OK, so the "Storing data in the network ... " title made me remember something.
If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data.
So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.
During NASA's Deep Space Optical Comms demo (https://www.nasa.gov/mission/deep-space-optical-communicatio...), they transmitted video at 267 Mbps from 16 million kilometers away. That's 1.78 GiB stored in space while in transit (assuming 53.3 seconds light-speed delay).
The furthest they did was 8.3 Mbps at 400 million km which is around ~1.38 GiB in transit.
You could totally do that with the mirror on the moon. (Retroreflector + optical data transmission).
The moon is approximately (it varies) 1.3 light seconds away, i.e. a 2.6 second round trip, and optical links can have very high data rates. You could fit quite a lot of data on there! (Edit: although maybe the data rate won't be so high at these distances)
People of Earth. I AM LRRR, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8! We will raise your planet's temperature by one million degrees a day, for five days, unless we see McNeal at 9pm tomorrow - 8 central!
With gravitational lensing, this is actually viable! Just send a signal at a gravity sink, and travel at sublight speeds to position yourself in a place where it will be redirected to eventually along a longer path, and you can intercept your own signal! You just have to be really, really lucky.
That's only true in classical electrodynamics, as it happens. If you're in a very strong B-field like you might find near a compact object you'll get nonlinear QED effects.
The logic we typically use for repeaters (EDFA, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers) for long-distance lines amplifies but does not clean noise (so across the oceans, you are very much bound by SNR). And you need one of them every 80 km or so in typical fiber.
Before I consumed calories over days to figure out syntax. Now, a language model exhausts those calories away in seconds. Eventually we will advance too far into the future that the tail end of humanity will forget how to make pants.
I vibe coded the shit out of a Chrome extension that does that while waiting on CI/CD. Go read the content.js to make sure I'm not hacking your shit, download the repo to your computer, enable developer mode in chrome, "load unpacked", point it at the directory with those files, and enjoy your tool tips.
I have a few blog posts which have received only about ~250 upvotes across different communities, plus a GitHub project with just 30 stars.
Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.
maybe not the recruiter but the hiring manager or prospective colleagues who'll interview you later?
not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about.
I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects.
it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.
-> Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster.
I love these and I know this is all in good fun, but I feel like this one is a little unfair to Jeff. He's a content creator and he didn't actually buy the rig. If he's rich it's because he creates content like this.
Most of these are unfair in some way and many are wrong. What makes this funny is precisely that it has more snark than is reasonable (and often pushes bad assumptions as snark usually does!)
I love asking Grok’s companions, especially “Bad Rudy”, for the news of the day. It’s pretty similar: Brutally honest, filtered news. Although recently he started editorializing with his personal opinion, which is boring (from an AI companion).
I got a good chuckle out of some of the titles. In Jeff Geerling's defence (the title on the site reads "Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster"), he was loaned the Mac Studios from Apple and so he didn't spend a dime.
Also his accompanying YouTube video mentions the kit retails for $40,000+, a far cry from $15k.
You may have thought this is an objective observation.
For anyone over the age of 16 this comment is a loud expression of your political views.
Also, I find Reddit to be super funny. Just yesterday someone posted a photo of their brain MRI showing a tumor the size of a tennis ball and everyone, including the OP were having a great time.
> For anyone over the age of 16 this comment is a loud expression of your political views.
I'm curious as to what you think those political views are, because I strongly agree with what sidcool wrote (even if they didn't mean it the way I interpreted it) and I disagree with you.
I think that Reddit "is a biased cesspool of partisanship", but very much in both directions. Many subreddits are so wholly hard right or hard left that I think they're almost caricatures of themselves. And even for subreddits without a hard political bent, they are often the very definition of an echo chamber - they are great places to go where you want everyone to agree with you and you can see people who disagree with you get downvoted to oblivion. And, importantly, this is literally by design based on how subreddits are created and moderated.
I have rarely (not never, but rarely) made a comment that took a somewhat nuanced opinion where I wasn't heavily downvoted. And, contrarily, I have made similar comments on HN where, if I wasn't particularly upvoted, I received what felt like fair dialogue and back-and-forth with other commenters.
All that said, I still use Reddit frequently and find it frequently interesting, sometimes informative, and often pretty hilarious.
You really don’t know adherents of which political stance are constantly complaining about “lack of a sense of humor”?
Or who has been complaining about the “tech bias”?
