-- Alan Kay

Direct your complaints to the source of your problem, namely the shitty browsers on mobile. Even suggesting to let HN fix their abysmal stylesheet would be wrong. Go to the source -- and if it turns out they don't care about requests to provide actual tools, tell them off.

I want good things, I have them, and now I want greedy, needy people to stop pushing their mediocre, poorly understood imitations to drown out the really good things we might use and nurture instead, hurting us all and even themselves in the process.

> How do you think a company gets to improve and optimize their product? By surveys?

If what you make serves a purpose other than generating needs to make a profit from, then you'll probably be fine with mostly simply paying attention to what you're making, using it yourself, and occasionally making surveys and collecting metrics from volunteers to see if there's anything you missed.

I complained about this from day one, and not once did I get anything but patronizing handwaving in response.

If I want to buy a pizza, I'll enter "buy pizza in $city" or something, but if I just enter "pizza", I want to see what every person on the planet would see if they used the English language version of the search engine (and then on top of that have the option of personal customization that I can undo or suspend anytime). IMO the convenience of "just typing 'pizza' when you want directions to the nearest pizza place" is nothing at all compared to the fracturing of the public space, for lack of a better way to put it.

> Of course it is "more useful" to commit an injustice than to be victim of it; for the sake of the thinking dialogue with myself, this point of utility must be abandoned.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Wahrheit und Politik"

> Natürlich ist es "nützlicher", Unrecht zu tun als Unrecht zu leiden; um des denkenden Dialogs mit mir selbst willen muss gerade dieser Nützlichkeitsstandpunkt aufgegeben werden.

-- Max Frisch

> Warum reisen wir? Auch dies, damit wir Menschen begegnen, die nicht meinen, daß sie uns kennen ein für allemal; damit wir noch einmal erfahren, was uns in diesem Leben möglich sei.

It's better to fail as a good person than to succeed as a charlatan, and a bit of money can't plaster over the faculties of the mind drying up, among that the ability to resist charlatans in other contexts, including the political. "Business sophistry" is simply sophistry, brownnosing your boss is just brownnosing, and either you feed sophistry and naked emperors, or you don't. Everybody has "reasons", but more importantly, every day new people come into the world, and they deserve a clean shot at life more than crooked people deserve respect and comfort. Save your soul, you just have the one.

> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

-- Kant

The trouble is that issue is that earnest discussion of these serious issues has been suppressed for more than a year, and that by now, talking about this "cute" stuff while pretending said suppression is going leaves a certain aftertaste. I guess in your mind, ignoring an elephant on the couch is just the thing a curious intelligent person acting in good faith would do. But that's just you.

> The generic discussions are always the same

That's just as true for many articles about social media, node, golang, whatever. It can be demonstrated in 5 minutes that what you criticize consistently in one context, isn't even worth a mention in many, many others.

In the elevator sure, though just as often it's abbreviated EG for Erdgeschoss, which does mean ground floor. We call the floor above that "erstes Geschoss" or "erstes Obergeschoss", whereas that would be the second floor in English, but we never say "nulltes Geschoss", always Erdgeschoss.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Erdgeschoss

> The aim of the missions was to track, and when the conditions were deemed right, kill suspected insurgents. That’s not how they put it, though. They would talk about “cutting the grass before it grows out of control”, or “pulling the weeds before they overrun the lawn”.

> And then there were the children. The airmen would be flying the Predators over a village in the tribal areas of Pakistan, say, when a series of smaller black shadows would appear across their screens – telling them that kids were at the scene.

> They called them “fun-sized terrorists”.

[..]

> Toward the end of his service, Haas switched to training new recruits in the technology of drone warfare. That shocked him anew, as he discovered that many of the younger intake were gung-ho about the power they wielded at their fingertips. “They just wanted to kill,” he said.

> He remembers one training session with a student in which they were flying live over Afghanistan. The student said that a group of people on the ground looked suspicious.

> Why? Haas asked. Because they look like they are up to no good, the student replied.

> Would you act on that? the instructor asked. Sure, the student said.

> Haas immediately pulled him from his seat, took over the mission himself, and promptly failed the student. “I tried to get the students to understand that preservation of innocent life had to take priority.”

> Because he failed the student, Haas was later rebuked by senior officers. They told him that they were short of bodies to keep the drones flying, and they ordered him to pass students in future so that there would be a sufficient number trained and ready to go.

> I think the university should tolerate a large diversity of opinion, which it does not. I think there is a severe failure - the failure is one of honesty, in my opinion. That is, I don't believe that scholarship within the university attempts to come to grips with the real structure of the society. I think it is under such narrow ideological controls that it avoids any concern or investigation of central issues in our society.

-- Noam Chomsky, interview in Business Today (May, 1973) https://chomsky.info/197305__/

-- George Orwell

That's how you write honestly for the target audience.

> Nasdaq runs more than 40 different algorithms, using about 35,000 parameters, to look for market abuse and manipulation in real time.

That is how you use big words on an audience not capable of seeing through their meaninglessness, and it's the responsibility of people who do see through it to call it out.

Weasel words are like your little lucky charm, aren't they? What "ideology" would that be? Resisting the ideology you peddle isn't an ideology. Not being a Nazi isn't a politcal stance. I'm German, I just don't march in goosestep -- criticizing something out of China is "national battle" in your mind. Nevermind I do the same for any other nation as well. Nevermind the mountains of sophistry you enclosed yourself in.

How is using flags and moderator privileges, how is you lying, not doing battle? I can actually argue my points, that is what you don't like. You pay lip service to what I do, and you never actually engage. The last time I asked you what's wrong with my comment, you couldn't say either. I told you then, if you can't actually point to a consisten principle you apply, if all you have is these weasel words, ban me or don't. You just ignored it.

So don't spit in my face and pretend it's snowing. You can do that on your own little site, you couldn't do it in an open forum where you actually have to own your words and can't just throw out a convenient lie and run off.

> The problem with bringing such links into arguments like this is that no one does so for reasons of intellectual interest. For example, in this case, people aren't actually interested in the plight of the Uighurs.

That's you. That's not everybody though, only a sociopath would think it is, and it certainly isn't me. You use these people as welcome fig leaves to not own your own shit, and you lie through your teeth when it comes to manipulation on this site.

So fuck you and your supposed moral high horse.

> Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17763554

> people aren't actually interested in the plight of the Uighurs. Rather, it's convenient ammunition for justifying pre-existing political and national feelings.

Hardly anyone would say that to the face of someone who gets tortured, and nobody would say it while they get tortured.

For every Nazi who actually laid hand on anyone, there were hundreds or thousands of Nazis who "merely" looked the other way, with oh so flowery language.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dx8rn0/absolutely...

Can't talk about that here, it all gets flagged like a brick, because hey, anyone who cares is just "virtue signalling". I mean, how the fuck could totalitarianism be important for any intellectuals? Just like no intellectuals wrote about the Nazis or Stalin, why would they, it was all just partisan dick waving contests.

https://twitter.com/arslan_hidayat/status/118550371514021478...

Imagine being in bed with something so horrible, you don't even dare to lift the covers. Congratulations, to all whom it may concern. May you live a long life, see interesting times, and all that jazz. All of it.

The context is "disagreeing with unions", which wasn't further qualified.

edit: and certainly not restricted to Google. Just re-read chrisseaton's comment -- downvoting me doesn't change what's written here, it just adds the data point of dishonesty and underhanded tactics.

> These examples are hilarious, but also a little insulting to employees who actually need unions.

How so?