Not a single person on the Bun team nor Anthropic has yet done anything egregious to market this as anything but a swap to a more memory-safe language with better compiler guarantees.
Thus far most of the buzz and marketing has been entirely negative from people who are against AI.
My take is that most of the buzz is also tied to recent negative opinions of Anthropic themselves due to some of their recent decisions.
The best kind of marketing is when you don’t need to say it aloud by yourself. Yet, this is constantly in HN front page. Maybe engineered or not but marketing regardless.
rooted in a long 30+ year reality. you can engineer the greatest, most secure, most accessible, most ____ thing but if it doesn’t sell those amazeballs engineers will be talking to their recruiters…
That's fine but I'll say as a human, that makes you a pretty crappy one. Only caring about monetary rewards is pathetic frankly, luckily the vast majority of humans don't agree with this sentiment and continue pushing the boundaries and our imaginations onward.
I have some programming work for you to do unpaid of course since only caring about monetary rewards is pathetic. But I'm sure you'll be able to feed yourself on exposure right?
> Thus far most of the buzz and marketing has been entirely negative from people who are against AI.
To me it seems like quite a lot of it is also by people who spent years maintaining a codebase just to have the metaphorical rug be pulled out from under their feet, and feel that a migration like this might be kind of disrespectful (how many of the people that have gotten good at Zig and know the codebase will find the switch over to Rust easy)? Or in some cases, that it's just bad engineering - instead of releasing it alongside the main project and focusing on gradually getting parity over months, it just got merged into the main branch.
On a more practical note, however - if you get acquired by a company that gives you almost unlimited usage of tools that might help you migrate to a language, that 3 years down the line will lead to a better codebase than today, then I guess it also makes sense to take that chance.
And of course, you get a lot of people who are opposed to AI on principle, as you said.
I mean, the phrase "Zig to Rust port of Bun" makes little sense even to many professional developers. They may know Rust, might have heard of Zig, very likely don't know what Bun is.
So the fact that this gets any attention at all says something.
Just like how they did the rewrite. It is not longer a small OSS team trying to survive in the world, it's a corporate entity with unlimited access to Anthropic resources. All the doomsayers who were prophesying that Bun will become sellout were right.
I dunno, I am commenting on it mainly because I find the intensity of the anger and accusations of bad faith to be pretty out of proportion with what's actually happening, and I kind of value pushing back on such things to try to moderate the tone of the discussion (not as a devil's advocate thing per se, but more I am more likely to comment if I feel like the average vibe is unreasonable).
The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to do what you're doing, and say what to do if you have a genuine concern:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Huh, I didn't recall that. FWIW I have e-mailed them in the past and gotten detected abusers banned, but didn't this time because it's just a suspicion. Didn't realise posting about hunches was against the guidelines, though, that's my mistake.
If you can increase your reach, why not do it? Also, HN has better reputation among tech circles than Reddit and is less niche than other resources. Modern marketing hits everything.
HN is enormously influential for programmers and employees within the tech industry. Who happen to be exactly who Anthropic, and other AI companies, desperately need adoption from...
I think HN has an outsized influence in the industry, for its size. There are a lot of big tech employees and startup founders reading it. Account purchasing absolutely happens, I've discovered and gotten banned at least a dozen years-old accounts that were blatantly sold and puppeteered by bots in the past. The comments aren't obviously bot-written this time around, so I can't conclusively prove it happened in this case, but it is a thing that happens in general and something to be aware of. There's also vote selling to promote things onto the front page. Given how cheap shilling on HN is, and the fact that many will perceive it to be organic while always viewing straightforwards ads skeptically, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost:effectiveness ratio probably beats any other form of advertising.
I am Cuban and from Miami. The culture here is very similar where people will sacrifice everything in order to stay living close to family and "home". Here it stems a lot from the financial anxiety passed down from our parents and a culture where you relied a lot on your entire family. I think it really holds a lot of people back.
If you're Cuban and living in Miami, you are literally not near your "home", and probably not near your family? Or rather, physically close but still a plane ride and a diplomatic cold zone away.
Sounds like you haven't been to Miami before or don't know about the city demographics. Cuban population is massive, more people speak Spanish in and around miami than English these days. So yeah, he's home.
I think the best approach is to start taking things apart that interest you, and learn along the way. For example - on my blog I use things like arcade cabinets and home routers to introduce some hardware reversing concepts:
There is also nothing wrong with getting some of the arduino starter kits on amazon and using those to learn how to interact with various peripherals, etc.
Adafruit tutorials and Neopixels can be fun with a very low barrier to entry. Get into sensors and networking from there. The RP2040 by Raspberry Pi is a great chip to start learning with micropython.
Also, cheap electronics kits can be a great way to get your sea legs, especially if you take the time to work out why the circuits are designed as they are.
My favorite RSPS was 2speced. It was probably one of the most famous 317 servers. I still remember the forum names of the developers, Tyler and Blurr. I sometimes wonder what they do now. The RSPS scene was awesome.
What they do over at Koenigsegg is amazing, i feel like most people arent aware at the incredible things they do, CVK is an amazing engineer too and its awesome watching him speak about the cars.
Koenigsegg does innovate a lot in manufacturing car parts for their hypercars, if you watched Christian von Koenigsegg speak about the engineering they do its really impressive.
In some alternate universe CVK is making cars that compete with Tesla and are better. Although they make amazing products i wish he and his team of brilliant engineers would work on inexpensive cars, im almost certain they could innovate in the space.
Standing on the shoulders of giants, Netflix engineers didn't have blog posts from other companies on how to handle the scale they started facing. Facebook didn't have blog posts to reference when they scaled to 1B users. They pay for talent that have built systems that had not been built before and they have seen a return on it so they continue to do it.
Sure? "After an early beta test in Oct. of that year, Hulu was made available to the public on March 12, 2008—a year after Netflix launched its own streaming service."
Youtube is very different than Netflix from a technical problem perspective. They serve free videos to anyone around the world that are uploaded by users.
It's closer to a live streaming problem than pre-encoded video like Netflix.
Having worked at Netflix I can say that the YouTube problem is much more complex.
I wonder what portion of Youtube's request traffic can be served with cache servers at the edge with a few hundred terabytes of storage. There's a very long tail but i would guess a significant portion of their traffic is the top ~10,000 videos at any given moment.
There was a Google organised hackathon on this topic. Given a set of resources, locations, and (estimated) popularity, Optimise for video load time by determining what should be moved to the cache when and where.
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