I learned Django 15 years after its inception. After 5 years of experience I'm probably not too far behind someone doing the exact same work as me but for 15 years.
Or would you say people shouldn't learn Django now? As it's useless as they're already far behind? They shouldn't study computer science, as it will be too late?
Every profession have new people continuously entering the workforce, that quickly get up to speed on whatever is in vogue.
Honestly, what you've spent years learning and experimenting with, someone else will be able to learn in months. People will figure out the best ways of using these tools after lots of attempts, and that distilled knowledge will be transferred quickly to others. This is surely painful to hear for those having spent years in the trenches, and is perhaps why you refuse to acknowledge it, but I think it's true.
I would not say that about a framework like Django - though I would encourage people not to under-invest in understanding web fundamentals since once you have those Django, Rails, Next.js etc are all quick to pick up.
I would say that about LLMs.
That's why I'm ringing the alarm bells here. LLM skills are not the same as framework or library usage skills. They aren't clearly documented or predictable - they're really weird!
If you assume learning to use coding agents is the same category of challenge as learning to use something like Django you'll get burned by that assumption.
But what makes it impossible to catch up? Does it matter if I wait a year and then start? It's not a linear thing, at some point I will catch up with those that started before me, as the logarithmic curve of learning flattens out. And then, why does it matter that I started a year later?
Except the fact that the idioms and patterns used means that I can jump in and understand any part of the codebase, as I know it will be wired up and work the same as any other part.
I think here “to the user” is referring to the end user, not the programmer (the user of the coding style). There is a comprehension benefit for the team working on the code, but there is no direct¹ benefit to the end user.
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[1] The indirect benefits of there possibly being a faster release cadence and/or fewer bugs, could also be for many other reasons.
But you could say the same about tests, documentation, CI, issue trackers or really any piece of technology used. So it's not a very interesting statement if so.
* are all the patients really sick or as sick as the symptoms he documents, or is it some kind of Munchausen induced or lied about by the doctor?
* Or are they all sick, they're just not getting the help they need because he wants to have a mystery disease?
* If they're all sick, is it then a higher prevalence than expected, so even if there is no mystery disease there is still something environmental or similar that should've been explored? Aka, is there a cluster, it's just a known disease?
The prevalence question isn't really answered in the article. If it is 500 cases in an area in which 1m people live then it might not really be a cluster. But if it is 500 cases out of a town of 40000 then it is quite something different.
I remember a game I played on my phone ~15 years ago called "Greedy Spiders". The spiders would move greedily towards something every move, but you could cut strings in their web so they would have to start a new route. So you would kinda have to lure them into going one direction while slowly chipping away at the web, until you could completely cut them off or force them to have to take a longer detour giving you more time to cut more of the web. Quite challenging after a while.
Yes but it would be nice to see the targets, so you know how far off from an optimal solution you are. I know I'd spend more time looking for better solves if I knew the current one can be improved
I'm not much on X anymore due to the vitriol, and visiting now kinda proved it. Beneath almost every trending post made by a female is someone using grok to sexualize a picture of them.
(And whatever my timeline has become now is why I don't visit more often, wtf, used to only be cycling related)
I left when they started putting verified (paid) comments at the top of every conversation. Having the worst nazi views front and center on every comment isn't really a great experience.
I've got to imagine that Musk fired literally all of the product people. Pay-for-attention was just such an obviously bad idea, with a very long history of destroying social websites.
Even on that theory, _not long term_, because for that sort of thing to work you still have to draw victims in, and breaking it as a social website will tend to discourage that.
Twitter also doesn't need users to fulfil Musk's goal of destroying a key factor in many (all?) people-powered movements. Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, BLM.
And I'm sure that's a factor in why people like Larry Ellison and Saudi princes stumped up some of the money.
The problem is that the media still uses X in it's reporting, and people still use and link to it. If we just stopped using X and stripped it of any legitimacy, it would fall off pretty quickly.
To be fair, as someone who used to manage an X account for a very small startup as part of my role (glad that's no longer the case), for a long time (probably still the case) posting direct links would penalize your reach. So making a helpful, self-contained post your followers might find useful was algorithmically discouraged.
Everything that is awful in the diff between X and Twitter is there entirely by decision and design.
