Well Mastodon would make the most sense. They can run their own server with their own moderation policies while still federating with the broader network. The EU has actually already done this—the European Commission runs its own Mastodon instance.
That's really the key point: with Mastodon, you control your own space. So in theory you can create your own little bubble with your own rules.
Which is basically what Truth Social did, since it is also built on Mastodon, but they stripped out all the federation code—so it's just a walled garden that happens to use Mastodon's codebase. Maybe for the best.
I do not understand where this Ralph hype is coming from.
Back when Claude 4.0 came out and it began to become actually useful, I already tried something like this. Every time it was a complete and utter failure.
And this dream of "having Claude implement an entire project from start to finish without intervention" came crashing down with this realization: Coding assistants 100% need human guidance.
That seems to be a nonsensical generalization. A lot of symbols have the negative condition applied with an X. So if you applied it to "generic dry" it would mean do not dry. But it's reasonable when applied to a subset. For instance, do not tumble dry
You would think that, but there is an icon for not using a dryer. There is an icon for all forms of drying. On a clothes line, in the shade, "flat", ...
I agree, I started doing something like that a while ago.
I've had great success using Claude Opus 4.5, as long as I hold its hand very tightly.
Constantly updating the CLAUDE.md file, adding an FAQ to my prompts, making sure it remembers what it tried before and what the outcome was. It became a lot more productive after I started doing this.
Using the "main" agent as an orchestrator, and making it do any useful work or research in subagents, has also really helped to make useful sessions last much longer, because as soon as that context fills up you have to start over.
Compaction is fucking useless. It tries to condense +/- 160.000 tokens into a few thousand tokens, and for anything a bit complex this won't work. So my "compaction" is very manual: I keep track of most of the things it has said during the session and what resulted from that. So it reads a lot more like a transcript of the session, without _any_ of the actual tool call results. And this has worked surprisingly well.
In the past I've tried various ways of automating this process, but it's never really turned out great. And none of the LLMs are good at writing _truly_ useful notes.
> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off
I have the "all-you-can-eat" plan _because_ I know what I'm getting and how much it'll cost me.
I don't see anything wrong with this. It's just a big time-limited amount of tokens you can use. Of course it sucks that it's limited to Claude-Code and Claude.ai. But the other providers have very similar subscriptions. Even the original ChatGTP pro subscription gives you a lot more tokens for the $20 it costs compared to the API cost.
I always assumed tokens over the API cost that much, because that's just what people are willing to pay. And what people are willing to pay for small pay-as-you-go tasks vs large-scale agentic coding just doesn't line up.
And then there's the psychological factor: if Claude messed up and wasted a bunch of tokens, I'm going to be super pissed that those specific tokens will have cost me $30. But when it's just a little blip on my usage limit, I don't really mind.
Ah, another thread filled with people sharing anecdotes about how they asked Claude to one-shot an entire project that would take people weeks if not months.
What! You can still use rif like that? That's interesting. I completely stopped browsing Reddit on my phone after it went away (though maybe that's for the best...)
I'm not the person you replied to, but yes, I've been using RiF since the API changes ...with a small 4-month l break last year when I was automatically flagged as bot API traffic and instantly permabanned with no warning. Reddit's built-in appeals went unanswered and ignored. Luckily I live in the EU, I appealed under DSA and they unbanned me after actual human review right before the 1-month deadline.
Could have I created a new account instead? Maybe. Did I want to check if DSA actually works in practice and can get me back my u/Tenemo nickname that I use everywhere, not just on Reddit? I sure did! Turns out Reddit cannot legally ban me from their platform without a valid reason, no matter what is in the ToS. Pretty cool!
Back to using RiF with a fresh API key after that and haven't had any issues since.
Oh, that's actually even cooler. I had no idea that was a thing we could do under the DSA. Where would one go in case their rights were being violated?
(Because it's all nice on paper, but if nobody actually enforces it ...)
>most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic.
This is addressed in OPs post. The vast majority of the 'negativity' I encounter on HN is technical critique rather than criticism or toxicity. I've found HN to arguably be one of the least toxic communities.
There's a reason those kinds of posts are considered off-topic here. Polarized subjects quickly get ugly and toxic, people tend to turn off their brains and just react rather than trying to understand the other perspective. It's a shame, I enjoy discussing those topics, especially with people I disagree with. But it's almost impossible on the internet.
