1,726 karma · joined August 3, 2011
HOPE is one of the best hacker conferences, and it's somehow [subjectively] friendlier than other. Feels like home, so if you're on hacker news, I guess you wanna speak at hacker conference or contribute to 2600? ^_^
Well, actually, the whole cancel culture dynamic is a softer alternative to what you just described. And it doesn’t even require you to be the actor — it can be your spouse, your child, whoever. One tweet and you can lose your job, your house, your marriage, especially in an economy like this it hits hard. It really is the same idea: "your whole life, and often your family’s life, can be destroyed in an instant." You won’t go to jail, but your life can still become miserable.
Of course, the big difference is jail time — and that matters. I'm familiar with cases where a 30-year-old woman was sentenced to more than 10 years just for donating $20 to Ukrainian forces (she was traveling to her mom's funeral and got caught).
And at the end of the day, all of this is politics. If you're smart enough and in Russia or China, you can learn to navigate it. But there's never a guarantee. You can still end up as "лёд под ногами майора" ("ice under the major's feet"), as the famous Russian punk rock singer put it.
In Russia and China, they have their own search engines, social networks, eBay/Amazon alternatives, and so on. These companies have produced great free software like LLMs, databases, development tools, etc.
Seeing a corporation lose control over the Internet is usually good news for us, the small people - even if that change is coming from the government.
I bought Macbook Air for $1k just one week ago. I can't be more happier. Fuck these ThinkPads.
My solo projects were on HN news multiple times getting hundreds and even 1000+ points (submitted by other folks tho). I am still building.
I didn't realize there is so many folks from HN building solo, so I literally 2 mins ago created a discord for all of us so we won't get lost after this post goes down: https://discord.gg/GaCz3qMK
(I think it's almost impossible to convince your interviewer into constraint solvers, while the concept itself is great)
> In our hyper-connected world, we've become slaves to the endless scroll. Social media, news, videos - the algorithm-driven content feeds are designed to capture and hold our attention indefinitely. We tell ourselves "just 5 more minutes" but hours disappear. Our brains are being rewired for constant stimulation, making us less capable of deep thought, genuine connection, and meaningful work.
> The Big Internet Button breaks this cycle by introducing friction back into your internet consumption.
"Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves. If they could have offered a better way to content moderation, or ability to tune algorithms, that would be a great thing.
I recently created YouTube algo booster (open source) that allows to take this control back a little bit: https://github.com/ro31337/youtube-algo-booster
I wish there is a law that allows parents, and individuals to have control over some social media and their algorithms. For now all they do is just prevent themselves from scraping and automation
It indeed decreases. When my spouse was diagnosed, they prescribed her anti-depressants. We replaced them with psilocybin. Never taken any anti-depressants.
We had a very serious case with multiple surgeries, chemos, radiations. Not one, not two, and not ten or even twenty. MORE than that.
The treatment still goes on, soon it is gonna be 5 years. With ZERO anti-depressants. And I've learnt how to grow them, not buying them.
So we don't need studies, we tested it the hard way, and it works :) I can talk about it for hours.
The same is true for spyware installed on employee computers. Google laptops will snitch on you if you even attempt to attach USB drive. While there is HDMI and KVMs, there is no point of having these restrictions.