Vagueposting is a different beast. There’s almost never any intention of informing etc; it’s just: QT a trending semi-controversial topic, tack on something like “imagine not knowing the real reason behind this”, and the replies are jammed full of competitive theories as to what the OP was implying.
It’s fundamentally just another way of boosting account engagement metrics by encouraging repliers to signal that they are smart and clued-in. But it seems to work exceptionally well because it’s inescapable at the moment.
Vague posting is as old as social networks. I had loads of fun back in the day responding to all the "you know who you are" posts on facebook, when it's clearly not aimed at me.
They also don’t take down overt Nazi content anymore. Accounts with all the standard unambiguous Nazi symbologies and hate content about their typical targets with associated slurs. With imagery of Hitler and praises of his policies. And calls for exterminating their perceived enemies and dehumanizing them as subhuman vermin. I’ve tried reporting many accounts and posts. It’s all protected now and boosted via payment.
Inviting a debate about what it was or wasn't only leads to a complete distractions over interpretation of a gesture when the dude already digs his own hole more deeply and more clearly in his feed anyways.
My comment was in response to the debate already starting so it's quite bold to claim no debate will be had (i.e. "debate" does not mean "something I personally am on the fence about", it's something other people will hold in response to your views). Whether there will or won't be debate about something is (thankfully) not something you or I get to declare. It just happens or doesn't, and it had already - and so it remains.
I'm sure "The only people who say it's not are <x>" is an abominable thought pattern Nazis and similar types would love everyone to have. It makes for a great excuse to never weigh things on their merits, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to invoke it when the merits are already in your court. I can't look at these numbers https://i.imgur.com/hwm2bI5.png and conclude most Americans are Nazi's instead of being willing to accept perhaps not everyone sees it the same way I do even if they don't like Nazis either.
To any actual Nazi supporters out there: To hell with you
To anybody who thinks either everyone agrees with what they see 100% of the time or they are a literal Nazi: To hell with you as well
The majority of people who had an opinion (32%) said it was either a Roman salute or a Nazi salute (which are the same thing). Lots of people had no idea (probably cuz they didn't pay attention). Only 19% said it was a "gesture from the heart", which is just parroting what Elon claimed, and I discount those folks as they are almost certainly crypto-Nazis.
So yeah, I believe there are a LOT of Nazi-adjacent folks in this country: they're the ones who voted for Trump 3 times even after they knew he was a fascist piece of garbage.
A few minor cleanups - I personally don't think they change anything (really, it's these stats themselves that lack the ability to do that anyways) but want to note because this is the exact kind of Pandora's box opened with focusing on this specific incident:
- Even assuming all who weren't sure (13%) should just be discounted as not having an opinion, like those who had not heard about it (22%), 32% is still not a majority of the remaining (100%-13%-22%) = 65%. 32% could have been a plurality of those with an opinion, but since you insisted on lumping things into 3 buckets of 32%, 35%, and remaining %, the remaining % of 33% would actually get the plurality of those who responded with opinions by this definition.
N.b. If just read straight from the sheet, "A Nazi salute" would have already had a plurality. Though grouping like this is probably the more correct thing to do, it actually ends up significantly weakening the overall position of "more people agree than not" rather than strengthening it.
- But, thankfully, "A Nazi Salute" + "A Roman Salute" would actually have been 32+2=34%, so plurality is at least restored by more than one whole percentage point (if you excluded the unsure or unknowing)!
- However, a "Roman salute" (which is a bit of a farce of a name really) can't really be assumed to be fungible with the first option in this poll. If it were fully fungible, it could have been combined into that option. I.e. there's no way to tell which adults responding "A Roman salute" meant to be counted as "a general fascist salute, as the Nazis later adopted" or meant to be counted as "a non-fascist meaning of the salute, like the Bellamy salute was before WWII". So whichever wins this game of eeking out percentage points comes down to how each person wants to group these 2 percentage points. Shucks!
- In reality, between error margins and bogus responses, this is about as close as one could expect to get for an equal 3 way split between "it was", "it wasn't", and "dunno/don't care", and pulling ahead a percentage point or two is really quite irrelevant beyond that it is, blatantly, not actually a majority that agree it was a Nazi-style salute.
