[duopixel]

More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news. I don't mean this in a judgmental way, when I saw this posted I thought "that doesn't sound right, but I guess if it has so many upvotes on HN it must be true".

It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584

[AndrewKemendo]

Critically though, a correction is at #1 top spot today. That's about as good as it gets.

Corrections in newspapers don't run the same as headlines, nobody upvotes corrections to reddit or Instagram etc...

I'd suggest that as far as iterating in the direction of finding the truth, this is a best in class example of how to do it.

[FabHK]

And in less than 18 hours. Wish all fake news were debunked so quickly and thoroughly and prominently everywhere.

[mistermann]

In this one example. How might one know how many cases were not realized in HN's history?

[paulintrognon]

Maybe a tag in the original title could also help? Something like: "[FAKENEWS] When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple doesn’t refund the 30% cut"

People not reading the comments will then have a way of knowing this is false information.

[yborg]

Terrible tag idea, it's implicitly negative and accusatory. In this instance, the guy was apparently just honestly misinformed.

The main problem is that most of the original thread ballooned with upvotes because it became general "<big corporate entity> is bad" kvetching which is perennially popular and probably doesn't belong on HN at all. As long as these kinds of threads aren't modkilled, these things will happen, you just have to deal with it. Tagging them won't solve anything.

[mistermann]

Technically, it is not known what the consequences of an untried action might be. There are many possibilities, that vary according to differing circumstances.

[aaron695]

A current front page article - "Anti-climate action statements get more visibility in news coverage, study finds" is [FAKENEWS]

You want to fight that battle?

[Illniyar]

The article is not fakenews. It covers a research about anti-climate statements. Those can be fakenews (though depends on the nature of the statement I would say).

[aaron695]

I'd like to keep this meta if possible.

When you wrote this comment had you read the journal article to see if the Press Release and Press Release Title linked on HN accurately represents the published journal article?

[dicomdan]

It's already gone from the top.

[pjc50]

Apple's opacity leads to this kind of thing. The "rebuttal" doesn't have a citation either. How do we know that it itself is not also fake news? Apple should have a nice clear page we can all link to that explains how this works. But nobody seems to have found one.

Edit: no, really, this is important: we're in the middle of the lesson of "social media can amplify things that aren't true and you should check them". Great. So, how do we verify things? What should we be doing? The counter claim link at the top of this thread is also just a random unsourced tweet!

[tonyedgecombe]

It's in the terms:

"In such cases,Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User."

[ShroudedNight]

I have never engaged in any kind of professional legal training; I am most definitely not a lawyer.

That being said, my understanding of 'notwithstanding' in this context would imply that Apple reserves the right to retain its commission even when they refund the price to the End-User.

https://weagree.com/weblog/notwithstanding-is-a-tricky-one/

[voxic11]

What is in the terms? That part says they can keep the commission if they want to. But the question is do they actually keep it.

[jerf]

If I were writing these terms, I'd want to include that clause so that if someone attempts to attack Apple financially by getting a lot of people together to buy apps and then refund them, Apple would have some discretion in terms of keeping enough money to offset the attack. It would be a tricky situation, but at the same time, by including that clause they also make the situation less likely to come up in the first place by making that attack vector less appealing.

There's also some other attack vectors I can think of that this renders less likely, like "let's get my big YouTube fanbase to all buy this one app today, then refund it near the end of the refund window, thus pushing this app to the top of the store at no cost to my YouTube fanbase but at cost to Apple!" This would give Apple the cover to keep enough commission to cover the attack. Given the known shenanigans played on the app store, this seems less like some bizarre far-out possibility and more like something that would be a routine thing done by sketchier app developers if the terms didn't make it a bad proposition like this.

But in a normal day-to-day transaction, the logic works out in favor of refunding it even if they do nominally have the contractual right to refuse to do so.

[qwertygnu]

How would either of those situations (which are pretty much the same) cost Apple _financially_? If 10,000 people buy an app for 1$ each, the creator gets 7000$ and Apple gets 3000$. When they all get refunds. The creator refunds the 7000$ and Apple refunds the 3000$...

[Liquid_Fire]

Apple have to pay some amount (let's arbitrarily say 1%) for processing the payments, so in this example they would lose $100.

[LanceH]

That may not have a single answer.

[hardlianotion]

In other words: the rebuttal is not clearcut.

