Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet's biggest flaws - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/25/somethings-terribly-wrong-with-the-internet-and-wikipedia-might-be-able-to-fix-it/ <comment><USER2> _We might once have dreamed that the miracle of cheap, instant communication would knit society together. The reality has been closer to the opposite._

Once again, Douglas Adams turns out to be prophetic.

 _" Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."_

In the sentence before, he also predicted his friend Richard Dawkins' books:

 _" Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the theme of his best-selling book, Well That About wraps It Up For God._

[http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Babel_Fish](http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Babel_Fish)

<comment><USER3> It's very fashionable to suggest that social media is polarising. It's not clear from actual research that that is true. Most people lived in an echo chamber before social media anyway.

We live in the most peaceful time in human history. Yes, it's true that we can't know the tail risk, but we can take some comfort that, for example, war between two German provinces, or a North American civil war, are remote possibilities compared with 150 years ago.

[http://pablobarbera.com/static/barbera_polarization_APSA.pdf](http://pablobarbera.com/static/barbera_polarization_APSA.pdf)

<comment><USER4> American civil war feels quite possible at the moment. Even passing a budget is becoming a gargantuan governmental task subject to polarization and media trench warfare.

<comment><USER5> Insurgency, maybe, but a full out civil war would be very very implausible at this point. State militias are severely underpowered to launch a full on war.

<comment><USER2> Basically: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In most political topics on Wikipedia, you have a consensus because those who do not agree with it are quickly booted.

It works like this. Most of the time most editors are polite, but sometimes you get frustrated and are not. You might not write "fuck you ____fucking nazi-lover! " or something extreme, but something like "your opinion is idiotic!" or "you don't know what you're talking about here..." It happens everyone. However, if you don't agree with the "consensus" every little outburst will cost you much more. A newbie will be banned for much smaller infractions than a regular.

So, if you are having an argument with someone who is a "respectable editor" or "valuable contributor" in the community, they can and will be quite rude to you but you must not pay back in kind because you will be banned.

There are also intricate rules governing "reverting". Reverting means you are undoing someones changes and I can say from experience that having your edits reverted can be frustrating. I don't know exactly what the rules are but they seem to be effectively that the more "respectable" you are, the more you can revert your opponents edits.

This power imbalance can be seen all over Wikipedia if you look for it. Many articles have editors that consider themselves the "owner" of that article. The way they have written the article is the best way and they don't see their own NPOV violations (Wikipedia term for writing biased texts). Sometimes the talk pages and their archives contain dozens of comments from anonymous ip users raising issues with the article and they are all refuted by the owner. They don't have the endurance or enough standing in the Wikipedia community to fight so they give up and find more constructive things to spend their time on.

<comment><USER7> NPOV == Neutral Point of View for those wondering. Wikipedia strives for "just the facts", but as you point out they don't have it _everywhere_. Most of the articles are very good or at least acknowledge where there is bias that should be resolved.

<comment><USER8> Even "just the facts" is a fallacy. Wikipedia has simply outsourced its fact- checking to the news media, which is... well, how to put this... not very interested in facts.

<comment><USER9> I think that's the most damning thing about the truth on Wikipedia, not that any article can be edited by anyone but their policy of second hand sources over primary sources.

There is reasons for doing it but when you get into certain fields it just becomes a cluster F.

<comment><USER8> Presumably they don't want to put themselves in the business of determining if a primary source is legitimate or if some random pseudonymous writer's original research is accurate. Not an unreasonable desire! Except instead they've put themselves in the business of determining if a _secondary_ source is legitimate, which isn't fundamentally better.

Wikipedia has to come to terms with the fact that if you claim you're making an encyclopedia that comes with certain expectations, namely, that you've verified the facts you are printing. They try to obfuscate this with endless layers of rules and procedure, but that no more eliminates the need to check facts than credit default swaps eliminated the need to pay back debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 'In a draft paper published last week, Shane Greenstein and his colleagues Feng Zhu and Yuan Gu found that over the years, individuals who edit political articles on Wikipedia seem to grow less biased — their contributions start to contain noticeably fewer ideologically-charged statements.

"We thought this was quite striking," said Greenstein, a professor at Harvard Business School. "The most slanted Wikipedia editors tend to become more moderate over time."'

Uh yeah maybe because the people in question grew older? Many of them may have joined wikipedia in their teens or early twenties and like so many others in that age group had quite raical political views and like so many others become more moderate as they mature and learn more about the world.

<comment><USER11> racial or radical?

<comment><USER12> Both of those words have Levenshtein distance 1 from what GP wrote.

Maybe let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant the one that doesn't sound like a type-error/makes sense and avoids outrageousness?

<comment><USER13> Raical has a Levenshtein distance of 2 from racial. Swapping two characters is a deletion + insertion. You'd need to use Damerau-Levenshtein distance for transposition to count as 1 operation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damerau%E2%80%93Levenshtein_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damerau%E2%80%93Levenshtein_distance)

<comment><USER12> Thank you for correcting me, now I know! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > By looking for these kinds of partisan idioms in Wikipedia articles, the > Harvard researchers could determine whether the text sounded more like the > product of a Republican or a Democrat. They were also able to document how > the articles evolved over time.

Another explanation that fits the results of this study is that the popular party idioms changed over time. As the old idioms were replaced by new ones this analysis made the Wikipedia pages and editors appear to become less biased.

<comment><USER15> This seems like a serious risk, and I'd like to see how the "partisan idioms" were collected.

"Illegal aliens" stood out to me as something I don't hear much from either party - the fight today is generally over "illegal immigrants" versus "undocumented immigrants". That looks like an obvious candidate for a marginalized phrase distorting the analysis.

"Death tax" is still around, but I think there's a euphemistic treadmill thing happening - plenty of people on the right will now say "estate tax" and expect it to be understood as a thing they're strongly opposed to.

Finally, the example given seems to be about maturation rather than moderation. "Turbans and terrorists" is rather un-encylopedic, and it would be totally possible to strip it from an article even while preserving a strong conservative bent.

I wouldn't be shocked if these results were right, but it also feels like a sociology paper I wouldn't want to trust without a secondary analysis.

<comment><USER16> "Turbans and terrorists" gave me a pause too. Then again, that was in 2006, where Wikipedia was much less prominent than now, which means less editors, so I took a look. If we look at the article at the eve of 2006 it's not "turbans and terrorists" at all: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Afghanistan&oldid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Afghanistan&oldid=33409879)

I mean maybe it has some bias, it's quite large so I didn't analyze it, but it's not blatantly bad like WaPo seems to imply. I suspect they fallen the victim of what many journalists fall victim too - concentrating on rare exceptions like some troll putting there "turbans" for lulz and it surviving on the site for some short time - and not on the processes that govern the regular life of the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you read this carefully, you can see something quite ironic about this article:

The article's argument is: "Something's terribly wrong with the internet." Evidence provided for something wrong was three pro-Trump comments about an anti-Trump article. The article then suggests "recent research from Harvard Business School suggests that Wikipedia has become increasingly balanced in the course of its 15-year history."

So, the internet is biased, and people are uncivil. Wikipedia is civil and not biased; here are some points to learn from them.

The irony is that the article itself is no shining beacon of neutrality because it provides an anti-Trump and anti-alt right narrative. Any right- leaning comments must be fixed by editors, but left-leaning comments 'fix themselves over time.'

Instead of the article making a sound argument for neutrality, it does nothing of the sort.

Disclaimer: criticism of the DNC, media and Clinton != support for Trump. I do not support Trump.

This article is masterfully written, but it's not very pure in its intentions.

</comment><comment><USER18> Look at the utter contempt that the Washington Post is displaying for free individuals here. They refer to comments sections, where actual human beings who are not paid and bought for by corporate interests get to voice their opinions, as cesspools. What arrogance on their part!

Yeah, you'll see some ugly comments on all kinds of social media once in a while, but seeing an uncouth phrase or three is absolutely nothing compared to the WAR PROPAGANDA on behalf of the military industrial complex that leads to the deaths of thousands and thousands. So yeah, I'll take the cesspool of a comment section where I might see some truth every time over bought and paid for presstitutes, which we all know as absolute and undeniable fact now from Wikileaks.

<comment><USER19> I reeealy can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not[1]

[1][https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Poe's_law](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Poe's_law)

<comment><USER20> Would you like to refute their statements or provide your own view point? If not then there isn't much of a reason to think that the parent isn't correct in his analysis of the situation.

<comment><USER21> There is no analysis in OP's post, he just states opinions.

I value quality in comments, which is one of the reasons I come to Hacker News. It is not a waste of my time. Reading comments on Facebook or any newspaper usually is.

Wikipedia isn't a waste either, mired in a Yahoo Answers low quality answers. That is why I donate.

Creating quality interaction isn't easy on the internet - I admire every success.

Shitposting in the comment-section of a newspaper or indeed Hacker News isn't "free speech", it is just disruptive and destructive.