I am glad if you were somehow not exposed.
I don’t find it partisan. I come across a lot of criticism of Democrats. And the current administration.
Also, if you’re claiming subreddits are partisan in the way mods want it to be, we can’t conclude Reddit as a whole is partisan, can we?
I sleep better at night thinking it is just a battleground of astroturfing bots fighting each other (at least on the main pages).
Everything from massive Russian state-actor bot farms testing newly trained LLMs popping out AI-generated meme formats before deploying domestically unknowingly getting into arguments with Israeli bot farms trying to raise support for some new movie series that will enable them to raise money for their next missile strike competing for eyeballs/attention from some uni student in a dorm room paying mid-sized black market companies in India to post comments telling you that cast-iron pans are too hard to clean so you should buy the non-sticks you saw on instagram (which are just marketing dropshippers in the USA selling the QA rejected pans from established brands).
Hacker News is Reddit with a nuclear downvote button and tone policing.
It's not that much better in terms of "dead internet," the bots are just more eloquent. In some ways the HN flavor of gamified engagement actively encourages worse outcomes than Reddit.
Love this. can we get an honest title for this entry too? (I'm not quite happy with my 11l+ karma, please give me some upvotes so I can start the new year with a smile?)
jk, great one, cheers
Its not even just Rails ppl. In embedded ive seen so many consultants say things like, "no problem. I just started working on the ultimate, perfect way to set up a state machine." Confidence theater
You can still look at almost any codebase and ask 'why is this bit not using a state machine here?' ... the AASM repo readme is very accessible even if you don't know Ruby: https://github.com/aasm/aasm
To answer my question myself I gave Microsoft copilot this prompt:
I want you to rewrite this headline "Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks"
into something a little humorous and snarky that reveals the underlying truth that would bring a
wry smile to tech-engaged but big tech-skeptical hacker news readers.
This has to fit in the 80 character limit for Hacker News so keep it appropriately short.
Also I want you to reply with exactly one headline and not anything else so I can use your output
as part of a processing pipeline
and i get the response
Amazon Finally Remembers eBooks Aren’t Supposed to Be Prisoners
which I think is great. I started with the first paragraph and got something too long with some explanation. I added the second, and got three replies and more explanation. The three replies were all "good enough" in my mind but added the third paragraph to control the output.
I prompted Gemini to tell me how to prompt itself to get similar results on other news sites and it said I should give it a description of the intended audience and what it finds funny/snarky.
What's funny/interesting from a psychological perspective is that several of these made me click (and discover genuinely interesting content) on links that I ignored in the real version. Could you do this everyday please?
It would be a really interesting feature to have ai analyze the articles and write an actually honest sub-headline. (ie not these sarcastic humor titles)
"Show HN: I implemented generics in my programming language"
does not deserve the roast
"I built a language nobody will use just to learn generics"
It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project. It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction. Zig and Rust started out small too! This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
>It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project
Yeah... what they ended up implementing is not generics. So good thing the LLM doesn't read link/comments too or will've probably wrote an actual roast.
>It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction
Very fair to assume this. Referencing Rust/Zig disregarding the thousands other now abandoned ones is survivorship bias. Most small hobby projects remain small. But, besides joking about it, "built [something] nobody will use", if is in their free time, and enjoy it, does it matter? Is there a need for all hobby projects to have a goal of making it big?
>This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
But the "Please star my repo so I can get a job" is fine?
I find these kind of posts profoundly uninteresting (woah, the n-th parody of the HN front page...) and yet they seem to always garner so many upvotes...
These two follow-ups are pretty good follow-ups actually—they're fun variations on the theme—but I don't think they clear the bar for another major frontpage thread:
Anyone want to try a prompt injection? All we need to do is to get one or two story in the front page that have a good < 80 characters prompt injection.
"Math nerd explains how to spend 3 days proving 1+1=2" -> Original
"From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259343
I'd like to see a version of the HN frontpage, where the titles are reinterpreted by that 1913 AI. "Imagine these are newspaper headlines from the year 2025. Rewrite them so that a regular person in our time can understand them."
11/10 would read. So much clickbait going around (and lets ignore the articles that "magicly" are upvoted but strangewise have no comments whatsoever.... not sus at all....
(If you follow that link from HN, and the site sees an HN `Referer`, it will do a fake captcha load, so then click "HACKERNEWS" in the navbar on the right.)
