ctrlmeta

Do proof-of-work pages actually stop AI bots? Big AI companies have enough compute to solve these challenges at scale. And if their bots are already doing much heavier work to fetch, read and process each page, then solving a small challenge first seems unlikely to be a serious barrier. Who are these proof-of-work challenges actually helping?

The multiple levels of abuse here are astounding. That grown adults can think projects like this are acceptable, let alone promote them, is hard to believe. I am 90% sure this is yet another vibecoded project. Has vibecoding really corrupted people?

First, I am fairly certain this violates Github's ToS. Second, it effectively amounts to a denial of service. Third, are people seriously using the .charity TLD to host something this frivolos? Have people got no sense of propriety anymore?

This "Code is cheap. Show me the talk." punchline gets overused as a bait these days. It is an alright article but that's a lot of words to tell us something we already know. There's nothing here that we don't already know. It's not just greedy companies riding the AI wave. Bloggers and influencers are also riding the AI wave. They know if you say anything positive or negative about AI with a catchy title it will trend on HN, Reddit, etc.

Also credit where credit is due. Origin of this punchline:

https://nitter.net/jason_young1231/status/193518070341689789...

https://programmerhumor.io/ai-memes/code-is-cheap-show-me-th...

I don't know what >1M subscribers have got to do anything. It is the case that many YouTubers pushing a specific propaganda have >1M subscribers. YouTube may be a little better than Twitter or Facebook but if you land upon any propaganda, the algorithm will loop you in and keep supplying more and more propaganda videos. 1M subscribers or 1000 subscribers doesn't matter once you are stuck in the loop.

I see you have not been around in London for over 10 years. How was it back when you were in London? I've been in London for 10 years, so I probably came when you left. Never once I have been in any part of London where English was not the lingua franca. Yes, people speak their native languages too among themselves but I haven't met anyone anywhere in my 10 years who couldn't speak English. I don't think this is any different from any other megacity of the world.

> That's got to be why one UK VC after another is closing their doors.

One after another? The only one that closed office was Andreessen Horowitz.

What's the "another"? I don't know why all the London threads attract this kind of dishonest comments!

I have done a lot of social work with Bangladeshi community. What many people don't know that the Bangladeshi wives who come as dependants speak better English than their husbands and sometimes as good as the natives.

I was surprised the first time I got into volunteer work. Figured that these wives have never spoken English in their home country. So when they moved to London, they learnt English from scratch and picked up the local accent and speaking style. Their grammar may not be perfect sometimes but whose is?

> English no longer functions reliably as the default public language

Absolutely false. My god! Have you even been to London? Stop consuming propaganda from Twitter/X and Facebook. It isn't good for your mental health.

Where are you pulling this random 15% number from? And a ridiculous number too. It's more like 1% to 3% unless you spend your entire day traveling.

I just checked how much I pay for travel. My monthly travel expenses is £150 total. That's like between 1% to 3% of someone's net income (depends on how much net income you make).

Do you know it is impossible to 15% of your net income in travel because there is a weekly fare cap: https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/find-fares/capping

Worst case scenario, you are traveling too much every week to max out the fare cap across all travel zones. Your monthly total would be £244. That's like 3% to 6% of your net income. But this is the worst case scenario. If you are spending 6% of your net income on travel, maybe you should reconsider which zone you live in.

So seriously where are you pulling out this ridiculous 15% number from?

The website has been made by AI. May be it has learned from its training that this kind of confirm box is cheeky humor for humans?

> Maybe its just you who doesnt like them?

Obviously it's just me who doesn't like them. What's your point?

The joke was fun the first time. When the joke posts (low effort AI slop no less!) are spammed to HN every week, it stops being fun.

That's true. But it is also true that almost nobody rewrites a whole complex software in Rust to get internet forum points from HN people.

Your question was "Is it wrong, though?" The answer is "Yes"

Yes, it is wrong. Take the top one:

> We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it

I'm pretty sure they didn't go through all the trouble of rewriting it in Rust to get some internet forum points!