When governments and corporations engage in bullshit (in the Harry Frankfurt sense) programs to disrupt public discourse, the answer isn't to yell and scream in the comment sections - that only helps them, in fact. The answer is to insist on solid arguments against their gish-gallops and red herrings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Never thought I'd see WP talk pages held up as an example of civility. They certainly weren't when I was there. AN/I, ArbCom, flame wars a plenty.

<comment><USER23> And the civility is definitely oftentimes a facade thereof.

Quoting rules, policies, passive aggressive civility was the norm, rather than sincere attempts at compromise.

<comment><USER24> Seriously. I gave up editing Wikipedia a long time ago after one too many of my good-faith edits were reverted by some random busybody citing WP:OMGWTFBBQ. It was done in an ostensibly polite way but the passive-aggressive "fuck you, go away" was very clear. I eventually just gave up because it wasn't very important to me, but I don't think that model can successfully transfer to society writ large.

<comment><USER25> I had the very same exact experience. It is astounding to me that there are no legitimate competitors to Wikipedia at all after 15 years. It's funny how social networking is such a competitive space from facebook --> instagram --> snapchat etc but it's still just Wikipedia --> Wikipedia --> Wikipedia

<comment><USER26> What money is there to be made from an online encyclopedia? Selling ads? :)

<comment><USER27> There's a few people doing this with Wikipedia content anyway, of course, not to mention the content farms geared towards search queries, which just makes the competitive space for a _raise VC-capital to invest a lot of time and effort into making an ad-supported traditional encyclopedia that 's actually good_ seem even less attractive

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _The Internet is dotted with cesspools, also known as comments sections_

Comments sections are also extremely REVEALING... It seems we are getting a theory of why public opinion is so moderate -- it's not just one opinion. It's half of people expressing one view, the other half expressing another view. The version on Wikipedia is effectively the average between the two.

The history sections of wikipedia document this process in action. A lot of the things I look at are pretty dead but I am often impressed when a crappy wikipedia page and a few months later the page has really excellent discussion:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_triple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_triple) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem)

</comment><comment><USER29> Most of the debate on wikipedia is regarding which rules to apply soasto prevent people from submitting edits.

<comment> crooked-v For my part, I stopped contributing long ago because every single edit attempt I made, including simple stuff like fixing punctuation, would inevitably get reverted by a bot or an overprotective editor within the next day or two.

<comment><USER30> If every single edit you made was reverted, maybe they weren't really constructive edits? Just food for thought.

> If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you > run into assholes all day, you're the asshole. - Raylan Givens, Justified

On a more serious note, I always hear people complaining about getting reverted. What they don't realize is that, often, their edits really are just bad. Here's some of the stuff I have to revert daily:

* Test edits/gibberish

* Vandalism

* Original research [0]

* Changing stuff to match their variety of English [1]

* Making the grammar worse, or going against the Manual of Style [2]

* Improper tone [3]

* No edit summary giving a rationale for the edit

A lot of the time, the changes people make are just arbitrary or don't improve the article. If you ever feel you were improperly reverted though, you can always bring it up on the talk page.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Nati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#National_varieties_of_English)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style)

[3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_better_artic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_better_articles#Tone)

<comment><USER31> Considering this very common experience had by people trying to contribute, I think your saying applies more to the "full time" entrenched editors, who are acting as wall of assholes blocking a wider group of contributors.

Also, that saying has been around alot longer than Justified.

<comment><USER30> I mean I just gave you the reasoning of entrenched editors, they're just not often good edits. These complaints come from people who think that Wikipedia is obliged to take any of their edits just because they took the time to hit the submit button. Wikipedia has policies and standards to uphold and people would complain if we went the other way and accepted all garbage people felt necessary to dump on the site. Also, the people who bring up these accusations never list the articles they were reverted on. Show me some of these edits improperly reverted and I'll personally help reinstate them or explain what was wrong with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Go to any article and visit the "talk" tab. More often than not, you'll find > a somewhat orderly debate, even on contentious topics like Hillary Clinton's > e-mails or Donald Trump's sexual abuse allegations.

Oh, for the really good talk sections, you need to look at anything vaguely related to Macedonia:

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

<comment><USER23> What about Palestine and Israeli foreign relations, if you want orderly debate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't think the "internet's biggest flaw" is that it allows for free, unmoderated speech.

> What's even more interesting is that Wikipedia seems to exert a moderating > influence on its contributors.

This is a great concept, but usually is horrible in practice. It says that wikipedia was partisan and quite left, and has since become more balanced. However, this illustrates a positive outcome of a dangerous potential. This model works much worse for less authoritative sites, but I personally do not believe wikipedia should moderate based on anything other than "truth". Regardless, this is extremely subjective and difficult to do. I think it is working at wikipedia (compared to other places) and am optimistic, but I have seen this go wrong so many times.

</comment><comment><USER34> After all the replication failures, poor statistics, and more in the social sciences. I am skeptical of this.

</comment><comment><USER35> Am I the only one that actually finds immense value in the comments sections of different sites on the internet? Obviously there's some sifting to do (inflammatory comments that are meant to be nothing but inflammatory should just be ignored), but I come to the internet to interact with people, not just seek out knowledge. I find things like hn (or reddit) hivemind immensely fascinating, almost like a shared consciousness.

I like the comments sections. I often go there for a chuckle, or to see what other people think. Yeah, some people use that opportunity to troll, or say hurtful things or whatever, but that's what the world is, I'd rather never forget that. I also don't want everyone to mellow to the same position and then everyone holds the same (possibly wrong) position forever, that sounds like a bland existence.

Free discourse is not a flaw, it's a feature.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is why I quite admire initiatives like Hypothesis[1] where we can annotate the web by overlaying an abstraction on top of it which can give a page more depth and context.

Similar projects like the Genius web annotator[2] tries to achieve the same.

It doesn't mean the commenters (or annotators) will be any less mean, but it certainly is preferable to a Disqus widget dangling on the end of a page, or the default Wordpress commenting engine which allows seemingly _anyone_ to comment regardless of whether they signed up or not.

[1]: [http://hypothes.is/](http://hypothes.is/)

[2]: [https://genius.com/web-annotator](https://genius.com/web-annotator)

<comment><USER37> Ted Nelson thought of this idea (annotating hypertext) for use in his Xanadu hypertext project, decades before the World Wide Web existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> First sentence:

> The Internet is dotted with cesspools, also known as comments sections.

Comment sections are the only thing keeping a check on publications like the Washington Post. Whether they're on-site or off-site (like what you're reading now on HN), they're invaluable. Sure, not all of the audience with an opinion will be politically correct, but I value the commentary of a piece as much or more as the piece itself. Especially when it's something purely opinion based like this one.

</comment><comment><USER39> The main skill—in short supply—that Wikipedia fosters is to look at things from varying points of view, through a kind of detached pseudoprofessionalism.

Because the function of Wikipedia is to exhibit different viewpoints (where applicable) rather than to convince anyone of them, it's much easier to step into a relativistic, descriptive mindset, rather than a prescriptive one.

</comment><comment><USER40> If I may weigh in, the "cocoon" that is so scorned by many, is a feature.

It allows people to actually _get things done_. It allows them to spend less thought on the topics that are not concerned them in their day lives and spend more on their... day lives!

Basically, if you want people to go out of their cocoons, make their life easier. Otherwise, the fight is futile.

<comment><USER41> > It allows them to spend less thought on the topics that are not concerned > them in their day lives and spend more on their... day lives!

This works as long as the cocoon is perfectly insulated. But it isn't, as elections show. The political process basically cuts through the cocoon like a predatory wasp-- assuming there is at least one candidate or law that is incompatible with insulated beliefs. And then all that saved energy is wasted on moral warfare against the invaders.

Cocoons are always bad in a non-homogeneous society.

<comment> norea-armozel Or maybe people should be free to associate as they wish? This seems to be the hardest concept for fellow Americans to grasp because it seems to be a growing (parasitically so) notion that we have to be friends to strangers who actively oppose to who we are or our interests. I don't want to force someone who thinks I'm a sinner for being bi and trans to be my friend nor do I want to be a friend to such a person. Nor should they or I have to endure each other's company beyond what's necessary to get a task done in public. If that's putting up a cocoon I'm not sure how civilization will get along then when every social interaction turns into a virtual duel. I'd rather just put up with fake courtesy than force someone into a fight with me or vice versa. Toleration is a better lubricant for social order than is constant challenges to deeply held beliefs.

<comment><USER41> > Toleration is a better lubricant for social order than is constant > challenges to deeply held beliefs.

Sure, but "cocoons" breed intolerance by magnifying the fears and insecurities of the group. Maybe if you have balanced, open, secure people, blocking information doesn't hurt, but those people are not only rare, they tend to go out of their way for new information. They don't willingly slam the door on new streams of information so it seems their "cocoons" if they exist at all have fairly thin walls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A centrist argument is not necessarily correct. There are many more dimensions to ideology than the left/right spectrum.

