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I've always held dang in pretty high regard seeing his answers on controversial topics, and haven't seen what you said above.

Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post? If so, I would love to see the reasoning behind flagging this one, and dang's reason for keeping it that way. But of course, this is a private website, so I'd understand, albeit disappointingly so, if this is buried.


>Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post?

not at all, you click one button and you're done.

>and dang's reason for keeping it that way

I can dig up some recent responses if you wish, but his responses came down to "I think this is what the community wants" and "these topics are flamewar bait".


> I've always held dang in pretty high regard seeing his answers on controversial topics,

He's probably one of the best moderators on the internet. Thoughtful, patient, level-headed - determined to keep controversy to a minimum here, no matter what the controversy is.

Tech companies aiding genocide? US torture chiefs given top positions in the tech field? Post-adolescent racist ex-hackers given physical access to federal systems managing trillions of dollars? Too controversial. Maybe let one post a month slip through, maybe not.

The effect of suppressing this discussion, in dang's view, is to save HN from becoming a toxic flamewar wasteland like everywhere else on the internet.

There is another effect though - to whitewash techbro crimes, like aiding torture, genocide, and treason. That these crimes just happen to be making tech billionaires a lot of money (contracts, tax cuts, hush money, back scratching deals etc) is not relevant to dang's stated goal of creating a safe space where people can discuss number theory and computer games without too much reality creeping in.

You can see some of the many flagged DOGE stories in my favorites. Any that appear unflagged in there were only unflagged after hours of being suppressed, by which time the algorithm puts them on page 5 or 6.

And you can see dang's response to my request for a dedicated thread on this topic here [0]. That's the level of debate, and dang doesn't make any attempt to hide it. Posts requesting a discussion on all the false flags lately get some initial traction, and are then flagged within minutes.

> Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post?

Nope. It's an incredibly easy system to game; and this is explicitly by design to keep HN nice and anodyne, ie, inoffensive and utterly ineffectual against any group that is motivated enough to make a few legit looking HN accounts.

Is this sufficient in a time where you can verbally ask an AI to start a few HN accounts and make them look real? Dang says, shut up, Hacker News isn't a place for discussing hackers taking over federal systems. And we want that, apparently, despite all evidence to the contrary.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058574


This is very relevant w.r.t. HN being LLM-related and to the current political climate. It is also easily verifiable as a few X/Grok links on this thread show. Why is it flagged?

Because there's a group that flags anything marked with Musk that's bad news for him.

It's the "absolute free speech" unit that does it.

I think what Grok's team did was deadly wrong. I didn't flag this submission. Instead, I'd rather see discussions. So this is just my speculation: people on the left on HN flagged the posts they didn't like left and right, and they loved to attack one's motives. So, it's only fair game that people who support Elon or Trump or whatever flag the posts they don't like. The Iron Law of Reciprocity, right? Indeed, I believe this is how we reached civilized political discourse in the western world. Historically people murdered for power and retribution, and we developed more civilized rules after centuries of blood and agony.

>people on the left on HN flagged the posts they didn't like left and right

any proof?

> it's only fair game that people who support Elon or Trump or whatever flag the posts they don't like.

two wrongs don't make a right.


I wonder how that differs from the sibling post with the exact same prompt? https://x.com/i/grok/share/fov27TB0Zn9jH5ZYIV70nTqN2

Is there some entropy or randomness at play here? Or some sort of RAG? Even if it was RAG, the "reasoning" is very different and doesn't mention the clear censorship in the initial prompt that the one I linked mentions.


See: the parameter "temperature" for LLMs

Property taxes work like that. People sometimes sell houses because they can't afford their property taxes when their assets increase in value substantially. Not saying I agree with that or not, but it is reality today.


They are taking the devices back for recycling.


Or, for read scenarios, putting a CloudFront distribution in front of the bucket!


You can get close with a Cognito Identity Pool that exchanges your user's keys for AWS credentials associated with an IAM role that has access to the resources you want to read/write on their behalf. Pretty standard pattern.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/co...

edit: I think I misread your comment. I understood it as your app wanting to delegate access to a user's data to the client, but it seems like you want the user to delegate access to their own data to your app? Different use-cases.


The best gem in all of it is this:

> You can make classes, but you can only ever make one instance of them. This shouldn't affect how most object-oriented programmers work.

This describes my experience with most OOP code very well.


I think the best gem is the ability to delete paradigms.

As for OOP, a bit more realistic would have been to restrict interfaces to at most one implementation.


One real implementation and many implementations for testing that do whatever the consumer wants them to do.


I've seen this called "bulldozer code". As in "Hey, all of those plain functions need to be OOP! Get a big earth moving machine and gently push them inside the curly braces of a class! Which class? Any class!"


I love Singletons and God Classes. ;)


Factories and Managers. Don't forget Decorators!



The original comment from Joel on Software has been preserved with comments at:

https://gwern.net/doc/cs/2005-09-30-smith-whyihateframeworks...

Note that one of the comments is from me :-)


First time reading this. Thanks for the laugh. Trigger warning for those who have worked on legacy Java/C# code.


I'd like the extend the Trigger warning to people still building Java apps because it's the same shit.


You really need a visitor pattern factory factory for trigger warnings.


This thread slice is making me feel really bad.


Sturgeon's Law: "90 of everything is crap".

It's no surprise that when you make virtually all mainstream programming languages OOP, then there will be a vast amount of bad OOP code out there (as by definition mainstream code then becomes "OOP code").


I like how you forget the % after 90.

DreamBerd probably allows this.


IIRC, numbers without a percentage sign are assumed to be percentages. Numbers that are not percentages have to be followed by ;% (the semicolon is the NOT operator in DreamBerd).


I think they actually meant that there are 90 crap OOP language implementations and the infinite quantity that remain are ‘not crap’


Maybe you can hoist % symbols like you can hoist variables.

If not, maybe you can hoist the ability to hoist % symbols, before which you can hoist % symbols.


Why waste time type lot char, when few char do trick


Ouch, that is a harsh view. Black & white thinking leads to depression in people with a disposition. Questioning these thoughts helps.

I'm more inclined to follow the bell curve. 10% crap, 40% mediocre but rather bad, 40% mediocre but rather good and 10% great.


> Black & white thinking leads to depression in people with a disposition.

That sounds interesting. Who has researched/written about that?


This is awesome! I've been using https://jguitar.com/ for quite some time, specially the scales portion of it. I'll give this a try!


Most people in the world are sexually active before 18. Your teenage years are you prime years of curiosity. Now, yes, they shouldn't be engaging in sexual activities with older, more mature people. But there's zero problem in late teens just being teens and discovering themselves. The more information they have on how to do that safely, the better. This law (and your puritan line of thinking) does the exact opposite. Expect to see a rise in teenage STDs and pregnancy.


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