skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://archive.ph/PsooH

>An innovative E.V. ride-sharing program is bringing low-cost clean transportation to an agricultural town in California’s Central Valley. Others are following suit.
... the entire product is based on voting
I acknowledge your position but it is very blind to the real impact global warming is already having. Yes, we, meaning the decently off in rich countries, will adapt. In other places this is much more difficult - see Bangladesh, Pakistan, various sub-saharan countries.

We will not go extinct, but millions or tens of millions will die from climate change over the coming years and decades (and many have already died), many many more will suffer for it. No, technology will not fix this in the near term.

It's similar to air pollution, which we have many ways of stemming and are estimated to kill 7 Mio per year, much less however in todays rich countries which can invest to reduce it (and still do woefully little as everyone wants a big car). https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2
>You've agreed that a glitch that leads to complete data loss is possible.

Complete data loss of one instance (whether "instance" is a single computer or single site as in the case of a fire/flood). But random glitches, mistakes, or events without any intention behind them are very different from hostile actors. They don't work to spread everywhere. They don't actively work to hide themselves. Random glitches, mistakes, or events don't try to install rootkits and persist themselves.

>If you still don't backup

Ransomware operators aren't stupid either. We've long since passed the point where "just have a backup" naively is enough, ransomware outfits will actively go after backups if it can, trying to move laterally throughout the victim organization, as well as do things like keep a key around long after everything is encrypted so it can stay transparent for awhile. The idea being that even if backups it can't touch are happening, by the time the trigger is pulled and all keys deleted weeks/months of data will still have successfully locked up with the backup systems dutifully backing it up. For many people, individuals even not just businesses, "we can restore but everything for the past 1-2 months will be lost" represents major expense/pain. Particularly in a medical setting.

It's not that there aren't solutions to that too, and yes I'd hope a big organization would cover it, but afaik it's not as easy as I wish it was. I don't think the challenge of malicious for-profit actors should be trivialized in the way you seem to have been doing. And the value function of computers vs crypto is astronomical, I don't think it's reasonable to equate the two as you originally did either.
This is circular reasoning. The only reason it "generates profits" is that it satisfies a demand, from the public.
Oh dear, heaven forbid we keep wanting features that should have been there from day one after the ten year cutoff! Good thing you reminded us of that expiration date.
I think that's the emerging plan, yes.
It's more than a spam problem, though: you only have to look as far as Twitter to see that lax moderation that allows toxic or illegal content to exist-- even on a small part of the site-- can begin to drive away advertisers across the whole site, which could turn into a death spiral for Reddit.
> "What I'm suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy,"

If he wanted more democracy he would have listened more and sooner. He simply didn't like what he was hearing.

But let's not confuse things - Reddit is a business that wants to IPO, democracy isn't what this is about by any measure. This mess keeps getting worse (for Reddit but also all the communities on it) and he clearly lacks the means to navigate his way out of it.
To actually answer: Huffman's argument is that mods are like business executives and users are like shareholders, and therefore the users should be able to vote out moderators who are not acting in the users' best interests. He said this while also implying that the blackout was only supported by moderators, not by the regular users, and that this means that Reddit administration is having to step in to save the users from the evil, sinister "inactive" moderators who enacted the protest.

Since Huffman thinks moderators should be able to be voted out by users because the users are the primary "shareholders" of Reddit, the parent comment to yours is asking (rhetorically) whether they will extend those policies to the CEO and other administrators.
It doesn't need to do that on with 100% uptime on the day it launches. Especially if Reddit itself is going down this week.
Is this news to anybody? I feel like anybody who's ever read a book already understands this.
In addition to the issues everyone else has pointed out, unpaid volunteer mods give Reddit a lot of deniability.

If they switched to paid mods, they'd become much more strict on what content and opinions they allow, because to advertisers, things would switch from "reddit allows communities to moderate themselves and can't be expected to catch everything we don't like", where reddit can still get away with some amount of unfriendly content as long as it doesn't get too prominent, to "it's reddit's job to make sure that all content is advertiser friendly".

Similarly, if you have paid mods, what does that mean for subreddits which have the same topic, but were split over moderation disagreements? With volunteer mods that doesn't really matter to reddit, but if the mods cost reddit money, they'll want subs on the same topic to be consolidated, creating further friction and destroying communities.
Yes, I guess people would do something rather than nothing.

