every single HN comment on these articles makes me doubt both the sentience of my fellow nerds and whether there are any actual human users of this website remaining.
Hacker News can only be good if enough people make the effort to make it good. There is always going to be a mix of things that push the standard up and things that drag the standard down. That's how averages and distributions work.
Unfortunately what we see from you is a pattern of low-effort comments, some of which don't even bother with basic sentence formation features like capitalization at the start and a period at the end. That's a high-signal hallmark of low-effort comments. Looking down your comment feed we see many single-line comments that are low on substance and high in snark.
The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. They ask us to be kind, and to avoid snark and swipes. They ask us to converse curiously. They ask us not to fulminate, and not to sneer, including at the rest of the community.
It's fine to want HN to be better. As moderators we certainly do; that's why we do this job. But it requires us all to actually make the effort to be better in our own conduct. When you see comments from other users that aren't up to standard, we need you to use the tools that have always been here, like downvoting, flagging and emailing us (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can take action.
It isn't other people's job to make good enough for you whilst you conduct yourself in this way. If you really want HN to be better, please do your part to raise the standards rather than dragging them down further.
If I were you I would be more concerned with the fact that you have allowed what was once a well-respected forum to become little more than a spam platform for AI shills. You can silence me, but I am not wrong and I’m not the only one who has noticed this. It’s very obvious.
You should understand that one way people improve the standards of a commons is by imposing social controls on those who violate norms which create a healthy society, such as by shilling. That is normal behavior on every forum I’ve ever seen.
When you allow there to be 100x more of this mindless slop than of anything else, the most any individual can do to resist the tide is to contribute to the voices trying to make antisocial behavior come with a cost.
It works, and because it works, people will continue to do it until you figure out how to keep a clean commons.
PS. I suppose you would probably say the same thing to Rob Pike (if he were a user of your site which he doubtless is not).
Please don't sermonize to distract from your own record of disrespect towards HN and its guidelines.
The people you claim have “allowed” this have maintained HN for many years – 13 in dang's case, the majority of its history. The primary reason this is a place where people want to participate is because of the guidelines that have been developed and refined since HN's inception, and that we spend hours each day upholding. People have been heralding the decline of HN since it was barely more than a few months old [1], yet it continues to grow as a place where people want to showcase interesting work, which is what we most care about.
Generated comments and posts are banned, and we state this frequently. I spend time each day evaluating submissions and Show HNs to determine whether they're human-authored or AI-generated. We welcome people to flag generated content and email us so we can ban accounts with a pattern of posting it. Yes, it takes time for these mechanisms to kick in. HN is a public, anonymous site. Anyone can post anything, and the immune system takes time to do its work. That's always been the case.
There is a cohort of community members who have demonstrated a commitment to making HN better over several years through: (a) submitting good articles, (b) posting thoughtful comments, (c) observing the guidelines, (d) flagging bad submissions and comments, and (e) emailing us to point out guidelines breaches and to discuss the healthy functioning of the site. These are the people we listen to when they express concerns about HN's health, because they've established a track record of genuine contribution and care over several years.
From you, we see two comments prior to 2023, and little or none of the above kinds of actions. Instead: ragey fulmination, hyperbole, and ascribing views to us without basis. And now you hold yourself up as HN's heroic defender, having never undertaken the earnest, unglamorous, unseen work that other community members do to make this the place you claim needs you to defend.
Please, if you really want HN to be better, you are most welcome to start doing the things that other community members quietly do every day to help make it better.
I wanted to express similar sentiment, but I didn't understand how I would without leaving a rule breaking comment.
It's my sincerely held opinion that we're fostering a culture here that ignores the "human impact" of the technology that we're rushing to adopt.
I'm well aware that many members of this community have achieved "success" through software. This includes the rapid adoption of new computing paradigms, new technology stacks, new frameworks, etc.
I am fortunate to be employed. But around me, when I step out of my house, it's painful. People are hurting. They're unemployed. They're depressed. And the younger generation is even worse. They can't even afford to dream.
