when I worked on an extremely difficult geneology project, where much of the family had absolutely no birth or death records - newspaper obits become an unbelievably accurate way to find out a person’s siblings, when they were born/died, and geographical information. Old records, especially those of african americans, were often completely incorrect, mispelled, or missing entirely - but obits don’t really ever lie.
I’d write my own but I’m afraid there’s not much to write about.
Kind of tangential, but this article mentions Twitch Boost - I can't imagine small creators having any real issue with this. Building momentum on twitch is hard, and usually involves a ton of luck. If you have no viewers, you get few recommendations, until either the algorithm helps you out and you get lucky or you get a big raid/rehost that gives you the momentum to grow. It's either that or you happen to be one of the first streamers of some entirely new gaming category that doesn't have any big names attached to it, you get lucky there, and grow.
Offering a shortcut to skip all that and pay for growth seems like a common sense move for a lot of small creators. I struggle to think of the arguments against it - are they concerned big creators will flood money into it and drown out smaller ones? They already drown out smaller streamers, especially in streaming categories that are very "saturated." They also have no incentive to boost their stream, they're already top of the recommendations anyway.
Great revenue idea, and a change I as a small creator was welcome to see. Often I have viewers want to spend their channel points or bits or whatever they're called and I tell them to save it, I don't seek profit off of what I do (plus twitch takes it all anyway) I have a day job - but I do feel bad because they seem to want to spend it on something and I only have enough energy and bandwidth to add custom emojis or bot commands, which are dumb and people tire quickly of anyway.
Partner here - I don’t know the precise TOS here because it’s twisty and constantly changing but I have streamed now for almost 10 years as a partner with a micro following, my account balance to this day is like $46. They make every excuse possible not to give you money or put arbitrary restrictions on how much you should stream to access it, to the point I just stopped and put a paypal link on my profile and said dont give it to twitch. They steal a lot from smaller partners. However, it’s a good platform so I just take it. Kind of on the theme of this thread, lol. You choose to build a castle in someone else’s kingdom because there’s no other place.
Not really trying to start a political debate, but,
> would be a significant escalation that threatens to spark an all-out war in the Middle East that the Biden administration has desperately tried to avoid.
Did they, though? Because every single action the US has taken in the last ~year seems to have been leading to this exact outcome.
The US is the reason Israel didn't respond to the April attacks from Iran. They have also been breathing down Israel's neck about their use of force and escalation problems in Gaza and now Lebanon.
You would have to do a very bad faith reading of the news over the last year to imply the current administration has been trying to increase tension between Iran and Israel.
In 2024, U.S. officials expressed increasing frustration for Netanyahu due to his handling of the Gaza war and relations with the U.S. There were tensions over his reluctance to negotiate ceasefires and his perceived prioritization of political survival over broader strategic interests.
There were serious criticisms, including calls for him to step down.
My evidence seems more ironclad to counter the idea that approval for Netanyahu is not "unconditional". You know criticisms are a conditional approval by definition, right?
No, I didn't miss that, nor did I miss the millions of dollars of weapons this administration has also sent, nor the warships and troops - that doesn't seem very "de-escalate"y to me, personally, but maybe I'm nuts.
I am not sure what you are implying - the US parking warships nearby seems like a strong deterrent. It didn't work this time, but it didn't mean it's a bad idea.
Deliberate misunderstandings or just a general incomprehension of how deterrence works.
You use deterrence to prevent a bigger conflict. It's on Israel and its leadership (Bibi) that they used the lull between their increasingly brazen attacks against their opponents as an excuse to launch a full scale invasion of a neighbouring country.
Israel didn't start many conflicts, I have none in my head. This of course was also caused by an attack by Hamas and Hezbollah, which lead us to today.
And you are cleary using a false argument. GP said that the conflict werent started by israel while your argument is about who started the kinetic war.
A conflict in these cases started before the first shot was fired, hence your take is just wrong.
Right, I was talking about kinetic engagements. Which are pretty much all that matter when one makes the mistake of stepping into these silly "who started it?" debates.