What a vacuous side-point to make.
I like how you think Reddit has the spare capital to hire mods. VCs are running for the door (that’s why it’s an IPO) and index fund retail investors will be left holding the bag.
I know I will get crucified for this here, but the more I think about it, the more I think that the current LLM architecture may be a 90% solution that is also a dead end.

I am not an AI expert though, so take what I say with a grain of salt...
> Welcome to do all the moderating yourself Huffman

This is obviously the endgame. I don’t even think it would be that expensive.
Profit being pointless is a weird take. You realize that generating profit generally means people are willing to forgo other things in order to obtain good or services you're providing, right?

If anything, I see profit as a signal that what I'm doing isn't pointless, by virtue of people willingness to pay for it.
It is pretty much impossible to protest without annoying anybody, and it isn’t as if they are out there blocking ambulances or something.
I've been on reddit for the majority of its life. Mods are dime a dozen.
"The trick is to do less and less of the shit you don’t like doing as you age, sorry I mean as you gain experience."

So this is why the people who've climbed the corporate ladder don't seem to jack shit?
Yeah before I deleted my accounts yesterday, the rate of weird pro-reddit admin comments was getting pretty high. It would not surprise me at all if they are trying to game the numbers more before their IPO, so they can claim they made the right decision.

Investors: do you due diligence! Reddit has used fake accounts in the past! :)
That’s how I thought about it (and lived) as well. Developers knew how to configure operating systems and databases, deploy them, etc. Everything but racking their own hardware. And sometimes even that.
https://<SUBSTACK_NAME>.substack.com/feed

Go wild
There are a lot of wannabes on Substack. There are wannabe "journalists" who don't leave the house and wannabe philosophers who don't study philosophy. There are lots of tech and VC types like PG who are nowhere near as interesting as they think they are.

Despite all these wannabes, there are probably 30 or so high-quality substacks that are actually worth reading. I wouldn't dismiss the entire platform.
People in IT what do you use now that Google is trash?
A decade ago it was super easy to find any solution to error messages, I could always find a forum with such obscure information thanks to Google, or even duckduckgo, but now, I've cycled through at least 10 engines now, and I'd say half the time I end up giving up as there's just no information to be found. While chatgpt can be helpful sometimes, it usually is my last resort and usually useless at that point.
Honestly, if mods can just be voted out by their community, it will be chaos and little noisy groups of people will ruin everything.

I am thinking this is not so much a well thought out and reasoned opinion after weighing up historical behaviour on the platform, but a whiplash to a protest actually having effect. Just maybe...
Imho this is as close as you get to what the intent of devops was originally.
I don't teach kids how to code, I teach them how to make games -- that difference dramatically changes their interest.
No, "most people" are happy with the way things are. And as it turns out, people reading and posting on HN are not most people.
Yup, variety is a big part of it. You don't just want a large language model that can produce meticulous text, you also need to be able to handle user input, which will frequently include faulty input itself. Otherwise you end up with something as mechanic and inflexible as google assist. Interactions with large language models can be much more organic if you have this kind of input data.
There's a silent majority - "lurkers" - that the mods have completely ignored over the course of their tantrum. I've commented more in the past few days than i have in the past few months, because it's obvious the mods have completely lost perspective of the average user experience.
Depends on what you are looking to create. Good writing? Then it is an issue. Authentic seeming writing? Then it is exactly what you want.
If you have more than 50% and your actions are deemed to be against the company the minority stakeholders can ask legally to take control. Even if no actions are taken but your statements appear incoherent
Charlie Guo - Artificial Ignorance. I don't have time to keep up with everything going on in the AI world, and Charlie's writeups each week keep me up to date enough to not feel lost.

Shameless plug, I write Mostly Python, so I read that many times before it hits my inbox. :)

https://www.ignorance.ai

https://mostlypython.substack.com
I'm surprised that noone came up with a free (libre) alternative to reddit where each subreddit would be a deployable standalone server. Or is there a project like that that I'm unaware of?
The blog is just hugo so it's 100% static files over nginx.

The search engine is serverside-rendered mustache templates via handlebars[1], via served via spark[2]. It's basically all vanilla Java. I do raw SQL queries instead of ORM, which makes it quite a bit snappier than most Java applications. The sheer size of the database also mandates that basically every query is a primary key lookup. The code is written around that constraint.

