[Non-political] News that makes you Laugh/Cry/Both...

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Apr 25, 2014 3:57 pm

i can't help but snicker at this:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyp ... -1.1765159

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Apr 25, 2014 4:56 pm

It's basically what Maj said. I don't work on the search engine but I'd be surprised if we didn't have a way of ignoring these spam links, though.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Wed May 07, 2014 10:18 am

We Fallout now. May as well be using Holotapes.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed May 07, 2014 10:55 am

Meikle641 wrote:We Fallout now. May as well be using Holotapes.

Not that specific thing, but we have to deal with that sort of stuff a lot. If you are suing a company and in discovery you want emails from years ago, you are glad as fuck that they shunt everything off to tapes after 90 days instead of deleting it.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Wed May 07, 2014 2:30 pm

It's one of the reasons some companies are returning to a "delete after X time" policy rather than tape backup. Unfortunate, because there's a real cost to the employees there.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed May 07, 2014 3:24 pm

Yeah, all the server backups at work are on cassette, and that one isn't a case of us being too poor to have any DVD drives.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed May 07, 2014 4:00 pm

Although they might finally be changing it soonish, the IRS has long stored its data on linear tape. Apparently if you make sure to store everything in exactly the order you want to access it tape is actually stupidly fast.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Wed May 07, 2014 11:24 pm

I think the advance in tape tech is really damn cool. I think it's awesome when engineers and scientists find ways to improve old tech in unexpected ways.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 11, 2014 6:12 am

http://www.outsideonline.com/news-from- ... Roads.html

Of course it won't fucking happen, at least not for, oh... even a century seems optimistic. I mean, this is America we're talking about. As much as I hate to sound like a conservative, the government doesn't actually do fuck all, but private companies occasionally use advances like this if they can make a buck out of it.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun May 11, 2014 7:50 am

Talking about roads and how governments don't do anything is always good for really high marks on the irony scale.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 11, 2014 8:02 am

Well... ok, yes, they maintain them, and on a broad scale, somewhat constantly, but I was talking about large changes like "replacing the entire country's roads with solar panels."

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun May 11, 2014 8:53 am

Prak_Anima wrote:Well... ok, yes, they maintain them, and on a broad scale, somewhat constantly, but I was talking about large changes like "replacing the entire country's roads with solar panels."

They did replace the entire country's roads with freeways. The Eisenhower Interstate system didn't just happen spontaneously or anything.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 11, 2014 8:57 am

Huh, I didn't know anything about that. I'm still not expecting super tech wifi solar power roads anytime soon, but I'll shut up now.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun May 11, 2014 10:02 am

Prak_Anima wrote:Huh, I didn't know anything about that. I'm still not expecting super tech wifi solar power roads anytime soon, but I'll shut up now.

Where did you think all the fucking roads came from? Did you think roads just naturally existed?

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun May 11, 2014 11:38 am

Is it unreasonable to say that when our current infrastructure is degrading that we don't expect it to be replaced with what seems like cool future tech?

I think that was where prak was coming from.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun May 11, 2014 12:08 pm

#Kaelik, just that the interstates were all built at once in a gigantic national project. On the scale of the Apollo program, or the nuclear program. People are allowed to learn things at some point after having previously not yet learnt them, it's an XKCD.

And I'm not convinced that running trucks over your power generation scheme is a great idea for maintenance costs, but it's probably worth a pilot scheme somewhere suitable with light traffic and good use for midday power and the maximum insolation.

Come on spellchecker, insolation is too a proper word. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation

As to what governments will do, technically that depends who's paying them. There's no particular reason the big oil folk couldn't monopolise all the green energy patents and get government to pay to install them everywhere all at once on sweet long-term contracts.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun May 11, 2014 1:45 pm

tussock wrote:#Kaelik, just that the interstates were all built at once in a gigantic national project. On the scale of the Apollo program, or the nuclear program. People are allowed to learn things at some point after having previously not yet learnt them, it's an XKCD.

So he thought the roads were built all at once by a non government entity, like Apollo or Nukes. Yeah. Totally that. Great example. Idiot.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 11, 2014 4:02 pm

I was under the impression that the roads were built over time as needed, I didn't think about the interstate system. However, I also said "doesn't do anything," as in present tense. I honestly do find it hard to believe that it would undertake a project of this scale now, as opposed to in the 50s.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun May 11, 2014 5:28 pm

That's true, but it's in large part a consequence of "PRIVATE ENTERPRISE, RAH RAH" thinking, which is why I made the "Irony top score!" comment.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 11, 2014 6:53 pm

Which is self perpetuating because there actually are a handful of private companies that say "Well fuck, the government's not doing it, so it's up to us!" Which hilariously tend to be run by liberals, I think, if their science and conservation focus is anything to go by.

K · Post by K » Sun May 18, 2014 12:32 am

Data-mining shows that negative feedback in online communities creates negative feedback loops, positive feedback does nothing.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Sun May 18, 2014 1:13 am

K wrote:Data-mining shows that negative feedback in online communities creates negative feedback loops, positive feedback does nothing.

Something that isn't mentioned in the link is that having negative ratings allows casual visitors to tell the difference between something disliked and something that has merely not been rated much at all, and to tell the difference between something that's basically very popular, and something that's hotly divisive.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun May 18, 2014 6:31 am

As far as I can tell, they are misreporting their findings. Up votes do have an effect, because a lack of upvotes causes people to either leave the community (no votes), or to descend into flame spirals (down votes). Since there is a negative effect of both non-upvote possibilities, claiming that there is no effect of upvotes is specious. Upvotes obviously increase poster retention without decreasing conversation quality.

The obvious takeaway from their data is that online communities should have an upvote button and an "ignore user" button and no down vote button at all. They claim to have produced a result that is the opposite of operant conditioning, but they haven't. They showed that positive reinforcement caused a continuation of the reinforced behavior, while negative reinforcement caused people to change their behavior. Now, they found that in online discussions, when people changed their behavior in response to negative feedback, it was to become more negative, but that seems to be entirely in line with what you'd expect from basic Prisoner's Dilemma thought experiments.

Bottom line: the actual data is simply consistent with a majority (or at least, a statistically influential plurality) of people on those sites being basically reciprocal altruists. Which is about the least surprising thing they could have found.

-Username17

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun May 18, 2014 12:52 pm

I think this study's results should have just been titled "Ignore the trolls."

Some forums incorporate the down voting into their ignore, like Slashdot where you can filter out posts with poor ratings.

My experience with forums that have +/- reputation boosting is that people with +rep tend to receive more +rep in the hopes that they will reciprocate with their big karma hammer (+/- reputation given was weighted by how much you had) and they get less -reps out of fear of retribution. Cliques that just rotate through giving each other +rep was a thing. The people who started to get -rep did often troll and just try to see how much red they could get but they couldn't spread around the - rep.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sun May 18, 2014 11:13 pm

somebody on dumpshock actually asked for a +/- system to be implemented on the board . . such an moronic idea . .
The whole concept is stupid in my eyes.
You go somewhere like forums/boards to communicate with people.
What communication is there in clicking one single button?
Why did i receive a -? no idea, no information in there, ne ground for discussion, not even enough for a good flame war!
Hey, he got a +! why? for what? when? from whom? and is that such a good thing? if he got it for making a sexist or racist or whatever remark from another bigot for example, then why should that count as a + if it's clearly not positive at all?
The whole thing just boggles my already failing mind . .