I strenuously disagree. Not every language needs to chase trends and pile on unnecessary complexity because developers want the latest shiny language toys to play with. It's good to have a simple, stable language that works and that you can depend on to remain sane for the forseeable future.
C is a language like that but I fear the feature creep is coming (auto? AUTO??.) JS is a lost cause.
The weirdest part about that is this administration was clearly willing to just stall and could have done what the CIA and FBI does all the time and just "disappear" all of the documents.
What would be the fallout? The Democrats are complicit, the regime all but controls the judiciary (at least the Supreme Court.) And a lot of these guys are billionaires and untouchable anyway unless someone does a Luigi on them. They have the ability to just brute force past the controversy and yet they've chosen to attempt the most ridiculously inept coverup possible.
On the one the sheer stupidity of this administration and its incompetence at implementing fascism means that as bad as things are they could be much worse. On the other hand I fear that once JD Vance or someone just as evil but without Trump's instability takes power we're going to wish we'd done something more when we had the chance.
dang has made it clear that all generated comments and articles are off topic. Hacker News is for human discussion, and AI generated content undermines that.
A blanket prohibition may be futile but it's anything but pointless.
Once Hacker News becomes nothing but bots posting stories written by bots for other bots to comment on - which is the inevitable end point of a permissive attitude towards this stuff - what even is the fucking point to any of this? SEO juice?
I think they're less excusing current wrongs and more attempting to point out that Trump and the nature of the current regime aren't anomalous. Believing such means getting rid of Trump alone is sufficient. Rather the attempt here is to illustrate that Trump is a manifestation of deep and systemic problems with American culture and that simply waiting for the "pendulum to swing the other way" or "Democrats to clean up the mess" isn't going to help.
We need to have a much more complex and nuanced conversation than "Orange man bad," even given that orange man is very much bad. Otherwise he won't be the last, much less the worst.
The house is burning down, we should put it out!!.
“it burned down before this is more of the same hurrrummmph.”
Democracy cannot rest or it is eroded, so yes bad things happened. American is flawed but over time has worked towards improving itself and going towards its ideals of equality. But every inch forward is hard fought against the likes of the current administration. Suffrage, voting rights, environmental regulations, abolition were all won as huge battles against those clinging to and abusing power.
The way these “but America has always been…” post are toned, if we listened to the likes of them then none of those victories would have occurred.
Listening to them, we backslide. Dwelling on past imperfections instead of fighting today’s fire? Thats Self sabotage.
These posts are never framed in a constructive way, like how do we right the wrongs of the past, how can we make reparations for them. No, they’re framed like “we’ve always been bad, so this current bad is not so bad”
They seem to be insidiously on the side of injustice, trying to diminish current ills so that they may continue.
The better metaphor is: the house has been on fire for decades, and hyper-focusing on throwing water on a single part of the fire that's only been around for a few years isn't going to fix the gas pipe leak that's the actual reason for it going on for decades. People say words like "fascism" as dog whistle for "Trump" which is exhausting because of reasons other posters have been made clear: he's a symptom, not the root cause. It's boring partisan politics and very naive to the real systemic issues that people are blind to due to many reasons, and at least in part because of group think and tribal mentalities and a lack of class consciousness. And it's a perspective/dog whistle ignorant to nearly any establishment politician being at least, in part, complicit for the gas leak not getting fixed. And it's exhausting that the same accountability and frustration isn't being held when it's someone they voted for who's in office despite them still being an enabler of a broken system.
I strongly disagree that it’s pointing out the gas leak, it’s posting the way a foreign dictator would gleefully like his minions to post. “See that democracy has always been just like us”
If I were a totalitarian leader of any sort, I’d definitely be having my propagandists go after any country more liberal and try to paint them as also authoritarian and bad, and always that way.
Are you denying America has not improved itself? Slavery was horrible but slavery was ended even though it took a massive bloody war. Thats an extreme example but there are plenty.
No no, to the Debbie downers we are and always have been the equivalent of mao, Stalin, mussolini, and polpot
Yeah, I believe there is a difference between "hey, welcome to the party, isn't this horrible" and "what are yall complaining about, this is totally normal".
The latter is "normalizing", the former is attempting to get folks to understand a broader context.