Not so off topic. About 2 weeks ago, I commented in such an article saying I humbly don’t think is an appropriate topic for HN, and I was downvoted to hell in a hurry…
most of your comments start by objecting to the person you reply to - that sets most people on edge and they are likely punishing you for your tone as much as the content
We could have positive discourse on polarized subjects, but the forum doesn't want that. We are artificially limited here in many ways. If the forum were changed, it could be a lot easier to direct conversations in a constructive way. But it's currently designed for mass-appeal and engagement.
First of all, there are famously no real sub-sections of HN, it's just this one "home page" with 30 "stories" that are voted on by 5 million people (unique monthly viewers), and a couple other ways to sort or view the same stories based on some algorithm. So it's nearly impossible to have discussions here unless it falls into a very broad category. Therefore the discussions are broad, the opinions are broad, the reactions are broad. You have a lot of people talking past each other, arguing over nothing, reinforcing false beliefs, etc.
Second, like Reddit and its other "story-specific discussion" brethren, there is no ongoing conversation, like older forums, so all discourse has to be topical, temporary, and based around a specific piece of media and set of positions. People get trapped in debates over false premises, presented bad information, and can't reference other discussions or pick up where one left off. There is no memory or continuous conversation, so every new story is nearly random in what will be discussed, what opinions will become dominant, what group rides in to take over the thread.
Third, the site is filled with algorithms to filter, optimize, weight, and otherwise alter what content shows up on the front page. It is a highly curated, highly artificial environment, serving the purposes of YC to gather users with which to funnel potential founders into its startup machine. This is a business and we are the product, and we are being honed and shaped according to a very particular set of interests, priorities, goals. A sort of 'ideal world' according to a very small number of people.
Fourth, there's as many moderators for all of HN as there is for the average Subreddit, yet 10x as many users here. It would be trivial to simply acquire more volunteer moderators. But I believe they want to keep tight control on moderation in order to ensure they shape narratives, behaviors and culture in a specific way.
Fifth, the technology of the user interface hasn't advanced past what was available in the 90's. Besides the lack of topics/categories, tags, customization of the feed, and no way to provide feedback other than up/down vote. This is intentional in order to force the culture YC wants. But it makes it difficult to have more nuanced discussions. For example, the "up/down" vote button could easily expand to more specific reactions, ala Slashdot's moderation modifiers (Troll, Flamebait, Offtopic, Redundant, Overrated, Underrated, Funny, Informative, Interesting, Insightful, Normal). Going further, votes could have emotional modifiers (Angry, Scared, Confused, Excited) and intellectual modifiers (Incorrect, Misleading, Stupid, Correct, Factual, Agreed). The addition of this intellectual and emotional context would allow users to provide more feedback to the comments they're voting on, which helps guide users in their discourse as well as shape the culture towards more intelligent discourse. But without these signals, there is no way to divine what an upvote or downvote means, so it becomes an incredibly poor signal. The only way to know if a story is a shit-show or not is to compare total upvotes to total comments, as a majority of comments indicates a lot of emotional, uneducated people trying to force their opinion on everyone else.
This could be improved if those people could provide more context to their feedback, or the discussion continued past the initial story in a more nuanced way. But there is no way to solve this as every single story is another battle that everyone feels like they have to fight over again, because ground is never won, nuance never captured, education impossible. This forum is designed to force people to come back to reassert whatever they already believe, or argue to perpetuate it, which keeps engagement high.
I find the most emotionally negative content on HN is about public education. There are so many people who were personally affected by poor schooling in their youth and cannot resist to add their (usually unhelpful and uninsightful) two cents to the discussion. So many of these negative comments are paint with a very broad brush, like: "Public schools are terrible in state X." It is so general as to be useless.
Years ago, when I was young, I noticed a trend watching local TV news: Whenever they would interview people on the street, past a certain age, their comments become so much more negative. Example: "So, how is traffic in your part of town? Oh, it's never been worse." "How are the public schools? Oh, it's never been worse." Ad nauseam. Whenever I feel any conversation in my life is drifting into "Oh, it's never been worse.", I tune out.