[KingOfCoders]

Shouldnt this be the top comment?

[jerf]

That is a good question, and what I'm about to say is not a full answer. But I do give some of credence to this tweet because it is the original claimant publicly admitting they are wrong, which is a costly act that puts skin in the game. Now if it is found that it is true that Apple does keep the %30, the claimant is going to take an even harder hit.

There is also the matter of prior probabilities; if you had asked me beforehand "How certain are you that if Apple refunds a charge, the refund is complete and they also refund their cut?" I'd have given you an answer in the 90%+ range, on the grounds that if they did something that nasty we'd have heard by now. Furthermore, if they did change that policy, I'd expect to hear about it precisely as a change in policy, rather than the sudden discovery that it's been like that all the time.

I am emphatically not holding these up as total answers to the question. I'm not sure there is such a thing. But these are reasons to consider this tweet likelier to be true than the original claim.

There is also the constant possibility "What if somebody knows about these signals and fakes them?" In which case the question is, who would have motivation to do such a thing? In this case I can't see how this Tweeter has any particular motivation to fake this matter, as this retraction mostly doesn't benefit them any. (I mean, I do respect them for it, but we still have the original error to consider. I don't have a concrete threshold, but you're still burning a bit of rep. To see it clearly, consider the strategy of "impress jerf by making lots of public mistakes and then publicly apologize for it"... I do respect the public retraction and maybe the first time it's even a net gain, but it's not a scalable strategy.)

Apple would clearly have a motivation to claim they don't keep the refund even if they in fact do, as clearly keeping that 30% would be bad PR, so this signal would weigh against them. Weighing for them, though, would be the sheer mass of people who could contradict them if they claimed not to keep it but in fact did; any app author of any significant size has direct experience with this and that's a large pool of people, which also includes some vocal people in it.

[Nition]

This is really common on Reddit, where if an article says one thing, and the top comment says it's wrong, everyone believes the comment. But sometimes the article was actually right and the comment is wrong, or they're both wrong.

[jasonlotito]

While I agree with you, I can't help but reference Hitchen's Razer: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

[baxtr]

So opacity justifies fake news?

[pjc50]

"Justifies"? "Fake news"?

No, but not having a clear policy makes it very easy for inaccurate gossip about your policy to circulate.

[damnyou]

Opacity means that the blame for any "fake news" rests solely on Apple for not being clear enough.

[Illniyar]

I don't see upvotes as being a form of agreement. I often upvotes things I have no knowledge about and sometimes even things I don't agree with that I think would be interesting to hear more about from the HN community.

It an interesting topic for many HNers and such seems appropriate that it'll get on to the front page.

That being said, downvoting dissenting comments in the thread are extremely problematic. And is a common theme in HN. Which I think stems from the implicit assumption by many people that upvoting a comment or item means agreeing with it.

[_qulr]

Same. I legit didn't know the answer and thought it deserved discussion.

[tomduncalf]

My bad for posting the original tweet up without proper fact-checking... I've emailed the mods to ask them to correct or delete the original to avoid confusion in future.

I had heard rumours that Apple did not refund the 30% previously, and seeing a developer of respected apps post it (along with a graph, although actually that didn't prove anything lol) and doing a quick Google (where the top result is "Apple's iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers"), I thought made it seem legit enough to post, and thought it would get shot down quickly if it was incorrect!

Interesting lesson in the realities of post-truth as you say! Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched...

[thih9]

> Also with all the negative press about App Store policies lately, it didn't seem too far fetched...

It seems so easy to spread misinformation with this way of thinking going on. My point is not to blame you, I just wanted to point out that as long as we accept believable data as true, we’ll see believable misinformation on top of HN.

[vikramkr]

It's a good example of the importance of using respect/a large platform appropriately. If I was in your position I also don't think I'd have really fact checked it, since that level of scrutiny on everything would be nearly impossible to maintain if I tried to fact check before posting any given titbit. And even then, I might have fact checked by checking in with a developer of respected apps that would have experience. A significant amount of the burden of getting this right is in the hands of the original twitter poster IMO. If you are originating, rather than sharing, a piece of information like apple keeping the refund, then the burden of fact checking should definitely be on you at that point.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

That's why I treat HN the same way as Reddit. Just because people talk in a more sophisticated manner doesn't mean that they are anymore factual.

