[moksly]

I’ve always found these articles fascinating on HN, because while anecdotal, hacker news is easily the social media that has wasted the most of my time and been the source of the most stress and anxiety (aren’t you using this new tech yet?).

The privacy issue doesn’t exist here, at least not unless you decide to share, but if you do, you actually won’t be able to delete your posts unless you contact the admins.

Facebook actually adds a lot more value to my life than HN does because Facebook is the place one of my friend groups arrange our 4-6 yearly weekend retreats. This is the only thing I use Facebook for though, I don’t have any of their apps and I only log on a couple of times a month. Don’t get me wrong, I wish we could do it on some other medium exactly because of facebooks evil history, but unfortunately Facebook is the only place everyone is.

I used to use Facebook differently, I used to follow things and interests, but one I removed all my likes and follows it became a pretty harmless address book that sells my information to advertising. Hacker news on the other hand is where I waste the most of my online time, and mostly it’s on feeling inferior because I’m not learning X and Y or starting some side project company. This is anecdotal like I said, but I don’t think HN is any better than FB from a purely psychological point of view. Facebook is obviously still more evil due to the privacy issues, but this article is about the cigarette side of social media.

[aphextron]

The time wasting aspect was never really the issue with social media. It's the way it warps peoples' view of reality without their understanding of that fact. Humans are really really good at being social. We have these skills from millions of years of evolution and existence in social groups. We're really good at filtering out bad actors and building strong communities. But when those communities are algorithmically mediated, chopped up, and repackaged for each individual, it atomizes people and has the effect of replacing actual human interaction with an artificially created situation whose purpose is to profit a single entity. It short circuits all of those safeguards we have to protect our selves and our minds. I refuse now to take part in any form of online social discourse that isn't completely unfiltered, because I understand the dangers. But most people don't, or don't care, and I fear that these behemoth walled garden "curated" experiences will turn out to be the most harmful thing ever done to human civilization.

[david-cako]

Could you also view this through the lens of all social bubbles, especially online ones with weighted ranking of popular opinion, being detrimental to one’s concept of truth?

In real life we have very different inputs and outputs and sense for anonymity. All of the internet has turned us into a different creature. All technology seems to. We make tools that change us.

Seems like the best we can do is understand as many social spheres as possible.

[agumonkey]

we need a legacynews where people discuss how they're not transitioning to java8 but keep java7 for now

[shantly]

"How Perl 5 is basically fine and gets the job done"

"If node is so fast why does my PHP site feel way faster than this React+Redux+Node thingy? An inquiry into what 'fast' means."

"Why GUIs in things other than webtech are actually not hard at all and work way better."

[agumonkey]

> "If node is so fast why does my PHP site feel way faster than this React+Redux+Node thingy? An inquiry into what 'fast' means."

this actually a true statement.

I probably spent a thousand hours deeply mocking PHP, but everytime I use their website I'm shocked how lean everything is.

Given the infinte amount of brilliant work done on js VMs and HTTP2 or whatever, I think there's something to be learned there.

[derefr]

PHP is, at its core (i.e. after in-engine precompilation), a hand-coded-in-C virtual machine with its ISA purpose-designed for efficiently generating dynamic HTML from the results of backend network service requests.

Honestly, that’s not a bad idea. It’s a lot like how many old game consoles have ISAs that specifically make game software efficient to run compared to generic application software. Purpose-built architectures can be exploited to achieve incredible efficiencies in CPU/memory usage for a given effect—as any demoscene programmer could tell you. Even emulators running this CISC code often outperform the same code written idiomatically for the host arch (see: one of the reasons that z/OS FORTRAN programs stick around.)

So far as I know, we haven’t recapitulated this approach in any other modern stack. Sure, we “compile” templates, but only to the bytecode ISA of the scripting language hosting the MVC framework, which has none of these dynamic-HTML-oriented CISC opcodes (other than maybe the Erlang VM’s vectorized write of “IO lists” using writev(2).)

A web MVC framework for another language (e.g. Ruby, Node, Elixir, whichever!) would actually likely do well in performance terms by having its “view” component be a static PHP (or Zend microcode) generator, feeding the web frontend (e.g. Nginx) a directory of PHP to expose to the world, which would only call into the server backend (and so the MVC controller) through API-subdomain subrequests. The static-generated PHP “app” would serve the same purpose as a JavaScript SPA... but would exist on the server together with the backend, so there’d be much less point in persisting state there (since you’re not patching over a latency boundary by doing so.)

There’d probably be even more efficiencies to uncover if you designed an ISA from the ground up to be used solely for this purpose (i.e. being “edge-worker logic” spat out during a backend’s compilation phase), though, compared to PHP which must be Turing-complete for those that want to use it as a full-stack solution. I imagine the resulting ISA would look like some weird bytecode hybrid of eBPF, Server-Side Includes, and Nginx’s in-memory representation of loaded location{} entries. (I also imagine that some Cloudflare engineer already has a design for such an ISA in a notebook somewhere, as a more-efficient-through-constraints Cloudflare Workers target—but they haven’t bothered going further because it’s kind of an arcane idea and they’d need buy-in from framework devs before it’d be useful to build.)

[spdionis]

I could argue that all 3 are true statements.

[johnisgood]

"But is it web scale?"

[shantly]

"How to Use Apache and Postgres to Serve a High Traffic Website on a 1U Server and Use the Leftover Resources to Host an NFS Server with All Your Pirated Music On It"

[johnisgood]

If it can handle 100k billion connections simultaneously I will never need, I am sold!

[gonzo41]

Can we also talk about supporting google web toolkit with no budget to get off it?