The last post or so sounded stressed. I hope they feel better.
But in general, going to read a little n-gate was a relief when some HN comment thread went off the rails. Someone else could rant about the dumbness, and a burden was lifted.
Seconding a little, perhaps dim button to toggle the original. But I love this. So much so that I might start referring to it more than HN when I'm in a rush.
Definitely fun, although after recently submitting one (a simple browse extension to make HN Christmas colors last all Christmas season instead of on Christmas Day)[1] that got very little attention I started looking at other posts and found a whole lot more slip through the cracks than I would have thought.
I am fine with the current layout, but I also have to say that I
preferred old.reddit.com as a layout base (the new reddit UI is horrible, and reddit overall succumbed to willy-nilly tyranny of moderators on power-trips). I am not saying HN should change to become like old.reddit.com in the UI, mind you, but a few things could perhaps be considered. Using old.reddit.com was much more efficient to me than the default UI here. It is not the end of the world, but I would not mind small, slight, modest improvements to the UI (not only the front page, but all of HN).
Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions and changes and people could vote. It should be as conservative as possible, though, because while I preferred old.reddit.com, I also think that not everyone may prefer changes. So one should aim for the highest acceptance value possible, before making any change.
I'm not even so sure it's such a useless joke. I mean, it is, and I wouldn't want titles to be like "Academic publishers admit paywalls were a scam all along" (unless ALL major publishers actually admit it, which so far they didn't). But I clicked on "Math nerd explains how to spend 3 days proving 1+1=2" and when it turned out to be a Lean tutorial I thought "Oh, that's exactly what I wanted!". I don't know why, but "From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4" I didn't even notice. It's such a boring and verbose title with lame attempt at wordplay that, that my brain somehow filters it out.
That’s it. It singlehandedly sold the idea of an AI browser to you. Like I now want an AI radio in my car, and we’re all putting AI between Google and us because Google’s results unfiltered are bad.
ok but how does it work though? Is this seriously just passing the titles to some llm with a prompt like 'roast this'? is it reading the actual content of the link as well?
The year is 20X5. Despite the onslaught of artificially intelligent agents capable of understanding and synthesizing new concepts in written language, humans are still capable of basic cognition… for now.
This is really awesome, I am interested how you made this, is there a way that we can have something this like for hackernews for more than this one instance of (20?) posts, I know its satirical but I really enjoyed it
Considering its hosted on github I think that it is a static page
So.. Does that make me political Ebenezer Scrooge?
I dunno, you'll have a hard time finding someone with less skin in that particular game than me, I'm not American and I've never even been to America (well, I switched flights in Chicago once, but I don't think it counts).
But a lawsuit for privacy being "accidental" because it's brought by a politician that's not popular seems difficult to interpret as anything other than dogma.
Being in the "right side of politics" doesn't automatically mean you're right about everything. And the reverse is also true.
Take Hitler for example: founding VW was a good move! He did that one good thing. Doesn't make him a good person, but similarly, all the other shit he did doesn't make VW any less of a good deed.
From the outside it looks like the same thing applies here.
Since this post is now on the front page, I'll suggest an honest title for it: HN front-page but titles are snarky dogma.
A lot of the dogmatic snark happens to be accurate, but that's besides the point. Just means it's good quality dogmatic snark.
(Edit to add TLDR: I'm going to put some context around "Hitlers good move" of "founding Volkswagen". But first I am going to explain my original comment and apologize for scrooge-ifying you.)
I made that quip because you reacted to a satirical, presumably generated headline by questioning the honesty of the satire and by ascribing a political motive to it.
That's okay to do, of course, but reacting to this particular one among all the other unfairly and satirically reduced headlines, and immediately smelling political motive maybe says more about where you're coming from than it does about the particular circumstances how this headline came to be. Maybe you want to see it as political for some reason, or are at least primed to read it that way, when everything around it suggests it's just indiscriminate satire?
So the fact that this is what popped into your head maybe wants to tell you something, like the visiting ghost. It's probably related to current politics. And then I think your comment in the face of this fun little website felt a bit scrooge-y to me, and so this admittedly silly comeback popped into my head.
It wasn't very nice or productive of me, so please accept my apologies for hanging this old bore's name on you.
Now that we got that out of the way, I'm going to skip past how I think you're misreading what was meant by "honest" and "accidental" in their respective places, and quickly jump into the other can of worms you opened, and wield my worm-relativizer.