[thelittleone]

To be fair you say "our gut feeling" as if everyone shares the same 'gut feeling', i.e., that Apple would not do such a thing.

On reading the original post my gut feeling believed that this could be or is quite likely true. Why? Because it aligns with the continuous declining customer experience I've had with them for the last 5-7 years. Examples include declining product quality, difficulty getting them to service properly, getting busted for impairing performance on older hardware (planned obsolescence) all that feels like tall poppy syndrome, dark patterns and arrogance.

[carlmr]

>I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling.

While that may be true, for me the gut feeling was in line with the fake news, which makes it even harder to spot (confirmation bias).

I never worked on iOS apps, but my consumer experience with Apple was such that I would have expected exactly this kind of behavior. They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one.

I just assumed that a company that treats their consumers like this also doesn't treat developers fairly.

Granted, this is my experience from a decade ago. I've never bought anything Apple since. So maybe they've changed.

[merpnderp]

This is a great point on how the world seems to have developed a deep sense of biases on just about everything and now we're left incapable of passing the "would only a cartoon villain do this" test. How is it ever possible to fix this, because we're quickly moving to a point where the most ridiculous of claims, that happen to fit with our biases, are instantly accepted as true and unshakable facts.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

The problem is that real life is already stranger than fiction. The NSA actually tapped American phones and intercepted inter-datacenter links. Multiple major companies now have voice assistants that have been shown to send voice recordings to employees for review. Apple has used legal action to shut down repair shops. Real life is left incapable of passing the "would only a cartoon villain do this" test.

[jjk166]

At the end of the day, we must remember that just because we can believe something to be true is not actually evidence in support of it being true. Even the most mundane of claims should not be taken on faith alone. We may not verify everything, but we shouldn't repeat or make serious decisions based on claims for which we have not seen compelling evidence, no matter how believable the may seem.

[brlewis]

To even have hope of getting people to overcome confirmation bias and look at evidence, we need concise and convenient ways of presenting evidence. Fact checking is too much of a chore the way things are now.

[coldtea]

>They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one.

Do they regularly sell keyboard replacement parts? If not, why expect them to "sell you one"?

And the laptop was "out of warranty", wasn't it? How does "barely" change this?

[bpfrh]

(I'm not the one who you commented to)

Because we all want to live on this planet for a few hundred years?

I expect a company that produces things to either supply spare parts on demand, or allow a third party to produce them.

Even more so, when the device I bought costs >1000$

Sure, legally they don't have any obligation to do so, but many things are legal but ethically wrong.

[carlmr]

Exactly, and every other laptop company I never had an issue getting spare parts. So they were intentionally behaving worse than average.

[coldtea]

Most other companies have easier case constructions though...

[RealStickman_]

I'm sure it would be in apple's interest and ability to make their parts as modular as possible to make repairs easier if that was what they were going for.

[carlmr]

Then they should revise their designs maybe.

[carlmr]

Just a new keyboard for a reasonable price, like every other laptop I've owned.

I didn't expect it for free, but a lot of companies want to keep their consumers happy and will fix something that's just out of warranty, especially if it's a part that should last longer than 2 years, like a keyboard.

[coldtea]

>More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news.

"Fake news" is a regular thing on the tech/HN community.

The whole hype around technologies (e.g. Mongo/NoSQL, etc) is just that.

As Alan Kay put it "Programming is a Pop Culture".

[pjc50]

> Alan Kay put it "Programming is a Pop Culture".

Do you have a reference for the original of this? I can find people quoting him on it but not the original. I'm also wondering: compared to what? What would it mean for programming not to be a pop culture?

[aaron695]

Google Search -> Tools -> date -> click today's date twice -> go back, set top date to 1900, set the second date to 2000.

Get nothing

Go back set second date to 2005 ->

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Win?

[merpnderp]

Yes, absolutely a win and thanks for explaining how you found it.

[coldtea]

>I'm also wondering: compared to what?

As I read it, compared to hard science and engineering for example.

>What would it mean for programming not to be a pop culture?

Less cults, less subjective opinions, less influence of marketing and marketeers and brand names, less "fans" and "fanboism" of some particular brand/product/methodology, etc, for one...

[ratww]

He confirms it in this interview, but is quoted as saying that "computing" rather than "programming" is a pop culture.

https://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wi...

[threeseed]

You can't possibly be serious.

