GenericDev

Hacker News discourse is of a much higher quality than any other social media website.

That said, the priorities of the community is frustrating as a lot of it's driven by venture capital and money. I know it's Hacker News, but that doesn't change the point that in order to participate in a higher level of discourse I have to tolerate a bunch of capitalist stans.

The community also has a profoundly noticable difficulty with empathy for people outside of tech.

The community also loves to self-congratulate itself for how much better they are than other communities while still having their own issues.

There are other aspects as well like when people are talking about X but then commenters chime in and start taking about Y or Z, and say it's so much better and completely go off course.

Lastly I cannot emphasize how much I hate the articles that make it to the top where they say "X is bad" only to try and sell me on a solution. I'm getting quite sick of that as well.

Again, the discourse is great and I love it. But I still think this community suffers.

I wish they would just let Reddit die.

I hate it so much. I'm tired of ecosystems.

We need to get away from content farms. Get away from shitty monetization driven efforts. Get away from shitty people moderating communities without giving members any locus of control.

Bring back the 90s web. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.

God I hope Reddit sticks to this API nonsense and kills themselves in the process.

Part of me wants this to happen to Hacker News too. This community sucks, but for different reasons.

Not a single mentioned of HTMX[1].

That's a real bummer as it's really the only modern web technology that's getting me hyped. Let's move it all back into HTML. I'm begging you all. Please, let's move back to markup.

[1]https://htmx.org/

They hate you because you spoke the truth.

So much of security is performance or ruining the convenience of things just for the sake of protecting things.

It's really frustrating. But hey it's to protect the kids or something /s

I know :(

We have no privacy anymore, and no recourse to take it back.

That's show-biz baby!

I would like to propose another candidate: Street-Fighter with Martial Arts training.

I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property.

I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology.

The internet archive is a huge boon in intangible value for communities and the world. It represents a huge cultural fountain that is accessible for anyone so long as they have the ability to access a computer.

A great example of this is that the Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There was a lost episode where OJ Simpson was in it and it never aired because of obvious issues. BUT there was a book published from the production called "White Rabbits Can't Jump"

https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl

I can't imagine being able to go to any publisher or paid streaming service or god forbid Amazon to find this book, and I sure as shit don't believe in this community to help create ecosystems to support finding things like this.

I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. And the fact that I have to read people in this community who sound like boot-lickers for corporate oligarchs and their shitty value adds to the world drives me so fucking insane.

I'm only commenting here because I feel it's important to articulate that there are people out there who care, and that the vocal a-holes on this site really miss the point and the intangible value of what the internet archive provides.

Call me Spider-Man, because "I missed the part where that's my problem" [1]

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCAaBWmKTDg

No it isn't.

I cannot tell why I'm seeing this all over Hacker News.

A Central Bank Digital Currency solves nothing. It only emboldens and tightens the grip of people in power.

By definition it is centralized and forces anyone who needs to work in an economy to be accountable to an entity that can and will remove access controls to their financial streams. It does not change anything in the context of the current financial environment. It does not make things safer for investments.

The only thing this solves is having money be digitized and managed by parties who are not trust worthy.

Get out of here with these comments. You feel like astro-turfing.

Not to disparage the poster, but these type of comments always come across to me as astro-turfing.

At no point has anyone been advocating for a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and furthermore the only people who stand to gain from this are the powers that be. I'm vehemently against a CBDC purely because I like to play a thought experiment if I were from the 18th century and landed in the present day, how hard would it be for me to engage with society. A CBDC is 100% the anti-thesis to creating and supporting people.

In short, boo to OP, I doubt their legitimacy.

This comment adds no value to the discussion.

Posting links without elaborating does nothing to engage, and actively diminishes the discussion.

This is such a blasé way of disassociating outcomes from actors and actions. We may live under capitalism, but people are making these choices.

We don't have to move in these directions, but people who work at these companies, people who are paid by these companies, people who are applying to these companies are all choosing to make these decisions and drive us to these outcomes. Every step of the way they have had the chance to say "no". They have had the chance to champion for a different outcome. They have been a piece of a broader machine that they could have collectively grouped together and said that we can be better.

Do not try to wave this away as "well it's capitalism, too bad, so sad". These are real people making these choices, and at the end of the day this is what they've chosen. And, the out come is incredibly sad.

I mean, I work in this industry and have worked for big companies in Silicon Valley and I freaking hate these companies and people.

These companies are all about profits at the cost of degrading living conditions and "disrupting" businesses, but in my experience it's all been a trend downward. One of my most favorite example is the whole Real Page renting price fiasco[1]. A bunch of a-holes who help landlords be worse.