> How much of this navel-gazing junk do we need? See also, from the same author:

Seriously! I'll admit the first post was mighty fun. But now this is turning into an AI-spam-fest! I objected in the 2nd thread but got downvoted. Apparently the community here thinks this kind of low effort Reddit-style humor is now on-topic for this place!

Not to mention the systematic downvoting of every comment that is critical of these spam posts!

> As a result, I can no longer log in and lost access to all my Kindle e-books.

Can't you file a suit in a small claims court?

> How perfectly accommodating does life have to be to not annoy you?

I don't need to tell you the answer. You're not my mom nor my therapist.

Just as you are bothered by my comment enough to leave this comment, I'm bothered by banal low-effort AI-generated spam enough that I left my comment.

How is this happening though? What's the democratic process there that's allowing this kind of stuff to happen?

It is and I said as much. I'm sure these experiments are fun for the creator. From the downvotes I'm getting, I'm sure it's fun for the community too. It was fun for me too the first time. It's not fun if this type of experiments are on the front page every week. There's already a good home for these posts at /show. Pages can reach /show without reaching front page. This could have been one of them. But anyway others here disagree with me. So I'll go take a break now.

Of course it is boring and silly for me. That's why I commented. The downvotes show the community agrees with you and disagrees with me. That's fine. I'm here to speak my opinion. I'm not here to speak your opinion.

I know about lucky 10000. It's the XKCD joke that is increasingly being used as an excuse to support every banal post. It's like modus operandus now. Party A makes a banal post. Party B questions why a banal post deserves to be on the front page. Party C says 'lucky 10000'.

There may be lucky 10000 but it's boring and silly for me. Good for he lucky 10000, but it's distracting when this kind of AI spam hits the front page every week. Show HN posts already gets special appearance at /show which I think is enough for this kind of stuff.

Totally unreadable with the all caps. I guess that's the point.

This kind of thing is fun once. And it was a lot of fun when the AI-generated fake HN was posted was last week.

But there's no need to upvote this kind of stuff to front page every week. The novelty wears off. It gets boring and silly pretty quickly.

> How many do you know in real life?

2 emacs users and they do everything in emacs.

> I suspect a lot of this is selection bias

Exactly and that's why I want to know more from those who don't do everything in Emacs and how they decide when to use Emacs and when to use another editor and how mixing both editors in your life works out for you.

> I know I'm a bit of an emacs user, but for this I've been using visual studio code because of one extension in particular: Cursorless.

Honestly want to know how many people here use Emacs like this? I thought Emacs users live their lives in Emacs. I know people who move more and more of their workflows into Emacs with packages like vterm, EAT, lsp-mode, pdf-tools, etc.

Are there seriously Emacs users who only a "bit of an emacs user". What is your workflow like? How do you decide when to use Emacs and when to use other tools? VSCode and Emacs have a lot of overlap in their purpose. How does this switching in and out of tools that overlap in their purpose feel?

> A few months ago I started a new job at a company that uses Elixir

> In fact, I might go as far as saying that Elixir gives you a fun language (like Ruby) while leaving out the stateful footguns OOP languages give you.

I don't mean to discount the author's experiences and opinion in this post. It's a nice post with a lot of good food for thought. Likewise I want to share only my own experience here. Two months into any new programming language, it feels like a fun language. Eventually the novelty factor wears off. And then it becomes a boring language. And I say "boring" in a positive sense.

The daily driver languages should be boring. Should present no surprises. Get the job done and get out of my way. When we transistion from the fun phase to that boring phase, what matters more is how good the language is fundamentally designed. As an example in Elixir the pattern matching abilities are great but I don't know if I could justify choosing a language without compile-time type safety in this day and age!

Emacs being Emacs it is possible to change how Emacs behaves for every key you type. Evil mode is a fantastic example of how you can emulate most of Vi within Emacs! But it's not the only game in town.

If you don't want to buy into the whole Vi and modal editing thing there are plethora of packages to have better key bindings. To name a few: god-mode, devil-mode, meow, hydra, general, spacemacs. Pick any from this and you don't have to worry about key chording anymore.