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

<comment><USER43> Also, a position in the middle of the two US parties usually quite right- leaning in the global context and hardly a good benchmark for neutrality outside the Washington Post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm wondering how popular media sites could apply to their comments sections some of the things Wikipedia is doing. For example, imagine commenters divided into two opposing camps over a controversial issue discussed in a news report. A separate discussion is organized to create a report on the issue using the Wikipedia process and rules. Any commenter can contribute, and it is guided by (perhaps volunteer) editors. Such reports then get aggregated in a separate section of the site...

Could something like this actually 1) create value for the media by engaging users and generating content 2) elevate the discourse between readers and 3) actually make the media less biased over time as it is repeatedly called out for partisan slant in its editorial and reporting?

</comment><comment><USER45> There's a subreddit of people who think Wikipedia operates with large-scale bias by the administration. [https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiInAction/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiInAction/)

</comment><comment><USER46> >In a draft paper published last week, Shane Greenstein and his colleagues Feng Zhu and Yuan Gu found that over the years, individuals who edit political articles on Wikipedia seem to grow less biased — their contributions start to contain noticeably fewer ideologically-charged statements.

This seems obvious: as you are exposed to more points of view, you start to develop your own nuanced view of the world. At a certain point you feel okay with reading FOX News because you would like to see how other people think and it trains you to see the logical fallacies and biases.

</comment><comment><USER47> The title of this piece makes no sense. How are the talk pages on Wikipedia supposedly going to fix the vicious comment sections on the internet?

</comment><comment><USER48> The internet is a large, evolving cognitive system. Present information flow, riddled as it is with disinformation, faulty reasoning, and category errors, might be comparable to disorganization in the minds of individual creatures during early development.

</comment><comment><USER49> I think one of the interesting consequences of the echo chamber that social networks create is that everybody thinks they are in the majority. For example, if you view the comments on political pages, you'll often see conflicting claims that "the majority of people think X". I think each person making these claims genuinely feel that they are in the majority because their echo chamber distorts the proportion of supporting voices, and then you see comments like "who are all these people who voted for Y?"

Edit to add: I think the problem is not only that people don't see views other than their own, but that they become unaware that other views even exist.

</comment><comment><USER50> This article is hardly about Wikipedia. You can feel the electoral smell from a mile away.

<comment><USER51> It's the washington post. What else would you expect from them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's possible that highly biased editors drifting toward center is just another instance of "a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth" where the lie is the opposing ideology that one must read in order to edit.

</comment><comment><USER53> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikilawyering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikilawyering)

</comment><comment><USER54> This is why for CVE's assigned via the Distributed Weakness Filing (DWF) Project I require a copy of the artifact, the reality is your website might go away, or get lost at sea, or deleted, or whatever. For information supporting CVE identifiers it's a super huge pain in the ass when the website/document disappears.

</comment><comment><USER55> The search for an unique , single truth is the mentality that destroy ancient ruins and burn books, no matter if it's coming from Wikipedia, Trump supporters or BLM all of them are valid. And that's Wikipedia's biggest flaw, their system can only handle one version of truth. A more complex system would be able to handle more than one version of the truth.

</comment><comment><USER56> Why have there been so many washingtonpost articles lately? Pretty annoying to those who don't want to deal with paywalls to get their news.

<comment><USER57> When all else fails (web link, incognito), learn to archive.is:

[http://archive.is/Wh2iM](http://archive.is/Wh2iM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> 'Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be OK, because you're safely in the moral majority.' \--Christopher Hitchens

Well worth a watch imho [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4hqFvXm57M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4hqFvXm57M)

</comment><comment><USER59> The real problem with the comments on the Internet, is of logistics of huge number, and lack of human ability to process them at scale. Just look at any of the popular HN threads. You cannot expect anyone to be reading all the comments when they show up in large numbers under one thread. The rest of everything else is secondary.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's disingenious to apply a methodology designed to find out "republican" and "democratic" positions to Wikipedia, and then draw conclusions about how objectively biased the content is, especially since the center in US politics is so right-leaning in the global context.

<comment><USER21> Indeed, but their method is clearly stated and very easy to understand, so the reader can take the conclusion with an appropriate grain of salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As a Wikipedia editor, I think this can mostly be attested to the site's policy on maintaining a neutral point of view. [0] Over time you learn to watch out for certain words [1] and you can sniff out things that were copied verbatim or written in a improper tone. In terms of discussions, personal attacks are discouraged [2] and there's a strong focus on providing reliable sources, [3] so discussion often shifts to discussing those instead. Off-topic discussion is also commonly removed [4] and there are avenues for dispute resolution. [5] Of course you'll still find plenty of heated disputes and some biased articles, but the project is a work in progress after all. I think the most important factor is that there are people of different viewpoints willing to work together to integrate them in a way to best give weight to them rather than creating content forks. (this is why conservapedia is doing so bad) [6] You can't fix bias by creating an echo chamber or pretending it isn't there, but rather by keeping an open mind and welcoming those who think differently.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Word...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_personal_attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_personal_attacks)

[3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources)

[4]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page_guidelines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page_guidelines)

[5]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution)

[6]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_forking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_forking)

<comment><USER60> As a counterpoint, here Wikipedia's discussion on why NPOV is hard or maybe unattainable:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_not...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_not_so_great#NPOVness_.28non- bias.29)

I think the NPOV policy has been great for Wikipedia and contributes to many positive outcomes, but I often think Wikipedians are too sanguine that they can recognize and/or achieve it, and about the scope of the "neutrality" they're actually working towards. One reason for that is the other policies on reliable sources and undue weight, which means Wikipedia will usually appear to be NPOV when it reflects the attention and approaches given to something by media and academic scholarship that are readily accessible to Wikipedia editors.

While that might be _more_ neutral than any available alternative, it's still going to reflect tons of biases found in the underlying sources and in the editors' ability to select and access them. I've been thinking of trying to describe some examples, maybe deliberately including points of view that I don't hold or agree with instead of those that I do. :-)

I think one highlight is that if a point of view is now a minority view or extremely unfamiliar in middle-class English-speaking communities, paying a lot of attention to it on enwiki will be considered undue weight because editors can correctly describe the status of the view as marginal. But that point of view might be more correct or extremely important from some other perspective, even though reading an encyclopedia that gave more weight to it would be jarring for many readers and they might find it less useful overall. (It might also be a _majority_ view in some other social classes, cultures, or language communities whose views aren't expressed in reliable sources that many Wikipedians can access, understand, or defend as reliable sources.)

<comment><USER30> I agree that true neutrality is likely impossible. For starters, Wikipedia is only as biased as its sources and like you said "media and academic scholarship". It's this attribute that lets us readily say that vaccines don't cause autism, but that will also prevent it from assimilating new breakthroughs or ideas until they are readily accepted. (In other words, Wikipedia is not The Truth) FUTON bias is a problem in a lot of areas [0] but there are tons of articles that use offline sources. As for your last point, you might find this essay [1] interesting in that we often assume too much to be a given, and Wikipedia definitely suffers from an anglophone bias, but that's why multilingual editors are important to bring those sources to the fore. Fringe theories [2] are an interesting subject that I think should be discussed more, but I do find the current approach sensible. Thanks for the interesting counterpoints.

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

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_do_need_to_cite_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_do_need_to_cite_that_the_sky_is_blue)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Has anyone read the comments section below a DrudgeReport linked article? Oh my god you will lose your faith in humanity.

</comment><comment><USER62> Use Infogalactic instead.

</comment><comment><USER63> From 1933 to 1953, the Democratic party held the presidency in the United States. Twenty years out of power is said to have been one of the factors leading to McCarthyism. McCarthy called it "20 years of treason" (then once he started fighting Eisenhower he started talking about 21 years of treason). Republicans began accusing the entire Democratic establishment of being KGB spies. The head of the John Birch Society thought this was a foregone conclusion, he wrote a book about how the Republican establishment including Eisenhower were all KGB spies.

This cold war paranoia and political shift is all over Wikipedia. The faintest accusation of someone back then is all over their Wikipedia article. Much of the Democratic and liberal establishment from 1932-1952 is said to be Soviet spies on Wikipedia, and as far as I know, 100% of people who had questions about the Cold war. I don't know one liberal from that period who was more skeptical of the Cold war than Truman (who launched the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, then became involved in the Korean war) who is _not_ accused of being a Soviet spy.

I wish I could remember the whole list. The article for journalist I. F. Stone. The article for treasury official Harry Dexter White. Commerce department official and later author Harry Magdoff. Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Lee who had the misfortune of being acquainted with the kooky, flighty Elizabeth Bentley. In the light of all of these, the article for secretary of state Dean Acheson all but accuses him of being pro-communist.

The "China hands" like Owen Lattimore (being accused of being an agent of the Chinese wouldn't do, so he was accused of being a Soviet agent). John S. Service who had the misfortune to be assigned to the Dixie Mission while working for the Foreign Service. Actually the article on China hand Theodore H. White manages to have been relatively unscathed by the crazies.