As for who started the whole "conflict" in Palestine, metaphysically speaking -- we all know the answer to that question.
So is alcohol - there are plenty of people who gamble responsibly and get enjoyment out of it. Taking away the entire thing rather than simply making sensible regulation and dealing with scumbag behavior by corporate bookies is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, not to mention extremely moralistic. And, in the end, prohibition never works - bookies still and always will exist.
> And, in the end, prohibition never works - bookies still and always will exist.
I don't think that's exactly true. Laws introduce varying degrees of friction for citizens to do something.
It's like entrepreneurship. If there are a bunch of laws in place making it hard to start a business, fewer people will start businesses. Some people will still create illegal businesses on the black market, but lots of law abiding citizens will just stop creating businesses because there's too much friction to bother.
That fails to acknowledge that a) the black market tends to be dramatically less safe b) it drives addicts underground where it's hard to identify and help them and c) the addicts this is meant to help will be disproportionately willing to participate in this new, much worse black market.
Bookies scale very well, a small number of them could serve whatever clientele is still interested.
It'll probably turn out similarly to drugs. Prohibition keeps your average citizen away, and makes the market much worse for anyone left in it.
>b) it drives addicts underground where it's hard to identify and help them
I'm not sure about B, it's pretty easy to identify an addict.
The problem I have with sports gambling is the massive commercialization and advertising. We don't tolerate it for cigarettes, and gambling addictions are much worse than cigarette addictions in terms of financial harm.
Gamblers know where to go, but the purpose of all the advertising is attract new gamblers, preferably the compulsive kind.
Another harm is what it does to the integrity of sports. There are famous cases like the 1919 White Sox and Pete Rose. The people who took part were banned for life for a reason.
What do you mean prohibition never works? Are you really going to claim legalizing sports betting a few years ago DIDNT increase gambling in the US? This doesn't strike me as a good faith comment just a platitude
Sure, but if people, for example, started to declare bankruptcy due to gambling addiction, doesn't that mean that taxpayers like you and I are effectively subsidizing these gambling institutions?
That goes beyond moralism; most people don't want to pay higher taxes. I think that it's good that we have a safety-net for people who get into impossible levels of debt, but that does mean that we have an interest in figuring out ways to minimize how often bankruptcy is actually invoked.
Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in this space can spot them pretty quickly/easily. They tend to stick to certain scripts and themes and almost never deviate.
In my experience, that's not true. Rather, people are much too quick to jump to the conclusion that so-and-so is a bot (or a troll, a shill, a foreign agent, etc.), when the other's views are outside the range of what feels normal to them.
I've written a lot of about this dynamic because it's so fundamental. Here are some of the longer posts (mini essays really):
Since HN has many users with different backgrounds from all over the world, it has a lot of user pairs (A, B) where A's views don't seem normal to B and vice versa. This is why we have the following rule, which has held up well over the years:
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In my research and experience, it is. I’m making no comment about bots/shills on this site, either, I’m responding to the plausibility of the original comment.
> I’m making no comment about bots/shills on this site, either, I’m responding to the plausibility of the original comment.
The original comment:
> I wonder the same about HN. Has anyone done this kind of analysis? Me good LLM
Slightly disingenuous to argue from the standpoint of "I'm talking about the whole internet" when this thread is specifically about HN. But whatever floats your boat.
The claim is not "zero bot activity" - how would one even begin to support that?
Rather, the claim is that accusations about other users being bots/shills/etc. overwhelmingly turn out, when investigated, to have zero evidence in favor of them. And I do mean overwhelmingly. That is perhaps the single most consistent phenomenon we've observed on HN, and it has strong implications.
If you want further explanation of how we approach these issues, the links in my GP comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710142) go into it in depth. If you read those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I can take a crack at it. Since you ask (in your other comment) whether HN has any protections against this kind of thing at all, I think you should look at those past explanations—for example the first paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725.
Alright, thanks. I read your explanations and they do answer some of my questions.