Even though I'm one who agrees with you Elon exhibits neo-nazi tendencies, the above just shows how we go from "Elon replies directly supporting someone in a thread about Hitler being right about the Jewish community" and similar things constantly for years to debating individual percentage points to try to claim our favorite sub-majority says he likely made a one off hand gesture 3 years ago. Now imagine I was actually a Nazi supporter walking into the thread - suddenly we've gone from talking about direct pro-Nazi statements and retweets constantly in his feed to a chance for me to debate with you whether the majority think he made a one off hand gesture 3 years ago? Anyone concerned with Musk's behavior should want to avoid this topic with a 20 foot pole so they can get straight to the real stuff.
Also... I've run across a fair share of crypto lovers who turn out to be neo-nazish, but I'm not sure how you're piecing together that such a large portion of the population is a "crypto-Nazi" when something like only 28% of the population has crypto at all, let alone is a Nazi too. At least we're past "anyone who disagrees with my interpretations can only be doing so as a Nazi" though.
Ah, you're almost certainly correct here! Akin to crypto-fascist, perhaps I'd seen too many articles talking about the negatives of crypto to see the obvious there.
None of these kind of examples hold up under scrutiny when observed in video. There's a reason they're all shared as still photos or tiny blips of video which never shows the full motion salute that's being claimed.
I imagine I'm not the only one using HN less because both articles like this and comments like this are clearly being downvoted and/or flagged by a subset of users motivated by politics and the HN admin team seemingly doesn't consider that much of a problem. This story is incredibly relevant to a tech audience and this comment is objectively true and yet both are met with downvotes/flags.
Whether HN wants to endorse a political ideology or not, their approach to handling these issues is a material support of the ideologies these stories and comments are criticizing.
Yeah this was my first reaction this article is about tech regulation that is relavent and on topic. If Grok causes extra legislation to be passed because its lack of comment dececeny in the pursuit of money that is relavent. This is the entire argument around we can't have accountability for tools just people which is ridicuously. The result of pretending that this type of thing doesn't happen is legislative responses.
PG and Garry Tan have both been disturbingly effusive in praising Musk and his various fuckeries.
Like, the entirety of DOGE was such an obviously terrible series of events, but for whatever reason, the above were both big cheerleaders on Twitter.
And yeah the moderation team here have been clearly letting everything Musk-related be flagged even after pushback. It's absolutely vile. I've seen many people try to make posts about the false flagging issue here, only to have those posts flagged as well (unapologetically, on purpose, by the mods themselves).
There is 'might makes right' and then there is 'money makes right'. At some point it isn't just who you are but also the company you keep and Musk is about as radio-active as it gets in that sense.
Anecdotally I think that moderation has been a lot more lenient when it comes to political content in the last year than in years prior. I have no hard evidence that this is actually the case, but I think especially pre-2020 I'd see very little political content on HN and now I see much more. It's also probably true that both liberals and conservatives have become even more polarized, leading to bad-faith flagging and downvoting, but I'm actually not sure what could be done about that, seems similar to anti-botting protections which is an arms race
I'm late to this, but I'm doubtful that that perception is correct. It's true there are fluctuations, as with anything on HN, but the baseline is pretty stable. But the perception that HN has gotten-more-political-lately is about as old as the site itself. In fact, it's so common that about 8 years ago I took a couple hours to track down the history of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
Any thoughts about the issues raised up thread? This article being flagged looks to me to be a clear indication of abuse of the HN flagging system. Or do you think there are justifiable reasons why this article shouldn't be linked on HN?
My thoughts are just the usual ones about this: flags of stories like this on HN are a kind of coalition between some flaggers who are agenda-motivated (which is an abuse of flagging) and other flaggers who simply don't want to see repetitive and/or flamebaity material on the site (which is a correct use of flagging, and is not agenda driven because this sort of material comes at us from all angles). When we see flaggers who are consistently doing the first kind of flagging, we take away their flagging privileges.
I don't know, I just searched "Grok" on HN and the 3 most popular stories of the last week have all been flagged killed while having 75+ points and 30+ comments. I can't imagine there are many single world searches that would return that result.
I understand why you gave the general answer you gave rather than addressing this specific example, but I'll just say this story would be a good place to look for those potential "agenda-motivated" flaggers.