There is no hype for NoSQL or MongoDB on HN. In fact it is the complete opposite with every one trying to push SQL and PostgreSQL for every use case under the sun.

[coldtea]

There's no hype today, which is because the hype died out. 5-6 years ago it was all "SQL is dead", before those people got burned.

I wasn't giving an example of a current hype -- just of a hype.

[hombre_fatal]

threeseed is famously (to me) HN's personal MongoDB cheerleader. It always fascinated me. When I read the upstream comment my first thought was "I wonder if threeseed will show up."

Not trying to call you out, I just think the consistency + choice of hobby horse is funny, and you always stand out as the one person defending MongoDB: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I always wanted to know though: why? What compels you, threeseed?

[barbecue_sauce]

There was hype for NoSQL/MongoDB on HN ages ago, but it has long since passed. The only people bringing it up now just seem out of touch.

[merpnderp]

Why couldn't they be serious? NoSQL got big somehow. There was obviously a big push and support for it when it became big. How would HN be immune to this when it can't even spot an obviously fake story about Apple acting like cartoon villains?

[amelius]

The reason is that as programmers we're highly dependent on the technical choices made by the masses.

[UweSchmidt]

While voting is now getting considered a statement of ideological alignment (see Reddit banning people based on their vote for unsavory posts, and people in Germany being prosecuted for 'liking' a violent crime), my vote on the original post was to signal my interest, encourage posts of that sort on this website and to raise awareness, to encourage potential corrections.

[KingOfCoders]

"people in Germany being prosecuted for 'liking' a violent crime"

Do you have a link for this?

[UweSchmidt]

Can't find the article about a specific case, but according to the link below it appears that a new law specifically includes "liking" as punishable in serious cases.

https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/nachrichten/region/daumen-ho...

[KingOfCoders]

Thanks though the article is very sketchy on "liking"

[UweSchmidt]

I agree.

[reaperducer]

More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed

Many threads in HN reflect the tribalism that now permeates society. There are plenty of people on here that will upvote a comment or story simply because it paints Apple in a bad light. Same thing happens to Google, Oracle, and to a lesser extent these days, Microsoft.

It doesn't matter if a piece of information is true, it just has to align with someone's personal-conceived biases.

We have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are better than the people who get sucked in by political trolls on Facebook just because we work with computers.

[chasd00]

This was on full display when the early Covid19 studies were coming out suggesting many more infections than what was being counted. It implied changes to thinking and numbers were needed and people came out of the woodwork, with anger even, to discredit anyone who dared agree. Same goes for anyone who dared to consider Sweden's model as anything less than a killing field for their own citizens.

it was pretty disturbing for me, i had held this place in very high regard prior to that experience.

[rvz]

> We are in the post-truth era indeed.

Indeed we are, it's also the interesting thing about confirmation bias in communities. In any community, they seem to always believe any news that is immediately negative about the subject that they haven't researched about or want they don't like as the real truth.

It's up to us to do our own research with actual evidence rather than sources such as: 'X suggested', 'sources say', 'my friend who works at ABCXYZ' or because it has 1000+ retweets, upvotes, etc.

Generally, a healthy dose of skepticism is needed on social media content like FB, Twitter, HN, etc.

[duxup]

Yeah there's certainly a factor of "title seems about right, I'll up-vote" out there.

There have been a lot of articles where even the comments were entirely "nothing about this is right" and that's not counting opinion / perspective articles, like cold hard facts wrong.

It's really frustrating to see on HN.

[natch]

Where people think they are well educated and well informed. You give us a lot of credit. Most of us are ignorant about a lot of things we have strong opinions on.

[nojito]

The idea that HN is well informed is incorrect. The top comments to many posts are completely incorrect.

Social media caters way too much to feelings and biases.

[supernova87a]

That's what happens when you want to believe in symbols more than taking the time to investigate the complicated facts. And the symbol here was Apple as the big bad evil company trying to exploit developers.

Maybe it's a lesson to temper outrage before knowing facts.

[xxs]

In the very same thread there is a quote of devepors agreement with Apple that allows Apple to keep it.

[nonbirithm]

And what if a more radical piece of demonstrably false information ended up being believed by enough people that they'd rise up to take corrective action?

Will there come a point where the only way to prevent violence from demonstrable falsehoods and flamebait social media posts would be to protect people from themselves and their ignorance?

If that amounts to censorship, then maybe the focus will have to be deflecting the rioters than forcibly removing the information.