I'm sure there were some Russian spies in the US in the 1940s, and some American spies in Russia. Wikipedia still has this McCarthyist idea spread out over the high officials of that time were all KGB spies. Forget about anyone to the left of the 1947 Truman Doctrine to fight the Greek left, they're almost automatically concluded to be communist spies.

Then it's proffered that Venona proves all these people as spies. But Venona has code names, not names. Venona says something like "Agent TREE met us in Central Park in May 8, 1948". As so-and-so lived in New York in 1948, the editors use that fact to link a codename to a name. Venona is said to prove every accusation, but it does not. Most of the people who it does seem to confirm were European emigrees and people in the communist party orbit. Not the liberal WASPs in the Democratic establishment who are accused of being Soviet spies.

The Wikipedia articles on various Democratic officials in the 1930s and 1940s are really nuts. Even a neutral article like the Theodore White one has to mention that he was suspected to be a communist spy at one time.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm not sure your single variable alternative explanation of this effect warrants such a dismissive tone to the hypothesis in the article. Using such rhetoric is Truthy, by being plausible and socially and rhetorically effective without being backed up by any research or even data. Claiming you have greater expertise through attempted ridicule of the original is not a valid argument. Such a rhetorical tactic likely has a fallacy named after it. (Any debaters here cars to chime in? )

What are your justifications for your beliefs, and how are they superior to those in the article?

<comment><USER65> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790032) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER66> Why did you do that? HN tries hard to avoid middle-brow dismissal, which GP was.

<comment><USER64> I agree, but I can see how HN may want to keep the conversation as it turned out below away from disrupting the thread; I think the thread did get derailed. For anyone confused here's the comment the GGP was detached from: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12790032)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Apparently AMP prevents the Google trick of being able to bypass paywalls. Can someone post the gist of the article here?

<comment><USER68> Researchers studied the changes to Wikipedia articles and found that in the course of these article's edits the political tone and biases tended to converge toward neutral over time.

<comment><USER69> And the flaw was how comments have gone downhill.

But really, what is the internet's flaw? No live human body present?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> sorry I can't take someone/entity seriously when they claim the internet's biggest flaw is shit-posting, or free expression as I call it.</comment>


Brendan is back to save the Web - <AUTHOR> http://andreasgal.com/2016/01/20/brendan-is-back-to-save-the-web/ <comment><USER2> The uproar over web clients using adblockers strikes me as "not my problem". The web works like this:

\- A client sends an HTTP request to a server.

\- The server responds with data

\- The client interprets that data as it is configured to.

The assumption that all clients are standards-conforming web browsers that will run all JavaScript, use provided CSS, download all resources, etc. is incorrect. Once that data is out of the server's hands, it has no control. Are Lynx, curl, wget, etc. somehow evil now? Sending mail to a daemon that downloads the page and emails it to you?

If you built your business on sending data to an unknown remote client and expecting it to perform in an exact way, you should probably reconsider your business model.

<comment><USER3> "Not my problem" is a perfect characterization of ad blocking. Of course, so is recycling or voting or any number of choices you make. It doesn't actually matter if you do or don't personally use an ad blocker. Just like it doesn't really matter if _you_ recycle or not.

But if _everyone_ uses an ad blocker, well, things on the Internet are going to change drastically. At this point, I am in favor of us just getting it over with, enabling ad blockers everywhere, and making the transition to micropaying for content (or the less pleasant alternative of submarine advertising).

I'll totally agree that advertisers and content producers have brought this on themselves by allowing ever increasingly annoying advertisements on their sites. Hell, I vacillate between using an ad blocker or not myself. Nonetheless, I find that people that use an ad blocker and claim they're not ripping anybody off are being intellectually dishonest. The fact is that viewing ads and thus generating revenue for the content producer is the entire, if implicit, point of the free-content arrangement. It's like not tipping your waitstaff - sure it's voluntary, but you're still ripping someone off.

<comment><USER4> > It's like not tipping your waitstaff - sure it's voluntary, but you're still > ripping someone off.

That's a good analogy, precisely because many people (myself included) consider the concept of tipping as it exists in the US to be absolutely ridiculous. It's technically voluntary, except it's really mandatory. And this causes a bunch of issues that seem entirely avoidable to me. Over here in my part of the world tipping is actually voluntary, as it should be.

If content producers provide content online for free, it should be free. If they want to get paid, well, they should put a paywall, use microtransactions, ask for donations, or think of other ways to make money. It's not my job as consumer to go out of my way to make their business model work. Especially not if this business model relies on the scummy world of (online) advertising.

Edit: If anything, comparing ad blocking to neglecting to vote or recycle is intellectually dishonest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who is Brendan? Am I supposed to know him? There is no one named Brendan shown at the Brave Software page.

And, I don't understand the logic behind paying Brave instead of the original ad providers. He is still showing ads and taking (at least part of) the money.

<comment><USER6> Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla</comment></comment>


iPhone Users Are Pestered to Enroll in Apple Pay - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-insists-iphone-users-enroll-in-apple-pay-with-a-red-badge-that-wont-go-away-1522753200 <comment><USER2> It's annoying, especially when updating a device as a developer whose only reason for existence is "testing". To get rid of their stupid red "1" icon you have to follow the only option to proceed, then Cancel.

Stop this, Apple.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> No-paywall link via @WSJ on Twitter: [https://t.co/41otdGaCcO](https://t.co/41otdGaCcO)</comment>


Ask HN: Newer job, feel like have to `carry` the team? - <AUTHOR> How'd you handle it? <comment><USER2> I found a new job, with more pay.

<comment><AUTHOR> What if current job pays exception Ally high for my geographic area?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Negotiate higher compensation.</comment>


Google Analytics Launches Real Time API In Beta - <AUTHOR> http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/google-analytics-launches-real-time-api.html

<comment><USER2> After I wrote a script to scrape this data client side ([https://qzaidi.github.com/2013/06/23/dashboards-with- dashing...](https://qzaidi.github.com/2013/06/23/dashboards-with- dashing/?utm_source=hackernews)), I guess this was bound to happen. Murphy's law</comment>


Askyourprice – Bid on workers to do jobs for you. The ebay of job bidding - <AUTHOR> http://www.askyourprice.me/index.php <comment><USER2> Hi, that's an interesting concept. A few UI suggestions to get it started:

\- just grab some bootstrap theme and re-do the design (create a clear hierarchy of most to least important and implement it in the design, too)

\- show how bidding works, even if it will just prompt me to create an account first when I actually try to submit.

\- I see one insert, there should be 3 at least, even if 2 of them are examples (but you should be able to find 3 people...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'm going to work on it tonight!!! I got a few ideas for the site. But thanks for the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the comments. Like I said, I'm going to work on the design a little.

</comment><comment><USER3> A better idea than a race to the bottom. Needs some front-end work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'm going to work on the design a little. But thanks for the comments.</comment></comment>


Guy Steele: Musical and Mathematical Design of Square Dance Singing Call[video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_TqFOyYYmc

<comment><USER2> This is _fascinating_. I cannot stand country music, but the structural concepts are equally applicable to the forms of dance music that I _do_ like.</comment>


Show HN: A Reader for Programmers - <AUTHOR>

I have buit an android app which allows the programmers to read the latest programming news, tutorials about the languages and technologies. Google Play: http://goo.gl/2SAh7 <comment><USER2> Has simply ignoring the trolls stopped working? ;)</comment>


Do these screenshots reveal a heavily revamped Gmail is on the way? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/05/24/do-these-screenshots-reveal-a-heavily-revamped-gmail-for-mobile-and-web-is-on-the-way/ <comment><USER2> *whom I found.

Really?</comment>


Hey Google, I want my cache links back - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/hey+google+I+want+my+cache+links+back <comment><USER2> Just google for

      cache:http://www.example.com/

and it will take you directly to the cached site. This is particularly nice in combination with Chrome's omnibar where you just have to prepend "cache:" before the current URL, hit return, and it will automatically show the cached version of the page you are viewing.

<comment><USER3> Cool trick. Completely fails at discoverability though.

<comment><USER4> Caches are kind of a touchy subject. I have no information that they are, but I would not be surprised if Google was inexorably moving toward a 'no user accessible cache' policy. The reasoning is pretty simple, people push things they don't mean too, then they 'fix' it, but if the GoogleBot was in the area your 'fix' may not be as durable as you hoped. Recent examples are iPhone 5 leaks on carrier sites, mis-priced sales at Walmart.com, and support sites at HP for products that were going to exist but now aren't.

Clearly its not Google's fault that people screw up and they happen to look at the wrong time, but a strict interpretation of Google's mission would suggest that keeping bad pages 'cached' isn't part of it. And while the vast majority of cached pages provide a great service like when HN exposure overloads a web site you can still see the content, Google cannot practically fix every cache page where the owner doesn't want it cached (they might not even know it is) and then fix it. (Yes you can email them to have them spike the cache but how many people realize that?)

A couple of the newspaper types went after them claiming the cache was an 'illegal copy' but of course the page didn't say 'no-cache' (which would keep it out of most CDN's as well so its painful).

