I'm not sure this is good advice. dang and the rest of the HN braintrust are very opaque about how your own flagging and voting affects your account, and I wouldn't be surprised if flagging or downvoting something like that increases the likelihood of you having some negative weight put on your subsequent votes/flags.
If the mods think your definition of "off-topic" and "spam" is too broad they will remove your flagging rights and your flags will simply stop working.
Upvote the wrong things too often and your upvotes will stop voting.
Downvote the wrong things too often and your downvotes will stop working.
Vouch for the wrong things and your vouches will stop working.
Everything you can do here is a privilege contingent on moderator assessment. Go against the flow at your own peril.
So then never upvote, downvote, flag, or vouch because you might lose the privilege to upvote, downvote, flag, or vouch. Still strange, but you do you.
Why the non sequitur? I never said it was a free speech zone nor was it implied by my other comments.
I'm just pointing out that it's a weird paranoia to be worried about how your votes, flags, and vouches get interpreted by the mods. "Oh no," you and the other guy say, "they might take away my flagging privileges if I use them." Ok, so out of paranoia you don't use them, which amounts to the same thing. The fear is in your head, get over it.
You asked upthread why we would have the ability to flag off-topic and spam content if the mods didn't want use to use it, and I'm giving you the answer. The mods only want us to use it in ways that reinforce the site's cultural norms.
It isn't something to worry about, but it is something to be aware of.
I don't "worry" about it, as I don't care about karma and almost never flag anything, but most other users care greatly about their internet points (it is orange reddit, after all), and as krapp pointed out, it's long been suspected that using votes, flags, vouches in ways the site algorithmically dislikes or that moderators find adverse results in the equivalent of "hellbanning" of those functions.
For example, I still upvote or vouch comments that I feel were unfairly downvoted or flagged, and at least for vouching, it certainly seems like mine don't work anymore. I guess I vouched too many no-no things, and now I'm on the naughty list.
The fact that dang and the other mods engage in what's effectively a form of low-level gaslighting and deny doing so ought to be reason enough for any HN to dislike them, and yet all I see is fawning praise for the work they do.
> At 67 I'm refreshing my calculus, linear algebra, and statistics
Does anyone else find this messaging from Anthropic's marketing department silly? AI ultimately devalues human knowledge by commoditizing it, which ought to make one less motivated to go out of their way to acquire it, not more. Yet if these comments are to be believed, it's the exact opposite, with (as of now) 72 instances of the word "learning" in this thread. This, as we barrel headlong towards a world where having a strong back and the ability to turn a wrench or swing a hammer is going to be more remunerative than being able to solve differential equations or follow some arXiv preprint about frontier models. (At least until robotics is solved.)
For me the biggest signifier is Spotify. They claim their (best) devs don't even code anymore, they use an internal AI tool that they just send prompts to which then checks out a personal test build that they can download off of Slack. "A new feature in 10 minutes!"
Okay, if that is the case, why have we only seen like 3-4 minor new QoL improvements in Spotify the last ~12 months, with no new grand features? And why haven't they fired 95% of their devs and let the remaining elite go buckwild with Claude?
Everyone here says "if developers are so much faster, why aren't we seeing more features?!" as if the only thing required to release a feature is developers.
My CEO keeps asking me "how can we go faster with AI", and my answer is "we can't, because even if we had developers that would instantly develop any feature perfectly, we'd still be bottlenecked on how slow we are at deciding what to actually release".
tbf they have been saying they've started doing this since December, so we're only a few months in. And like most software it's an iceberg: 99% of work on not observable by users, and in spotify's case listeners are only one of presumably dozens of different users. For all we know they are shipping massive improvements to eg billing
Because believe it or not, majority of users couldn't care less whether it is native or not. I don’t even see Spotify, it’s just something that lives in the background and plays music.
Strange subthread. I don't see Claude Opus 4.6 changing the tide for PyPy. There is no need to understate AI capabilities for this.
"Anthropic released vibe coded C compiler that doesn't work" sounds like https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1 passed through a game of telephone. The compiler has some wrong defaults that prevent it from straightforwardly building a "Hello, world!" like GCC and Clang. The compiler works:
> The 100,000-line compiler can build a bootable Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V. It can also compile QEMU, FFmpeg, SQlite, postgres, redis, and has a 99% pass rate on most compiler test suites including the GCC torture test suite. It also passes the developer's ultimate litmus test: it can compile and run Doom.
The primary objective is to retarget PyPy on top of the Python main branch. A minor objective is to document what of PyPy can be ported to CPython (or RustPython).
Keep a markdown log of issues in order to cluster and close when fixed
Clone PyPy and CPython.
Review the PyPy codebase and docs.
Prepare a devcontainer.json for PyPy to more safely contain coding LLMs and simplify development
Review the backlog of PyPy issues.
