Discovered Hubski through a theory of Reddit post. Still learning my way around, but the content is like a breath of fresh air. That said, I think it will be awhile before I post anything, just to get a feel for the community.

I think there's a few issues going on here. At face value the case looks racist, a Hispanic guy protecting his neighborhood by shooting a black guy.

When the news first came out I'll admit thats how I saw the case without doing any research, completely unsupported. And I held that view until the verdict came out. Now it was wrong and I've come to support zimmerman a little bit more than I had before, but I still think there should be another trial charging him with wrongful death.

I think that while Zimmerman had a right to defend himself, and the verdict shows that. No contest there. But that only takes into account Stand Your Ground from Zimmerman's perspective. If Trayvon Martin weren't dead we could take the case from his perspective as well. He stood his ground against Zimmerman who was clearly stalking him (a situation in which race may or may not have played a role). While my perspective on the case has changed I think that people's initial reaction to the case may have been much closer to the reality of the situation than this article wants it to be.

While Zimmerman was found not guilty for defending himself, the verdict does not acquit him of any responsibility in Trayvon Martin's death. He may have been right in defending himself, but I still want to see him tried for the wrongful death, because I still believe that he was responsible for creating situation that required him to defend himself.

Unless I am missing something, it doesn't seem like he is talking about assisted suicide, he is talking about euthanasia.

I know he mentions assisted suicide, but he never mentions anything about his father wanting to die. If somebody wants to die then I think they have a right to, but euthanizing someone just because you think they are suffering too much is just wrong. Even if I am laying in a hospital bed, and nobody else sees a reason to keep me alive, I still want to be given the chance to live, because I only get to do this once.

I'll open with my bias, I am religious, but even with the lack of evidence presented in this press release there are a few things I'm not to sure about (as much as I can surmise without actually hearing his argument).

Firstly, his overarching theory of population control reads like a conspiracy theory. Roman aristocrats spent thousands of hours, constructing the story of jesus, wrote it in a book, and then just hoped that it would catch on? As many unexpected routes that propaganda seems to take today, that seems like a lot of work for something that "might" work. Even then, they constructed a story so bulletproof that it tricked scholars for centuries? Sure religions come and go, but religions that end up being used as population control (egyptian pharaoh as a god strikes me as most obvious), these rose though centuries of cultural development. None of them were just "thought up" by a group of aristocrats. They developed to a point where they could be exploited.

Secondly, him playing the "every scholar before me missed it" card doesn't inspire confidence.

If he has a legitimate theory, I'll hear him out, but (and I realize this is just a press release) it seems flimsy at best. Plenty of people have tried to disprove god or jesus plenty of times, whether through physics or philosophy, but so far nobody has been able to inspire the religion ending effect they hope for.

8 of 11. Despite the popular opinion of the internet, there is a recognizable difference between toddler art and abstract expressionism.

And I have yet to see a toddler with enough restraint to paint something similar to a Rothko, or even a Pollock for that matter. Usually its always just big smears.

If you want to acquire skills I think online courses are great. Math and computer science are sure to make a transition to online quickly as the method of teaching them is pretty straight forward.

But I think the article misses a huge advantage that some students (not all) get from a college or university: connections. Most students don't realize that college is a place to start socializing with people in the industry, or start working with a professor. Today I think college is viewed as a specialized extended education (but something that is required to get a job) and with that view spending outrageous amounts of money to learn a skill is a terrible idea. The reason people spend 150k to go to MIT isn't (or rather shouldn't be) to just learn a skill better, but its because of the connections that come from that institution.

I've always hated this bullshit, wrapping the current situation that Gen Y currently sits in as self-loathing and delusional expectations.

For example: When the article talks about the generations it talks about Gen Y and their grandparents. It completely ignores Gen X and whatever situation they were in. Sure their Gen Y's grandparents worked hard, but what did Gen X then do? They sat around smoking pot during college and then graduated into a job. No Fuss. No Nothing.

Did I ask for that meaningless trophy? No, Gen X did, because they need to feel like their child means something. Did Gen Y ask teachers to curve their grades so that everyone gets an A? No Gen X did because God forbid their child isn't exceptional. When Gen X graduated from college they expected to get a job, and they got it. Yet I have the AUDACITY to expect the same thing and I get shit on for being delusional. Get off your high fucking horse and clean up the mess you made because its not my problem, its yours.

