sillysaurusx

I was wondering if someone would mention this.

It's interesting how much worse off the world would be if the smartest people were in charge of it.

What ultimately blocked his nuke proposals? (Why didn't anyone listen?) I'm curious about whatever failsafe that was.

It’s easy to hit your quota. “Speed up the compilation time of this C++ codebase. Feel free to use several subagents to search through the files in parallel.” That’ll cost you about $200 for a codebase of ~1,000 files.

Subagents are like trading derivatives. You can lose as much as you want.

It'd probably be best to give an example of an issue you're talking about. I thought you were saying to concede trans topics altogether.

This is probably a silly question, but is the internal monologue useful training data? It's where the work is done, but without the input or output, it seems hard to get any useful context.

In other words, what would the data be used to train for? It has to improve some kind of objective function. But it's a little hard to see what the objective function would be if it's just raw inner monologue.

What is it about Automattic's structure that lets Matt stay in control? Even Travis got ousted at Uber, and he was the primary founder. Is the company set up in a way that makes removing Matt very difficult?

It's starting to feel like MMOs were just a product of the times we lived in, rather than a separate genre of game. In ~2004 I remember at least four MMOs: Asheron's Call, Planetside, World of Warcraft, and Dark Age of Camelot. It seems like only WoW survived, and nowadays I'm not sure the experience resembles the original anymore. Oh, and then there's EVE-Online, Runescape, Ultima Online...

Nowadays it's mostly Roblox and Fortnite. I saw some 11yo's socialize the other week. One asked the other hey, do you play fortnight? And they swapped contact info that way.

What's the genre of Roblox / Fortnite? Live service games? It would be interesting to have a separate term for them the way we had for "MMOs".

MMOs were also fun from a technical standpoint. One of my big challenges to myself was to make an MMO. I learned a lot about networking that way. When I was 13 I even ended up on the phone with a local business trying to negotiate a dedicated 10 Mbit link. He correctly told me to just wait, that 10 Mbit won't seem so crucial in a few years.

Then there were the MUDs. I'm not sure if it's correct to call them MUDs, but Gemstone and Underlight spring to mind. Underlight especially was a charming little game where you were expected to roleplay in-character whenever you were online. Meaning, no discussion about the real world. It was very addictive for a socially awkward 6th grader to just vanish into this new world.

I wonder what kind of new genres of games people will be talking about in a couple decades. It's tempting to think there's something like "the MMO" that's yet to be discovered, just like the arena shooter was.

Agreed. The pool hall nearby has a game of pool for $2. But if you use a credit card the minimum purchase is $6 (three games) due to fees. It works, but I thought it was a gimmick to trap people into playing more pool until I saw your comment here and realized it was from fees.

> 90 percent of people who survived a suicide attempt reported that they had been feeling an urge to alleviate psychological agitation and pain that turned out to be temporal — like “being in a burning room” or wanting to “shut everything off for a couple of days,” Nock said.

I moved to Austin last week, away from my wife and 3yo daughter. It’s been torture. Today was the first time I could FaceTime with her without completely breaking down crying.

One annoying part about suicide is that if you reveal to anyone that you want to stop living, they usually treat you like a big risk, or think you’re insane, or worry you might hurt them, or be uncomfortable to be around you anymore.

Someone at a party was going through my key chain. “Mail key?” “Nope, gun key if I decide to blow my brains out.” That was basically the last time I talked to them.

For a datapoint of n=1, my biggest factor motivating me to do it is the constant pain. It permeates your whole chest, all day, every day.

I’ve been fortunate to make some friends here. But really, I just don’t want to continue living. In a way, it feels like being in a cult — everyone around me thinks life is so great, and that it’s so horrible if I cut it short. But cutting it short has so many benefits. No more job. No more boss. No more missing my family. No need to rebuild my life after 20 years.