I'm still surprised that the percentage of this activity here is so low, below 0.1%, as you say. Given that the modern internet is flooded by bots—over 60% in the case of ProductHunt as estimated by the article, and a third of global internet traffic[1]—how do you a) know that you're detecting all of them accurately (given that it seems like a manual process that takes a lot of effort), and b) explain that it's so low here compared to most other places?
Most of the bot activity we know about on HN has to do with voting rings and things like that, people trying to promote their commercial content. To the extent that they post things, it's mostly low-quality stuff that either gets killed by software, flagged by users, or eventually reported to us.
When it comes to political, ideological, nationalistic arguments and the like, that's where we see little (if any) evidence. Those are the areas where users are most likely to accuse each other of not being human, or posting in bad faith, etc., so that's what I've written about in the posts that I linked to.
There's still always the possibility that some bad actors are running campaigns too sophisitcated for us to detect and crack down on. I call this the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator problem and you can find past takes on it here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I can't say whether or not this exists (that follows by definition—"sufficiently" means smart enough to evade detection). All I can tell you is that in specific cases people ask us to look into, there are usually obvious reasons not to believe this interpretation. For example would a sufficiently smart manipulator be smart enough to have been posting about Julia macros back in 2017, or the equivalent? You can always make a case for "yes" but those cases end up having to stretch pretty thin.
Dang, I agree with and appreciate your moderation approach here and I completely agree with most of what you said. IME the last 18 months or so I’ve been here, this has been a welcome bastion against typical bot/campaign activity. Nowhere in the web seems safe the last ~dozen years. Most of what I’ve written here applies to my research of foreign bot activity on social networks, particularly in election years, in which you can far more easily piece together associations between accounts and narratives and writing style and piece together a lot more dots than on a site like this - and conclude very definitively that yes, this is a bot.
My original comment was just meant to chime in that, in the wild the last ten years, I’ve encountered an extraordinary amount of this kind of activity (which I confirmed - I really do research this stuff on the side and have written quite a lot about it) - that would support credibility to anyone that felt they experienced bot activity on this site. I haven’t done a full test on this site yet, because I don’t think it’s allowed, but at a glance I suspect particular topics and keywords attract swarms of voting/downvoting stuff, which you alluded to in your post. I think the threshold of 500 upvotes to downvote is a bit low, but clearly to me what you are doing is working. I’m only writing all of this out to make it very clear I am not making any criticisms or commentary about this site and how it handles bots/smurfs/etc.
Most of my research centers around 2016,2020 political cycles. Since the invention, release, and mass distribution of LLM’s I personally think this stuff has proliferated far beyond what anyone can imagine right now, and renders most of my old methods worthless, but for now that’s just a hypothesis.
Again, I appreciate the moderation of this site, it’s one of the few places left I can converse with reasonably intelligent and curious people compared to the rest of the web. Whatever you are doing, please keep doing it.
I think that HN may in general be an outlier here. Typically outright political content is not allowed, along with religious which is quite often intertwined with politics. Because of the higher quality of the first pass filter here (users flagging this stuff), you don't see the campaigns here that you do on typical social media.
For example in Reddit you'll see accounts that are primed, that is they reuse other upvoted/mostly on topic older existing user replies on new posts of the same topic to build a natural looking account. Then at some point they'll switch to their intended purpose.
Thank you. I appreciate your positive outlook on these things. It helps counteract my negative one. :)
For example, when you say "The answer to the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator is the Sufficiently Healthy Community", that sounds reasonable, but I see a few issues with it.
1. These individuals are undetectable by definition. They can infiltrate communities and direct conversations and opinions without raising any alarms. Sometimes these are long-term operations that take years, and involve building trust and relationships. For all intents and purposes, they may seem like just another member of the community, which they partly are. But they have an agenda that masquerades as strong opinions, and are protected by tolerance and inclusivity, i.e. the paradox of tolerance.
2. Because they're difficult to detect, they can easily overrun the community. What happens when they're a substantial percentage of it? The line between fact and fiction becomes blurry, and it's not possible to counteract bad arguments with better ones, simply because they become a matter of opinion. Ultimately those who shout harder, in larger numbers, and are in a better position to, get heard the most.
