers that were promoted in the feed - not all relevant, but at least interesting.

A second use is a signalling factor that you are active in the field - <USER2> an exercise in building brand.

Finally, there are probably two people who actively engage in discussion on Twitter (from my field). This doesn't happen more often because scientific review is a subtle beast, and doing it in the open with 280 chars, as quickly as possible on a phone isn't conducive to constructive feedback. In fact, I've got a number of draft tweets initiating discussions that I didn't end up sending because it just felt plain rude to review in that manner!

</comment><comment><USER13> I am a PhD student at Stanford (focusing on AI/learning algorithms for robotics manipulation) and happened to retweet this article, so perhaps I can give my perspective. This is what I tweeted about this:

"Neat discussion of benefits of this here platform for scientists / researchers. Personally I was pretty mystified with its popularity til trying it and finding it useful, so this might be helpful for like-minded ppl. But, imo it's really mostly a great way to keep up w news. [https://t.co/J3aLAh56W3"](https://t.co/J3aLAh56W3")

Really, don't knock it til you try it. As I said in a reply on here, the biggest benefit is being able to keep up with neat new papers from researchers you think do cool work. Just after that first tweet I just happened to see this from a researcher at Google:

"New from Google Research! REALM: [https://t.co/kS2oTyxAAj](https://t.co/kS2oTyxAAj) We pretrain an LM that sparsely attends over all of Wikipedia as extra context. We backprop through a latent retrieval step on 13M docs. Yields new SOTA results for open domain QA, breaking 40 on NaturalQuestions-Open! [https://t.co/DYDFX69Td8"](https://t.co/DYDFX69Td8")

And I retweeted it with a comment that it's cool (and read the paper to understand a bit more) and now follow that researcher.

Like any big platform, Twitter can be used in bad ways (engaging in drama, constantly looking at it instead of working _cough_ much like HN _cough_ , etc.), and it can be used in many good ways. I was pleasantly surprised with how useful it actually is, personally.

That being said... much of the content of this article is kinda weird, it's not like this is that complicated... I guess the intent is to speak to more senior researchers, but it does come off weird.

<comment><USER11> > it's really mostly a great way to keep up w news

Receiving information is not the same as being informed. The head of Facebook's news authority is the owner of a far-right news site. A famous 2012 study[1] found that Fox News viewers were the least informed on facts covered by the news while NPR listeners were the most informed. Fox viewers were even less informed than those who consumed no news media at all. All news is not created equal and you are what you read. Curation is important and an organization with a fact-oriented status quo is a superior source.

1\. [https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/survey- nprs-l...](https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/survey-nprs- listeners-best-informed-fox-news-viewers-worst-informed/)

<comment><USER13> When I wrote news, I meant news for me as a researcher (which I figured can be gleaned from context), ie new papers, conference announcements, etc. Not much disinformation there...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Scientists should spend less time on twitter. It's all noise, and even the signal gets distorted by all the crazies.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's definitely a lot of good content one can find linked on Twitter (not so much tweets themselves). But I ultimately decided it wasn't worth the opportunity cost when I have a house full of books I could be reading instead.

</comment><comment><USER16> When do we get to mob people we don't like? It's like covertly campaigning against tenure but without being passive aggressive! I'm just here for the ratio!

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't

</comment><comment><USER18> J. Peterson suspects the small character limit get people to react impulsively and often aggressively.

<comment><USER19> Twitter is a cesspool of shit. The worst of humanity.

But like any war zone if you're tough and willing to take a risk there's money to be made.

But if you cry over getting rape and death threats or don't like people who make them, then just don't go there. That is part of Twitter, it's in it's fundamental design, you enter 7 billions peoples homes and ask what they think of your opinion. It's not for the normal scientist, they can do great things outside of Twitter.

To your point, yes the character limit seems likely it is a factor of why it's so bad. But lot's more people than J. Peterson think that.

But he perhaps was one of the first to think fundamentally at a low physiological level what was happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Please dont! Very very few scientists can use twitter for scientific discussions, they are interesting, technically capable, and are already there. Do not encourage scientists to slide down the road of self-promotion, as most people on twitter do.

I hate how much time academic institutions and PIs are investing in social media, curating facebook pages, twitter pages, a linked pages yadda yadda. It's mostly scientists chasing publicity so they can add another blog/newspaper article bullet to their CV so they can get more funding. I sincerely hope funding bodies start banning those publicity bullet points from CVs during evaluations.

<comment><USER21> My field's Twitter hashtag is one of the best sources for interesting and technically capable discussions. If I have a question, at this point I'll turn to Twitter before I turn to say...the relevant Stack Exchange site.

Also, most major funding bodies (NSF, NIH, etc.) use standard "biosketch" templates that are separate from CVs already and don't use that category.</comment></comment>


Bet you can't tell whether or not the girl in this picture is real - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/15/bet-you-cant-tell-whether-or-not-the-girl-in-this-picture-is-re/ <comment><USER2> I voted CGI. The tip-off was in the eyes. Doll's eyes like the shark in Quint's speech in Jaws.