Like, truly, other than seeing my daughter again, I don’t have a reason to keep going. Playing games is fun, meeting people is nice… but I’m alone in a 700sqft apartment with some cereal and Dino nuggets, fantasizing about playing tag with my daughter, and being incredibly jealous that the man who replaced me gets to experience “my” family life every day.

Suicide is appealing because life is hard. It’s so much effort. I just wish people wouldn’t cut me out for admitting it’s appealing, or try to force me into a hospital. I just want to be heard, not “helped.”

These studies presume that suicide is treatable, and that it’s a “thing” that can be “fixed”. But it often isn’t. You want to rebuild my life for me and go to work every day? I’d give anything to be on autopilot in my own head, and just be asleep.

I’m doing a little better. It’s just really hard, you know? I wish I could say “hey, I’ve had a good life. I’ve done a bunch of cool things. I’d like to call it quits please” without it being sacrilege.

Anyway. I wish all of you a great night. Hug your kids or your SO for me.

I had a nice mobile experience. It asks you to log in or create an account, but it’s along the bottom, and you can read all the content fine.

Thanks. And I'd never muck with the data. I worry about it being stale, but it won't ever be modified.

For posterity, here's a screenshot of what the activity on the Wiki looks like: https://i.imgur.com/w0uoAx1.png

It goes on and on and on, for months. July, June, etc. Pretty astonishing.

Is it natural? It immediately made me suspect AI, if for no other reason than every human is avoiding it now so they’re not confused with AI.

Props to the author if they simply don’t care though.

Thank you. That meant a lot.

Thank you for pointing out https://serializer.io. I hadn't heard of it.

Philosophically, it doesn't. No art project needs to exist. Neither did the first HN client app, or any of the dozen HN readers on the app store.

But "Why does it need to exist?" kills every art project, side project, or anything built for the love of building. None of those need to exist either.

There's also the argument that if something isn't forbidden, it should be allowed. The way you lose rights over time is by your existing rights getting clipped off at the edges.

A lot of the criticisms leveled at me here would also apply vs Google back when Larry and Sergey were grad students. If they'd had to worry that indexing content equals copyright infringement, they'd have a steep hill to climb.

No discouragement taken :) Thanks for the question.

Some people have asked for a "No AI" version of HN. That's one possibility.

Another possibility is to just stop cloning comments, so that only the articles are mirrored, and then launch the site. There would be few comments, but that might be a feature. I sometimes miss when HN was small.

A third is to AI-generate the comments. That way it's like https://reddit.com/r/subsimulatorgpt2.

Some further analysis that argues this is fair use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440395

There's also going to be an opt-out feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49439657

Actually, scraping a publicly accessible website has been litigated extensively. In hiQ Labs vs Linkedin, the court held that scraping publicly accessible data doesn't violate the CFAA.

Regarding copyright, copying for display purposes non-commercially seems to be fair use. There are four factors to fair use analysis: purpose (non-commercial art project), nature of the work (short factual public comments), amount taken (individual comments in context), and market harm (none, your comment still exists on HN and YC loses nothing). Three of the four factors favor fair use, and arguably all four.

The point is, it's not as cut and dry as you're portraying it to be. If you post data publicly on the internet, you should expect it to be read. The current legal system seems to support this theory.

Since this neither violates the CFAA nor copyright, it seems ok. Publicly posted content carries an implied license for reasonable access and display. That's why you can quote HN comments in a blog post without getting sued.

To be clear, no ads. I might have a donation link just to cover hosting costs, but I'm not trying to extract money out of this. I have a full time job for that. This is just an art project.

When you do that, the locomotives lose diesel and I gain diesel. When I copy a comment nothing is lost (except an insignificant amount of HN's performance, which I'm working with Dan to make sure to stay in bounds of).

It's open source. The point of open source is that you have a lit candle and I have an unlit one. Lighting mine with yours doesn't extinguish your flame; there are now two flames.

The site will eventually offer an extended API that shows content that the official API doesn't, like downvotes and [flagged] status. It's partly why I made it, since there was no way to see flagged comments without visiting HN directly.

