altairprime

The broader industry pressure, at least as it shows up in HN posts about AI usage at work, is apparently to pressure ICs to manage AI workers without being granted access to the management pay scales. As we’re seeing on HN, a lot of our ICs are clearly itching to be managers when the workforce has no ability to complain about or contest their demands. It must be an infuriating time to be a middle manager, both jealous of the ICs who get to manage compliant workers rather than human ones, and terrified for their own jobs, and having to see HN enraged at all the managerial content being posted with ‘AI’ after years of HN rejecting those exact same topics when it’s about managing humans rather than AI.

(Outside of the context of HN I don’t have anything to say here about the industry as a whole. Someday in another more appropriate post about the tech industry I will, though!)

I’m talking about the new management focus at HN since AI lowered the bar for ICs to become managers, not about “management incompetence in tech”.

Hacker News didn’t turn into Reddit because of AI, but it’s certainly turning into Harvard Business Review. The primary benefit of the HN-saturating component of modern AI is about allowing untrained managers to delegate some or all their work to cheap labor. Without that benefit of delegating to one’s contracted agents, the majority of HN’s AI interests over the past two years evaporate. So, yes, we’re still an insider community for professionals, but a lot of those professionals have revealed their preference for management rather than individual contribution, and in a very short period of time. It’s no wonder the community is tearing itself apart: I can think of no greater insult to our ICs that aren’t interested in delegating their work to others, than turning this community into an HBR forum. “Ten ways to get more work out of your workers” is just as offensive a submission to ICs as it always has been whether they’re employers, contractors, or generative AI — but now that anyone can be a manager, with HNs mods choosing to remain powerless against submissions of managerial content, here we are. The only recourse left is for users to start flagging managerial content as unsuitable for the site, since the mods will be forced by their own adopted principles to accept that popular opinion as well. Sadly, I don’t think there’s enough ICs left here to outweigh the managers’ upvotes.

The company is “Adorn Cosmetics”.

This is a really terrible article. It feels like a paid placement by Roku that carefully avoids saying the one newsworthy thing: that Roku lost their license after selling out to Fox.

Search term ‘knowledgeconstructiond’ reveals an Ask HN from years ago about this, that only got a handful of comments but no serious attention. Duly noted for keyword search purposes.

UV Mie-void reflective metasurfaces in silicon (2026) https://doi.org/10.1117/1.AP.9.1.016002

The disease referred to in the title is “rickets”, for search purposes.

I love bank collapse in specific and macroeconomics in general as topics to talk at length about (friends and family can confirm), so I’m definitely not arguing in favor of my own interests here.

I’m arguing that this ambulance-chaser upvoting pattern on is an unhealthy thing for the community to do and that the offtopic guideline advises against it, regardless of the fact that I particularly love talking about some of these Breaking News events, too. Yes, the users and the mods disregard that off-topic guideline all the time, allowing popularity to outweigh the guidelines several times a day. No, I’m just as upset by this on topics I care about discussing personally. But someone has to stand up for the community against members mobthink once in a whole, however hopeless it is to do so. Thankfully, most of the time I just stay silent - life is too busy to tilt every windmill. It was fun to try otherwise here, but don’t worry, I’ll go back to letting the mob do its thing after this.

Definitely looking forward to engaging with the topic once there’s more to read and say about what caused it and these various noisy threads are a distant memory :)

One that was forced on something like one billion people, rather than just one, yeah.

There was a case a few months ago where the App Store was forcing an app reinstall into people’s phones even after they’d deleted it years prior, which I assume ended up being a server-side bug (perhaps a database shard had a defect?) since so few, relatively speaking, were affected.

I had to escalate to a cloud data repair through their support to unbreak my own database entries re: a different service. It took several weeks but it eventually got resolved.

This video was posted in April last year. Is there something specifically newsworthy about it?

If you long-press on it and choose View/Goto Episode/Show, are there any third-party apps listed as a way to watch it? If so, and you’re using any of those apps, then check each of their in-app wishlists for it as well; it’s possible that (unlike Netflix) they’re actually well integrated enough into the TV app to cause this. If not, in total seriousness, you could open an Apple Support case that might result in them asking permission to reset your watchlist database records cloud-side.

(None of this excuses the annoyance but I loathe leaving something untriaged when it’s a matter of seconds for the dice roll of helping.)

As a followup, I did a live test of my interpretation today on a bank receivership post and the various outcomes from that are as described above. For the curious, the public side of that test is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50381537

I disagree with the curiosity level of a bank collapse prior to a post-mortem analysis, when it’s not a bank intimately tied to HN’s usual topics. When we understand what led to this, I think this should be a front page topic on the site for sure! But without that analysis, it’s merely Breaking News with rumor and guesses as the primary foundation of discussing the event in any more depth than ‘whoah dang’. That’s not Hacker News? That’s just News.

This topic isn’t newsworthy for HN as presented.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

How is the collapse of Ueno Bank relevant to HN?

- It’s not closely tied to HN or the VC community like Silicon Valley Bank was.

- It’s not a bank that was noteworthy for innovations in HN-relevant topics

- It’s a standard ‘undercapitalization’ collapse scenario with no unique, newsworthy, or innovative HN-relevant economics or politics involved

So I don’t see why this is a worthwhile post here. This is, as of right now, a boring econ/polit event and will definitely be covered “on TV news” (and I say that as someone who enjoys studying and writing about economics!). Without further explanation of specific relevance to HN, it without the eventual ‘what happened and why?’ essays that will follow when Breaking News is replaced by Informed Analysis, I don’t think this (yet) deserves HN’s attention as a community.

