They switched their best sorting algorithm to be engagement based rather than upvote based [1]. Upvotes are just one of many metrics, but heavy comment interaction is another. It incentivizes rage bait and performing for the crowd with every comment and post. They also switched into an almost purely moderator curated frontpage [2] rather than allowing users to vote.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_b...

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282

One of most magical things about HN is that heavy comments are punished as a negative signal, not rewarded as a positive one.

I created an account and started reading this site primarily for programming news when r/programming took a precipitous dive in quality around 2020 or so. Before it was an example of one of the few good communities there, but it quickly became show and tell (ironically this was against its unenforced rules). And any real interesting posts had no discussion. But then I noticed the "Other Communities" tab would show posts from a HN posts sub that tracked posts here, and suddenly I was able to get great information. A post about CockroachDB that had 20 boorish comments complaining about its name over there would have the designer of it over here answering technical questions about its capabilities.

THAT SAID, I think this might be what gets me to go back to that place. I used to come here to read about new Python tooling, latest database development news, interesting thinkpieces on development practices, etc. Now it's dominated by AI evangelism, "I'm Showing HN™ What I Used By Claude Tokens On :)", AI complaining, AI agent strategies, AI's impacts on the industry news, etc. There are some non-AI posts but not as many good ones as there used to be, and a lot of the non-AI posts quickly turn out to be AI written. Because they respect their time as a writer greatly and my time as a reader not at all. It's ClankerNews, the Hackers are in short supply.

You should elaborate your snarky rebuttal more.

Wasn't my first, but my first unintentional one was writing multiprocessing code with Python on Windows many years ago. Not sure if this is still true now, but if you didn't wrap your main entrypoint in a if __name__ == "__main__" block, and your code spun up a worker pool, Python would reload your module for every child since Windows doesn't have a fork() for it to use, and they'd all happily rerun the code to create children, and so on.

Little tip for anyone who decides to try this:

You need to enable IP access on the device you intend to connect to. It's under the security settings in RustDesk.

I've been playing around with it. The iOS RustDesk app is nice, and I've been controlling my Mac Mini at home using my iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard, and it's shockingly smooth!

How secure is all this? Not really into networking and I always wondered if this has any risks.

If you're just connecting over Tailscale and your machine is otherwise not exposing the (configurable) port to the internet, it's fine as far as I know. Set up firewall entries if you are concerned.

>This was the most-discussed finding in the HN thread. The general reaction: an LLM company using regexes for sentiment analysis is peak irony.

>Is it ironic? Sure. Is it also probably faster and cheaper than running an LLM inference just to figure out if a user is swearing at the tool? Also yes. Sometimes a regex is the right tool.

I'm reading an LLM written write up on an LLM tool that just summarizes HN comments.

I'm so tired man, what the hell are we doing here.

Today, on "how did I get here?"

As far as actual people? Depends on their personal moral code and is why colleges make people take ethics, even if I don't think that results in anything other than more elaborate ways to justify doing whatever they feel like anyway. Most people would agree that you should minimize suffering in others if you can, but people who make it to upper management and C suites often got there by not being bothered by such scruples.

As far as the company is concerned, obviously there's no reason not to care aside from not wanting to lose any critical employees who value stability. That's why many of the labor protections we take for granted now were fought for many years in the past.

One of the most surreal meetings I've ever been to was a company All Hands after a 20% layoff round. The upper management people who decided who was laid off took turns talking about how upset it made them to have to do it. They showed a diagram of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and went back and forth talking about what stage of grief they were in having to lay all these people off. Was like something out of the UK version of The Office. It was so tone deaf that it was bleakly comedic at a certain point.

The extra kicker was that there were a bunch of UK people in this meeting who knew they'd be laid off, but it takes longer to do the redundancy process over there, so they had to listen to these people complaining about how sad firing them feels.

The sad thing is they probably did feel bad about it! But nobody cares and talking about it at that time is incredibly tone-deaf.

>Although 80 % of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run in a LLM enginee for grammar and vocabulary cross-check, made it failed the "probable written by AI " metric; and it was rejected.

should be:

>Although 80% of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run through an LLM engine for grammar and vocabulary cross-checking meant that it failed the "probably written by AI" metric, and it was rejected.

  1. 80 % -> 80%
  2. in -> through
  3. a LLM -> an LLM
  4. enginee -> engine
  5. cross-check -> cross-checking
  6. cross-checking, -> cross-checking (removed the comma)
  7. made it failed -> meant that it failed, (or "made it fail" depending on whether you want to preserve the past tense or preserve the word "made")
  8. probable -> probably
  9. by AI " -> by AI"
  10. ; and it was -> , and it was (no need for a semicolon when linking with a conjunction like "and", and I would consider another word or phrase such as ", and, as a result, it was rejected" to emphasize the causal relationship between the clauses)

That's ten corrections that are fixing straightforward typos and/or grammar and vocab mistakes in one sentence. Most are fairly objective, though I can understand different opinions on 2, 7, or maybe 10.

Relying on AI for editing seems to have atrophied the author's writing if that is what he or she thinks is worth publishing on a blog like this. I would suggest practicing editing your own work and not even thinking about passing it through AI (especially when you were told not to use any AI!) to edit for a while. Given that English is not your first (or even second or third) language, I would also suggest having a native speaker with some demonstrable writing skill review your writing and give feedback on how to make it more idiomatic. For example, writing being "run through an LLM" rather than "run in an LLM" is a relatively subtle difference compared to the others, and it's very very common for preposition mistakes like this to show up when writing in another language than your first. I am still hopeless with French prepositions.

Typos and minor grammatical errors within a well-reasoned piece are aesthetic now, means you didn't run it through an LLM...

This is 2000s era middle school level English or below. I get not stressing things like judicious use of parentheticals and comma splicing, but if it's just stream of consciousness motor mouthing run on sentences, it gets fatiguing to read.