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It's still really early 2000's! We have over 900 years left :)

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On topic: discussions like these are as old as human discussion forums and communities. I think that the participants each grow and change on an individual level just as much as the community and platform does. I think humans have a hard time identifying how much of their feelings of nostalgia are based in reality.

Maybe the platform has not actually changed in the ways people fear, and instead, peoples' opinions on what is interesting, important, or valuable has changed?

Since this thread has been discussing politics-adjacent things, let's consider Senator John Fetterman from the United States. Mr. Fetterman is notably different today from when he first started his campaign, regarding what he believes is important and valuable. (Mr. Fetterman suffered a stroke, which is suspected to have brought about personality changes and shifts in political ideology.)

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I think we, as individuals, should always be focusing our first line of questioning on how _we're_ changing, rather than trying to figure out how the world, or the zeitgeist, or Hacker News, etc. is changing.

Sometimes we outgrow things that we hold dear, and instead of accepting that it's not really the place for us anymore and moving on to a different environment, we try to shape our current environment around our new personality by instituting new rules or adding new features.


Genuinely curious: would you mind please explaining to me how your contributions are more productive than the person you are responding to (read: attacking)?

It reads like you are upset at the poster using "DEI" and projecting your own behaviors onto them ("tedious and unproductive political discourse", "immune from critique or any burden of evidence").


Fair enough.


I think it'd be good to keep in mind that Hacker News is mostly populated by a demographic commonly referred to as "Tech Bros" who, for the most part, are here as part of their journey in creating profitable businesses.


Profitable (very) was Thomas Midgley Jr. when he introduced lead petrol for cars, it took 75-100 years til the «profit» was stopped. What did we learn?


Is that the definition of tech bros? I thought tech bros were people who shilled cryptocurrencies, NFTs and other grifts.


The definition of “Tech bros” is “tech people you don’t like”. There’s no agreed upon definition (just like how people disagree about what is/isn’t a “grift”) because it’s not meant to be descriptive, it’s a rhetorical device.


No, it's tech people you don't like for a specific set of reasons: it's mostly hubris and its implications like downplaying the damage the tech does to society and environment.


perceived downplaying of the damage. Popular soundbites (including "don't solve social problems with technology") have it generally backwards, and most people don't go beyond them.


No, this is too dismissive. There was a large shift in the culture of people over the last decade or so as the bay area money printers started printing faster than finance firms were printing. Eg tech money attracted a culture of people wed normally label “finance bros”. Patrick Bateman types but without the explicit murder. Status, money, often born outstandingly privileged.

This is the tech bro people speak of. It is that psychopathic desire for status at all costs which sadly is learned, emulated, and exalted. Ironically, yc is the poster child for breeding this culture over the last 8 or so years and the place it is most often complained about outside of reddit ofc.


That’s how you use the term because you don’t like those people.

I’ve heard people use the term to disparage Linus Torvalds and even Aaron Swartz because they didn’t like them.


Using tech bro on Torvalds is well outside the pattern of usage I’ve seen, which trends more towards GP’s definition, at least in the past 5 years.


Saying we don't like someone because we deem them to be a tech bro, is indeed a circular argument.

But saying we don't like someone that calls themself a tech bro? Well they had it coming.


For a company that had Sears’ positioning at the time? It wasn’t far off from that description.


But a lot of stuff had to be invented and Bezos was the person to do it. Amazon sounded intense to work for to get to where it is.


They invented almost all of that a century earlier. Amazon improved their warehouse management and, later, delivery times but that happened later. If Sears management had been earning their pay in the 90s that would have been much harder because Sears had a huge inventory and unmatched local presence for returns, support, etc. if they hadn’t been AWOL moving the catalog online. Amazon was shipping at regular postal speeds then, too, so Sears could even have beat them if they shipped from their warehouses.

This wasn’t uncommon back then: we had several clients in the 90s who just couldn’t wrap their heads around how quickly many of their customers would switch to email or online forms when it saved them a few days on the transaction.


Web search-based RAG is very different from having something embedded in a model's training data, though.


ChatGPT website gives a similar answer. Are they running RAG, or the model?

> Yes — I’m familiar with the “pelican riding a bicycle” SVG generation test.

> It’s become a kind of informal benchmark people use when evaluating whether an image-generation or SVG-generation model can: ...


Runnin’ confabulations:

>Yes — the “hamster driving a car” prompt is a well-known informal test …

>…that’s a well-known informal test people use…(a mole-rat holding or playing a guitar).

Try any plausible concept. Get sillier and it’s trained to talk about it being nonsense. The output still claims it’s a real test, just a real “nonsense” test.


Acting as a pass-through for LLMs is logically equivalent to wiring up a bot account.


No, it's not, unless you can argue that the bot would have thought of asking the same question I did, which is unlikely.


"I asked [AI] and it said..." is not the path to social acceptance in this herd.


Let’s define the bot as one that asks LLMs to visualize concepts, then.

Now I’ve argued that the bot would very likely have thought of the same question you did, and my original assertion stands.


Would you mind elaborating…?


Sane, easily readable syntax and expressive semantics. Easy to learn. Very scalable. Suitability, by design, for low level systems programming, including microcontrollers. Suitability, by design, for large, complex real-time applications. Easy to interface with C and other languages. Available as part of GCC. Stable and ongoing language evolution.


Manual memory management for anything beyond RAII.


I’d guess that’s a reference to Ada 95.


Yes


Unrelated to the topic, it seems awfully unintuitive to name a function ‘poll’ if the result is ‘not polling.’ I’m guessing there’s some history and maybe backwards-compatible rewrites?


Specifically, earlyoom’s README says it repeatedly checks (“periodically polls”) the memory pressure, using CPU each time even when there is no change. The “poll” system call waits for the kernel to notify the process that the file has changed, using no CPU until the call resolves. It’s unclear what systemd-oomd does, because it uses the phrase “periodically polls”,


The "poll" system call does not wait until a file changes.


s/the file has changed/it has published new data to the file descriptor/

See https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.html


Poll takes a timeout parameter. ‘Not polling’ is just a really long timeout


"Let the underlying platform do the polling and return once the condition is met"


One thing worth taking into account is the practice of finding people who actually like the product, and then paying them to write an honest review. I find this to be much closer to ethical than paying exclusively for positive reviews to people who may not have ever used the product, but it has a similar net effect of distorting the sentiment by amplifying a subset of opinions, so still not ideal but at least it’s rooted in honesty.

If you haven’t been vocal about your support of products in general, you wouldn’t show up on the radar for these “opportunities.”


I recently got a comma.ai. I really like it. I tell everyone I know to get one. But I'm embarrassed to talk about it on the open Internet because I don't want to be accused of being paid to say good things about them.

I haven't been angling for an opportunity, but the world of marketing to developers isn't the same as for, say, a new face cream.

Paying for a good review on a site that features reviews, eg Amazon or Yelp is one thing. Paying people to troll the Internet at large and make random comments on random sites or discord/etc just seems a bit much.

Then again, the appearance of money make people doubt people are sincere about other things. Specifically, my employer is an AI tech company means that anything pro-AI, even for a different company that's competing with mine, or in a totally different area than my employer's, is suspect.

Human psychology is weird


> Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them.

What does this mean? What do you mean unique shit? What do you mean when you say you’re trying to draft on the sentiment? What is “them” referring to?

Genuinely. I’m not being (deliberately) obtuse, just trying to follow. Thanks


Thanks for asking this because for a moment I thought I was too dense to read this correctly


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