Although the search engine is a bit on the slow side since it's routed through cloudflare and I think I'm relatively far away from the closest datacenter so it adds like 100ms to the load times.

[1] https://github.com/jknack/handlebars.java

[2] https://sparkjava.com/
I'm torn.

There is a well-known cabal of reddit mods that control many of the most popular subreddits [1] and many of them act like the subs they mod are their personal fiefdoms. Some of them have been alleged to exploit their subs for financial gain, or personal karma gain [2] at the expense of regular users

Some of these mods have operated in cahoots with Reddit Administration to squelch stories they didn't like [3], to push a political narrative, or to stop grass roots issues. While I recognize people should live harassment free, they need to operate with a great amount of editorial discretion to keep conversations on topic and apropos.

[1] https://www.cracked.com/article_29675_the-secret-war-against...

[2] https://www.protocol.com/reddit-powermods-war

[3] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/927/965/6c2...
I am sorry to hear that, it is a great shame of society that education is continually neglected, underfunded and politicised.

I believe it is largely accepted by economists from accross the spectrum that a key driver and indeed one of the only gurantees of long term economic growth is investing in education and yet we routinely do not do so to the point where it is simply not financially viable for teachers to remain in the profession.

As to your argument that 2-3 years is where you learn most, I would argue that is probably the same for ever profession out there, but the experience of time is what adds that extra 10%. Just like we complete 90% of a programming task in the scheduled time, its really that last 10% where most of the difficulty lies.
> I've been expecting our downfall for years and we just keep moving along.

Yeah, with the massive layoffs over the last year, I expected salaries to cool off a bit.

Then I got laid off in January, and it took me about 6 weeks to find a new job, and I ended up getting a slight pay bump with my new position. Though FWIW, I work in Application Security, which still has considerable demand.
Recorded videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCuC_hcXReaS3YJoSnsBMHTfJ...
The difference between Musk/Twitter and spez/Reddit is that the value of Reddit lies in its army of unpaid moderators, and Twitter's value lies in its brand recognition.

When Musk took over and pissed off everyone, the only protest the users can do is to leave the platform. Some did but not enough to hurt Twitter. That's because the management (ie modding) is done by Twitter staff already. With a strong brand, Twitter survived.

For reddit, the core value is the unpaid moderators. If those moderators leave, you now have a bunch of communities with no management. History shows any communities entering an anarchy (or worse sycophants assigned by Reddit) will not last long, or at least, will stop their organic growth and decline.
A theory I read that makes sense is their code/services for handling private/closed subreddit post fetching wasn't very well optimized and so when a record number of subreddits went dark suddenly that portion of their service was overloaded.

That or some other black swan shift in user behavior makes the most sense why it would paradoxically crash during a boycott.
Can we get a third party to handle votes? I have a feeling voting might be rigged otherwise.
It's really going down hill I hope someone makes an actually viable alternative. There is no good place to have discussions on a variety of topics on the internet anymore.
100%. I've definitely been one of the people complaining on Reddit.
During this whole debacle, there's been quite a few posts across various parts of the internet that register to me as astroturfing, including a handful on HN. It's not about the opinions presented, nothing wrong with dissent, but the way these posts express those opinions just feels wrong somehow — I've seen 20 years worth of impassioned people posting on the internet, and these posts come off as poor imitations of that.
What if, future AIs gain capabilities to sort, categorize, discriminate, deduplicate and rank new post-2022 datasets? When we ask for a text to be human produced, what we are really asking for is novelty and groundedness to facts. Most of the opinions on reddit is regurgitated hive mind thoughts.
>How is this supposed to be believable

What are you saying? That they aren't doing research? That they are straight-out lying?

I don't see this as in conflict with their claims that EVs, as is, aren't the future.
Well, that's accurate and indeed a major problem.

Subreddit moderators, like unfortunately usually moderators everywhere, can act arbitrarily and there is no way for users to remove or punish moderators.

So this means that /r/$FOO is not actually a subreddit about $FOO, moderated so that exactly any non-spam discussion about $FOO is allowed, but rather a dictatorship ran by whoever happened to grab the name first.

So for instance if a company creates a subreddit about their product before it's announced (which they are guaranteed to succeed at) or perhaps buys or acquires it afterwards, they are allowed to censor it arbitrarily to remove negative opinions or anything they don't like. Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda.

