HN user

_zagj

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github.com 4mo ago

NaviServer, a versatile multiprotocol (HTTP(S), etc.) server written in C/Tcl

_zagj
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 4mo ago

Ask HN: Have LLMs sapped your motivation for open source?

_zagj
1pts1
www.thenation.com 5mo ago

Unabomber victim, social media inventor Yale prof steps down after Epstein email

_zagj
8pts7
www.nytimes.com 5mo ago

Peter Attia 'Ashamed' After Epstein Emails Become Public

_zagj
6pts2
old.reddit.com 5mo ago

Reddit post by "maxwellhill" used as FBI evidence in Ghislaine's investigation

_zagj
10pts0
apnews.com 6mo ago

Cuba says 32 Cuban officers were killed in US operation in Venezuela

_zagj
6pts1
www.youtube.com 9mo ago

CNN calls Florida for Al Gore an hour before polls close in the panhandle (2000) [video]

_zagj
3pts3
nypost.com 9mo ago

Eric Schmidt ex-mistress sues over alleged stalking, abuse, digital surveillance

_zagj
2pts1
www.bloomberg.com 11mo ago

Russia's Secret War and the Plot to Kill a German CEO

_zagj
7pts1
www.youtube.com 1y ago

Enron Analyst Conference, January 2000 [video]

_zagj
11pts3
www.nbcnews.com 1y ago

Reddit bans an anti-natalist group after Palm Springs explosion

_zagj
3pts0
www.youtube.com 1y ago

Policing the internet in Germany, where hate speech, insults are a crime [video]

_zagj
7pts0
k12ssdb.org 1y ago

How Many School Shootings? All Incidents from 1966-Present

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100pts119
www.science.org 1y ago

Fat cells 'remember' being bigger–and act like it

_zagj
2pts4
www.sfchronicle.com 1y ago

Sources: San Francisco police identified Luigi Mangione 4 days before arrest

_zagj
3pts0
www.newyorker.com 1y ago

The Republican National Committee's Poll-Watching Army

_zagj
5pts3
www.newsweek.com 1y ago

Where Did the Joe Biden Votes Go?

_zagj
5pts5
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 2y ago

Blood lead level association with lower body weight in NHANES 1999–2006

_zagj
3pts0
Digg is gone again 4 months ago

Did you not see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777

Look at how many updoots it has. Look at how many vacuous, enthusiastic replies it got. That post is especially egregious, but you see stuff like that on a lesser scale every day here, now. My favorite bit is when they go out of their way to shill specific plans/pricing, e.g.:

You really NEED the $200 Claude MAX plan.

The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example.

Yeah, the EUV photolithography machine, but not much else. American companies like Lam Research and Applied Materials are the leaders in thin film deposition and etch, KLA Tencor is the leader in metrology, and Synopsys and Cadance are the leaders in EDA (though there's also Germany's Mentor Graphics).

The MIT license

I still can't believe that developers got memed into this being the default license. 20 years ago, you'd always default to GPL and only opt for something else if it was a complete non-starter, and then you'd turn to LGPL (e.g., if it was a C library), and failing that, some BSD variant. But developers were always cautious to prefer GPL wherever they could to prevent exploitation and maximize user freedom.

It's crazy that even in compiled languages like Rust, MIT is now the default, though I think that's probably due to the lack of a stable ABI complicating dynamic linking enough to make LGPL less viable.

submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me

After it became obvious that 1) these LLMs were trained heavily on OSS, and 2) that they (arguably) wantonly violated the licenses of the OSS they were trained on (as even the most permissive of which mandated attribution), 3) that LLMs could be used to rewrite code licensed with terms (e.g., copyleft) deemed unsuitable for certain commercial purposes to nullify those terms, and 4) that these LLMs would ultimately be used to reduce the demand for developers and suppress developer wages (even as cost of living keeps rising, and now even cost of compute, once deflationary, rises quickly as well, ironically thanks to LLMs), the culture of unbounded enthusiasm for open source amongst devs ought to have quickly been supplanted by one of peer pressure-bordering-on-public-shaming against open source participation.