So the cache feature is useful, but not everyone thinks its a good thing. If they have annoyed Google enough, Google may have just said 'screw it, lets get rid of this capability for end users.' But again, that is just speculation based on seeing it get harder and harder to 'discover' that Google has a cached copy somewhere.

<comment><USER5>
      <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">

or

      <meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

renders the google cache "user inaccessible"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another thing that has been annoying me lately is that it seems like like I have to add a + in front of every word or Google might decide without any indication that it will completely ignore it.

<comment><USER7> This is especially annoying as in days gone by if you added + to the query they'd show a message explaining that you don't need to use + as Google only returns results containing all the terms in your query. I wonder when they stopped doing this?

<comment><USER8> Because that would lead to the dreaded no results, which google doesn't like to show a user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The OP raises a wider point:

      For the longest time google made good on their promise to keep their search page simple and easy to use.
      Now, bit by bit the search page is getting more filled up with cruft that you don't need and stuff that you do need gets removed.

I am getting a hunch (just a vague feeling) that we might be approaching a time where a new, simpler search experience would pick up a lot of users - maybe amongst us HN/early adopters?

<comment> mike-cardwell If you want Googles search results, but without all the interface spaff, use Scroogle: <https://ssl.scroogle.org/>

<comment><USER10> I really dislike services like that. Searches cost real money to Google, using them through that is almost stealing, in my opinion. Just use a different search engine.

EDIT: I'd like if someone would reply if they disagree. Do you dispute that each search costs money to Google, or what?

<comment><USER11> I feel no guilt. Google's main revenue stream is advertisements, which I will never click on. Yet, I still use Google continuously. Does that mean I'm stealing? Either way I'm getting something for free and not contributing to their revenue.

<comment><USER10> Hmm, I suppose that's true - I never click them either, if only because my eyes skip them unconsciously - but on the other hand, accepting $20 from my aunt or taking it from her wallet are very different, despite her ending up with the same money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If it makes people feel better, I just spent around an hour debating the points from this discussion in my office with other people who work on Google's search UI and search quality.

P.S. If people want to leave examples, for example "If I do the search ["society of spectacles"] I get a result which doesn't have that phrase," I'm happy to pass that to people here to debug.

<comment><USER13> > _If it makes people feel better_...

It depends entirely on the outcome of the debate.

<comment><USER12> I'm just speaking personally, but I'm on the side of most of the folks here. A senior engineer is looking into the ["society of spectacles"] search now, for example.

What would be most helpful would be constructive examples of bad queries, bad experiences, or concrete proposals for how to improve Google's results page or results UI.

<comment><USER14> Is it concrete enough that getting to the cache is now a series of 3 actions: 1) Hover over result 2) Move mouse to hover over double-arrow (careful don't miss it or you go back to step 1) 3) Click on Cache link

Whereas before it was just: 1) Click on cache link.

Not to mention the accessibility issues, which I'm asking an expert in the field about now to see how it affects screen readers.

<comment><USER15> I would think this would break most screen readers, as you have to perform a click to get the cache link. If a screen reader didn't understand js, however, then the cache link may still be in the html (but not if it is loaded via javascript).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't agree this is necessarily bad. Arguably, "view cache" is a feature for power-users that know what they're doing.

Moving the cache link into that pop-up did simplify the user interface in the most common case, in which the user just wants to view the real link. It no longer has to be rendered for every result.

IMO it just takes some getting used to that the cache link has been moved. Or are you viewing pages from cache _that_ regularly that the extra clicks/mouse moves are a problem?

<comment><USER17> Depends on the users, for example my non-techie partner always clicks on the cache link just because it highlights the words that she searched for on the page.

For some people it may be an important move

<comment><USER16> Hmm yes I can see it used for that. However, that will only work for simple passive pages. "view cache" is inherently incompatible with pages that render from javascript (or that make extra requests to get the content). These get broken, and as a growing amount of sites is affected this might be another one of the reasons for obscuring the option.

<comment><USER18> Pages that render from javascript or make extra requests to get the content were broken already. They fail REST and thus they're not easily cacheable. We shouldn't encourage them outside of those specific web apps for which linking is not a relevant operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This does not bode well for the employees at google. You get extra features like this (instant preview) when you have too much manpower - you look for things for your employees to do.

But if your customers don't want it, and you can't find anything else for them to do then you start reducing the workforce.

<comment><USER20> When Google released Instant Preview they claimed it increases click through rates to a website. This makes me think a good number of customers do want it.

Edit: here is the announcement: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/beyond-instant- result...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/beyond-instant-results- instant-previews.html)

"In our testing, we've found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. "

<comment><USER21> _people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click._

This sounds too little to justify a UI change that increases complexity.

<comment><USER22> 5% of a billion monthly users is more then enough justification. At Google's scale fractions of a percent are often worth it.

<comment><USER21> That's 100% of the same user base who have to deal with a more complex user interface with more usability snafus and one that evolves less well. If you make a couple of dozen such UI changes based on similarly narrow evidence of improvement, you will end up with a mess.

<comment><USER22> It isn't 100% of the user base. I would guess the majority of users don't care/use/know about page caches so overall it is a simpler UI. The simpler UI will improve the UX for 80% users (lets say for the sake of the argument) and the other 20% will either be able to figure out the marginal increased complexity or will be outweighed by the improvement of the previously mentioned users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I didn't realize they'd hidden cached pages this way...but here's a data point on human behavior that may be non-optimal for Google:

So, yesterday, I searched for something on Google, found what I wanted, went to click Cache and it wasn't there.

I didn't think to go mousing over the page...I instead did what any red- blooded search engine user in a hurry would do: I copied the URL, pasted it into Bing, and viewed cache from there. 0_o

</comment><comment><USER24> Another thing I find more annoying with the recent changes is that previously visited links are not marked as such any longer. When searching for the solution to a problem, it is quite nice to easily know which pages have already been visited using a different search query.

<comment><USER25> Previously visited links show up as the default purple for me in Chrome. Maybe it's due to a particular plugin you have installed?

<comment><USER24> No, I tested in three browsers[1] prior to writing my comment, just to avoid getting caught in something like what you suggest. :) The behaviour seems consistent across all three, independent of whether I'm logged into my Google account or not.

[1] Firefox, Chrome and IE.

<comment><USER26> Interesting. Links show up as purple if visited for me as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I haven't noticed this till now and now I'm shocked. I hated the preview so much that I had to use a custom stylish addon script for firefox to block the annoying thing. Now that the cache is moved to preview, I'm stuck between getting annoyed with preview again or losing the cache links :(. I just don't understand what they were trying to solve with all these changes...

<comment><USER28> Google is starting to become a lot less minimal. I like their current design direction but as the OP stated in the article the cruft is starting to build up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "For the longest time google made good on their promise to keep their search page simple and easy to use. Now, bit by bit the search page is getting more filled up with cruft that you don't need and stuff that you do need gets removed."

I completely agree with this...

</comment><comment><USER30> I thought I was going crazy when I realized the cache links were gone... good to know I wasn't the only one and that they're still there, though hidden (I never click on the preview arrows).

<comment><USER31> I thought it was some magical new robots.txt line you could use if you hate people trying to read your content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If the feature wasn't widely used I'm sure that's the reason for it's disappearance...Google has a tendency to make decisions by the numbers, if they don't see engagement with certain features, they get the axe rather quickly

</comment><comment><USER33> Not to mention the annoying +1 button after each link. I don't want to +1 unless I visited it, and I don't mind taking the extra step of sharing if I found a webpage interesting!

</comment><comment><USER34> I mainly went to the cache link. Getting easy access to the highlighted search terms was so useful.

<comment><USER35> If you're on Chrome, check out Google Quick Scroll for that: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/okanipcmceoeemlbjn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/okanipcmceoeemlbjnmnbdibhgpbllgc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> i too dislike the previews. there's a few things that i find useful tho:

\- timeline

\- image search

\- cache (when it was there and working. lately, it didnt work aka it tries to fetch from the server and if its down, which is what i often use cache for, then it fails)

hum, well thats it.

special search commands used to be cool but they don't work so well now (i mean the filetype stuff and all). and the rest are just bloated reactions to "bing fear" or something

<comment><USER37> You don't use the timeframe option? I use that one all the time, it's invaluable to me.

<comment><USER38> I very very rarely do a search where I don't timeframe limit it. This makes me wonder why Google insist on hiding that option every time I visit the search page. I guess they want me to go somewhere else unless I'm going to log in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39>
        .vspii {
          display: none !important;
        }

Will hide the buttons that display the "preview" thing when you mouse over them.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm just getting fucking sick of it. This includes supporting a number of "normal" users on Google products. Of course, my/our opinion doesn't count. Nonetheless, Google UI and support ( _cough_ ) are now actively pushing me away.

</comment><comment><USER41> I was bored so wrote some JS to put the links back. Only works in chrome.