It only takes a few flags to be effective and there are definitely more than a few Trumpists on HN so theoretically yes. Could also be the likely much larger contingent of people who flag all "political" and "non-technical" content by default.
Like it or not Hacker News has never been (and will never be) a platform for free and open debate. It's designed around aggressive curation for quality over quantity and that makes it very easy to brigade by design.
> Could also be the likely much larger contingent of people who flag all "political" and "non-technical" content by default.
It could, but that'd be odd. We've seen oodles of structurally similar posts hang out on the front page unflagged before. There are even past examples of major posts criticizing the journalistic integrity of 60 Minutes. Only once the material becomes critical of the regime does it become flagged.
As an American whose mental health struggled for a while after the election, I now thoroughly curate my media diet so that I only get "just enough" political news. So I understand your desire.
However, HN has huge sway over tech culture, for better or worse (probably worse). Many of the wealthiest and most influential fascists in America also run companies that HN users might work at or strive to work at. Probably not because they're fascists, but because they mostly care about the cool tech they use or just want a better job.
Applicants and employees of ̶I̶B̶M̶ Palantir, ̶I̶G̶ ̶F̶a̶r̶b̶e̶n̶ Tesla, and ̶K̶o̶d̶a̶k̶ Oracle should know what they're supporting. If they take the job anyway, at least we know whose side they're on.
I don't know if it's so much about making sure these people know what they're supporting but it's definitely significant that this is one of the few places where you can have a dialogue with the people who work at these companies.
> When people say "js doesn't have a stdlib" they mean "js doesn't have a robust general purpose stdlib like C++ ...
It does though! The JS stdlib even includes an entire wasm runtime. Its huge!
Seriously. I can barely think of any features in the C++ stdlib that are missing from JS. There's a couple - like JS is missing std::priority_queue. But JS has soooo much stuff that C++ is missing. Its insane.
That's what I assume people mean, because they can't mean trivial stuff like "left-pad" and "is-even" because why would that be part of any language's standard library?
Weird that the JS community relies entirely on external libraries with arbitrarily deep and fragile dependency trees that default fail to wrecking the entire web because JS "doesn't have a stdlib" for this sort of thing then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It is. Though in their defence, I think this api was added after the leftpad fiasco.
Also not many people seem to know this, but in the aftermath of leftpad being pulled from npm, npmjs changed their policy to disallow module authors from ever pulling old packages, outside a few very exceptional circumstances. The leftpad fiasco can’t happen again.
If LLMs were simply a niche but somewhat useful technology people could choose to use or avoid, then sure, such an absolutist stance seems excessive. But this technology is being aggressively pushed into every aspect of our lives and integrated into society so deeply that it can't be avoided, and companies are pushing AI-first and AI-only strategies with the express goal of undermining and replacing artists (and eventually programmers) with low quality generic imitations of their work with models trained on stolen data.
To give even an inch under these circumstances seems like suicide. Every use of LLMs, however minor, is a concession to our destruction. It gives them money, it gives them power, it normalizes them and their influence.
I find the technology fascinating. I can think of numerous use cases I'd like to explore. It is useful and it can provide value. Unfortunately it's been deployed and weaponized against us in a way that makes it unacceptable under any circumstances. The tech bros and oligarchs have poisoned the well.
I mean, I share some of the concerns you expressed, but at the same time there is no chance at all that working programmers and artists won't be using LLMs (and whatever "AI" comes next).
I'm a programmer, and I enjoyed the sort of "craftsman" aspect of writing code, from the 1990s until... maybe last year. But it's over. Writing code manually is already the exception, not the rule. I am not an artist, and I also really do understand that artists have a more legitimate grievance (about stealing prior art) than we programmers do.
As a practical matter, though, that's irrelevant. I suspect being an "artist" working in games, movies, ads, etc will become much like coding already is: you produce some great work manually, as an example, and then tell the bots "Now do it like this ... all 100 of you."
It’s like banning any and all uses of chainsaws for any kind of work ever just because some bros juggle with them and have chainsaw juggling conventions.
It’s just a tool, but like any tool it can be used the right way or wrong way. We as a society are still learning which is which.
More like banning automated forest clearing power chainsaw robots because they mowed down all the forests killing most life on earth. That's a terrible analogy, but better than yours.
The same thing happens with every HN predictions thread.
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