The wild thing is that this article isn't even a political issue!
"Major Silicon Valley Company's Product Creates and Publishes Child Porn" has nothing to do with politics. It's not "political content." It is relevant tech news when someone investigates and points out wrongdoing that tech companies are up to. If another tech company's product was doing this, it would be all over HN and there would be pretty much no flagging.
When these stories get flagged, it's because people don't want bad news to get out about the company--it's not about avoiding politics out of principle.
I've been using https://news.ycombinator.com/active a lot more the last year, because so many important discussions (related to tech, but including politics or prominent figures like Musk) gets pushed out from the front page quickly. I don't think it's moderators doing it, but mass-flagging by users, (or perhaps some automagic if the discussion is too intense like num comments or downvotes). Of course, it might be the will of the community to flag these, but it does feel a bit abused in the way certain topics gets killed quickly.
I just found out about this recently and like this page a lot. Dang has a hard job to balance this. I think newcomers might be more comfortable with the frontpage and if you end up learning about the other pages you can find more controversial discussions. Can't be mad about the moderation hiding these by default. Although I think CSAM-Bad should not be controversial.
Even a year ago, when Trump was posting claims that he was a king, etc. these things got removed, even though there were obvious implications on the tech industry. (Cybersecurity alone makes more political assumptions than it does on the hardness of the discrete logarithm, for example.)
I (and others) were arguing that the Trump administration is probably, and unfortunately, the most relevant topic to the tech industry on most any given day. This is because computer is mostly made out of people. The message that these political stories intersect deeply with technology (as is seen here) seems to have successfully gotten through.
I wish the most relevant tech story of every day were, say, some cool new operating system, or something cool and curiosity-inspiring like "you can sort in linear time" or "python is an operating system" or "i made X rewritten in Y" or whatever.
I think in most things, creation is much harder than destruction, but software and software systems are an exception where one individual can generally do more creation than destruction. So, it's particularly interesting (and jarring) when a few individuals are able to make decisions that cause widespread destruction.
We should collectively be proud that we have a culture where creation is easier than destruction. But it's also why the top stories of any given day will be "Trump did X" or "us-east-1 / cloudflare / crowdstrike is down" or "software widely used in {phones / servers} has a big scary backdoor".
I think HN should just add another tab: Politics. That way the need for flagging goes down and everybody gets what they want. The main reason why you would want to keep politics off HN is because it turns would be friends, collaborators and people that respect each other into opposing factions (just like religion does). But in the end IRL that would come out anyway so better to have it up front. So I don't think it makes a difference in the long run.
This story belongs on this site regardless of politics. It is specifically about both AI and social media. Downvoting/flagging this story is much more politically motivated than posting/upvoting it.
I agree with that. But one, it is on the site, and two, how can the moderation team reasonably stop bad actors from downvoting it? They can (and probably do) unflag things that have merit or put it in the 2nd chance queue.
> But one, it is on the site, and two, how can the moderation team reasonably stop bad actors from downvoting it?
In 2020, Dang said [1]
> Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years: [...]
> I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this, as well as tracking down voting rings of every imaginable sort. I'd never claim that our software catches everything, but I can tell you that it catches so much that I often go through the lists to find examples of good projects that people were trying ineptly to promote, and invite them to do it again in a way that is more likely to gain community interest.
Of course this sort of thing is inherently heuristic; presumably bots throw up a smokescreen of benign activity, and sophisticated bots could present a very realistic, human-like smokescreen.
> how can the moderation team reasonably stop bad actors from downvoting it
There are all sorts of approaches that a moderation team could take if they actually believed this was a problem. For example, identify the users who regularly downvote/flag stories like this that end up being cleared by the moderation team for unflagging or the 2nd chance queue and devalue their downvotes/flags in the future.
Accounts are free to make, so bad actors will just create and "season/age" accounts until they have the ability to flag, then rinse and repeat.
I think the biggest thing HN could do to stop this problem is to not make flagging affect an article's ranking until after a human mod reviews the flags and determines them to be appropriate. Right now, all bad actors apparently have to do is be quick on the draw, and get their flagging ring in action ASAP. I'm sure any company's PR team (or motivated Elon worshiper) can buy "100 HN flags on an article" on the dark web right now if they wanted to.