As a userscript: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/114144>

Or as a bookmarklet: javascript:(function(){var c=document.querySelectorAll('a[href*="webcache.googleusercontent.com"]');for(var a=0,b;b=c[a];a++){b.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.querySelector("h3.r").parentElement.insertBefore(b)}})()

</comment><comment><USER42> The iPad "Tablet" Google results experience has removed them completely, no instant preview, no "hidden" swipe-to-expose (that I could find). You have to go to the "classic" version, via a link on the bottom of the page, to get them back.

The classic version? It's the one we used to have: no instant preview, Cache link present on almost every listing.

So, at least on some platforms, the info-dense but useful version is sill around...

<comment><USER43> Can you please post the link to your classic version?

I'd like to see what happens when I hit that link from a different platform.

<comment><USER42> Using User Agent Switcher on Firefox, I set my UA to iPad and went to Google. The link for the "Classic" version was: [http://www.google.com/?hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&...](http://www.google.com/?hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&nota=1&sa=X&ei=Nj6DTqeHPITMgQeV5pAh&ved=0CAAQyRM)

However, when I set my UA back to Default (Firefox), this link did not appear to do anything. YMMV.

<comment><USER43> Ok, thank you for trying that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> One of the things he mentions here is that some sites don't have a cached link at all - it may be because they're explicitly telling Google not to cache the page. You can do that using the noarchive tag, which looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />

</comment><comment><USER13> That's a minor annoyance compared to the changes they made to the search logic. I noticed lately that way too frequently now the first result page contains irrelevant junk unless I resort to using quotes. And even then quoted words appear to be mangled and ignored at will.

Complained about it too here, about a month ago, which is when it appears to have started - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2935261>

</comment><comment><USER45> I just noticed it yesterday (or maybe the day before).

It is really a bummer when you are _used_ to going to a website to use their feature and the feature isn't there anymore.

</comment><comment><USER46> Easily solved with this chrome extension which gives you a dropdown with links to the google cache, as well as The Internet Archive, Yahoo Cache, MSN cache(Bing Cache), CoralCDN, Gigablast, and WebCite.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/coblegoildgpecccij...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/coblegoildgpecccijneplifmeghcgip)

or, as others have said, just google for cache:<url>

</comment><comment><USER47> Install the Hide Google Instant Previews Userscript in Greasemonkey: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/90222>

Replace one line of code with this:

var css = ".vspib {display: none;} .vshid {display: inline; margin- left:7px;}";

You'll get "cache" and "similar" links back.

Thanks, bitmap.

</comment><comment><USER48> I agree with the author, but a convenient workaround is to use a bookmarklet: [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/07/useful-google- bookm...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/07/useful-google- bookmarklets.html)

</comment><comment><USER49> I often use cache links instead of going to the actual site since it was faster and your search terms were highlighted in the document. Now it takes a bit of work to get to the cache link.

</comment><comment><USER50> Great extension for firefox:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect- pag...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/)

</comment><comment><USER51> To be fair, I suspect that the cache link was used by 0.1% of all users. Even I almost never use it, and I am likely to be a power user.

</comment><comment><USER52> i also dislike the previews :'( and the cached link was nice and easy, now an annoying extra click, etc. Why oh why?

Aaaargh!

</comment><comment><USER53> Google implement AB testing don't they. They'll probably be back tomorrow - don't worry.

</comment><comment><USER54> I used the cache links purely because it hilighted my search terms, just me?

</comment><comment><USER55> Mine is still here.

(Just don't get me wrong, what I really miss is the "Related" link)

<comment><USER43> Phased roll-out? AB test in progress?

This seems to have started a couple of days ago.

<comment><USER55> Is cache:xxx method still working?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is Google being dumbed down for the average user.

</comment><comment><USER57> I think they're trying to make their interface look exactly like Bing so the only way Microsoft can compete is by having better search results.

You guys at HN probably don't check out Bing very much, but many of the UI changes in Google were in Bing first... hover over a search result to show more info on the side, image search with just images (details when you hover), infinite scroll on image search, background image on main search page, etc.

<comment><USER23> Which is _terrible._ I use Bing as a backup for Google when Google fails me (not often), and I just don't like all of Bing's noise, the background graphics, the sidebar stuff, the slow load time, the Facebook Like button (FFS, WHY??), the "Check out our other services!" topbar that keeps the search field from loading until it's finished, ugh.

It seems like Google is becoming more Bing-like with each passing day. This is not a good thing.

What is great and always has been great about Google (and why, I believe, it's a staple for many of us after over a decade!) is its great results _paired with simplicity_ and fast load time (please don't get me started on Instant Search, it's not a pretty rant).

Google Search, be yourself, the self that's kept you as the autocompleted "g" in my URL bar for well over a decade now. Don't go chasing waterfalls. They take _forever_ to load.

<comment><USER58> DuckDuckGo! I'd say the search results are better/less cluttered about 60% of the time, and google or bing are only a !bang away...

<comment><USER23> Hrm, DDG's Privacy Policy <http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html> is enough reason to move over, methinks! Now to move muscle memory from g to d. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Search is just one of those things where power users will always rule, because in an information economy whoever has best access to information becomes dominant, and the copycats follow in order to keep up. So a search engine has to cater to power users.

</comment><comment><USER60>
      Now that's a pretty dumb move. If it isn't broken *please*
      don't fix it.

      >*please*

Does his blog software not allow him to italicize text?</comment>


15TB HDDs: Western Digital Unveils the Ultrastar DC HC620 - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13523/western-digital-15tb-hdd-ultrastar-dc-hc620 <comment><USER2> It's an SMR drive. So better for archiving than regular IO

<comment><USER3> Copy on write filesystems can probably be optimized for SMR by using TRIM commands to punch holes and rewrite the content sequentially in a new zone. Afaik both zfs and btrfs have plans to do this.

That way they can be useful for more than archival.

<comment><USER4> You probably mean log structured, not copy on write. CoW doesn't help make writes sequential, unlike log structured filesystems.

<comment><USER5> log-structured is a special-case of CoW; specifically it's CoW where the allocation strategy is sequential blocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Will we hit a point where the size of the drive is simply too big to get the data off in any decent amount of time?

<comment><USER7> This is one reason why RAID 0+1 is a best practice, and RAID 5 & 6 are no longer recommended. It takes too long to rebuild the array, leading to a multi-failed disk situation.

<comment><USER2> Raid 01 has its own risk. If the wrong two disks fail your entire array is toast

<comment><USER8> as opposed to raid 5 where if any two disks fail your array is toast, raid 6 increases this to 3.

However both raid 5 and 6 have 2 huge problems:

Data inflight at write time (power/hardware failures are more likely to corrupt the array, especially silently, which is the worst outcome).

Parity calculations require you to spin up the whole raid5/6 array during a rebuild, massively increasing the chance of a multi drive failure and a lost array. If one close-to-EOL drive dies, putting its sister drives through what is essentially an all day full tilt stress test is a terrible, terrible idea, and this idea keeps getting worse (takes longer) as drive sizes grow.

raid 0+1 sidesteps these issues mostly at a modest increase in drive count, its a no brainier for most setups.

<comment><USER9> _Data inflight at write time (power /hardware failures are more likely to corrupt the array, especially silently, which is the worst outcome)._

How is that? RAID doesn't affect data persistence behavior in any meaningful way. FUA/SyncCache/etc are supported by RAID controllers same as the underlying disks in writeback enviroments, parity updates included. Put another way, if you FUA or flush the writeback cache, those operations won't complete in a properly implemented RAID environment until the data is persisted somewhere, even if that means passing FUA down to the underlying storage. Granted there are a number of ways to mess this up, RMW cycles in a controller that doesn't have some kind of persistent memory and flush on power restore. Anyway, none of this is any worse than what happens in any other WB cached storage technology.

Finally, all this fearmongering about loss on rebuild is also something that should be more fully explored in the context of the fact that decent RAID systems run background scrub operations on a regular basis. Those operations by themselves are going to "stress test" the array on a regular basis when its consistent and not degraded. I've actually got a fair amount of experience in this area, and I'm here to tell you that if you think this is a risk consider what happens to non-raided unscrubbed drives that have a lot of data silently bitrotting on the platters. That latter effect is nearly always the problem in RAID environments when someone starts a rebuild on drives/sectors that have been unread for extended periods of time. But, in the case of RAID, a properly implemented system won't fail a drive for a single read failure during a rebuild, instead reconstructing from the other drives and leaving the drive online long enough to complete the rebuild and then taking it offline.

Basically raid 1 setups don't actually fix any of these problems, except through the use of massive additional parity disks overhead. Overhead that can also be applied to other RAID algorithsm to much better effect. AKA a mirrored RAID 6 provides far more protection than a mirrored raid 0. Similar levels can be had with 6+6 in environments where that is possible, with trivial capacity overhead.

<comment><USER8> Raid 5/6 require parity calculations before data can be written to disk. This is a significant amount of data, especially at high writing speeds. That is what causes the inflight data problem.

Battery and flash backup on controllers dosen't fix the problem of hardware failure (which is significant, especially on big hot controllers.