I thought about this a lot recently. Why We Sleep is still legal to buy in bookstores but people have shared anecdotes of friends who have read it and gotten insomnia and anxiety from the advice in it, and in the end so much of the book that was responsible for triggering that anxiety was provably false or unsourced. So why do we still let people read it, if them doing so is a net negative? Because they didn't do enough research, so it's on them if the book causes harm? That's strange, given that people on the other side wish there were public retractions or ways to stop people from reading the book. It feels like the people that did the research are just unable to do much but watch the damage such misinformation causes to unfold because the misinformation is already in such wide circulation that it can't be prevented from being read by people who, if they got possession of the book and read it, would believe it fully and inadvertently do harm in some way.

So if a person is just not going to do the research, which I'm not sure is possible to be helped in every circumstance, and the only difference between their life or other innocent people's being impacted negatively or not is whether or not they become aware of the misinformation and read it, then what's the solution? Is there a solution at all?

[Razengan]

One of Apple’s main adversaries, Samsung, has been taken to court for paying students to manipulate social media against their competitors.

And given Apple’s stance against the bread and butter of less scrupulous companies (privacy intrusion and data mining), it would be no surprise if there are many other people who are literally paid to make them look bad at any cost.

[Razengan]

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web-re...

https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paying+students+for+...

[0xfaded]

This is a very good observation. The "news" that intel was moving to TSMC was also on the front page the other day.

[malwarebytess]

Not only was the original story incorrect, but the top comment defending the incorrect information was also wrong.

[unix_fan]

this is why I don’t take anything at face value, especially if it’s trending on social media. I wait for the drama to blow over,and check for the actual truth later.

[wolco]

In fairness if you take what you find here and applied it to the real world. Everyone would be using rust/go. Meanwhile everyone is still using php.

[rimliu]

“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”

[gridlockd]

In this case, "the truth" is misleading. Apple presumably doesn't do what was claimed, but it reserves the right to do it.

[loceng]

Perhaps it was in part good timing for the false information, with the top tech CEOs hearing that Apple/Tim Cook was involved with as well - it would seemingly be the time for such an unreasonable behaviour of keeping 30% fee on refunds to make it to the surface for public viewing.

I have a similar shock or fascination when seeing how little the HN crowd understands the benefits of UBI (when tied to inflation + VAT) - there's seemingly been little critical thinking done from foundational principles, and the same common misunderstandings repeat. There's enough momentum of people with little understanding jumping to post that those comments all gain the most traction, and it's too much to jump into discussion with.

A good comparison of differences in abilities and then innate failure/mistakes that we can all make - Elon Musk, who understands exponentials and economies of scale via his success as a marker, and stating he decision makes from first principles, is in support of UBI. He says it's inevitable with technology-automation, and then comparing that to his tweeting some arguably misinformed or shallow on the details about COVID-19 - perhaps not having as full or clear as a picture as he should before someone with his reach posts about something so serious. To me however it's really all just signals for the state of the union, and these are canary moments that highlight how reactive people are and how ill-informed they are - due to not having a hierarchy of trusted sources that most of us follow. Is there someone who's as successful and trustworthy competence wise as Elon is with EVs (etc) but for viruses? It was supposed to be Fauci in the US, right? But he first lied to Americans saying masks don't work - and that lack of integrity is harmful and blinding.

[AmericanChopper]

> I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling.

Another word for this is groupthink.

[paulintrognon]

> We are in the post-truth era indeed.

Was it really better before? The cognitive biases behind fake news are not knew. Maybe there were there from the beginning, but we are just getting better at spotting them?

[goalieca]

No, we're certainly more politicized though.

[josefresco]

Except, it wasn't false information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992510

[nojito]

That section is about payment processors and chargebacks. Which is standard practice across the board.

[christophilus]

At least the correction also made the front page. That’s more than can be said for normal media outlets who seem to broadcast the lie with a megaphone and bury the correction in a footnote.

[peter_retief]

Now we wait for all the justifications. I really enjoy HN but there is a large number of politically indignant ready to punish who they disagree with rather than allow debate.

[jka]

Do you think that asking people to read -- and potentially answer a simple captcha-like comprehension question -- about content before amplifying it could help in situations like this?

(Twitter is apparently experimenting[1] with the former approach)

[1] - https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-un...