Why would a company like any one of Musk's need to buy these flags? Why wouldn't they just push a button and have their own bots get to work? Plausible deniability?
Who knows whether or not both happen? Ultimately, only the HN admins, and they don't disclose data, so we can only speculate and look for publicly visible patterns.
You can judge their trustworthiness by evaluating their employer's president/CEO, who dictates behavioral requirements regardless of the personal character of each employee
That already happens. I got my flagging powers removed after over-using flag in the past. (I eventually wrote an email to the mods pledging to behave more judiciously and asked for the power back). As a user you won't see any change in the UI when this happens; the flags just stop having any effect on the back end.
There is one subtle clue. If your account has flagging enabled, then whenever you flag something there is a chance that your flag pushes it over the threshold to flagged state. If your account has flagging disabled, this never happens. This is what hinted me to ask dang if I'd been shadowbanned from flagging.
I would be money that already happens, for flagging in particular, since it's right in the line of the moderation queue. For downvotes, it sounds like significant infra would be needed for a product that generates no revenue. Agree that I would like the problem to be solved as well however!
I think there's brigading coming in to ruin these threads. I had several positive votes for a few minutes when stating a simple fact about Elon Musk and his support of neo-nazi political parties then -2 a min later
I have downvoted anything remotely political on hn ever since I got my downvote button, even (especially) if I agree with it. I always appreciated that being anti-political was the general vibe here.
The part where you brought up politics is when I noticed it was political.
But I generally consider something political if it involves politicians, or anyone being upset about anything someone else is doing, or any topic that they could mention on normal news. I prefer hn to be full of positive things that normal people don't understand or care about.
What's political here? The mere fact of the involvement of Dear Leader?
(As a long-term Musk-sceptic, I can confirm that Musk-critical content tended to get insta-flagged even years before he was explicitly involved in politics.)
There's almost no such thing as a non-political thing. Maybe the sky colour, except that other cultures (especially in the past) have different green/blue boundaries and some may say it's green. Maybe the natural numbers (but whether they start from 0 or 1 is political) or the primes (but whether 1 is prime is political).
I mean, honestly, you are wasting your time. Why would you expect the website run by the guy who likes giving Nazi salutes on TV to take down Nazi content?
There's no point trying to engage with Twitter in good faith at this point; only real option is to stop using and move on (or hang out in the Nazi bar, I guess).
They meant howlingmutant0 but I don't know which posts they refer to
The ones I reported, I deleted the report emails so I can't help you at this moment. I don't know why you're surprised - you can go looking yourself and find examples
Yeah I went thru his media. There was some backwards swastika that someone drawn on a synagogue. People were mocking the fact that idiots can't even draw that correctly.
1. Can you point to exact posts? I saw one swastika somewhere deep in media. It's a description of what swastika is - no different from wikipedia article.
I normally stay away too, but just decided to scroll through grok’s replies to see how wide spread it really is. It looks like it is a pretty big problem, and not just for women. Though, I must say that Xi Jinping in a bikini made me laugh.
I’m not sure if this is much worse than the textual hate and harassment being thrown around willy nilly over there. That negativity is really why I never got into it, even when it was twitter I thought it was gross.
Before Elon bought it out it was mostly possible to contain the hate with a carefully curated feed. Afterward the first reply on any post is some blue check Nazi and/or bot. Elon amplifying the racism by reposting white supremacist content, no matter how fabricated/false/misleading, is quite a signal to send to the rest of the userbase.
he's rigged the algorithm to boost content he interacts with, unbanned and stopped moderating nazi content and then boosted those accounts by interacting with them.
X wrote in offering to pay something for my OG username, because fElon wanted it for one of his Grok characters. I told them to make an offer, only for them to invoke their Terms of Service and steal it instead.
Hmm, I have an old Twitter account. Elon promised that he was going to make it the best site ever, lets see what the algorithm feeds me today, January 5 2026.