Review the CPython whatsnew docs for each version of python (since and including 3.11).
What has changed in CPython since 3.11 which affects PyPy?
Study the differences between PyPy code and CPython code to understand how to optimize like PyPy.
Prepare an AGENTS.md for PyPy.
Prepare an agent skill for upgrading PyPy with these and other methods.
Write tests to verify that everything in PyPy works after updating it to be compatible with the Python main branch (or the latest stable release, CPython 3.14)
> Anthropic released vibe coded C compiler that doesn't work, how their LLM can help in maintaining PyPy?
This is the perfect question to highlight the major players. In my opinion, a rapidly developing language with a clear reference implementation, readily accessible specifications, and a vast number of easily runnable tests would make an ideal benchmark.
Both programs have been announced as granting six months, but neither of them have explicitly said that there won't be options to renew for another six months.
I expect they haven't decided that themselves yet and don't want to commit publicly until they've seen how well the program goes.
Even if you’re right, no one should be making a decision of enrolling into those programs because maybe, with zero indication they’ll be renewed again in six months.
You know what they could also do? Stop the programs for new enrolments next month. Or if if they renew them like you said, it could be with new conditions which exclude people currently on them.
There are too many unknowns, and giving these companies the benefit of the doubt that they’ll give more instead of taking more goes counter to everything they showed so far.
No, my argument is that your “but neither of them have explicitly said that there won't be options to renew for another six months” point is not something anyone should realistically be counting on, and is not a valid counter argument to your parent post of “Isn't the Claude one only for a few months?”.
We should be discussing what is factual now, not be making up scenarios which could maybe happen but have zero indication that they will.
I didn't say that I thought they would likely extend it, but I stand by my statement that it's a possibility.
Neither company have expressed that the six month thing is a hard limit.
The fact that OpenAI shipped their version within two weeks of Anthropic's announcement suggests to me that they're competing with each other for credibility with the open source community.
(Obviously if you make decisions based on the assumption that the program will be expanded later you're not acting rationally.)
If I understand correctly, they are literally giving things away for free for a 6 months period and we are complaining that they don't promise it stays free forever?
No, you did not understand correctly. They are not “literally giving things away for free”, they are providing a very conditional free trial, which is a business decision and not anything new. Then a commenter speculated they might extend that program because they didn’t say they won’t and I pointed out it doesn’t make sense to assume they will. No one on this immediate thread made any complaint, we’re discussing the facts of the offering.
What is there to learn about all of this? The way it's presented makes it come across as an "end of history" technology with a low skill floor and a skill ceiling that comes down more with each iteration.
> but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc"
I immediately guessed that's what prompted this thread when I saw the title.
> I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.
No, you're not. Besides the OP and its abundance of upvotes and all of the green accounts shilling CC and AI, even more disturbing was the older accounts, some created more than a decade ago, posting in a similar bot-like cadence, shilling just as enthusiastically, and in some cases, freely interacting with the obvious bots. (And I say this as someone who's generally preferred to do throwaway posting on HN, so I feel uneasy automatically impugning green names.)
I can only guess there's a black market for HN accounts (as there is for reddit accounts), or perhaps some entities have been seeding bot accounts for years.
Honestly they might also just be super hackable. I don’t even know my password on this site but given I set it like 15 years ago it almost assuredly sucks (I will fix!)
I had no idea there was a black market for Reddit accounts. Count me naive!
I doubt Big AI is mass violating the CFAA just to shill, but maybe some other entity did the dirty work and is now reselling the accounts or indirect access to them, similar to the residential IP proxy business they use to disgusie their scraping.
As an aside, letting us easily view the flagged comments of a user would be an easy way of wading out corporate shillposters, since they shy away from posting anything controversial or offensive.
Even though I almost posted a comment like yours earlier ("I'm an African-American lesbian with a seizure disorder, and ChatGPT is finally enabling me to finish my novel!"), I'm not sure how many of these comments are bots, since many are from quite old accounts, e.g., this one replying in a bot-like manner to a fairly obvious bot actually registered in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286976
But when you inspect Mr. "AI girlfriend's" post history, even ignoring the AI promotion, it's all superficial: short, unargumentative, inoffensive posts. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a black market for HN accounts similar to reddit accounts.
Yeah, if you studied and mastered all of the various disciplines required for fabricating a bicycle, and then fabricated your own by hand and offered to do likewise for others, sometimes in exchange for compensation, sometimes for free (provided others could use the bike), only for some machine that mass produces bikes to (informal) spec that was built by studying all of the designs you used for the bikes you made to suddenly become widely and cheaply available.
The difference between having a non-technical person and someone who is capable of understanding the code being generated and the systems running it is immense, and will continue to be so over the foreseeable future.
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