Probably the best response I have to that is (and possibly the rational for the offer), it doesn't matter of "The Facebook" fails if Facebook the company owns the alternative that people start using.

Isn't that kind of the point of a dynasty

I'm not really sure why everybody has been so surprised by this. Its been well documented that the NSA has been doing this for years. Its not right and should stop but its nothing new.

Its amazing the kneejerk reaction that everybody has been having to the role that social media served in all of this. Fast news is not reliable, and everybody was just reporting what they heard on the police scanner, and that's not journalism.

Personally I like my news fast, and then an after-action report to get all of the facts right.

Except that only blacklisted words for Google Instant results, not Google itself, which I don't think is a problem. Nothing worse than having porn instantly pop up when you mistype your search (Even if people don't mistype something similar to anal too much).

If Google started censoring its results after you press enter thats when it might be a problem. I say might because when your looking for porn you most likely know where to look, and a you don't need Google to find it.

Thanks... After I started becoming quite disenchanted with Reddit I had been playing around with the idea of a aggrigator like hubski where you follow people instead of voting for content but never had the time or knowledge to put it together, so seeing the concept in action, as well as knowing that it works is quite fulfilling.

After the first day though I have thought that it would be nice to know which users are feeding in new content and which are sharing (curating might be a better word) existing content. I say this only because I found myself struggling after first signing up figuring out who else to follow so that I'd get stream of content from various sources (and not just one user). Since the community is still relatively small I eventually got everything worked out, but it will be interesting to see how the idea scales when the number of posters and the number of "content curators" gets bigger. Additional Thoughts: Unfortunately this brings up an strong parallel to power users (who may or may not be a good thing for the site) and I quite like the process of discovery that happened when I joined, where I would follow and unfollow different users and topics to get my feed looking the way I liked it. So at the end of the day, I'm not sure if I actually want this feature or not, just thought I'd through it out there to think about.

This is not real. Explanation

I think its because conspiracy theories organize the world into common enemies, enemies that act against anything and everything. By simplifying the world into a small ring of "bad" people its easy to explain why bad things happen, and why getting rid of these enemies would make the world a better place. Ultimately its an attempt to put the world into a box, a more rational place, where the good guys and the bad guys don't get all mixed up.

That seems to be the way it goes, I think most people who vape came from cigarettes, and having tried an ecig without being in the smoking culture and I found myself thinking, whats the point? The question of whether ecigs were about nicotine or culture came from the articles quote about somebody going outside to vape instead of doing it inside. I would assume that there is some amount of culture between the people who meet outside while they are smoking. The example just struck me as something that identifies a culture that is created by smoking even if everybody is just getting their nicotine fix.

So I guess in the end the question wasn't really about whether or not people are just after the nicotine in ecigs, but whether or not ecigs really caught on because it allowed smokers to stay involved in the culture or social circles surrounding cigarettes in a way that patches etc do not.

I want to do two things with my life. Marry a rich woman and get fat.

Brings up an interesting point about supposed open-mindedness. In the case of hippies and redditors they are only considered open-minded relative to the general population. But internally they show the same closed off opinions as anybody else just with different biases.

At most I see this happening to the USPS within the decade, or sooner if it becomes politically advantageous to do so.

I tried online dating recently just out of curiosity (didn't go only dates, I just wanted to see if it would jive with me) and I found the experience really off-putting. Really the biggest thing I noticed was the lack of information that you get when you look at someone's profile. I'm already a pretty picky person when it comes to dating, and I found that the whole process brought out the worst of that. Beside wanting more information about people (which I'll admit involved a bit of sleuthing) I found that I started judging people on the tiniest things, how their profile picture was taken, the way they wrote their bio, etc. And when I stepped back I thought to myself "Man, I'm dismissing people one really tiny things, and if I met them in irl I would at least consider them for a few days".

I can't say anything certain, and of course all of this is anecdotal, but I wonder if this is where the dismissal of black women comes from. Because there is so little to go on, you start inferring all of this other stuff from stereotypes, cultural context, where they are from and anything else that might be a clue into their personality. Personally I hate that I started thinking that way.

Thats the one that really got me too. Besides being a tenuous geographic relationship given the other regions, the culture, but not necessarily voting history is very different. But I would also think that by segmenting Yankeedom, the author would be forced to split up some of the other regions too, which would distract from his point.

Yeasayer - O.N.E.