[lazyjones]

The upvotes of false information, based on random Tweets meeting negative bias towards Apple, worry me less than the malicious downvoting of corrections, of opinions diverging from the echo chamber's collective bias, of meta-comments addressing these issues.

The downvote is just used as a very low effort sh.tpost without content these days. It's risk-free and even more detrimental to actual discourse than its sibling.

[kerkeslager]

I'm not really sure where the impression that HN is particularly well educated and informed comes from. My experience here is that people don't read what's linked, they just opine on the title (which may be clickbait) or other people's comments (which are also opining on the title or other people's comments--it's uninformed opinions all the way down). There are a few posters who are knowledgeable in their fields, but overall, I get the impression that HN users are remarkably uninformed on the topics they choose to opine on.

HN specifically prohibits remarking on this when it happens; the guidelines say: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."' I understand that the intent of this is to create a polite environment, but the end result is one where uninformed opinions are welcomed.

It's even to the point that some people will proudly proclaim that they didn't read the thing they're responding to, often paired with a complaint that the linked content is too long, or that it didn't account for some gotcha (which it accounts for, just not in the first few paragraphs).

To be clear: you may be informed on a topic, but if you don't read what you're responding to, you aren't informed on what you're responding to. And over time, people whose only source of "information" is uninformed comments are going to be uninformed on topics as well, while believing that they are informed.

> It's kind of fascinating on many levels, I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling. We are in the post-truth era indeed.

But neither community consensus nor gut feeling have anything to do with truth. Primary sources, scientific observation, and to a lesser degree, logic and expert opinion--those are what we should be trusting.

[Tallasatree]

It comes from the fictitious idea that if you play with bits, you're smarter than most people. My outside-of-industry perspective has me come to this conclusion.

[kerkeslager]

Well... I think there's an important distinction to be made between intelligence and knowledge. If you "play with bits", you probably are smarter than most people, because there are a lot of people who can't do that. I've spent a good amount of time as an educator, and it does seem to me that some people just can't wrap their head around programming. That said, being smarter than most people isn't worth much.

I've also learned that intelligent people are a dime a dozen. There's no barrier to intelligence--you're just born smart, and fully half of people are born with above-median intelligence--so the relative value of intelligence is limited. Knowledge, on the other hand, is hard to come by: even if you're extremely well-informed on one subject, there are hundreds of subjects upon which you are completely uninformed. Intelligence can help you become informed if you apply it to learning, but as often as not, intelligent people just use their intelligence to skate by without having to learn things. I know that for a lot of my early schooling, I didn't apply myself to learning because I could get away without work due to my intelligence. This didn't pay off, and in my mid-twenties I had to really learn how to learn.

Nowadays I would rather be informed than intelligent.

EDIT: Note that in the "fixed vs. growth mindset" theory, "knowledge" is just the growth version of intelligence--I'm making a distinction between intelligence and knowledge, but that's not necessarily the terminology other people use.

[baddox]

Yep. Are you “technical?” That’s one of the silliest and most dismissive terms in the business.

[kerkeslager]

Well, "being technical" is a filter for intelligence, in that it would be pretty hard to become a skilled programmer without also being pretty smart. I think it's reasonable to assume that a skilled programmer is probably smarter than the average bear. I'd argue that "are you technical?" is a pretty shallow question for finding out if someone is actually technical, though.

The problem happens when people assume that if someone isn't technical, that they aren't intelligent. There are plenty of very intelligent people who can't write a line of code. One of the smartest guys I know is a roofer.

And there are all sorts of caveats here. "Being technical" optimizes for a narrow type of intelligence: bearded sysadmins with no social skills exist in real life. And the opposite is true too: lots of technical people who are socially adept exist too.

[eska]

Opining on things without reading the article becomes really obvious when there's an article about a non-trivial idea, but people only comment on the surface level attributes. E.g. an article about coding style may opine that as long as it's consistent it doesn't matter that much, but people will opine about tabs vs spaces, how smart indent should be a thing etc...

[iRomain]

I totally agree with you, that guy should never have posted on Stackoverflow!

/s

[Shivetya]

If you read the thinly veiled political pieces on this site you would never expect anything different. For a site mostly aimed at start ups and technology this site has a very large anti business view branding the whole with the happenings at outliers within the world.

[lowtolerance]

Anytime there’s a negative news story against Apple, rational thought goes straight out the window.

