Blade Runner 2026

My second programming job was with Patch, a small startup that had been acquired by AOL. Shortly after I started that position, AOL also acquired Huffington Post. At Patch we focused on local, small-town journalism, compared to Huffington Post which had a much larger, national scope. We also had completely separate technology stacks. Still, on the off chance that they might have something we could use (Huffington Post being significantly older and more mature at the point of acquisition than Patch) there was a meeting between senior engineers on both teams to share and to learn more about each other. That meeting is where I was introduced to the "Dick Cheney" effect. Huffington Post was one of the early prominent news websites to give readers the opportunity to comment on a news article, and also one of the first to implement automated moderation of those comments as the volume quickly exceeded the capacity of human moderators. Using an early form of sentiment analysis, the engineers a