[derefr]

A forum for the curmudgeonly old Senior Engineers of the world, regardless of where they work. I imagine this is what the IETF mailing lists look like.

[shawnz]

I hope you meant "not transitioning to java 11 but keeping java 8 for now"

[agumonkey]

that's not tru legacy man

[ryanmercer]

>Facebook actually adds a lot more value to my life than HN does because Facebook is the place one of my friend groups arrange our 4-6 yearly weekend retreats.

Exactly.

This is how we find out about events in the strength athlete community, it's how we can best follow our friends and their victories at competitions in their area, it's how we can see how training is going for other people and be an umpteenth set of eyes on their form or training issues and be able to go "hey, I had that same problem and this is what worked for me" or even find new programming ideas for ourselves.

Similarly, we use it multiple times a week for my local congregation. We have a private Facebook group where we post so and so needs help, the young men are meeting at so and so, we need volunteers for this still, etc.

And of course I can see what is going on in the lives of my friends that either distance or adulthood prevents me from interacting with regularly. "Wow, Meg is pregnant again!" "Hey, their wedding looked awesome!" "Oh, your mom died, she didn't even tell me she was sick, I'm so sorry Aaron".

I don't get this whole "Facebook is the devil, it makes me wish I too had a private jet and 6 lambos and had all the sex with all the women with my champagne parties!" thing. Uh, hi, unfriend people you don't actually care about or barely know... you don't need to be friends with 2173 "cool" people and you certainly don't need to compare yourself to them.

For me Facebook is a constant source of laughs and "hey I'm happy for them, they won their division/got married/are having a baby/are doing so great with their weight loss/passed the bar exam!"

[notzuck]

"I don't get this whole "Facebook is the devil,"

If you don't get it then that line of thinking is not for you. Different people like different things. I left FB a few years ago now and do not miss it one bit, whatsapp groups became more important for social stuff at some point and FB loss significance. This is not for everyone, not everyone is the same.

You could literally replace most comments here, yours included, with "different things for different people". What's the point in bitching about how I DONT GET PEOPLE THAT THINK X!!! well I don't understand how you think either mate.

[ryanmercer]

>, whatsapp groups became more important for social stuff at some point and FB loss significance.

I don't know a single person that uses Whatsapp and the only time I ever used was me and my former podcast partner (who was in Australia, 12 time zones away) and I used it to text each other. In average America Whatsapp is just not a thing, at least not for adults, nearly everyone has Facebook though.

[notzuck]

Cultural difference - most of my friends in the UK and Australia (I have lived in both) use whatsapp as a primary way to talk to groups of friends. FB is more of an attention seeking thing and a place for your mum to see what you're doing.

[ShteiLoups]

You could move yourselves to email lists.

My non-tech parents still organize their meetups over email, it works more than fine for them.

[philote]

I don't get why people have abandoned email for Facebook. Is it because of Spam, or poorly managed inboxes? Everyone has email.

[soylentcola]

I think it's mostly due to the difficulty of managing reply threads with large groups of people. Most don't have the patience to deal with it.

And while I quit Facebook a year or so ago, I do think they serve different purposes. It's more like a webforum or something in the Reddit/HN vein. You can have one-on-one or small group discussions, but you can also post things out to your larger friend/fam/acquaintance network or to more public groups.

There's definitely something to be said for that, and as someone who spent my college through adult life on IRC and message boards, I get the appeal. I just wish it didn't have to be a winner-take-all situation where the "winner" happens to be a really shitty company I don't want to do business with.

[shantly]

The UI, mostly. Email threads are harder to read than the same thing almost anywhere else. And yeah, spam doesn't help—most people don't know how to set up filters and automatic categorization and such, even in programs that make it fairly easy.

[gowld]

Facebook feeds have more spam than hosted email with default spam protection.

[PhasmaFelis]

Facebook's great use case is in maintaining casual communication with large groups of friends and family, friction-free, without having to fuss with mailing lists or spamming people with Reply All.

[wolco]

same reason why people with emails organized on places like meetup.com back in the day. A central location for information is ideal for gatherings.

[nindalf]

Deletion of posts and comments is a thorny issue. Why does HN not allow deletion of individual comments? It seems like a perfectly valid use case - you don't want to delete your entire account, just a few comments that contain PII or or any other reason.

Facebook allows this. So does twitter, reddit and every single other website that allows posts and comments from users. Why doesn't HN?

In fact, how do I delete my HN account at all? This isn't visible in the settings page, as far as I can tell.

[johnisgood]

Someone might quote your comment as well upon replying. Should we delete the comment after yours which may or may not contain something you wanted to delete? Should we delete the entire thread? If not, would it not get confusing quickly, as in many cases we would have no idea to what the comments are responding?

[gowld]

HN is a chitchat site, not StackExchange. It doesn't need permanent archival of full-fidelity conversations.

[ryandrake]

If you email the mods politely, they will remove a post of your own if you request it. I’ve done it. It’s not spelled out in the rules but that’s apparently how you can do it.

I’ve always wondered if they’d cooperate if I asked them to mass-delete all of my posts, in case I ever became a politician.

[rock_hard]

YC collects as much data about you as any other social network would via its website.

We have gotten to a point where people are set off by the information a standard http request sends to the server because it’s common practice to log each http request.

It sadly all has become a unproductive privacy extremist conversation

[helpPeople]

My concern are the one sided conversations. There are conversations I've seen mods participate in by flagging opposition.

I don't trust the opinions here anymore. The most I can hope is to see a range of opinions.

[willio58]

Is there any evidence of this?