I live in a corporate world of forced smiles and fake enthusiasm. I would hate for that same culture to take root here. We need to be able to express significant doubt, or even cynicism against AI, without fear of backlash.
If you have 50,000 servers for your service, and you can reduce that by 1 percent, you save 50 servers. Multiply that by maybe $8k per server and you have saved $400k,you just paid for your self for a year. With meta the numbers are probably a bit bigger.
That's not how it works though. Budgets are annual. A 1% savings of cpu cycles doesn't show up anywhere, it's a rounding error. They don't have a guy that pulls the servers and sells them ahead of the projection. You bought them for 5 years and they're staying. 5 years from now, that 1% got eaten up by other shit.
You're wrong about how services that cost 9+ figures to run annually are budgeted. 1% CPU is absolutely massive and well measured and accounted for in these systems.
What you're missing is that for these massive systems there's never enough capacity. You can go look at datacenter buildouts YOY if you'd like. Any and all compute power that can be used is being used.
For individual services what that means is that for something like Google Search there will be dozens of projects in the hopper that aren't being worked on because there's just not enough hardware to supply the feature (for example something may have been tested already at small scale and found to be good SEO ranking wise but compute expensive). So a team that is able to save 1% CPU can directly repurpose that saved capacity and fund another project. There's whole systems in place for formally claiming CPU savings and clawing back those savings to fund new efforts.
I've never in my life (25 years in the business) seen a system that was so utilized things needed to be cut. Every single cluster/DC I've worked with has been at 50-85% utilization tops. I mean, they might hit 100% during a report generation period or something, but the 95% avg I've seen has never exceeded maybe 80%.
You don't buy servers once every 5 years. I've done purchasing every quarter and forecasted a year out. You reduce your services budget for hardware by the amount saved for that year.
5 years is the lifecycle. You're not going to get rid of a 4 year old server because you're using less cycles that you thought you would. You already bought it. You find something else for it to do or you have a little extra redundancy. If I increase the mpg of my semi fleet, that doesn't mean I can sell some of my semis off just because the cost per trip goes down.
> “Reasonable” is a lynchpin bearing an awful lot of load here.
No it's not. I could imagine sentences where it would be, but not this sentence. Here, watch me replace the word:
"99% of adults are not allowing their teenager to to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway."
Even if most people aren't ""reasonable"", they are whatever adjective that sentence describes.
“Over half of U.S. adults surveyed said that it’s very inappropriate, somewhat appropriate, or were uncertain whether it’s appropriate for their child to set boundaries for their interactions” is a reasonable-sounding statement, too; it’s plausible, applies to children of all ages (below or beyond age 25!), and is demonstrably an aspect of culture represented by media and other ephemera.
The position itself is, of course, completely unreasonable — boundaries are never inappropriate to consider (and to contrast with the parent’s boundaries about immediate versus deferred conversations in unsafe circumstances, the child’s age and cognitive ability to assess risk, and so on), no matter how uncomfortable it is to teach a child about boundaries by honoring one they’ve presented one! — but that intolerance is presented in such a reasonable guise, with a tone of majority support to quash any brief qualms, that it causes many to overlook its true nature.
That sentence was the only part of the argument using the idea of something being "reasonable".
Whether you agree or disagree with their general stance, the word "reasonable" isn't load bearing.
In particular they didn't say that limiting cell phones was reasonable, or requires parents to be reasonable. They just wanted an example of parents enforcing boundaries.
The only load-bearing part of that sentence is the idea that parents do enforce those boundaries. Which they do. It's irrelevant if they are doing it because they're "reasonable".
TL;DR: I do know what the discussion is about. But your comment wasn't about the general discussion, it was about the quality of a specific point, and I'm defending that specific point.
It's a pretty generalized phenomena too. Few people actually think about the assumptions their arguments rely upon. It makes actual discussions difficult to have and leads to more arguing than problem solving
I don't even think it's a secret anymore, open or otherwise. As long as Vanity Metric Goes Up, it doesn't seem like anyone, anywhere, actually cares how much "economic activity" is fake.
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