Does the Department of Defense still have a clearance disqual for ADHD?

Sometimes, top security experts often can’t work for the U.S. government even if they do want to due to being ineligible for security clearance from checks notes gender and sexuality mistrust, non-zero drug usage lifetime to date, formerly grayhats, have ever sought mental health care, and/or anti-authoritarian viewpoints.

To clarify the title, “the DRM crack for the game comes with bug fixes”. Confusion would have been avoided with some light or heavy title editing to fit HN style:

> Onimisha: Way of the Sword crack comes with bug fixes

Removes the most egregious part of the title case, clarifying where the relevant component is relative to the title.

> ’Onimusha’ game crack comes with bug fixes

Highlights the meaningful part of the title, is more concise, etc. (I’m old-school so I considered replacing game with warez but no one knows that word anymore.)

The Maduro one, right at the top of the list, is pretty solidly relevant to your point. If I was paying attention to politics at the time I might have asked the mods to kill it — but I can already predict what they would have said:

‘We run HN mostly hands off, and when people are insistent on flagging or discussing a topic, there’s only so much we can do while remaining largely neutral per our founding ethics.’

I continue to insist that HN will need to take more actions that are perceived as biased, over the objections of its users, if it wants to become a healthy community; but I tend to do so in the form of one or two essay-length emails a year, rather than posting to HN. Here, I think HN needs to openly be willing to kill ‘not sufficiently specialized for this site’ submissions that are still of interest to the community, which will get them labeled ‘anti-this’ and ‘pro-that’ more often than now. (It doesn’t help that most users confuse ‘user action [flagged]’ with ‘algo/mod action [dead]’, either.)

To the best of my understanding, HN’s founding ethics prioritize community votes and flags over adherence to the guidelines up until the violations become hateful, interpersonal, or form a pattern of bad outcomes sufficient to earn action. Pressuring them to take a stand for or against the community on one specific topic that isn’t covered by those points is probably less likely to pan out, but I wish you luck all the same.

My rather red rural region, whose leaders have been signing datacenters to raze farmland for the county money that’s sorely needed, just evicted by popular vote every pro-datacenter candidate I can think of in favor of socialist-left candidates while also voting to raise taxes to fund schools. I suspect a load of business tax credits will be terminated over the next few years as a result. Good. There are other ways to bring a lot of money into your county than datacenters, and many of them involve taxing business profits after wages. Red doesn’t mean pro-capitalist, after all! Best of luck in your region :)

ps. Have never used tiktok

They’re now formally interested in doing one but, I imagine, not very urgently relative to flag reasons and other stuff.

Mission successful!

For future HN search purposes, that Android partner was “Videostrong Technology Co.”

Notable, given the headline, is that the city manager also quit, likely due to the mayor mixing personal funds and city business while not consulting with the city’s legal counsel. While I applaud the mayor’s willingness to apply Flock methodology to Flock’s constituency, I’m not celebrating this one like I would be if it wasn’t under such defective circumstances.

The paper’s abstract may answer your question. (see link above)

I only star projects to remind myself to go back and consider them on a desktop later.

Open source was never about metrics or downloads. It was about pride in one’s work. Are you proud of your work? If so, then you have succeeded — no validation of stars, upvotes, likes, or forks is necessary.

We differ on that subjective opinion: I feel the memo is rather bloviating and the Register’s opinion post about it rather less so. (This tends to leave me incompatible with Upper Management, for good or ill.)

I was very glad for that! It sounds boringly useless, and the extensive response to it is much more valuable than yet another corporate memo of spendthrift-firemore.

Edit: Yeah, it’s just stack ranking by token/use pivottable; keep your work within 1.5 stddevs of everyone else’s or get targeted. Definitely missable.

> We recommend paying special attention to the 10th percentile (finding those teams who aren’t embracing AI effectively and understanding why) and the 90th percentile (finding those teams who are heavily using AI and understanding whether they’re seeing delivery increases to match) of AI adoption.

There’s a missed opportunity here hidden in this drawback: while the site will likely never share downvote reasons with users (any more that it would share flag reasons with us, once those ship), the users who downvote with useless filler reasons could then be labeled as ‘bad faith voters’ by the mods (not for disagreeing but for having an absence of opinion expressed in the downvote reason) so that the ranking algorithm ignores their actions — both downs and ups. It would be an excellent form of penalty, because there’s no way for them to know if it’s applied or not without being in a (prohibited) voting ring, and it would waste dramatically more of their time for each useless downvote, and it would let us see what HN looks like when upvotes exclude those who openly disregard for the community and site’s health. That could be viewed as a win-win scenario!

People will just flag content that is compliant with the guidelines if you take away their downvote option, and flag reasons are already inbound someday. I rarely downvote and asking me to provide reasons (which would only be visible to the mods, same as flag reasons and in alignment with the ‘no accusations in public’ guidelines) would drive me to downvote more, since it would invest more weight into my opinion. Typing “This is a generic copy-paste of a rabble-rouse / talking-point that is unconnected to the post it was pasted into, and should be detached from the top thread and downweighted to the bottom of the discussion just above the blatantly-offtopic replies” is infinitely more attractive a downvote to submit than just clicking an arrow. I feel I can say with some certainty that the outcome would not be what you desire, but instead would result in a sea of downvoting that helps the mods identify and target uninteresting and bad faith participation (that often earns upvotes for also being popular or witty!) while leaving legitimate controversy alone. Though, I suppose, after a year of that, sitewide downvoting would decrease as users earn algorithmic quashes for their valuelessness. One can dream.