These are not some conspiracy theories. Psyops and propaganda are very real and happen all around us in ways we often can't detect. We can only see the effects like increased polarization and confusion, but are not able to trace these back to the source.
Moreover, with the recent advent of AI, how long until these operations are fully autonomous? What if they already are? Bots can be deployed by the thousands, and their capabilities improve every day.
So I'm not sure that a Sufficiently Healthy Community alone has a chance of counteracting this. I don't have the answer either, but can't help but see this trend in most online communities. Can we do a better job at detection? What does that even look like?
If you come up with good ideas on this problem you should share them, but the core of this thread is that having commenters on thread calling out other commenters as psyops, propaganda, bots, and shills doesn't work, and gravely harms the community, far more than any psyop could.
Does it, though? The reason why I ask such a loaded question is because I believe this is actually part of the 'healthy community' framework. It can be thought of as the communities immune system responding to what they perceive as outside threats to the system and is, in my opinion one of the most well known phenomenon in internet communities that far predates HN.
The modern analogy of this problem is described as the 'Nazi Bar' problem and is related to the whole Eternal September phenomenon. I think HN does a good enough job of kicking out the really low quality posters, but the culture of a forum will always gradually shift based on the fringes of what is allowed or not.
How is that different from humans? Humans have themes/areas they care more about, and are more likely to discuss with others. It's not hard to imagine there are Russians/Chinese people caring deeply about their country, just like there are Americans who care deeply about US.
If the comment is off-topic/breaking the guidelines/rules, it should be removed, full stop.
The difference is that the bots comment should be removed regardless if the particular comment is breaking the rules or not, as HN specifically is a forum for humans. The humans comment, granted it doesn't break the rules, shouldn't, no matter how shitty their opinion/view is.
If posts make HN a less interesting place to converse I don't see why humans should get a pass & I don't see anything in the guidelines to support that view either.
C’mon. When you have an account that is less than a year old and has 542 posts, 541 of which are repeating very specific kremlin narratives verbatim, it isn’t difficult to make a guess. Is your contention that they are actually difficult to spot, or that they don’t exist at all? because both of those views are hilariously false.
I feel like you're speaking about specific accounts here, since it's so obvious and exact. Care to share the HN accounts you're thinking about here?
My contention is that people jump to "It's just a bot" when they parrot obvious government propaganda they disagree with, when the average person is as likely to parrot obvious propaganda without involving computers at all.
People are just generally stupid by themselves, and reducing it to "Robots be robotting" doesn't feel very helpful when there is an actual problem to address.
No, I'm not. And I don't/won't post any specific accounts. I'm speaking more generally - and no one is jumping to anything here, you're projecting an argument that absolutely no one is making. The original claim was that russian/chinese bots were on this platform and left. I've only been here about 1.5 years, so I don't know the validity of that claim, but I have a fair amount of experience and research in the last ten years or so on the topic of foreign misinformation campaigns on the web, so it sounds like a very valid claim, given how proliferate these campaigns were across the entire web.
It isn't an entirely new concept or unknown, and that isn't what is happening here. You're making a lot of weird assumptions, especially given the fact that the US government wrote several hundred pages about this exact topic years ago.
> and no one is jumping to anything here, you're projecting an argument that absolutely no one is making
You literally claimed "when you have accounts with these stats, and they say these specific things, it isn't difficult to guess..." which ends with "that they're bots" I'm guessing. Read around in this very submission for more examples of people doing "the jump".
I'm not saying there isn't any "foreign misinformation campaigns on the web", so not sure who is projecting here.
Not at all - ten years ago russian misinformation campaigns on twitter and meta platforms were alive and well. There was an entire several hundred page report about it, even.
These kinds of arbitration clauses make me almost irrationally angry because if very seriously challenged by any real firepower, don’t seem to have any real standing in a court of law, and if it does, the law clearly needs to be rewritten.
as a consumer now I have two choices - one being to completely abstain from normal consumption practices, and be labeled a paranoid weirdo for not wanting to participate in any of these corporation’s services lest I get into some horrible unlikely predicament later and have no recourse because I used a starbuck’s at a disney park’s subsidiary once. Or just succumb, knowingly or unknowingly.