[https://johnnycat.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/quints-speech- fro...](https://johnnycat.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/quints-speech-from-jaws/)

<comment><USER3> I found the hair also lacked a bit of randomness that real hair has. But no doubt, it is still amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks very real, but the give away was the fact that if it were a real girl, they wouldn't be posing the question.

Should have done a comparison between a CGI and a real person to see if you could guess which was which.

</comment><comment><USER5> They ought to get makeup talent artists for this, 99% are CGI except certain movies.

</comment><comment><USER6> 90% of people guessed CGI. Author just lost a lot of bets.</comment>


Returning True Color to B&W Photos - <AUTHOR> http://www.solargreencolor.com/ <comment><USER2> I call bullshit. How would it be possible? I have two bets how this can remotely work:

1\. They use some newly discovered, color dependent property of original negatives, but the following quote debunkes that:

> If you have a ready-made files of black and white image or video, color > recovery process will be much faster.

2\. They use machine learning.

Well if they use machine learning then they just teach the computer how to do colorization and produce plausible results. It's not retrieving the original colors. It could be still a good idea though.

<comment><USER3> The people over on reddit's colorizedhistory subreddit do such a marvelous job. If it were applied to film, it would be fantastic. Of course, it's too hard to do every frame. But perhaps an artist could color one frame of each scene, and software + machine learning can deduce the coloring of the rest of the frames of that scene.

<comment><USER4> You could do keyframes and then in-beteween. If it is the same scene then use the previous keyframe as a guide. That should speed it up considerably.

<comment><USER3> I suppose the process would be analogous to and as labor intensive as the recent conversions of older movies to 3D, i.e. practical for many movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's hard to find an actual explanation for the process on the site, after a bit of rummaging this is the closest I could get: [http://i.imgur.com/YsbKHg1.gif](http://i.imgur.com/YsbKHg1.gif)

Still, it's a surprise to discover that changing a photo to black and white is a lossless operation that can be reversed.

</comment><comment><USER3> It'd be nice to have a description of how it works, but the site's explanation is vague to the point of nonexistence.

<comment><USER6> Walter if they explained how it worked then the gullible wouldn't buy.

<comment><USER7> You have so little faith in the power of gullibility [1]

[1] [http://www.yoyodyneindustries.com/inductions/beacon_inductio...](http://www.yoyodyneindustries.com/inductions/beacon_inductions.html)

<comment><USER6> Love this. The legal stuff is a classic [1].

1\. [http://www.yoyodyneindustries.com/disclaimer.html](http://www.yoyodyneindustries.com/disclaimer.html)

<comment><USER7> I wonder how you go about proving that it isn't a sufficiently good Alpha- Theta reinforcer?

I think I'll get one of the junior chaps to look into that once they've bought the tartan paint that I asked for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wait, how did they find the original color of a fake picture (the giant grasshopper, or "gracehopper" as they call)?

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't actually believe that Carole Lombard was quite that pink in real life.</comment>


How working memory gets you through the day - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-picower-how-working-memory-gets-you-through-the-day-1024 <comment><USER2> > It's also profoundly debilitating when it is diminished by disorders such as > schizophrenia or autism.

First of all, autism is better characterized as inability to cope with one's own emotions, which results in a state similar to permanent tension or stress (without being aware of it or knowing any better), which autistic people are trying to compensate with acquired/learned behavioral patterns that keeps them less tense (avoiding eye contact is the obvious example). This is why performance in some tests is lower - we have real difficulties with self- control, with concentration on the task. Working memory is OK, when we in the rare state of so-called flow we perform well. Usually above average.

Solitude and some meditation techniques (habitual return to state of being 100% idle) helps a lot.

<comment><USER3> >when we in the rare state of so-called flow we perform well. Usually above average.

I would say this is part of the so called "superpower" that autism provides. Once a subject becomes interesting enough to allow for flow, the associated hyperfocus facilitates hours of intense, deep work. The downside is that most subjects are not remotely engaging.

I liken autism to a very narrow, but large Q factor (resonance). Most subjects are uninteresting, but when something does resonate, the interest is engrossing and intense. So life can easily become a monotony punctuated by moments of passion. I also may be describing ADHD to some extent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be the actual research article: [https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(18)30825-0](https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273\(18\)30825-0)

</comment><comment><USER5> you ever want to see first hand how it gets you through the day, try some phenazepam.</comment>


Same laptop, different CPUs, Ryzen is faster, has better battery and cheaper - <AUTHOR> https://www.techspot.com/review/2075-same-laptop-different-cpu-productivity/ <comment><USER2> That is a fantastic comparison. I hope that more vendors start making high quality AMD configs with good thermal management. We need AMD laptops to go mainstream to have enough SKUs specially those focus on say developer usage. Given the massive multi-threaded advantage and low power AMD seems more suited to a dev laptop than intel like first time ever. Even when a Zen 1 desktop was a reasonable choice (for cores and price) it was hard to justify AMD on a laptop until now. But if vendors keep making low end design or rare SKUs few would be able to take advantage of the fact.

</comment><comment><USER3> RIP Intel</comment>