Sometimes I wonder, when did HN went so wrong and is full of comments that do not further the discussion but purely result into flamewar and ridiculous homilies.

I've only been here since 2015 so I'm not bringing much more than an early middle-aged viewpoint, in HN years. But I noticed a big uptick of this starting to happen when cryptocurrency people began proselytizing aggressively around 2016, 2017, so much so that I actually made an account to push back on it in some small way (my handle was originally blockchainoffools, but the hn handle limits knocked my block off) having been only a lurker for a couple years prior. Then it seem like the S/N regained some of its old strength for a bit. However the noise (and the halo of meta-noise such as this very comment) surged again to a degree that dwarfs the intensity of the crypto invasion, when first twitter and then reddit announced the end of free 3rd party API access.

I did not know Crypto bros are that old. Interesting observation though.

Most of my comments are serious.

But asking me to take Tailwind seriously as a CSS framework is like asking me to take Flat Earth Society seriously in a science forum. Everything has a threshold where you cross from the plausible to the absurd. To me there's a non-zero chance Tailwind is (or at least started as) a parody of bad software design.

We just had a submission the other day that "the JavaScript ecosystem has a talent problem". It's a real problem.

CSS's very goal is to separate styles into reusable, readable rules, and here comes Tailwind, inlining them into an endless combination of increasingly obscure and indecipherable abbreviations. Are you not entertained? It seems deliberate.

> Shouldn't we all cheer the fact that at least for Australia Facebook will not be handling "news' thus wont be influencing people

That conclusion does not follow from the premise. There are many ways to influence without being “the news”, and the news is at least wearing the clothes of shining a light on the hidden places of political and economic malfeasance (the fact that the term “yellow journalism” is older than any living person notwithstanding).

Before jumping to conclusion me might have to hear the other side as well.

Karishma, you were shadowbanned. I've seen nothing in your comment history which would warrant this so I've vouched this comment.

Some context here:

Indian railways website is very slow and pathetic (so bad that there are lengthy discussion on HN about it. search for IRCTC).

Given the shortage of tickets thousands of people try to book tickets at 7am when the window to book a certain class of tickets call `Tatkal` opens. Thousands of people are trying to book the exact same tickets from say 7am and by 7:10 am all tickets get sold out.

Now, if you could prefill all the forms and just press submit you might be able to buy the tickets before others. Railways website specifically tries to not allow any kind of pre-filling. The app merely bypasses that restriction. (I have written scripts in past to do just that when I lived there).

Railways is a classic colonial government system and operates pretty much as if India is still a British colony. They have their own police force called RPF which arrested the boy under Railways act 1989 for “unauthorised business of procuring and supplying railway tickets” which the boy did not do at all. Not to mention, the railways form has a captcha so it was not even a programmatic submission. There are railways mafias in India who buy tickets by bribing railways staff and I suspect these people are responsible for getting this boy jailed as his solution helped more genuine passengers to book their tickets by undercutting the "agents".

It remains to be seen how the courts apply the standard here but it will probably take around 10-15 years for the courts to come to a verdict.

Personal Rant: When I was in India, I had the misfortune of relying on Indian railways to travel home from college. I was so pissed that I was determined to get out of India so I have to never deal with Indian railways. I had tried all possible ways to hack the booking system and had my own chrome extensions to fill up the forms.

If the timeframe is so tight it would be way more stable to just register all booking attempts (let's say up to 7:15) and then distribute the ticket randomly between unique users for some definition of uniwue user

What truly impresses me is Orwell's ability to see through the propaganda and then engage in its meta-details.

It was only after moving to USA I realized some things which I took for granted were basically propaganda and there are "other sides" which I need to consider. I could not have come to that conclusion without youtube and the diversity of thoughts in American society.

I really wonder how Orwell could see through things like this without the Youtube and Internet. Really a fine mind.

Out of curiosity, were your prior beliefs about your home country, America, or global civilization? Would you mind sharing a few of them?

> I really wonder how Orwell could see through things

While he certainly had a fine mind and intellectual curiosity, it also seems he required exposure to different cultures, places, and events such as the Spanish civil war. Your own experiences provide similar anecdote, and my own travels certainly reinforce they idea.

It all depends on alternative. $100 is a lot of money for a kid in India, if the same kid can earn the degree while watching ads I think it does a great service to poor people because the alternative is not learning.

Alternative to a problematic suboptimal (according to you) school experience is not a perfect school experience but no-school experience.

American public schooling system has become a jobs program for adults.

If $100 is a lot for someone then they surely won’t be valued much as ad audience.

Coursera has a financial aid program for this, and it is easy to avail if one is a student from developing countries or low income households. edX has a similar program as well, where the price will get reduced to around 1/10th of original cost. In Coursera, the price is completely discounted and you can do the course for free. See: https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/209819033-Ap...

Spotify do regional pricing, the cost in India is about a tenth of what it costs in the United States. I don't know if Coursera do the same but I don't see why they couldn't.

Hello, I wanted to let you know that your HN account is probably banned as most of your comments are dead and the only reason I can reply to this one is that a mod undeleted it.

Surprised me as well. Milton Friedman's Free to Choose (book and tv) remains so much relevant reading in 2020. Hayek was very hard to comprehend because his writing is information dense. You have to read a sentence carefully few times to full comprehend it.

My app got suspended because my self publish ebook reader could be used to search for books one of which had a kid with a nerf gun on its cover.

Sad times we live in.