Yet people still go out of their way to open source projects, or work, uncompensated, on open source beyond the "good citizen" stuff of reporting bugs (possibly with fixes) in things you use.

It really boggles the mind. Even if you can't starve the beast, why willingly feed it, and for free?

I feel like anyone used AI coding tools before 11/25 and after 1/26 (with frontier models) will say there has been a massive jump in, there is a difference between whether LLM can do a specific task or pass some arguably arbitrary checks by maintainers vs. what the are capable of.

How much of that is the model and how much of that is the tooling built around it? Also why is the tooling, specifically Claude Code, so buggy?

Well, on one hand they lack new data. Lot's of new code came out of an LLM, so it feeds back.

Supposedly model curation is a Big Deal at Big AI, and they're especially concerned about Ouroboros effects and poisoned data. Also people are still contributing to open source and open sourcing new projects, something that should have slowed to trickle by 2023, once it became clear that from now on, you're just providing the fuel for the machines that will ultimately render you unemployable (or less employable), and that these machines will completely disregard your license terms, including those of the most permissive licenses that seek only attribution, and that you're doing all of this for free.

Among many, many other things, he invented the term "vibecoding".

Yeah, that's a great reason to hate him, but the person you're responding to asked why his Twitter braindroppings belong on the front page.

It should be stated, again, that Karpathy completely missed the boat on LLMs, leaving OpenAI before they developed ChatGPT, and that he convinced Tesla to pursue a visual-only, no LIDR approach to FSD that doesn't work and probably won't ever work until after LIDR-based systems have already solved FSD.

Karpathy is the AI-equivalent of Sam Altman, who, for whatever reason, only fails upward. I think many HNers like him because he reminds them of themselves. Look at this bullshit and tell me it doesn't read like something the average HNer would write: http://karpathy.github.io/2020/06/11/biohacking-lite/

Somewhat off topic, but any theories as to why the shilling for Claude (not insinuating that's what the OP is doing) is so transparent? For example, the bots/shills often go out of their way to insist you get the $200 plan, in particular. If Anthropic's product is so good: 1) why must it be shilled so hard, and 2) why is the shilling (which is likely partially a result of the product) so obvious? Is this an OpenAI reverse psychology dirty trick, the equivalent of using robocalls to inundate voters with messages telling them to vote for your opponent so as to annoy and negatively dispose them towards your opponent?

It's strange that I don't accept unverified anecdotes on their face, especially when they contradict the best evidence available? Also

calling this person a liar

"Liar" implies a deliberate attempt to deceive, but I specifically mentioned the possibility that these tools just make you feel much more productive than you actually are, as at least one study found. But I'm sure a lot of these anecdotes are, in fact, lies from liars (bots/shills). The fact that Anthropic has to resort to stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777

should make everyone suspicious of the extravagant claims being made about Claude.

Odd choice of a comment to post this reply to.

How? They claimed LLMs somehow enabled them to write more code in the span of 3.5 years (assuming they started with ChatGPT's introduction) than they would be able to write in the span of decades. No studies have shown this. But at least one study did show that LLM devs overestimate how productive these systems make them.

Lots of projects have had requirements like this for years, usually to prevent infection by (A)GPL's virality, or in the case of the FSF, so they can sue on your behalf, or less scrupulously, so the project can re-license itself or dual license itself in the future should the maintainers opt to. (This last part was traditionally the only part that elicited objections to CLAs.)

it's like a high tech pinky swear

So is you attesting you didn't contribute any GPL'd code (which, incidentally, you arguably can't do if you're using LLMs trained on GPL'd code), and no one seemed to have issues with that, yet when it's extended to LLMs, the concern trolling starts in earnest. It's also legally binding .

Realistically, there’s a lot in there now that I simply couldn't have built in a standard human lifetime without them.

I have yet to see a study showing something like a 2x or better boost in programmer productivity through LLMs. Usually it's something like 10-30%, depending on what metrics you use (which I don't doubt). Maybe it's 50% with frontier models, but seeing these comments on HN where people act like they're 10x more productive with these tools is strange.