<comment><USER9> Again, decent controllers have ECC protection and the like, and frequently are available in HA configurations if your worry is controller failure (along with redundant/dual data paths to the media via SAS/NVMe/etc). Plus, there are a long list of technologies that can be enabled at the HBA layer and pushed all the way to the media (T10 DIF/DIX comes to mind).

But much of this micro level redundancy is overkill as frequently one uses some kind of application level HA/redundancy as well. So, loss of a RAID5/6 disk in a single machine is the functional equivalent of loss of a any combination of RAID 0/1 in the same machine. You still need the higher level redundancy as well as a backup plan.

We could start breaking the discussion up into fabric attached vs direct attach RAID vs Software, but I think its sufficient to say, that RAID5/6 doesn't _increase_ the failure surface in any meaningful way when your not using fly-by-night RAID.

Edit: Maybe what your trying to say is that cache flush/FUA operations for a give piece of data don't cover the parity calculation and buffers? That is false, a controller should not be responding to FUA/etc until the entire (including the parity) block has been persisted. So if the controller dies during the operation the host OS is fully aware that the operation didn't complete. The given block is of course left in some unknown state in this case, but that is true of any write operation that fails like this, regardless of WT/WB/RAID/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So does anyone know of a way to take a set of files and write them to an HDD, in NTFS or exFAT format, in a single sequential write? Essentially building the FS on-the-fly (because we're talking about datsets that are much too large to fit into memory)?

<comment><USER11> So basically a zip file?

I will note that you could easily build the MFT before you start transferring data. That's really your active 'dataset' here, and it's not very big.

<comment><USER10> Building the MFT first is pretty much what I want to do. But I'm not aware of any utilities that can handle it, nor where to start with writing it myself...

I have a project where I routinely need to copy large amounts of data (3 to 8 TB) to a hard drive. Problem is, my files are all 512kb. So this is much slower than it could be...

If I write it as a single tar file I get excellent throughput, but the users who need to be able to work with the drive are unable to handle a tar file. They need to be able to plug the drive into a Windows computer and have it "just work".. which presents some problems.

<comment><USER12> Maybe you could use the same type of filesystem that file CD/DVDs use (UDF?). They're written sequentially and are commonly supported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was about to buy 3x 12TB Toshiba for Deep Learning datasets; now I need to reconsider... Does anyone know what are the current reliability stats for >10TB drives? My old 6x 4TB HGST in NAS are running without a single problem for the past 3 years...

<comment><USER14> How do people use such large HDDs when internet download speeds are still low as compared to downloading directly on cloud services (like aws)?

<comment><USER15> Internet speeds are slow in some places, such as France (specifically the Pays de Gex near Geneva, where my parents live). My dad uses iCloud, but he drives to CERN to upload (he just retired).

I have 18 TB: 5 TB Seagate (x2), 4 TB WesternDigital, 2 TB WesternDigital, and 2 TB internal.

Backups take the most space - I fix laptops for friends from church, and they don't back up but still want their files to be safe. I had to shuffle some files around to free up 650 GB for a recent repair, mostly photos & videos.

Virtual machines use a lot of space too. I made VMWare Fusion images of every Mac OS version 10.5-10.13, Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, 7, and 10, in several languages ( [https://peterburk.github.com/i2018n](https://peterburk.github.com/i2018n) ), and some Linux distros.

Another 1 TB is a dataset of Chinese characters from a machine learning project of mine ( [https://blog.usejournal.com/making-of-a-chinese- characters-d...](https://blog.usejournal.com/making-of-a-chinese-characters- dataset-92d4065cc7cc) ).

Music, mostly from repaired iPods back in high school, accounts for a lot as well. There's some movies too, though I missed a chance to get 2 TB from a friend because I didn't have enough space at the time. If I upload those, even those that I legally ripped from CDs & DVDs, I'm worried that it'll trigger content filters.

For these, local disks are more useful than cloud services in my opinion.

<comment><USER16> I'm going to highly recommend looking at drives with WizTree, which does a very fast display of what's taking up space based on parsing the MFT rather than scanning the entire drive.

You may find that there's a massive amount of data where you wouldn't expect it, such as in the Windows Temp directory - if so and it's a bunch of files named "cab_something", you can kill all of those and prevent recurrence with a little housekeeping.

Details: [https://www.computerworld.com/article/3112358/microsoft- wind...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3112358/microsoft- windows/windows-7-log-file-compression-bug-can-fill-up-your-hard-drive.html) (update log files in windows\logs\cbs get auto-compressed, but compression breaks and leaves big temp files if the file to compress >2GB)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The 15TB drive packs in 1108 Gbit/inch2. That is, each bit is a square of side 8.5nm. This is small but the transistors in flash are smaller [1]. As mind blowing as the numbers (for both technologies) are in the referenced article, that article is now 2.5 years old. Is anyone aware of more recent numbers?

[1] [https://www.computerworld.com/article/3030642/data- storage/f...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3030642/data- storage/flash-memorys-density-surpasses-hard-drives-for-first-time.html)

<comment><USER18> From my experience in the HDD industry I remember that a magnetic bit of data is about 13-15nm long and about 40-60nm wide (narrower tracks for SMR.) The length of a bit is constrained by the grain size of the magnetic media. However, the width of a bit (prior to SMR) is actually constrained by the size of the write head. I don't remember why, but I think it has to do with the fact that the write current is like 40 mA, and the magnetic flux density on the write element is like 1.5T (no that's not a typo)

I'm not an expert on transistor pitches, but here's a chart from Wikipedia for the 10nm - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_nanometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_nanometer) It's kind of impressive for HDDs considering that it's a 2 inch long mechanical arm that is able to move with that level of precision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am going for the 15tb instead of that 14 so I have extra space for backups. Says no body. We are clearly close to the end of spinning rust, absent some new breakthrough.

<comment><USER20> HAMR and then HDMR are expected to allow data densities to increase by 5 to 10 times what is currently achievable. HAMR will probably start showing up in a year or two.

Spinning drives are definitely not going away anytime soon unless there is a much more significant drop in the cost of SSDs.

<comment><USER21> _Investment_ in new spinning drive technologies is going away though. Nobody wants to spend R&D money on coming up with patents and ideas which will be worthless in 5 years when SSD's overtake.

Science investment requires a new technology to have a prospect of a return for most of the ~20 year patent lifespan for it to look like a good investment, and spinning bits of metal aren't that right now.

<comment><USER22> In the same way that hard drives didn't kill off tape, SSD won't kill off hard drives. The price differential is too great for many applications and they have different operational strengths and weaknesses.

<comment><USER23> Tapes have a use case that hard drives do not. Tapes are the lowest cost/GB stored and are more shelf stable than hard drives.

SSDs are higher performance than HDDs and have none of the packaging constraints. Flash storage is going to be put into everything and the economies of scale look quite good.

Storage is scaling but the r/w speeds of hdds aren't keeping up. Following the trend line and we see huge hdds that are functionally useless due to how long it takes to do disk operations.

HDDs only exist above tapes because of their performance. And only exist below SSDs due to cost. Tapes are the floor and SSDs are the quickly lowering ceiling. HDDs are likely to be crushed between.

<comment><USER9> You might be right, but keep in mind that flash has been scaling due to the shrinking semiconductor feature sizes (and additional layers/etc). So a large part of flash's core R&D & production costs are being spread over all the logic being produced. That has been hitting a wall, so while the capacity/price curves for flash look nice, they likely won't continue, which leaves open the possibility that if rust actually gets a 4-5x boost in the near future the current market trends will continue. SSDs for perf/power/size and mechanical harddrives for bulk nearline storage, leaving tape where its been for the past 30 years, as an archival technology.

<comment><USER24> Horizontal feature sizes for flash memory stopped shrinking years ago. The continued improvements in density and production cost have been the result of R&D that is very specifically focused on 3D NAND flash memory and has little in common with R&D for logic circuit fabrication.

That said, on the horizon of multiple years, I agree that the future scalability of NAND flash doesn't look quite as promising as HAMR/MAMR for hard drives. How that translates into actual product demand and adoption will probably depend on the relatively unexplored question of how much performance per TB our applications actually need. 40+ TB hard drives might not be fast enough to actually serve as nearline storage for that volume of data without eg. multi-actuator technology that essentially gives you more than one hard drive sharing a common spindle motor. Meanwhile, there's no question that QLC NAND flash definitely has adequate read latency and throughput.

<comment><USER21> Multi-actuator tech sounds interesting, and I wouldn't be surprised to see drives with 5, 10, 50 or 100 read heads per platter at some point.

With 100 read heads per platter, typical seek time is cut by a factor of 100. That won't let them overtake SSD's, but at least allow them to close the gap.

<comment><USER24> So far, nobody has announced plans to manufacture hard drives with two read heads per platter, so speculating about 100 heads per platter seems rather unrealistic. The multi-actuator technology that is actually being developed by Seagate still has only one read head per platter, but out of the eight or so platters in a drive, the read heads for four of them will be controlled by one actuator and the read heads for the other four platters will be controlled by the second actuator.