[mcv]

Some years ago, HN had a reputation for loving everything Apple. That has clearly turned around.

[Kiro]

Are you surprised? The HN crowd instinctively upvotes any headline that makes big tech look bad and is always quick to jump on the bandwagons in the comment thread without hesitation. We're no better than reddit.

[gridlockd]

Nothing bad came of it, because it highlighted a potentially abusive clause in the terms that many developers might not even have been aware of when they agreed to them.

"Apple is evil" might be wrong, but "Apple reserves the right to be evil" is still closer to the truth than "Apple is not evil".

[Kiro]

A lot of people won't see the rebuttal and will continue thinking this is true.

[gridlockd]

In terms of risk, it is better to believe that it is true, because it could become true at any time.

[xvector]

What was worse about this is that some people that described and provided evidence that the story was false were often downvoted.

For all of this community's focus on civility, clearly it, too, falls victim to mob mentality.

[stunt]

This is not a new era. Tooling is new indeed which makes it tremendously faster and available. On the bright side, you can also get facts back rather quickly like this.

[bilbo0s]

You're thinking incorrectly as well. There is no need to debate patent nonsense. Just correct it and move on. Why did we as a community waste so much time discussing and getting outraged over patent nonsense as opposed to doing the rational thing and calling it patent nonsense from the outset? The answer to that question is troubling.

HN as a community is far too accommodating to a lot of silliness simply because it gets votes. Remember yesterday's "news" that Intel was moving TSMC? And don't even get me started on the political nonsense HN upvotes. We should all be taking a good long look in the mirror. If we're not going to learn from incidents like this, at least a bit of self awareness would be nice.

[eanzenberg]

Oh please, HN is one of the least trustworthy areas of my life primarily because of its echo-chamber, vocal minority ways. All online communities that allow upvoting / downvoting devolve to this. In fact, I’ve started perusing old-style BB sites of my interests which explicitly have no upvoting or downvoting, forcing me to read through comments and replies and where the only nominal “upvoting” occurs in popular threads with lots of posts that continuously push to the top of the BB.

It’s a literal breath of fresh air. I’m close to done with community sites that allow upvotes/downvotes.

[lowkeynthorough]

Curiously, stackoverflow uses upvotes and downvotes too. How does that work?

[johnfn]

A lot of content on StackOverflow is trivially verifiable - just put it in your IDE and see if it runs. You'll notice that the more subjective questions on StackOverflow almost always 1) get closed immediately or 2) are filled with bad answers.

(You'd think getting a refund is trivially verifiable, too, but who's going to go to all that work?)

[zymhan]

StackExchange is a like a highly moderated subreddit mixed with a Wiki. Mods ensure the posts are of minimum quality, require sources for novel claims, and remove disinformation. An SE community also tends to strongly embrace the general rules for SE, which keeps it from being overrun with "reposts" and "clickbait".

[rplnt]

> just use jquery

Not that well.

[ColanR]

Any recommendations?

[iRomain]

Have my upvote!

[coronadisaster]

If you post anything that aligns with republicans on this forum (true or not), it has a very high chance of being downvoted or not upvoted.

[manmal]

And the correction has 1400 upvotes.

[hesarenu]

Isn't it again some random tweet not an actual apple document/confirmation.

[methodin]

It's more important how one deals with being wrong than always being right.

[sigzero]

People want to hate Apple.

[bzb3]

It is 2020. If you believe what you read on the internet...

[yepthatsreality]

Yes the Apple cult may have always been here but has grown more aggressive and defensive the last 5 years or so. Check any Apple thread and you will see similar results. You cannot utter a word of criticism towards the company without mass downvotes.

[moogleii]

I think you've misread the comment you're replying to; otherwise, I'm not sure I understand how your comment applies.

He's saying the post claiming that Apple kept the 30% was fishy (and false). I don't know about a cult, but in this case, the criticism was unfounded.

Ironically, your comment is an example of a cult of the anti-cult - always looking out for signs of that other cult.

[Illniyar]

mmm... that's the exact opposite of this situation - statements in favor of Apple were downvoted.

[sbuk]

Likewise the FOSS cult. It has been ever thus. Both sides make false claims regularly.

[eternalban]

Downvotes should force a comment box, or have a link for list of users downvoting a comment. I don’t see what value anonymous downvotes bring to a forum dedicated to informed discussion.