latexr

I agree in the abstract, but perhaps the way to avoid generic responses is to disallow (or segment) generic submissions. This website is no longer HN, it should be renamed AIN. There is only so much to say about the subject, and if cliché submissions keep getting accepted and upvoted and shoved to every visitor without a way to avoid them (barring leaving the website entirely), then people will eventually gravitate to the same responses. If your neighbours play loud music every night, they don’t get to complain that everyone is always mentioning the loud music to them.

You are a fantastic moderator, but there’s only so much even you can do. If nothing changes about the website, the problem will only get worse. I warned years ago that this would happen, the signs were on the wall immediately.

The title is stupid clickbait, and the story is interesting enough without it. Basically, all the files were deleted by mistake and the backups weren’t working, so they lost everything. Fortunately, a technical director had been working from home to care for her newborn, and thus had copies on her own computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story_2#Troubled_productio... (third paragraph)

Why does the homepage mention AI over 20 times? Why does it mention AI at all? Why is most of it absurdly long and obfuscated base 64, which looks be binary data?

Moment of the breakdown (I couldn’t find a less shitty video).

https://youtu.be/CtYEm21Fhpo?t=79

these seemingly intelligent entities that we could talk to and interact with just like we do with humans.

Now that we have that, everybody hates it.

There are several reasons for it, most of them having to do with looking beyond what’s right in front of your nose. For many people, we don’t “have that”, LLMs are not comparable to interactions with humans. Then there’s all the shit around it such as the further consolidation of power in the hands of a few who really shouldn’t have it, the destruction of livelihoods, the increase in disinformation and propaganda, unhealthy habits and depression, and on and on.

Too many of these conversations focus only on the technology and completely ignore the context in which it exists. That lack of human perspective is a major reason why Hacker News is made fun of and dismissed relentlessly on other places on the internet (called “the orange site”), and everyone here is (wrongly) lumped as being a bunch of out-of-touch selfish nerds.

posting this during the World Cup

The World Cup is over. This tweet was the day after.

literal conspiracy theory

The strongest words they used were “marketing stunt”. Calling that a conspiracy theory is quite the stretch.

They’re both. There are finance tech bros “idea guys” whose aim is to be at the top of the company, and other tech bros who got into programming for the high salary and clout of being able to say they work at or are ex-employees of Facebook, or Google, or whatever.

The shit and exploitation don’t build themselves.

The field of software engineering is dominated by the smart people that do something not because they have to but out of curiosity.

Emphasis mine.

We wish. I think the state of tech pretty conclusively demonstrates those people aren’t the ones who dominate. Money and power hungry tech bros do, which is why everything is shit and exploitative.

HN does something similar (…), new comments get some seconds/minutes on the top of the comments

Only kind of. There’s some time/upvotes algorithm that determines that. If a submission has been live for a few hours or a day and already has a number of highly upvoted comments, new ones can appear so far down the list they’ll realistically not get read. Also, some submissions simply don’t get engagement, it not rare to find some with one or two comments, read by effectively no one.

The thing with showing other people’s cursors and how many are looking at the page feels a bit creepy.

Quick fix for the font, which many people are (rightly) complaining about.

  Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName("quote")).forEach(p => { p.style.marginTop = "20px"; p.classList.remove("quote", "reveal") })

Real title of the video is “He Mined 300 Bitcoin, Then Sold the Computer for $200”.

Imagine the blogpost was on AI generated classical music. Everyone, including the authors, agrees the result is shit. You, being classically trained, can understand more than most why the results are bad.

Then someone comes along and says “I honestly can't really tell how these are worse than the human produced ones. They all sound kinda the same to me” and “I honestly can’t tell a good piece of music from a bad one. I don’t know what makes a piece of music “good”. These AI generated ones seemed pretty good to me, on the same caliber as those Mozart or Beethoven things”.

That’s what you’re doing, and that’s why you’re being downvoted. It’s fine that you can’t tell, but it’s supremely obvious to everyone else.

Seems pretty clear that the argument isn’t “approach a random kid in college studying philosophy or economics and ask them to make a music video for $100”. You ask this of someone studying cinema or something related, which has both the know-how and access to equipment but is lacking in experience.

They are funny, which is the point of Weird Al. The overwhelming majority of music and music videos are not comedic.

https://archive.ph/20260715223901/https://www.theatlantic.co...

Assuming the author is here (they link to the HN submission from the post), you have a typo: “laudbile” instead of “laudable”.

Would have anyone advocated a Rust rewrite of Bun before?

That’s hardly a “tech hope” or “visionary”. Dirigibles continue to be interesting and fascinating to new generations, even if just as a concept; the language used to write a JavaScript runtime is uninteresting and unimportant in the scheme of things.

The community would have frowned upon the idea, saying the effor would never be worth it. And now here we are.

Here we are where? Is the Rust release out yet? Didn’t it have tens of thousands of `unsafe` blocks? What’s so great about it? At this point in time, even implying the transition was a success is the same as calling the Hindenburg or the Titanic a success. You’ve seen the thing exists but have no idea how it’ll perform in the real world under real scrutiny and real scenarios. Perhaps that wouldn’t matter had much of Bun was just an internal project used by just one company, but it isn’t.

