Going to favorite it just so I can find it before it gets flagged. We have to redo the flagging system for HN, it's a complete joke. Why do they persist in the idea that it is better than simple upvotes and downvotes?
None have been flagged. As I understand, if there's more comments than upvotes in a short period, it's automatically considered engagement bait and deranked.
Edit: Per Dang, they have been flagged, but HN has opted to turn off flagging for YC companies.
> It set off the flamewar detector. Moderators haven't touched it, except that we turned off the user flags on the story. Otherwise it would be displaying [flagged] at the top.
I usually start my day by checking these first. Sometimes what happens is some actual spam flagged for genuine reasons but I'd say 70% of the time these are things that are interesting but there is a vocal group that doesn't like it (=the topic itsef, the conclusions of the article, etc.).
I flagged because I can’t stand this overly moralising cancel culture attitude.
This exact tech is already commonplace in industry, but no one is trying to find an industry wide solution, just taking cheap pot shots that the nth startup doing the same thing.
If you don’t like what this startup is doing, build something better instead of virtue signalling here.
The "overly moralising cancel culture" statement doesn't really prove anything here. "overly moralising" just says that you seem to disagree with all arguments based on 'too much morals', with no justification of why those arguments are bad or why using 'morals' is misguided. "cancel culture" means that you disagree with people trying to get things shut down, again, with no justification. This is just the culture war word salad of the decade, because there's no underlying point - just an attempt to wrap all the things people disagree with into one easy-to-dismiss package.
And no, this issue isn't something you can out-compete. Authority figures notably love surveillance - no matter if it's your government, a tech megacorp or a manager at a factory. There's no alternative solution that provides the same hit of power and control like surveillance. Social pushback is the only remaining way.
The observation has strong parallels to the notion that true organisational values are identified by what is rewarded or punished, rather than written "mission statements" or "statements of values". As was noted on a recent Complexity podcast episode (Santa Fe Institute, highly recommended), one of the challenges of language is that whilst it makes communications more powerful, it also hugely facilitates lying.
I remember the organisational observation making the rounds ... maybe a decade ago (I recall it probably being on Google+ back when that was A Thing), and though this all but certainly isn't the original, it's strongly similar in sentiments:
Company values are invisible – what's rewarded and punished shouldn't (2023)
Similar notions are that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with (of questionable veracity, though fairly high popularity), see: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/08/08/five-people/>.
There's the notion that a person, particularly a creative person (artist, musician, author, programmer, experimenter/tinkerer, tailor, soldier, spy, wups, wrong espionage meme) is what they can't not do.
Going back to G+, an observation I'd had on follow + blocking behaviour there was that social network landscapes are defined by the pathways along with information flows with greater or lesser impedence. G+ had a fairly strong block in which a block action (unilateral or reciprocated) meanth that neither party could directly see or interact with the others' content, at least whilst authenticated to the system. (The fact that logging out permitted visibility of otherwise public content meant of course that "blocking" was not an effective mechanism for preventing some adversarial relation from finding out what you were posting so long as that activity was public.
But both in terms of blocks by/against myself, and between other accounts, there was an interesting and somewhat fractured state of discussions particularly in what I've termed "salon" threads: a reasonably gregarious host, with diligent thread hygiene, who tended to attract a broad range of participants and lively discussion. The blocking actions would tend to segment that discussion in ways I still find fascinating.
Which is unrelated to the original comment and observation, though it comes up in context, at least here and now ;-)
A surgeon and an assassin both wield a blade, and both occasionally kill. Their intent and motives differ strongly.
Mens rea exists because reasons.
(This is also why surgeons generally request a statement of consent to medical procedures from the patient, where that's tractable, or by a representative --- parent, guardian, someone granted power of attorney, etc --- where the patient themselves is incapable of consent. There are still some loose edges, but this itself is a significant though not sole distinction between the two roles noted.)
Blowing up a building because you're a mobster, and you're "sending a message", is different from a demolition crew doing the same to make way for a new building.
You should really rethink what you're saying. An act is a wholesome, contextualize thing. It does not live in a vacuum.
By your measure, a sexual predator grabbing a woman's vagina and a doctor examing a female patient are identical.
If you don't like evil, you should do something not evil. But also, you shouldn't tell evil people that you don't like what they're doing, because that might hurt their feelings.
The founders simply digitized existing practice into a piece of software.
The demo could have been framed in a better way, but simply shifting the blame on the founders is very convenient.
Factories loose contract over minor delays and issues. Often times the difference between workers enjoying a little humane working conditions is 20 cents, which big retail refuse to pay while the same goods retail for 4X- 5X margin.
The problem isn’t the software, since most factories already employ similar process in other manual ways. Factories that adhere to efficiency survive, those who don’t simply die.
Even 10% efficiency boost can mean a lot in industries with razor thin margins.
This is particularly egregious, but I also suspect it's exactly how a large portion of the world currently operates. These founders explicitly stated that they grew up observing their parents factories. I doubt they learned such callous disregard for workers at Duke.
It is, and ultimately largely with the same dehumanization but less precision.
So instead of the worker being yelled at because of the AI, the worker will be yelled at because the boss imagines their pile to be smaller than the pile of another worker.
It being common and unfixable is implicit in how this criticism is levelled. Tools that track efficiency should be a great thing. The criticism comes because everyone knows exactly how they will be cruelly used and that is treated as unfixable.
Much more discussion in these posts, which AFAICT tend to quickly fall afoul of either user flagging or the HN flamewar detection and drop off the front page:
I think there are many companies that are trying to do something like this. But I'm pretty certain Amazon specifically didn't license their own technology to others.
What is the right response to a boss who accuses a worker of not meeting the boss' expected productivity criteria?
Assume that both the boss and the worker believe that their productivity expectation and result are fair, respectively. It is obvious that they will never see eye to eye.
In my opinion, it is for the worker to become more detached, not less, to treat the employment as temporary, to not invest one's expectations into lasting employment. All else is beside the point.
As someone with over a decade in industrial manufacturing, there is only ever the in-group of the masters, and the out-group of the serfs. Actually making things is merely the means to the end of neo-feudalism.
This is the kind of AI that leads to turnover like Amazon that is so bad they are so desperate for warehouse staff they took to mass junk mailing people to try and find new hires because they fired all the eligible ones.
serious late stage capitalism stuff right here and goes against the advice of successful business leaders that you have to instill trust and confidence in your team to get them to perform.
Whoever made that AI should read Ricardo Semler and Paul Orfalea and stop drinking the tech bro get rich kool-aid and build a business that makes the world better, not worse.
'Hey Number 17 ' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023 - Feb 2025 (122 comments)
Also recent and related:
Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850 - Feb 2025 (160 comments)