I simply choose to believe that people do this out of a place of genuine curiosity / excitement to share knowledge. I believe this approach of assuming the best of intentions is even in the HN guidelines! Or maybe it was just the old Reddit ones from long long ago when Reddit was more like what HN is now. Either way, maintaining the background assumption, even when it is challenging to do so, makes HN a far more pleasant place to inhabit.
I do run into the overly pedantic stuff pretty frequently, people will often latch on to some minor point or detail, maybe because it's easier to comment on?
Deep technical critique often can't be in the comments, in my opinion. Unless you're an expert, setting up the environment, doing the experiments and presenting the data is an entire article on it's own. It would probably be healthier if people did that, rather than typing out a quick comment.
Then there are topics like how AI will influence society in general, that's a multi-year sociology study, before being able to say anything with just a hint of accuracy. Warnings based on sentiment and anecdotes will always register as negative.
There are some articles that have 200+ comments, in those cases whatever you have to say has probably already been posted, but people like to vent their frustrations, sometimes it helps to type out your thoughts, even if no one will read them.
The classifiers I used are definitely conflating technical criticism with genuine negativity, and that's a real limitation. When I say "technical critique reads differently than personal attacks," I probably should have been clearer that the models aren't making that distinction well.
Compared to how bad online discourse has gotten pretty much anywhere else in the meantime, it's still really good here.
Only place I can stomach for extended periods
This is SUCH a good example of pedantry and will become my new primary example. All too often, people think of pedantry as being along the magnitude of scale. The "rational" pedant's response to this is to use quantitative jargon and bayes to scale up the size of the nitpick.
So you're arguing that technically the technical critique is not valuable by yourself arguing on technicalities of the technical critique. Oh the irony! But you're not wrong. ;)
Exactly; but rarely is this done for curiosity or accuracy; but instead for veiling toxicity.
This place drowns in veiled toxicity.
“Grass is green”
“But I live in California and we have a drought, and the entire concept of green grass is a waste of valuable water resources, and was frankly always a sign of privilege because only someone with excess freshwater can do it, and we need that freshwater for starving kids in Africa, and if Boomers hadn’t been so obsessed with single family housing and urban sprawl…”
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.
From the new yorker's profile of dang a few years ago. It doesn't specifically address the negativity but it contains it, if you get what I mean.
Also I mean you know you, personally, are one of the worst about this right? I only recognize a handful of usernames here and yours is one for exactly this reason.
Do you consider yourself an ideologue, an honest propagandist? I do for myself, I don't profess any particular devotion to these ideals of rhetoric or debate. I just consider them tools to accomplish goals, that may be laid aside at will or need. I think frankly most people here also do they just don't admit it.
It bugs me but also it comes with the territory - HN attracts an awful lot of programmers, and most programmers skew hard to pedantry (more specifically, noticing and correcting minute details). I'd love the exact same community minus the pedantry, but if losing the pedantry costs the programmers, but am not sure how possible that is (without more sophisticated moderation).
It‘s worthwhile to mention „clones“ because Mastodon/Fediverse and bsky turned into the same negativity sinkholes just with a different group. Builders and creators quickly became the minority, as it happend on Twitter within 3-4 years after launch.
I am active on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr but not X. On all of those platforms I am selective about who I follow (e.g. said anything about Trump in the last 20 posts I won't follow you, posted an image with angry text in it, I won't follow you) and quick with the block button. In the case of the first two I get a feed which is really cozy, the third has way too much AI slop (fake cat videos!) which would get the smackdown on the other too.
I really enjoy sharing photos on that kind of platform as well as the kind of links I post to HN. I did have an image that was a breakout hit the other day which got me a burst of follows and it was really depressing that 95%-ish of those new followers are people who are apoplectic about #uspol. There are just so many of those people and they post so much and they always say the same things and I find it emotionally contagious.
I am bothered less by the right wing equivalent of those people because I don't go on X, I live in one of the most liberal towns in America. They bother me less because I can easily dismiss the people who are bleating "free speech", "free speech", "freespeech" as NPC minions of Peter Thiel [1] whereas I agree with the followers of Heather Cox Richardson about the problem but think their solution is so wrong and actually destructive to their cause that they are effectively working for the Koch Organization for free and for me that stings.