It's CL now, actually :) Dang ported HN to CL, so I thought I should match it. SBCL performance is really nice, though I think the main slowdown was the global `atomic` lock. Removing that was ... hard.

I mean no disrespect. The site simply wouldn't work without it. HN has a million users or so.

Opt out is the best compromise I can offer. Without it, no site is possible.

You'll be able to claim your account on the site and then set yourself to "redacted" so that your content doesn't show up on it. (The claiming process is fun: I generate a 6 digit number, you put it in your HN profile, and then you get a link to reset the account password and sign in: https://i.imgur.com/OYaFZOI.png)

Certainly not trying to cheat anyone here. You ever make a model train set? It feels fun like that. Obviously it's not the real HN and I don't claim it to be. Suggestions welcome.

Part of the point of this is to offer an extended API that shows downvotes/flagged/collapsed/dupe/etc, all stuff the official API doesn't cover.

Yeah, I want to do it, I'm just not sure how to deploy an actual production harness. I got claude to generate some really funny convo threads: http://github.com/shawwn/hnsim (Check the text files like https://github.com/shawwn/hnsim/blob/main/sim7.txt.) If you think of a good way to deploy that let me know.

I was going to get a $100 Max plan and then try to janky rig it so that it runs in a loop on the server, or something. Definitely don't want to pay API prices. But maybe it's inevitable.

Oh no way, a fellow HN cloning nerd! Hi!

You’re absolutely right. It’s taken almost daily work from April till now, but I finally have almost everything. Navigation links were particularly tricky. I’d love to see yours too.

Right now it’s running locally on my laptop, but I plan to deploy it to https://news.ycombinator.lol soon. I was gonna make AI generated comments but the API costs are pretty high.

Source is fully available: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc

I started with arc 3.2, which is ancient, and implemented every missing feature one by one until I’ve mostly run out. https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... shows a chronological journal of the whole process.

Is yours up somewhere? Would love to compare notes.

EDIT: Here's a side by side screenshot:

HN Simulator: https://i.imgur.com/iZk5ypK.png

HN: https://i.imgur.com/ZocuK0L.png

It's fun to tab back and forth and look at the diffs.

I’ve been writing an HN clone that’s literally a clone. It copies all front page posts and comments. I just wanted to say publicly that dang is awesome. Instead of shutting down the idea, he’s been actively helping the project by answering periodic emails and… well, not shutting it down.

Not sure what to do with it yet. Maybe I could let users have custom filtering rules. But the point is, companies should support community projects like this, not throw around ToS violation claims like they’d hold up in court.

Legal advice costs a lot of money unless you find a lawyer doing it for free, which is rare.

I agree with the spirit of your comment though. More resistance would be a good thing. It’s just unfortunate how it seems to cost like $20k to $100k.

Nitter should put up a request for donations for legal fees. Lots of people are willing.

Make it easy on yourself and just use Tor. Clearing everything is a matter of clicking on "new tor circuit for site".

Some sites throw annoying captchas your way though.

That sounds infuriating. I hope you can recover your account.

> im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is.

> i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things.

These are incompatible. If you start a company, whether you're CTO or CEO, you'll need to sell things. Both founders have to focus on the product, since it's being sold to people. And people refuse what they don't like. Which means your most valuable feedback mechanism comes from trying to sell something and then doing something different in response, until people buy it.

> could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding?

You can, but your company will eventually die because you won't be able to raise more money. VCs want signs that a company is growing. So if you raise money and then ask for more without strong sales, they won't give you more.

> then pitch myself to vcs with hope of funding whatever topics im interested and have my company function like a research group except instead of publishing papers we build products? like no profit no big deal, i never intended to profit. which, is this not what openai is doing?

That's not what OpenAI is doing. They're so focused on selling that they were even willing to sacrifice some of their research culture just to get everyone on the same page of "we have to make money, otherwise research can't happen." Sam explained to everyone that money comes from sales, not research, and money is a requirement for research. Thus they had to focus on selling.