I always assumed this was the case anyway; MIT is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the mostly used licenses

No, it wasn't that way in the 2000s, e.g., on platforms like SourceForge, where OSS devs would go out of their way to learn the terms and conditions of the popular licenses and made sure to respect each other's license choices, and usually defaulted to GPL (or LGPL), unless there was a compelling reason not to: https://web.archive.org/web/20160326002305/https://redmonk.c...

Now the corporate-backed "MIT-EVERYTHING" mindvirus has ruined all of that: https://opensource.org/blog/top-open-source-licenses-in-2025

The LLM ban is unenforceable

Just require that the CLA/Certificate of Origin statement be printed out, signed, and mailed with an envelope and stamp, where besides attesting that they appropriately license their contributions ((A)GPL, BSD, MIT, or whatever) and have the authority to do so, that they also attest that they haven't used any LLMs for their contributions. This will strongly deter direct LLM usage. Indirect usage, where people whip up LLM-generated PoCs that they then rewrite, will still probably go on, and go on without detection, but that's less objectionable morally (and legally) than trying to directly commit LLM code.

As an aside, I've noticed a huge drop off in license literacy amongst developers, as well as respect for the license choices of other developers/projects. I can't tell if LLMs caused this, but there's a noticeable difference from the way things were 10 years ago.

worry about

I don't "worry" about it, as I don't care about karma and almost never flag anything, but most other users care greatly about their internet points (it is orange reddit, after all), and as krapp pointed out, it's long been suspected that using votes, flags, vouches in ways the site algorithmically dislikes or that moderators find adverse results in the equivalent of "hellbanning" of those functions.

For example, I still upvote or vouch comments that I feel were unfairly downvoted or flagged, and at least for vouching, it certainly seems like mine don't work anymore. I guess I vouched too many no-no things, and now I'm on the naughty list.

The fact that dang and the other mods engage in what's effectively a form of low-level gaslighting and deny doing so ought to be reason enough for any HN to dislike them, and yet all I see is fawning praise for the work they do.

flag

I'm not sure this is good advice. dang and the rest of the HN braintrust are very opaque about how your own flagging and voting affects your account, and I wouldn't be surprised if flagging or downvoting something like that increases the likelihood of you having some negative weight put on your subsequent votes/flags.

At 67 I'm refreshing my calculus, linear algebra, and statistics

Does anyone else find this messaging from Anthropic's marketing department silly? AI ultimately devalues human knowledge by commoditizing it, which ought to make one less motivated to go out of their way to acquire it, not more. Yet if these comments are to be believed, it's the exact opposite, with (as of now) 72 instances of the word "learning" in this thread. This, as we barrel headlong towards a world where having a strong back and the ability to turn a wrench or swing a hammer is going to be more remunerative than being able to solve differential equations or follow some arXiv preprint about frontier models. (At least until robotics is solved.)

I doubt Big AI is mass violating the CFAA just to shill, but maybe some other entity did the dirty work and is now reselling the accounts or indirect access to them, similar to the residential IP proxy business they use to disgusie their scraping.

As an aside, letting us easily view the flagged comments of a user would be an easy way of wading out corporate shillposters, since they shy away from posting anything controversial or offensive.

but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc"

I immediately guessed that's what prompted this thread when I saw the title.

I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.

No, you're not. Besides the OP and its abundance of upvotes and all of the green accounts shilling CC and AI, even more disturbing was the older accounts, some created more than a decade ago, posting in a similar bot-like cadence, shilling just as enthusiastically, and in some cases, freely interacting with the obvious bots. (And I say this as someone who's generally preferred to do throwaway posting on HN, so I feel uneasy automatically impugning green names.)

I can only guess there's a black market for HN accounts (as there is for reddit accounts), or perhaps some entities have been seeding bot accounts for years.

Even though I almost posted a comment like yours earlier ("I'm an African-American lesbian with a seizure disorder, and ChatGPT is finally enabling me to finish my novel!"), I'm not sure how many of these comments are bots, since many are from quite old accounts, e.g., this one replying in a bot-like manner to a fairly obvious bot actually registered in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286976

But when you inspect Mr. "AI girlfriend's" post history, even ignoring the AI promotion, it's all superficial: short, unargumentative, inoffensive posts. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a black market for HN accounts similar to reddit accounts.