1. Denmark taxes its rich people and has a high standard of living.
2. Scammy looking ad for investments in a blood screening company.
3. Guy clearing ice from a drainpipe, old video but fun to watch.
4. Oil is not actually a fossil fuel, it is "a gift from the Earth"
5. Elon himself reposting a racist fabrication about black people in Minnesota.
6. Climate change is a liberal lie to destroy western civilization. CO2 is plant food, liberals are trying to starve the world by killing off the plants.
7. Something about an old lighthouse surviving for a long time.
8. Vaccine conspiracy theories
9. Outright racism against Africans, claiming they are too dumb to sustain civilized society without white men running it.
10. One of those bullshit AI videos where the AI doesn't understand how pouring resin works.
11. Microsoft released an AI that is going to change everything, for real this time, we promise.
12. Climate change denialism
13. A post claiming that the Africa and South America aren't poor because they were robbed of resources during the colonial era and beyond, but because they are too dumb to run their countries.
14. A guy showing how you can pack fragile items using expanding foam and plastic bags. He makes it look effortless, but glosses over how he measures out the amount of foam to use.
15. Hornypost asking Grok to undress a young Asian lady standing in front of a tree.
16. Post claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine caused a massive spike (5 million to 150 million) cases of myocarditis.
17. A sad post from a guy depressed that a survey of college girls said that a large majority of them find MAGA support to be a turn off.
18. Some film clip with Morgan Freeman standing on a X and getting sniped from an improbable distance
19. AI bullshit clip about people walking into bottomless pits
20. A video clip of a woman being confused as to why financial aid forms now require you to list your ethnicity when you click on "white", with the only suboptions being German, Irish, English, Italian, Polish, and French.
Special bonus post: Peter St Ogne, Ph. D claims "The Tenth Amendment says the federal government can only do things expressly listed in the Constitution -- every other federal activity is illegal." Are you wondering what federal activity he is angry about? Financial support for daycare.
So yeah, while it wasn't a total and complete loss it is obvious that the noise far exceeds the signal. It is maybe a bit of a shock just how much blatant climate change denialism, racism, and vaccine conspiracies are front page material. I'm saddened that there are people who are reading this every day and taking it to heart. The level of outright racism is quite shocking too. It's not even up for debate that black people are just plain inferior to the glorious aryan race on Twitter. This is supposedly the #1 news source on the Internet? Ouch.
Edit: Got the year wrong at the top of the post, fixed.
Makes me laugh when people say Twitter is "better than ever." Not sure they understand how revealing that statement is about them, and how the internet always remembers.
They don't outnumber anyone. There's always a minority of hardcore supporters for any side... plus enough undecided people in the middle who mostly vote their pocketbook.
What to do about it is to point out to those people in the middle how badly things are being fucked up, preferably with how those mistakes link back to their pocketbook.
The best use of generative AI is as an excuse for everyone to stop posting pictures of themselves (or of their children, or of anyone else) online. If you don't overshare (and don't get overshared), you can't get Grok'd.
There's a difference between merely existing in public, versus vying for attention in a venue where several brands of "aim this at a patron to see them in a bikini" machines are installed.
And so installing the "aim this at a patron to see them in a bikini" machines made the community vastly more hostile to women. To the point where people say "well what did you expect" when a woman uses the product. Maybe they shouldn't have been installed?
I'd rather have a single repo with a curated format and thought behind it (not sure if this is, just assuming), than the normal awesome-* lists that are just linking to every single page on a subject with loads of overlap so I don't even know which one to look at for a given problem.
This type of things are time sink holes, as surprisingly it takes a lot of time to figure everything. I was hoping to dedicate a decent amount of time to review and structuring but sadly life got in the way. If you have a suggestion how to structure it better I am all ears.
My point was that I like your approach better than the huge lists where no one has really vetted whatever is put on them. Of course, a curated list has the drawback of someone having to curate it :)
Or would you say people shouldn't learn Django now? As it's useless as they're already far behind? They shouldn't study computer science, as it will be too late?
Every profession have new people continuously entering the workforce, that quickly get up to speed on whatever is in vogue.
Honestly, what you've spent years learning and experimenting with, someone else will be able to learn in months. People will figure out the best ways of using these tools after lots of attempts, and that distilled knowledge will be transferred quickly to others. This is surely painful to hear for those having spent years in the trenches, and is perhaps why you refuse to acknowledge it, but I think it's true.
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