I agree that good deeds can be done by bad people, and vice versa. But I would like the record here to show that the Volkswagen was not simply "a good move by Hitler", because people might take that literally and come away thinking Hitler was the single driving force here, or that it was unrestrictedly good.
Hitler played an important role bringing the Volkswagen about, that is correct. He did that by putting the power of the state behind efforts that had been ongoing for a while to develop a cheap, mass-produced car in Germany, and enabled engineers like Ferdinand Porsche to get it done by cajoling the car industry to put resources behind it. (More or less; the point is Hitler and nazi government were not responsible for idea nor execution, but they did push it forward because it aligned really well with their ideology, and would of course be happy to claim credit for the whole thing.)
Now, how about "good"? Before the Volkswagen became the affordable car for the masses after the war, it did a lot of work in a modified form as part of the German war machine. Before the civilian car came to market, the nazis started the European part of world war 2, and the engineering and tooling and factory put in place for the car, it started turning out what was essentially the German version of the army Jeep, if you will pardon that comparison, supporting the German war effort and all the atrocities it enabled and tragedies it brought about.
As a little cherry on top, I think the many folks who paid non-trivial sums to essentially pre-order the car before the war never got that car, nor did they get their money back.
So, I don't like seeing the Volkswagen poke it's head out as "Hitler's good deed". I don't think you wanted to mislead anyone, and your point about good deeds stands regardless.
But history is messy, and to learn from it it helps to see it in proper context, especially around this fella and his pugnacious posse.
Not sure if the source code for this is available but if you want to make your own version I did something similar that can be easily modified and run locally for your own festive mirth: https://github.com/justinhj/rudehackernews
This was a great way to start the day over a cup of coffee, sometimes we need things that make as laugh but what is awesome is the titles are spot on. Thank you for making this Friday morning fun
maybe so, though an inaccurate claim. the ai is the value add here (and quite a value add based on the other comments in the thread). we typically reserve the word "slop" for ai generated content that is of low quality or no value add. this website seems to be both of quality and value ad and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.
"Slop" is at _least_ as fair a description of "we had an LLM rewrite HN headlines" as "we rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it" is of "we removed our biggest source of crashes on Android by getting rid of Go FFI issues."
Entertaining and apparently useful, though of course not infallible. Given https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms it yields the title "Training AI on 1913 data to avoid 'woke' bias (and hygiene)". That the Honest Hacker News AI model has been trained on a dose of cynicism and intellectual dishonesty is probably hard to avoid...
Twas brillig, and the slithey-news did gyre and gamble on the title.
All manic were the Borogoves and gnome-rat's Anti-AI rhetoric in full recital.
Beware the SLOP my son!
The jaws that slurp, and claws that don't match.
Beware the Amazon-nerd, and shun
that Facebook Hack.
He took his local well in hand;
long time the perfect pose he sought.
So prompted he by the decision tree,
and waited while the AI Thought.
Spaghetti.
Meatballs.
Slurp.
Will I?
No.
Will Smith.
IYKYK
Yup. And if you dared to bring this up in the comments (ie. your own rewrite of a title/post), you’d get reminded of the guidelines and downvoted/flagged. Because fuck honesty - we are here for clicks and engagements.
This is a good step. Next: disclose financial incentives and other motives just to nip it in the bud.
well, I think OP is quite funny and I really enjoyed it, but it definitely goes against the entire idea of approaching things in good faith. I'm sure some or even many of them are sadly accurate, but if reinterpreting things people say through that lens became the behavioral norm on HN I think it would quickly destroy everything many people love about this place. Just my 2 cents of course.
I feel that my life has been improved by all three of these. I hadn't seen the "hysterical clickbait" one before you pointed it out, so thank you even though clearly that was the opposite of your intent.
It's funny, the OP doesn't have an ulterior motive, and it's close to the holidays so it is not cannibalizing more important news. There's no harm here.
> How much of this navel-gazing junk do we need? See also, from the same author:
Seriously! I'll admit the first post was mighty fun. But now this is turning into an AI-spam-fest! I objected in the 2nd thread but got downvoted. Apparently the community here thinks this kind of low effort Reddit-style humor is now on-topic for this place!