Except the repo doesn’t mention “tamagotchi” even once. Even the “gotchi” in the name only appears once in the README.

I’m talking about the submitted title to HN.

Calling this a tamagotchi is silly. The only thing this and tamagotchis have in common is that they’re small electronic devices with a screen (and even that tech is different).

When you compare a project to something that it isn’t, you’re doing it a disservice. The people who are intrigued by the tamagotchi angle are disappointed, while the people who are uninterested in it (but might still like the project) won’t even give it a change. Everybody loses.

The meal demo is hilarious.

— Hey, model, see this fake-ass stock photo of a variety of spices, vegetables, and spaghetti? What meal can I make with this?

— Just cook everything.

— I’m a complete noob. I can’t even fathom how to cook those things. Help me!

— Sure sure. First boil the spaghetti completely and drain. Only after that, while it’s getting cold, you need to sauté (good luck knowing what that is if you don’t even know how to cook spaghetti) the garlic and carrots at this specific temperature (good luck figuring out how to do that on a stove). Despite having mentioned the peppers and herbs in the previous message, I’m not going to tell you what to do with those. Just chew them raw or something, I guess.

The demo shows that the model can answer, but the answers are frankly bad. Here’s what you could’ve done instead faster with better results: a web search for “spaghetti carrots peppers”. Don’t even need to add “recipe”.

Presumably you’ve been using the model as you develop it, why not show something real and useful instead of a generic, unrealistic and uninteresting scenario that above all makes it look incompetent? Show something that genuinely surprised you positively.

They do that and much worse.

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/09/15/34...

It’s so prevalent it even has a name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalkerware

Don’t underestimate an abuser’s ability to find a way.

and/or try to hallucinate coherence

It’s bad enough for rational reasoned discourse that we anthropomorphise LLMs, let’s please not then feed those words back into human discourse, further diluting their meaning. No one “hallucinates coherence”, hallucinations are by definition a perception which does not match reality.

AI is simply an extension of

It may be an extension, but not “simply” as it also creates the problem where it didn’t exist. I’ve seen several reports (both on and offline) of people who used to engage in deep thinking (I’m talking scientists, postgrads, PhDs working at the edge of what we know) now worrying they are losing their ability to properly think due to their LLM use.

It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.

I hope we can agree that’s bad and that we should try to stop and even reverse it, not simply shrug our shoulders and go “ah well, we were already going to shit anyway, might as well fuck everything up faster”.

Not everything written on HN can be exceptional, because by definition it wouldn't be the exception.

I’m not arguing every comment on HN is exceptional, but that logic isn’t sound because exceptionalism is relative (as you alluded to).

In other words, it’s congruent that every comment on some website could be exceptional when compared to the internet at large.

I was rather pleased with the originality of this until I remembered pg had come up with "writes and write-nots" in (…)

Is Paul arguing that there will be people who can’t write because of AI? People have been crap at writing before AI, and much of Gen Z (and Alpha) literally don’t know how to write (not just how to write well) at ages where previous generations could.

That’s not his prediction, and not a prediction about technology, as claimed at the top of the post. School teachers could have told him that years ago.

It’s frankly dangerous that so many people lap up Paul’s words, when his world view is so distorted and out of touch with reality and devoid of understanding of regular people. He’s been rich and of high status for too long for his own intellectual good.

There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.

Why are you compelled to defend that (in my view) meaningless distinction? Why does it matter? I’m asking genuinely, so I can understand why we’re having this conversation.

I dont know you about you, but the reason I read is to learn and retain

Millions of people read for entertainment. If you ask the people who read Fifty Shades and other erotic novels¹, how many do you think would say they do it “to learn and retain”? In fact, not retaining is something I would like to do with certain pieces of media, so I could reexperience their impact.

Have you ever listened to a good audiobook for a fictional story? There are fantastic versions of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett stories where the voice acting really brings them to life in a way many readers cannot with their internal voice (see, for example, aphantasia). How about a book written by a comedian, read by the author? Having them read the funny bits with the intended delivery and in their own voice feels like you’re enjoying another of their stand-ups. They sometimes even go slightly off-script and make jokes not in the written book. Again: Consume books however you like and let others do the same. Why does it concern you how other people enjoy their books?

¹ No judgement. Smut is a big market and you do you as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.

What a meaningless gatekeeping distinction. Unless your sole goal is to be a poser who wants to be perceived as a literate intellectual who is oh so cultured and well-read, however you consume the book is up to you. Who the heck is thinking “I really want to read more books, but only if it’s in the way this stranger tells me I should, not the way I enjoy”?

If you like reading paper books, good. If you like reading electronic books, good. If you like listening to audiobooks, good. If you like having your partner lovingly transcribe a book into individual postcards and mail them to you weekly, good. Consume the book however you want and don’t judge others by their preference.

The title is, no surprise, clickbait bullshit. They’re making it sound like they vibe coded a game and it sold $25k in copies to real people in just two weeks, when in fact they participated in a competition specifically about vibe coding games and the prize was $25k. That’s meaningless.

The content of the article is also made of meaningless statements meant to sound impressive:

every year the games get noticeably better. 2026 is the second run.

Yeah, you can’t in good faith make an “every year” assessment for something which has happened twice.