Just completely beyond the pale to me. It’s almost satirical.
I appreciate the sentiment, but may I ask why, or for what purpose?
Some of this makes me extraordinarily angry because it isn’t just the ridiculous arbitration clause thing, it’s the symptom of a much larger problem that over the past couple of years I’ve deemed completely hopeless.
Voting - doesn’t really work in my mind, partly because politicians are in the pockets of big companies or lobbies, and even if they werent, they control most of the information the voting populace consumes and control/inject narratives as they please. Not even to mention the courts, or the impossible nature of the current 2 party climate (USA)
protest - first requires a critical mass of enough people being mad to actually do something about it (see corporate bootlicker comments all over the web for evidence why we’re nowhere close). If that critical mass is achieved, you may still get punished severely by the state in the form of riot police or other forms of police harassment, especially if youre an organizer
crime/sabotage - not particularly appealing to me because I loathe the idea of prison, but even if it weren’t for that, this is a powerful enemy you have no hope of beating and I think would be the least effective
journalism - this probably has the most chance and something Ive been working on on the side, writers like Ed Zitron have done a very good job so far at screeching into the void about how effed this is, but this also faces similar issues as protesting or voting - the state has methods to intimidate you into stfu’ing, and companies have methods to make sure you’re never heard by a significant audience
last option, I guess, is to just be extremely angry and bitter, which isn’t great either.
Voting - First-pass-the-post fails mathematically once two majority parties come to power, no third party can win, and if both parties are subverted (into one hidden party with a hidden agenda) democracy then fails.
We are seeing a perfect example of this with regards to Harris/Trump. Trump closely aligns with Fascism, Harris policies closely align with Marxism/Communism. You only have a choice between the two, is that even a choice?
Protest - Has always relied on the inherent threat of violence and leaders being responsive to the groups involved. It has been shown in the last 20 years that the threat of violence no longer works, and leaders have learned to be no longer responsive at all once they have been elected so long as they don't commit any crimes or scandals that would force removal of them from their positions.
Additionally, when protests occur, surveillance of any protest guarantees government retaliation moving forward for all individuals involved. Surveillance is never by itself, there is always government harassment associated with it that are often impossible to prove. Any protester has likely seen the telltale signs of this, and it never ends. (i.e. mail goes missing, both sending and receiving, communications/cell phone calls become unreliable in ways ou can't know a message was sent, internet services may throw weird errors on a continual basis, email/submissions dropped silently (i.e. job applications/resumes, or other high importance items like taxes).
Crime/sabotage will increase as its one of the only viable response mechanisms, actual violence too because of the increased cost imposed through broad surveillance efforts. Protesting is protected under the law, but we don't really have a sound rule of law right now since surveillance allows attacks on individuals without attribution.
Journalism - not viable because state run media under the trusted news initiative can outspend and crush competition, and they violate journalistic practices (i.e. they don't distinguish or separate opinion/facts/must-runs from head office in their news broadcasts).
All this means is that the systems and society will slowly erode and fail, and wise people are preparing now because when order fails so does food production. In a grid down situation you need food, trusted people, and guns (to protect from the food being stolen).
Since you are into SRE/DevOps you are very familiar with cascade failures, and resiliency design as am I. If you have not read Mises, you might enjoy his works on socialism (written in the 1930s) as a structural analysis of how centralized systems involving people fail.
While it is an intractable problem at this point, it isn't hopeless, because it is not the end, but rather a new beginning. There will be dark times ahead, but being forewarned is being forearmed.
There are. The fact that the example that comes to a mind is a case from 30 years ago so heroic they made a movie about it hints this is pretty rare. There doesn’t seem to be an Erin Brokovich for every type of problem or even every location in the US.