And this is just one example. There's this other great example of companies and people using technology for terrible things like murdering people better. [2]

I mean, one of the most pernicious things to come out of the rise of technology is the complete lack of ownership of anything, ever. Streaming services have removed media ownership. Day one patches on games make it impossible to play games 20 years down the line, and that completely ignores the whole issue of trying to archive games that obligate you to have an internet connection for experiencing content. I miss peer-to-peer lan content.

And don't get me started on how tech has helped people be more "secure". Services and tools like Ring have only aided and abetted the worst types of community members in actively antagonizing neighbors and people because now they can watch people when they're away.

I cannot emphasize enough how upset I am that I grew up during the 90s where there was so much hope and optimism for technology only to see it grow and distort into ecosystems, fiefdoms, and toxic patterns that actively affect people physically, mentally, financially in ways that are negative.

So yeah, (apologies for the bad language), but fuck Silicon Valley, and fuck all these a-hole tech assholes who drink the kool-aid of "bUt wE'Re dIsRuPtInG ThE WoRlD To mAkE A BeTtEr pLaCe", because they're not, and I fucking hate them all.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-mak...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tXbrrQH36e8

You do not speak for me. I want decentralization, self hosting, and the right to repair. The modern technology ecosystem has failed me in every one of these areas.

I'm so thrilled to have come across this. Thank you for sharing this OP!

I bought a Steam Deck to get away from Windows entirely.

I'm not a huge fan of Apple for a lot of reasons, so eventually I'm looking to move to a Linux development environment, but at this point I don't think it's ready.

To be honest, I'm not sure what to do anymore. I hate the modern Operating ecosystem. I find little value in the additions, and the ever encroaching privacy issues is really problematic.

For now I can keep it at bay with MacOS and SteamOS. But where do I go after this?

This is so cool. I'm a sucker for card games and e-ink, so to get both in one serving is VERY exciting. Thanks for being an innovator :)

+1

Preach it brother/sister. Everyone is out here treating real estate as an investment and inserting themselves pointless middle-people extracting capital from those who are blocked from entering the housing market or even scaling their living situation to match their family requirements.

It's incredibly depressing to see comments like yours considered "wrong" and in the minority and even more so vociferously defended against in the name of "small-business owners" or the "capitalism IS fair" crowd. Despite those who succeeded being a survivorship bias group.

Housing is a right, and should not be an investment. To invest in housing alienates its purpose which is stability and shelter. It creates an antagonistic lens in which its ownership is held, not for those housed and protected by it, but those who wish to squeeze as much blood from the stone it has become.

Thanks throwboi123

Hard to feel bad for anyone who chose to work at Amazon.

I am thrilled at how well compensated software engineers are in America, but frequently it's a short-sighted discussion when talking to my peers about it and a bulk of it is completely ignoring the stagnant wages and buying power of the now carved out middle class. Engineers I've talked to are against unions, and frequently lack the empathy for service workers and others in trade, or at least show a shallow level of empathy.

So when people are being laid off from Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon I can't help but lack any surprise or empathy for these people. I don't wish suffering, but I am completely indifferent to their discomfort. These companies are legitimately bad companies who have demonstrated a repeated lack of ethics, and now engineers are sad because they're finally being directly affected by these awful companies. These engineers and these companies enabled and abetted a race to the bottom in products and services across the board. They've created and normalized toxic work environments that have eaten away at people who have/had potential to create and do potential good for the world. They have chiseled away at so many good possibilities that this world had. I have nothing nice to say about these companies or these people.

It's a tale as old as time, and yet it's still frustrating to watch these people lament when leopards eat their face.

The global dimming feature is insanely good. And it's incredibly easy to use from a development perspective as well. You can simply set the dimming as a percentage value and it hides the world.

It's incredibly impressive and to be honest it's a little surprising how good it is.

Man, you all are some of the biggest haters I've ever seen.

I've gotten to wear and use both the Magic Leap 1 and Magic Leap 2. These devices are like wearing technology 15 years into the future. It's absolutely wild seeing what is possible. It's crazy because you all are hating so much, but they're out here shipping enterprise products and services and doing it as a first-in-class device.

I'm especially confused because some of you are comparing this device to VR devices when it's a completely different product focus. VR != AR folks. And if you got the chance to try and see it, you would completely understand the vision.

I'm incredibly hyped about Magic Leap and can't wait for this technology to become more widely available. What they're doing there is nuts, and exciting!

All you all need to go touch grass.

Weird flex, but ok?