Not to mention the systematic downvoting of every comment that is critical of these spam posts!
reminds me of how people used to shove autotune into anything and people lapped it up like the slop that it was and this is. but, as with that slop, this will also get boring to the masses. there's only so much "I told an llm to pretend it was deadpool by way of ryan reynolds" that people actually like. the novelty is the brunt of it. and, like with autotune, when used well, people will continue to appreciate it. just ride out the hyperslop, for now.
This is not "honest", this is mostly just dismissive. The headings are no more neutral and explanatory than the originals, because, I suppose, the intent was just having fun.
Its on the front page, that means it atttracted attention and was upvoted. If what you are saying was true, these posts would die very quickly and we would never see them.
I guess if everyone thinks mocking peoples' projects and efforts is funny, it's okay!
My opinion is a weakly that this is tiring and borderline insulting to people who are genuinely looking for feedback and community. Clever once a year or so, but the creator has leaned into it and posted a lot of meta in a small timeline.
I already made my point. If the community agrees with you then we wont see these on the front page anymore. If not then you will either need to be ok with seeing more of them, or not read HN.
If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data.
So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.
The furthest they did was 8.3 Mbps at 400 million km which is around ~1.38 GiB in transit.
Tom 7 did something reminiscent of this if you hadn't seen already: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
The moon is approximately (it varies) 1.3 light seconds away, i.e. a 2.6 second round trip, and optical links can have very high data rates. You could fit quite a lot of data on there! (Edit: although maybe the data rate won't be so high at these distances)
archive.space
You just need to be traveling faster than the radio waves, catch up and enjoy :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
https://youtu.be/a5hOmPdxw0U
https://code.kryo.se/pingfs/
Discussed in 2015:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844725
made my mind tickle for quite a while
The big limiting factors are free space path loss and noise.
You can get a low order correction with Euler-Heisenberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%E2%80%93Heisenberg_Lagra...
GNU John Dearheart
Don't you worry!
AI rover robots are soon going to dominate Mars.
- Amazon finally adds a feature that has been standard since 2005
- Texas accidentally does something good for privacy
Would it possible to add a feature where hovering over a title displays the original title?
https://github.com/fragmede/honest-hn-tooltips
Edit: Took 18 minutes.
Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.
not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about.
I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects.
it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.
You could game a few stars with sockpuppet accounts, but it's infeasible to game 100+ stars.
Edit: Oh no, that was for the repo I actually stared before seeing this. I'm just learning Go :)
I love these and I know this is all in good fun, but I feel like this one is a little unfair to Jeff. He's a content creator and he didn't actually buy the rig. If he's rich it's because he creates content like this.
I don't know chief, have you seen how many rpis this guy has?
Love these things. Every time someone has posted an AI-flavor of HN it's been comedic gold.
I found myself pulling up the original and the honest versions side by side. The translation makes it funny.
Also his accompanying YouTube video mentions the kit retails for $40,000+, a far cry from $15k.
Plus some of the stories seem to be a bit old like openai board controversy remark.
All in all, some funny stuff i agree!
Now you know why HN has the "no editorializing" rule. :)
For anyone over the age of 16 this comment is a loud expression of your political views.
Also, I find Reddit to be super funny. Just yesterday someone posted a photo of their brain MRI showing a tumor the size of a tennis ball and everyone, including the OP were having a great time.
I'm curious as to what you think those political views are, because I strongly agree with what sidcool wrote (even if they didn't mean it the way I interpreted it) and I disagree with you.
I think that Reddit "is a biased cesspool of partisanship", but very much in both directions. Many subreddits are so wholly hard right or hard left that I think they're almost caricatures of themselves. And even for subreddits without a hard political bent, they are often the very definition of an echo chamber - they are great places to go where you want everyone to agree with you and you can see people who disagree with you get downvoted to oblivion. And, importantly, this is literally by design based on how subreddits are created and moderated.
I have rarely (not never, but rarely) made a comment that took a somewhat nuanced opinion where I wasn't heavily downvoted. And, contrarily, I have made similar comments on HN where, if I wasn't particularly upvoted, I received what felt like fair dialogue and back-and-forth with other commenters.
All that said, I still use Reddit frequently and find it frequently interesting, sometimes informative, and often pretty hilarious.
Edit:
The sibling comment offers a more concise explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329213
Everything from massive Russian state-actor bot farms testing newly trained LLMs popping out AI-generated meme formats before deploying domestically unknowingly getting into arguments with Israeli bot farms trying to raise support for some new movie series that will enable them to raise money for their next missile strike competing for eyeballs/attention from some uni student in a dorm room paying mid-sized black market companies in India to post comments telling you that cast-iron pans are too hard to clean so you should buy the non-sticks you saw on instagram (which are just marketing dropshippers in the USA selling the QA rejected pans from established brands).