John, it is rational anger not irrational, though not a lot of the general public get a background sufficient to express it appropriately, and there's been an ongoing trend of gaslighters claiming rational reasoning is indicative of psychotic ideation, autism, or mental illness, as a deceitful discrediting and nullification technique to curb any communications/discussion on topics.
Some may argue and contest what I'm about to say, but it is well established, primarily under Social Contract Theory (Locke/Rousseau/Kant).
A "rule of law's" primary purpose and function is in allowing non-violent conflict resolution between parties and people that are equal under the law.
Whenever the "rule of law" fails, it becomes a "rule by law", and it allows no recourse, coercing unequally under the law, either fully, or through byzantine/kafka processes; the social contract then fails, and these intolerable acts grow with increasing suffering until society falls back to a natural rule, which primarily includes violence (there is no other alternative when these events occur).
Your anger is a righteous rational anger because these things are well known in legal circles and by historians (its required curricula under political science and philosophy/law eduction iirc, and the outcomes are reasonably well documented in the historical context during several different revolutionary wars).
When you see these things happen, with these type of coercive actions within the courts, it is destructive and erodes the "rule of law" and undermines credibility of institutions, until it becomes a "rule by law", which as I mentioned has severe consequences.
The more widespread, the greater the severity of injustices and outcome. Incidentally, this is also largely why adoption of forced arbitration type clauses had so many respected professionals against it, not being swayed by the false reasoning of reducing costs because it opened up many avenues for corruption and denying/limiting rights to the courts, which are already limited by representation costs (annual median salary for the population is needed upfront to start a cause of action in many cases, few have this this since they spend it on food) and other things.
There are many components of a "rule of law" depending on who you talk to, but broadly speaking it must have 5 things: Independent Judiciary, Equality Under the Law, Laws that are Transparent and Just, and finally Accessible.
Arbitration fails these in several ways. Even the existing court system fails these, but that wasn't always the case, corruption and ruin have made these systems brittle.
Repeating the same mistakes from history is worthy of anger, and this is a rational anger because of the documented consequences.
With a layman's understanding of sea level rise projections from studies like this, I now have a macabre fascination walking around in popular public places that are either barely above sea level or already below sea level and have been for a long time - like Balboa Island near Los Angeles [0], and marveling at the fact that in ~100 years time these places may not exist at all or at least in a drastically different fashion than they do now. This became fascinating to me because some of these places haven't even really been around that long. In geological time scales 100 years is nothing, or even in human history time scales - places that are just a ~century long blip in the historical record can easily be forgotten by future civilizations. It makes me marvel at how much of human history we have likely lost to climate change and other external factors. To us, 100 years seems like an eternity, because that's beyond the span of most humans' natural lives. A mighty metropolis like Los Angeles at the bottom of the ocean in 2000 years may not even end up being discovered!
This is all I can do really because thinking about it with any other feeling than awe or apathy is extremely difficult. We're living in what will surely be a pivotal moment in history, and not all societies have been able to say that.
> In summary, the apology appears mostly sincere but is tinged with some defensiveness and rationalization, which might affect how it's received, especially by those who were most upset by the initial actions.
Maybe they should pivot to developing an AI powered suite of software license generation and code rebranding and serial number filing and non-apology apology writing plugins for VSCode, so they can say they eat their own dog food.
When 98% of your "product" is a thin wrapper around chatGPT, you will of course end up competing against every other product that is a thin wrapper around chatGPT.
Not really. The medical ChatGPT wrappers don't compete with the legal ChatGPT wrappers or the code editor ChatGPT wrappers. It has been argued (ad nauseam) that ChatGPT itself competes with all the wrappers, not that the wrappers compete with each other.
They don't compete right now, but surely the architecture of the system will be quite similar, or solve very similar types of challenges. So it should become easier to jump domains when these solutions mature.
A legal wrapper will use domain specific legal expertise to structure and develop their product and functionality. It will likely have many functions that are specifically optimized for the legal use case.
If a wrapper can easily move across many domains, then the wrapper likely adds little value to the base model.
I’d write my own but I’m afraid there’s not much to write about.
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