FWIW I also just don't think there's a point to discussing AI/ML usage here. The community is too crabby and cynical, looking too hard at how to tear people and things down, trying to react with the most negative thing they can. Every discussion on AI here eventually devolves into "AI can turn water to gold!" "no you idiot, AI uses so much water we won't have enough water left oh and AI is what ICE and Palantir use"
As the (dubiously attributed) Picasso quote goes: "When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." Most of HN is the former, constantly theorizing, philosophizing, often (but not always) in a negative and cynical way. This isn't conducive to discussion of methods of art. Sadly I just speak with friends working on other AI things instead.
Someone like simonw can probably get better reactions from this community but I don't bother.
I think it's doable with a heavy dose of LLM moderation. If you do something like this, I'd be happy to help get things started. The quality of discussion here is just... bleh these days. I don't need AI positivity, just something that sounds more intellectual than people shouting "nuh uh" "uh huh" at each other.
Just use a stablecoin, don't float a "utility token" those things are stupid. Have a smart contract receive a USDC deposit. If the maintainer "times out" reviewing your PR, the contract returns all the deposit. If the maintainer does not accept your PR, the contract burns 0.5x of the deposit and returns the rest. Maintainers can decide to turn off the time-out for very popular projects where you probably would have devs trying to spam PRs for fame/recognition, but hopefully the deposit price can accurately reflect the amount of spam the project gets.
Utility tokens are fundamentally equities and you need to firewall equity from an organization the same way companies in most market economies are regulated.
Not sure which circles you run in but in mine HN has long lost its cache of "brilliant minds in IT". I've mostly stopped commenting here but am a bit of a message board addict so I haven't completely left.
My network largely thinks of HN as "a great link aggregator with a terrible comments section". Now obviously this is just my bubble but we include some fairy storied careers at both Big Tech and hip startups.
From my view the community here is just mean reverting to any other tech internet comments section.
> From my view the community here is just mean reverting to any other tech internet comments section.
As someone deeply familiar with tech internet comments sections, I would have to disagree with you here. Dang et al have done a pretty stellar job of preventing HN from devolving like most other forums do.
Sure you have your complainers and zealots, but I still find surprising insights here there I don't find anywhere else.
Mean reverting is a time based process I fear. I think dang, tomhow, et al are fantastic mods but they can ultimately only stem the inevitable. HN may be a few years behind the other open tech forums but it's a time shifted version of the same process with the same destination, just IMO.
I've stopped engaging much here because I need a higher ROI from my time. Endless squabbling, flamewars, and jokes just isn't enough signal for me. FWIW I've loved reading your comments over the years and think you've done a great job of living up to what I've loved in this community.
I don't think this is an HN problem at all. The dynamics of attention on open forums are what they are.
I've largely stopped commenting here because I feel the community is broken. There's definitely truth to what you say, that an educated audience can have a consensus. But one thing makes the HN community (and many Reddit communities) particularly bad: A lot of these threads have repetitive comments with insults or silly name calling get upvoted. Even if consensus is around the earth being round, there's no need to pettily insult flat earthers. We just ignore them and move on leaving their content to languish at the bottom. On the other hand these threads bring a lot of childish insults that get upvoted just because they hit the right buttons.
This to me is one (of many) sign that the community here cannot healthily discuss these topics. IMO the community here isn't healthy at all. That's why I don't post here much anymore. It's a sign to me that too many discussions in this community are about seeking emotional catharsis. And I'm sorry but for my own mental health, I'm not going to listen to someone else's panic attack resulting from political uncertainty.
I feel for dang and tomhow. It seems that most of their work is doing emotional labor. And emotional labor can grind a person down quickly.
Some topics can't be ignored. Vaccine effectiveness, for example, require a consensus from a large fraction of the population. That larger societal consensus begins with discussion in smaller subsets, of which HN is one.
I don't think it would be that difficult to reconcile suicides between G20 countries. Outside of that, sure, data collection methods and quality heavily differ. But many people are interested in the varying levels of happiness among the G20 and there it doesn't seem that difficult to compare.
> Google Gemini was never in the mix, never on the table and still isn’t. Every one of our engineers has 1k a month allocated in Claude tokens for Claude enterprise and Claude code.
Does that mean y'all never evaluated Gemini at all or just that it couldn't compete? I'd be worried that prior performance of the models prejudiced stats away from Gemini, but I am a Claude Code and heavy Anthropic user myself so shrug.
Most Asian cultures with suicide problems acknowledge and try very hard to bring those rates down. It isn't just a cultural norm and is in fact a good indicator of the happiness of a population.
Here's [1] the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare's page on preventing suicides. The motto is 誰も自殺に追い込まれることのない社会の実現を目指して or "Aiming for a world where nobody must deal with suicide"
That's a straw man; There are many cultures that have a strong emphasis on honor/shame mechanics, which in turn drive suicides in those cultures. And which match cultural expectations in a grim kind of way.
The fact that people want to change their culture is possibly an early indication of a shift, which could take decades or centuries to actually occur. And such a cultural shift can also lose momentum and be still-born.
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I find counting suicides innovative. But if you do it in a global context without looking at the cultures as confounding factor: It's wrong.
There are many other confounding factors, such as a forgiving national (personal) bankruptcy regime. The USA has a pretty forgiving regime compared to other countries. But that doesn't mean you can say it correlates with how happy people are. Because - like suicides - the number of people that go bankrupt might not significantly correlate to the average happiness rate. Because a (small) minority of people go bankrupt / commit suicide.
It's in fact perfectly reasonable and possible to suppose that a country with higher average suicides and harsher penalties for bankruptcy still ends up higher on the happiness index. Because perhaps health and social-contact / family factors impact the rating more, on average.
The substack references Nilsson et al [1] in regards to criticisms of the Cantril Ladder. It's a pretty easy to read paper so I highly suggest just reading it.
I don't know. To me this seems like an energized minority trying to use technology to make a lot of noise; much like social media activism. In our city Flock cameras are very controversial but both the PD and transparency reports have shown benefits from Flock. We're not a wealthy, well-to-do suburb though. I imagine heavy ALPR presence is a lot more silly in those areas.
As the (dubiously attributed) Picasso quote goes: "When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." Most of HN is the former, constantly theorizing, philosophizing, often (but not always) in a negative and cynical way. This isn't conducive to discussion of methods of art. Sadly I just speak with friends working on other AI things instead.
Someone like simonw can probably get better reactions from this community but I don't bother.
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