1. Follow people who deliver. Deliver code, arts, thoughts, ideas, change.
2. Ignore the cultists of all sides, ignore the people who fall into every rage bait trap or just want to start a cult. Almost nobody is right or wrong all the time except people who outright hate all people and have no empathy.
3. Even when you follow a person, treat them with a big grain of salt. Everyone is an influencer, many have some underlying agenda or questionable views. Be reluctant to share, be reluctant of trusting in topics people are not known for. Your three letter guy sure knows A LOT about code, business and getting things done, however his view on politics may be dubious. You need to be able to accept that both at the same time.
Another problem I'm starting to see lately is accounts on Reddit posting vague positive comments to farm karma, make the accounts look real, run cover for other AI posts from the same account, etc. I'd love to see a world where we have more positive comments on articles but positivity on a post is starting to be a weak (but growing) spam indicator!
Reddit is more toxic than even Facebook to be honest. I've posted something just in discovery questions for something I'm building and immediate was banned from the group. First time on Reddit, first time in that group.
Has happened in two other same type situations. Find it super territorial and toxic TBH.
I believe Nat Friedman said "pessimists sound smart, optimists make money." It's certainly much easier to give a snarky/negative take and shoot an idea down than think creatively about how to make it work. Also, negative people are perceived as smarter!
It is important to filter ideas, but being reflexively negative like a large portion of HN is just isn't productive. To quote my manager from years ago back when I was still an IC - "I know there are problems - tell me solutions". The whole point of constructive criticism is to start a dialogue in good faith.
To be frank, a large portion of HNers just aren't qualified for that and never will be, and a growing proportion exhibit bot-like behavior. The fact that a bot account for "The Register" operated undetected on HN for 3 years and accumulated 66k karma until I and one other commenter decided to call it out highlights issues with this community.
I personally think stricter moderation of tone (maybe in an automated manner), a stricter delineation on the kinds of topics being posted to HN, and a complete overhaul of the now 17 year old HN guidelines is now in order.
HN used to be a platform where ICs and decisionmakers could anonymously have a water cooler conversation or a discussion but leave with changed impression. Over the past few years, it has exhibited hallmarks of becoming a more combative forum with users exhibiting Reddit-like behavior and oftentimes sharing articles from a handful of Reddit subs. Without a significant revamp, HN will lose it's signal-to-noise ratio which differentiated it.
Already, most YC founders prefer to use BookFace over HN and more experienced technical ICs are looking to lobsters.
You disparage the negativity as "reflexive", but isn't whether the negativity is warranted more important than the pace at which it is delivered, or some oblique critique of its motivation? This looks like an attempt to smear the negativity. Your critique as HNers as not being qualified also looks like an ad hominem argument.
Pace could be driven by the rapidity with which posts fall off the front page or with which comments expand so new comments are far down the list.
I'd turn that around and say the observation that negative comments are upvoted shows that HN readers value them.
I'll admit we could use more steelmanning when critiquing.
No doubt he was making this claim in a business context, but I wish it wasn't framed in financial terms. Our culture is already too obsessed with money, falsely framing it as the measure of the good life and of human worth. What an impoverished, boring, and frankly nihilistic and horrifying worldview.
That being said, pessimism/optimism is a false dichotomy. The reason is that both are willful attitudes of expectation on an emotional spectrum rather than rationally grounded and sober assessments of reality. The wise path is prudent (I don't mean "cautious"; I mean the classic virtue [0]). Prudence is rational. You can't be better than rational (genuinely rational; believing you are rational is not the same as being rational).
As a counter point - every couple I ever ran across in divorce court getting raked over the coals seemed to have at least one delusional optimist in the mix.
Both to have gotten in there, and to keep going.
Like anything, it's a balancing act. Being optimistic the IRS isn't going to throw you in jail for not paying your taxes, after all, has a so-so track record. But not zero!
This is brutal. The examples just kept on coming. Halfway through the article I assumed it must have a bunch of comments under it, but nope. More brutal examples
That's really the key point: with Mastodon, you control your own space. So in theory you can create your own little bubble with your own rules.
Which is basically what Truth Social did, since it is also built on Mastodon, but they stripped out all the federation code—so it's just a walled garden that happens to use Mastodon's codebase. Maybe for the best.
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