simplesocieties
simplesocieties on Hacker News
SO’s demise was two conflicting user bases who wanted mutually exclusive things: the questioners a space to learn and grow without judgement, and the point collectors a glorified FAQ for programming and social media network.
The operators of the platform never grappled with the reality that these two users want opposing things, and LLMs were just the final nail in the coffin.
“Local pedo didn’t get an invite to his favorite pedo club, therefore he can’t possibly be a pedo.”
You’re right, if not for the countless innovations and designs NASA made SpaceX wouldn’t exist, therefore it owes its profits back to the taxpayers that funded its success.
"Seatbelts don't solve car crashes so there's no need to wear one!"
Just to put everything in perspective, I recognize fully that Cloudflare had a use case for tsrs with WASM sandboxing. I am addressing your larger point about this sort of thing becoming the norm.
> We cannot ignore individual benefits in contributing, but that is not everything.
Individual benefits are the very foundation of most collaborative efforts. Pharmaceutical companies get payouts via patents for researching life-saving medicine. Even with money taken out of the equation, many academics slave for years over their research in hope of recognition either via Tenure or Nobel Prize. Ignoring the fact that people want credit for their work is dangerous and irresponsible.
Forking projects that are near-complete or have already undergone major refactors just to snipe them last-minute with vibe coded efforts is going to kill collaboration. I'm never building another project in the open again because that is precisely what I'm aiming to avoid.
You are talking about banning the DeepSeek hosting provider which no one in this thread disputes would be a risk to national security. The issue is banning open weight models which are not software, they are
data.
Some of the government bans have entered into the territory of banning the open weight model itself. This is like saying we must ban intelligence services or the military from using public weather reports in China for any operations. Public data is used all the time for these things, and an open weight model like DeepSeek should be treated with some level of care (e.g. putting it behind a firewall, having people study the model outputs, etc.) like you would for any foreign source of data, but that's all it is. data.
ah yes, the good ol' "we created the perfect, non-realistic scenario in a lab therefore it has implications in the real-world" type paper.
The hugging face hack was not a model gone rogue, it was intentional security malpractice. An open weight model cannot re-arrange electrons nor can it magically break a firewall that's setup properly.
Don't governments have tech literate advisers? What's to stop someone from distilling DeepSeek into the TotallyGrownInTheUSA model?
> It wasn’t “let’s build a faster Rust based Typescript compiler” at all. That was a nice side-effect.
Then why are the performance graphs the headliner topic in the article? The WASM sandbox is barely a footnote.
What are the problems in async the new trait solver will fix? Looking forward to building more on async Rust so I'm curious
AI isn't improving productivity if EVERYONE is trying to reinvent the same f*king thing. What are we doing here? Why publish any open source software at all if someone is gonna swoop in and vibe something better™ faster™ and more memory efficient™ the next day?
Too late I just shipped tsasic so you can have a custom-made board for every single application you will ever write.
These two things are mutually exclusive. They can store encrypted backups on a server somewhere, but unless they have the decryption keys from both parties (E2E) then no, it can't be stored in plain-text.
The productivity gains of people using their own "custom" harnesses and agent tooling (e.g. letting agents talk to eachother over a messaging board) is questionable at best a waste of time at worst. No one I've talked to is actually applying the scientific method and measuring how long and how many tokens it costs to get a certain task done with just a plain chat input vs all this custom harness/tooling crap.
All you need is the source code for your existing project and the claude code/codex/opencode cli and boom, you are ready to ship. Most people doing the impressive stuff with AI are just using it, not building harnesses or "agentic" tooling.
> If your primary purpose is SOLVING the problem, you should be ecstatic! If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles*, you'd be very upset.
I'm not a mathematician but I find this framing to be rather non-pragmatic and frankly, pointed.
In the process of Leonhard Euler's "rent-seeking" so he could "play with" bridge crossings he invented a completely new branch of mathematics that is the basis for things like Google Maps today. The process of working with these problems is just as important if not more, than just solving them.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
I'm not a Musk fanboy by any stretch of the imagination but this was clearly done as a marketing stunt to drum up hype about the street legal roadster. I didn't even watch the announcement but now everyone in my friend circle is talking about it because of the rocket engines. That's just called effective marketing.
I agree the average tech worker is woefully unaware of how tech illiterate the non-tech user is, but I would push back on the notion that basic security measures would've threatened the margins of a grocery store, and I am well aware of how they operate on single digit margins.
Tailscale pro pricing is $18 per user per month. Assuming you had one tech per store even, and 500 stores, that is a $9000 per month expense. Ok, not as bad as refrigerant and electric bill costs, but not great. So let's say instead of having a dedicated IT tech per store, we have 5 techs who work from HQ managing the infra for 500 stores.
$90. $90 per-month is all it would've taken to take these fridges off the public internet. If your margins are so razor thin that a monthly $90 bill would threaten profits, I question whether your business is even viable.
Language choice is more often due to politics than practicality. Microsoft probably has some internal process for deciding on languages and "defaults" to typescript & C# since they have the most direct control over those languages.
A refusal to hold the individual responsible for starting the prompt is in itself a declaration of war against humanity. Either have some accountability or the nation states with nuclear arms will do it eventually.
Morality is defined by the people with the most dollars. Until enough people cancel subscriptions over this (spoiler: they won't) nothing will happen.
Why are there an endless flood of comments like this on HN and other social media insisting that because there’s such high demand, it’s IMPOSSIBLE that these tech companies are overvalued and over leveraging debt.
Reality is way more nuanced. Something can have high demand AND be on the precipice of financial catastrophe. See: Spirit Airlines.
What about the current ecosystem is lacking that made you want to write a new one from scratch? (gpui, Dioxus, Slint)
I'll be honest given the article title I was hoping for a detailed rant on the complex installation process that most Windows apps hide, but this was also a nice read. And as a user of Raycast they do indeed have a very nice installation background.
Go ahead and go live next to one then and show us how it's nothing but propaganda.
Quite convenient how the same people trying to run roughshod over the others to get these bubble mania mausoleums built NEVER live near them but are HAPPY to make others who can't afford a second home live next to them.
It's political doublespeak. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
I don’t have some grand theory on SO’s downfall. All I will say is that sometimes us programmers try to optimize
every single thing in life and that’s simply not how humans work.
SO tried to optimize the Q/A by eagerly rejecting repeat questions, without considering what the consequences of that were. If you’re in a classroom / lecture hall, your teacher / professor isn’t going to chide you for asking an “obvious” or “repeat” question (bad ones might). Imagine if every time you wanted to talk to a TA or professor you first needed to lookup previously asked questions in a database and then, iff your question hasn’t been asked before, you may ask the professor or TA after hours. Programmers might call this system “efficient” but most people would be pretty unhappy with it.
Cyberpunk 2077 is such an accurate picture of the future. Megacorps will own and control everything, we will be lucky to get the leftover scraps.