Going all the way to 100 read heads per platter would be insanely expensive and would massively increase drive failure rates, while still leaving them about four times slower for random reads than the slowest $35 SSD on the market. This will never turn into a viable product.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


4.95 million people signed up for Telegram today - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/telegram

<comment><AUTHOR> This is maybe not obvious from the US, but the buzz in the EU media is staggering.

Anecdata: I live in the Netherlands, and half of my whatsapp contacts switched to Telegram since yesterday. Lots of talk about privacy and discussions surrounding NSA and Facebook privacy violations.

</comment><comment><USER2> Telegram is awesome. Having a web client and open API alone is a huge improvement, even if you don't care at all about privacy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, the WhatsApp deal is definitely going to go into the history books, was $19B the price you had to pay?</comment>


Yay for Sugary JavaScript OO - <AUTHOR> http://killdream.github.com/blog/2011/11/for-sugary-object-oriented-js/index.html

<comment><USER2> Odd choice of name, given that <http://boo.codehaus.org/> has been around for a while

<comment><USER3> I had the exact same thought as soon as I read paragraph 2.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best resources for learning JavaScript in 2017 - <AUTHOR> I'm a front-end web designer that doesn't know JavaScript. I wish to learn the fundamentals over winter (northern hemisphere) and continue to extend my knowledge. I am not on a time limit, I have a budget to purchase materials, and I'm allocating up to three hours a day to learn.
My question: what resources do you recommend for someone learning JavaScript from scratch in 2017?
Thank you. <comment><USER2> Eloquent Javascript[0] is free and online, it starts of with simple concepts but ramps up very fast.

Javascript the Good Parts[1] is very solid, albeit a little more advanced and dry. Probably not a beginner book, but one to read after you've built a couple of medium sized projects. I use it as a reference to brush up on certain topics.

You-Dont-Know-JS [2] is a free online book series that is a great reference for brushing up on more advanced topics.

MDN Reference [3]: this is the best documentation out there. Always have a tab open and try reading the actual documentation on how things work. This will be very hard at first but will allow you to become a very strong developer.

I also recommend you avoid [https://www.w3schools.com/](https://www.w3schools.com/). Google often puts W3Schools at the top when searching for what a method does, but often times it is out of date or provides technically incorrect information.

[0]: [http://eloquentjavascript.net/](http://eloquentjavascript.net/)

[1]: [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do)

[2]: [https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know- JS](https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS)

[3]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference)

<comment><USER3> Is there any resource that teaches mixed ES5/ES6 for beginners?

Either I find some ES5 resources, and I have the feeling to spend my time learning stuff I'll never use by myself. Either I find some ES6 resources that need ES5 knowledge as prior requirements.

For example, even some may say I should, I don't wan't to be teached that before, we used "var", and now we use "let". I just want to learn the "let" version.

<comment><USER4> I'm writing an ES[latest] series of guides at [https://www.writesoftware.org](https://www.writesoftware.org) on various frontend development topics, all JS-related.

It's not yet on par with the other resources listed in this thread obviously, but I always use arrow functions, const and let, avoid semicolons and in general make use of modern JS across all the examples.

I did video courses once and I find that they are very hard to update once shipped, and they tend to age pretty quickly, so I went all-in with text content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://javascript30.com/](https://javascript30.com/)

Do every single one of those. When you're done, do them again without any help from the videos.

100% guarantee that if you make it through that process, you'll be better off than you would've been reading a bunch of O'Reilly books (though many really are excellent).

[EDIT] If that's a bit too advanced of a starting point, you can try something like Codecademy to get you familiar with the basics.

</comment><comment><USER6> Big fan of [https://egghead.io](https://egghead.io) Super high-quality content, but most of it is paid content

A good free online good is Eloquent Javascript [http://eloquentjavascript.net/](http://eloquentjavascript.net/)

<comment><USER7> A couple of years ago, I bought a year subscription to egghead for about $100.

The other day I wanted to refresh a bit my knowledge about react and, when I checked again, it was $200. Maybe the content is really good, but I finally found what I needed in Udemy for less than $30.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd just like to add some votes for resources already mentioned:

MDN's documentation is by far the best. A very easy entry would be to use Codecademy, while more in depth video tutorials can be found on Pluralsight and Egghead (though Pluralsight also has some introductory and rapid training courses focused on Javascript). The best book for learning how JS works under the surface is Simpson's series 'You Don't Know JS'.

</comment><comment><USER9> Personal recommendations:

Egghead [0] if you want to learn JavaScript and some of the most popular / common techniques and frameworks currently used. The videos on this site can help you to get up to speed with frameworks and libraries such as React, Reactive Extensions, Vue, Angular, Redux, Ember and the like pretty quickly (once you get the hang of vanilla JavaScript)

Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript [1] if you want to have a great start (and deep dive afterwards) in vanilla JavaScript. I suggest to start with the video tutorials here which will help you to get a solid background not only in JavaScript, but also in application architecture, test driven development and things like build automation. Plus James is a great teacher, with a solid background in all of the above (and more).

[0] [https://egghead.io/](https://egghead.io/)

[1] [http://www.letscodejavascript.com/](http://www.letscodejavascript.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://javascript.info/](http://javascript.info/) is an excellent, up-to- date, comprehensive resource for learning JS.

I also really liked getify's course on Frontend Masters, "Deep JavaScript Fundamentals," as well as his book series You Don't Know JS (though it's a bit much for a beginner).

</comment><comment><USER11> Eloquent Javascript is probaby a single good resource I'd recommend if you're starting out. [http://eloquentjavascript.net/](http://eloquentjavascript.net/)

Other one if you want to go in a little deep: [https://github.com/getify/You- Dont-Know-JS](https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS)

Working on side projects or sth will be beneficial after these or along with these. I think Codacademy is pretty basic. Look for a bit more advanced problems.

Edit: For some advanced topics or frameworks, frontend masters is a very good resource. [https://frontendmasters.com/](https://frontendmasters.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm an experienced programmer (C++, C#, F#) and would also like to learn JavaScript from materials that present current best practices. Would appreciate pointers to which of the mentioned resources in the thread or which other resources are most suitable for someone coming from that background (e.g. I don't need to learn to code or what a variable or function is but do want to learn current JavaScript idioms and best practices).

</comment><comment><USER14> You can get a trial oreilly membership for safari [https://www.safaribooksonline.com](https://www.safaribooksonline.com) then they have pretty good tutorials, other than that use mdn [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/) instead of w3schools.

</comment><comment><USER15> Best Tool: Chrome Developer Console

Best Docs: Mdn

Best Approach: [https://javascript30.com](https://javascript30.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> Ex sapientia an optimal learning environment/community for Javascript and computer science related subjects @freecodecamp.org. The reward-system hooks and maximizes cognition while the social fabric prevents the fall down the rabbit hole.

</comment><comment><USER17> Look at some of the videos on pluralsight.com – $29 a month will give you access to the whole catalog. You can start from JS basics, and go all the way to courses related to specific frameworks.

<comment><USER18> I second pluralsight.com. Also look at codeschool, they offer free courses before you decide to buy. Codecademy can be a good tool to get a feel of the language with zero setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> codeschool and codeacademy are great intros to the language and some frameworks. The following are excellent free books, [http://eloquentjavascript.net/](http://eloquentjavascript.net/) and [https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS](https://github.com/getify/You- Dont-Know-JS)

</comment><comment><USER20> w3schools has got lot of examples and decent documentation for javascript.</comment>


In under 3 weeks, iPhone 5 overtakes Galaxy S III in mobile web traffic - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/10/12/in-under-three-weeks-apples-iphone-5-overtakes-samsungs-galaxy-s-iii-in-mobile-web-traffic/

<comment><USER2> Isn't Chitika the largely discredited company that basically invented nonsensical stats a few months ago?

</comment><comment><USER3> Lil at the amazing 4g technology of the iphone. Thats like its best new feature... i had that on my old galaxy s2 even hahaha. Apples markketting is so much better than their products

<comment><USER4> In the past 6 months I gave up my iPhone 4S and tried out a few Windows Phones and a Samsung Galaxy S2 (with Gingerbread). I'm very happy with the iPhone but I thought that I would see what's out there before purchasing an iPhone 5. I have to say that by far the Galaxy S2 was my least favorite phone; I could barely stand to use it for a day. This isn't a comment on Android or even the S2. I'm willing to believe that my tastes are atypical and I believe that the phone was _usable_. I learned that people value certain things over others. Perhaps iPhone owners value something that you yourself do not.</comment></comment>


The Extreme Right and Online Recommender Systems - <AUTHOR> http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0894439314555329 <comment><AUTHOR> I'd encourage everyone to take a few minutes to watch a few conspiracy theory / fake news videos on youtube in incognito mode then look over the recommendations on the main feed.

Also another study that's not focused on the right wing extremists [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0159641)</comment>


Dark Patterns in Domino's Order Online Service - <AUTHOR> http://jackwink.com/posts/dominos_dark_patterns

<comment><USER2> The UK site still displays a running total, I wonder how long it'll be before we get this 'update'.</comment>