The online world is a wild place.
It's not that much better in terms of "dead internet," the bots are just more eloquent. In some ways the HN flavor of gamified engagement actively encourages worse outcomes than Reddit.
This one shows the "age" of the LLM, or the data cut off time
Laughed so hard on this one.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000302102827/https://suck.com/...
Which looks like what you did.
does not deserve the roast
"I built a language nobody will use just to learn generics"
It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project. It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction. Zig and Rust started out small too! This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
Yeah... what they ended up implementing is not generics. So good thing the LLM doesn't read link/comments too or will've probably wrote an actual roast.
>It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction
Very fair to assume this. Referencing Rust/Zig disregarding the thousands other now abandoned ones is survivorship bias. Most small hobby projects remain small. But, besides joking about it, "built [something] nobody will use", if is in their free time, and enjoy it, does it matter? Is there a need for all hobby projects to have a goal of making it big?
>This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
But the "Please star my repo so I can get a job" is fine?
i am so confused, whats the reason behind this little event handler?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221900
The curiosity value of something like this diminishes under repetition, of course: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... It's a bit like repeating the same joke.
We downweight follow-up posts for that reason: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That, I think, is what's going on here. This post was great—it was impressive and original enough to clear the bar, so we left it up:
Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632 - Dec 2025 (965 comments)
These two follow-ups are pretty good follow-ups actually—they're fun variations on the theme—but I don't think they clear the bar for another major frontpage thread:
Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46326588 (<-- current thread)
Show HN: Hacker News, but every headline is hysterical clickbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324579
On a topsy turvy day, one finds oneself suspecting these are human-written instead of AI.
If it’s AI, it’s very clever and nuanced: comedians should be worried for their jobs. If it’s human it’s still very funny.
There's a reason it's banned in HN submissions
I spit out my coffee laughing lol
The title are so funny ! I'm thinking to switch for the time ^^
> Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt,
Better:
"Engfluencer suggests you spend $15k to run a model slightly faster (jeffgeerling.com)"
Who unfortunately stopped posting HN critiques, a few years ago. But you can still read old posts on: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/2021/07/
(If you follow that link from HN, and the site sees an HN `Referer`, it will do a fake captcha load, so then click "HACKERNEWS" in the navbar on the right.)
But in general, going to read a little n-gate was a relief when some HN comment thread went off the rails. Someone else could rant about the dumbness, and a burden was lifted.
They're a lot of fun! And super easy to vibe code, if I'm looking to test a new model.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266496
When you developer market hard enough that you make it into the LLM training data.
Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions and changes and people could vote. It should be as conservative as possible, though, because while I preferred old.reddit.com, I also think that not everyone may prefer changes. So one should aim for the highest acceptance value possible, before making any change.
;)
An opinionated, tuneable, reader-agent.
Considering its hosted on github I think that it is a static page
on point
My favorite is the link in the footer:
Rf.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Christmas_Present
I dunno, you'll have a hard time finding someone with less skin in that particular game than me, I'm not American and I've never even been to America (well, I switched flights in Chicago once, but I don't think it counts).
But a lawsuit for privacy being "accidental" because it's brought by a politician that's not popular seems difficult to interpret as anything other than dogma.
Being in the "right side of politics" doesn't automatically mean you're right about everything. And the reverse is also true.
Take Hitler for example: founding VW was a good move! He did that one good thing. Doesn't make him a good person, but similarly, all the other shit he did doesn't make VW any less of a good deed.
From the outside it looks like the same thing applies here.
Since this post is now on the front page, I'll suggest an honest title for it: HN front-page but titles are snarky dogma.
A lot of the dogmatic snark happens to be accurate, but that's besides the point. Just means it's good quality dogmatic snark.
I made that quip because you reacted to a satirical, presumably generated headline by questioning the honesty of the satire and by ascribing a political motive to it.
That's okay to do, of course, but reacting to this particular one among all the other unfairly and satirically reduced headlines, and immediately smelling political motive maybe says more about where you're coming from than it does about the particular circumstances how this headline came to be. Maybe you want to see it as political for some reason, or are at least primed to read it that way, when everything around it suggests it's just indiscriminate satire?