Having worked with a computer scientist in computer vision it is really interesting to see the huge difference between what people can imagine and what is actually possible. For instance, tracking people isn't a hugely difficult thing to do, but using multiple cameras to track people in 3d space is one of the hard problems of the day. Those kinds of things are possible in real-time, but doing facial recognition in real-time is nearly impossible.

My favorite quote about computer vision comes from one of this professors PhD students:

The thing you have to remember about computer vision is that everything is nearly impossible

3vr is one of the In-Q-Tel (CIA venture capital arm) supported companies doing a majority of the work for the NSA and looking their products is a good measure of what is currently possible.

Yea, that one was probably a bad example, but I was pretty impressed with the class recruitment presentation. That is something I would not have thought of.

Does anybody really believe this is about terrorism?

There is plenty of room for subjectivity when we are talking about the role aggregators play online. If Reddit deleted all of the content that was more than 24 hours old, the front page would look the same. Why, because people upvote the same shit without regards for the organization of past content. You can say that the fundamental problem that aggregators face is organization of content, the act of clicking on links doesn't require any organization. You can say that aggregators are all about organizing interesting content, but that doesn't make me "Unavoidably, wholly and fundamentally incorrect."

If I misrepresented your views on hashtags fine, but I don't think that I misrepresented things so poorly that you should be so offended. If I was wrong, then by all means I recant my statement, but your profile clearly shows that you prefer following tags over following people. Unless my eyes betrayed me, then I was not wrong about your preference, even if you didn't say it above.

As far as I can tell (and please correct me if I am wrong, or simple offend you) but your arguments have nothing to do with following people. A tag based organization can be implemented in parallel with the current organizational paradigm without interfering with a tag-based system. From the backend perspective it matters, but to the user it doesn't make one difference. One can exist without killing other. People can use hubski in two different ways.

The fundamental reason that everybody hears "make if different" when you say "make it better" is because you use hubski in a different way than most people do. By saying that the current organization is wrong, you are saying that it should be different. Doesn't mean that your method won't be better, but it will be different.

This all presumes that the "goal" of aggregators is organizing the library of articles that each person submits. Topic based organization is helpful to users, and conversations certainly develop around topics, but I would argue that simply organizing content is not the goal of an aggregator. If we think about a library, sure I find all of the information that I want, but I don't have conversations in the stacks about what I am looking for. Rather, the goal of an aggregator is to filter good content from shit content, and to foster/moderate discussion.

All that hubski is is a different approach to that problem. If we just follow hashtags, then it is nothing more than a decentralized reddit model (if hashtags are thought of as individual reddits). Your still going to see the same degradation of content around each hashtag. The biggest problem is discovery (the reason that you noted further down) that new users can't make heads or tails of the follow a person model, and hashtags are the only way to keep your feed populated. That doesn't mean that the follow model is wrong, it just means that it hasn't been developed enough.

I don't come here to talk about one thing, Reddit works just fine for that, I come here because I've found a few people to follow who submit consistently high quality content, and I can look through it without having to worry about being inundated with cat pictures. Is it perfect, no, but it works pretty well for what it is.

But at the same time, most conspiracy theories are so vague that it is impossible to disprove them. Without a way to disprove them how do you sort out the legitimate concerns from the theories that are a lot bit looney? There has to be some reasonable excuse to ignore them, and if you can't disprove them the only way to do that is to call them crazy.

Just like every Buzzfeed list relates to your life, some conspiracy theories are bound to be right about something, even if they got all the details wrong. And something about a stuck clock...

Genius is always an interesting thing to talk and read about simply because so few people actually have an understanding of what it is. Most people's I idea of a genius comes from the Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon is just written as Spock, but not like a thinking feeling person.

I think it should also be noted that even though the article mentions IQ, it seems to separate genius from intelligence by only mentioning people who have made huge contributions to the world. By naming Nobel Prize winners at the beginning of the article, it seems the author places greater emphasis on accomplishments rather than intelligence.

So what is a genius? Does a genius have to be abnormally intelligent? (I would argue that you don't need to be to win a Nobel Prize). Or does a genius just need to contribute a lot to the world? (While Hitler and Stalin certainly had a great impact on the world I don't see them as abnormally intelligent and I really don't see them as geniuses). For me, genius has a stronger relationship with intelligence than accomplishments. They are someone that can come to conclusions that you or I would never think of, and don't think anything of it. They are a strange mix of intelligence and accomplishment that doesn't really fit into a neat recognizable category.

From what I heard he just got the job, didn't know he was working for jacobin. At least someone is doing well these days