So the fact that this is what popped into your head maybe wants to tell you something, like the visiting ghost. It's probably related to current politics. And then I think your comment in the face of this fun little website felt a bit scrooge-y to me, and so this admittedly silly comeback popped into my head.
It wasn't very nice or productive of me, so please accept my apologies for hanging this old bore's name on you.
Now that we got that out of the way, I'm going to skip past how I think you're misreading what was meant by "honest" and "accidental" in their respective places, and quickly jump into the other can of worms you opened, and wield my worm-relativizer.
I agree that good deeds can be done by bad people, and vice versa. But I would like the record here to show that the Volkswagen was not simply "a good move by Hitler", because people might take that literally and come away thinking Hitler was the single driving force here, or that it was unrestrictedly good.
Hitler played an important role bringing the Volkswagen about, that is correct. He did that by putting the power of the state behind efforts that had been ongoing for a while to develop a cheap, mass-produced car in Germany, and enabled engineers like Ferdinand Porsche to get it done by cajoling the car industry to put resources behind it. (More or less; the point is Hitler and nazi government were not responsible for idea nor execution, but they did push it forward because it aligned really well with their ideology, and would of course be happy to claim credit for the whole thing.)
Now, how about "good"? Before the Volkswagen became the affordable car for the masses after the war, it did a lot of work in a modified form as part of the German war machine. Before the civilian car came to market, the nazis started the European part of world war 2, and the engineering and tooling and factory put in place for the car, it started turning out what was essentially the German version of the army Jeep, if you will pardon that comparison, supporting the German war effort and all the atrocities it enabled and tragedies it brought about.
As a little cherry on top, I think the many folks who paid non-trivial sums to essentially pre-order the car before the war never got that car, nor did they get their money back.
So, I don't like seeing the Volkswagen poke it's head out as "Hitler's good deed". I don't think you wanted to mislead anyone, and your point about good deeds stands regardless.
But history is messy, and to learn from it it helps to see it in proper context, especially around this fella and his pugnacious posse.
http://n-gate.com/
EDIT: open the link manually, they put a mock "security check" on referrers from HN
"Texas accidentally does something good for privacy"
is not really an improvement over the original (already half-editorialized) "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"
LOL ... and it actually ran slower.
“Click to keep avoiding work …”
Good LLM prompt, excellent understanding.
He took his local well in hand; long time the perfect pose he sought. So prompted he by the decision tree, and waited while the AI Thought.
Spaghetti. Meatballs. Slurp. Will I? No. Will Smith. IYKYK
Still pretty funny tho, ngl.
what could this mean???? and why 1913 specifically
This is a good step. Next: disclose financial incentives and other motives just to nip it in the bud.
I’m all for prefacing each post that comes from a16z with “Asshole Alert” so that we know who we are dealing with upfront.
Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632 (10 days ago)
Show HN: Hacker News, but every headline is hysterical clickbait https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324579 (4 hours ago)
META-MELTDOWN: WE BROKE HACKER NEWS WITH THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK (dosaygo-studio.github.io)
Superficially, they're the same, but digging in shows the real difference.
Seriously! I'll admit the first post was mighty fun. But now this is turning into an AI-spam-fest! I objected in the 2nd thread but got downvoted. Apparently the community here thinks this kind of low effort Reddit-style humor is now on-topic for this place!
Not to mention the systematic downvoting of every comment that is critical of these spam posts!
They're a lot of fun! And super easy to vibe code, if I'm looking to test a new model.
It's hard to restrain myself from navel-gazing, the lint in there is fascinating.
I'm not sure they satisfy curiosity as much as many posts with fewer votes, but that's okay.
"We rewrote it in snark so you have to upvote".
The comments make it clear that the language author has not yet learned generics by this exercise.
> We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it
I'm pretty sure they didn't go through all the trouble of rewriting it in Rust to get some internet forum points!
Maybe its just you who doesnt like them?
My opinion is a weakly that this is tiring and borderline insulting to people who are genuinely looking for feedback and community. Clever once a year or so, but the creator has leaned into it and posted a lot of meta in a small timeline.
If not, then you will start seeing them more and more and you will need to suck it up my friend!
Obviously it's just me who doesn't like them. What's your point?
> ...
> it stops being fun.
Right. Sorry. We apologise. We didn't know the joke police was monitoring.
Your question was "Is it wrong, though?" The answer is "Yes"