The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead, and it was pretty absurd that there used to be no way to do that.
World uranium resource information is readily available. For example:

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

gives a resource, as of 2017, of 8 million tonnes. Note that the recent expansion in uranium exploration didn't increase the resource very much.

A 3000 MW(th) thermal burner reactor uses about 250 tonnes of natural uranium per year.

https://material-properties.org/what-is-natural-uranium-cons...

To "power the world" (by which I mean provide, as heat, the 18 TW of current world primary energy consumption) would therefore require 6000 x 250 or 1.5 million tonnes of natural U per year.

It has long (like, since shortly after WW2) been known that powering the world with fission will require some kind of breeding, which implies some kind of reprocessing. If you are committed to that, burying spent fuel as is makes no sense.
Not everyone that disagrees with you is doing so in bad faith. Not everything is brigading, etc. Some of us think that the blackouts are starting to look a lot like a tantrum that doesn't represent the best interests of the community. It is a very one-sided argument, as if the moderators are the reason the community exists. No. Moderators are unnecessary without users. It's a symbiosis.
This TRS-80 program blew people away in 1979

http://www.dnull.com/demon/
>I direct you to Twitter's valuation.

That's an imperfect correlate of user experience. A lot of sites have banned NSFW content for the sake of their valuations in ways that have obviously agitated their userbase.
If crypto was, at any point, not a tool of the rich elite of those countries then immediately, it would be banned.

Crypto isn't magic -- indeed, it's vastly more sensitive to state control, since anyone in control over any local part of the network can completely disable the system.
How much more are you willing to pay to rebuild Miami after bigger hurricanes do more damage? They probably aren’t going to end up permanently underwater but everything suggests a lot of pricey real-estate is going to end up getting washed away (California already has billions of dollars in real estate threatened by erosion) or regularly flooded. There’s no realistic long-term outcome other than relocating from the affected areas and letting them become buffer parks (hopefully with lush mangroves in Florida).

That’s in a rich country with a lot of resources, and at least a history of helping other states out. Bangladesh is facing another climate change-boosted storm but has thousands of people who are still homeless from last year’s storm which also hammered food production. That’s the kind of scenario where things get ugly because millions of people live in areas which will see the worst impacts but lack anything like the resources to harden infrastructure or relocate large numbers of people.
> I wish I could read it via RSS

I do this using https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ -- it's a great service
Yeah exactly this
I don’t think it’s fair to call the Elixir/Erlang ecosystem indecent. Of course it’s not on par with the vast ecosystems of the top 10 most popular languages, but in my experience, there’s at least one solid package for most things you might need.
Americans (and terminally online Europeans) have a hard time understanding that people outside their social bubbles can disagree with them without being sockpuppet accounts or bots.
Because the talent pool more broadly is probably lacking quality, lol.
Are they good about staying up to date?
Yes, that same sentiment exists in many areas. In motorsports there is a very healthy Vintage Racing community. The ethos is that even completely unique historic racecars were built to race, not exist on a pedestal as garage queens. And although the rules in vintage racing are a bit more strict about contact and racing room, the racers go at it hammer and tongs — often very exciting on-track action.

I'm all for that attitude
> delete your comments

Given reddit is apparently restoring deleted comments, that's going to be a useless gesture.[1]

I agree with the sentiment though; if people en masse migrated away from Reddit the way they did with Digg, that would be the only really impactful long-term gesture.

Edit: Regarding the sockpuppet thing, I mean, we've literally seen that happen a number of times. When you see an account created in 2023 with no comment activity at all post, sure, that could be a lurker deciding to comment on this one very contentious issue. When you see a dozen in a sub that has 100k subscribers, that's odd but probably not unreasonable. When you see thousands, maybe something is going on.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/14av2z3/reports_of...
God Save the King.
While there may be trends none of the examples you cite are new, the only thing these trends definitively reflect is that society is changing, which is to be expected.

1) Feudal Society was overwhelmingly debt based with serfs in debt for life or even generations, medieval European society did not collapse but rather changed over time in part due to the unstable nature of this system.

2) not sure what "demographic cratering" refers to here, low birth rate? Low birth rate is a well understood economic phenomenon when a society reaches a position of high comfort and well met needs for its population. I would argue this is a good thing.

3) participation in communities of faith has historically fluctuated, such as during the renaissance era. and high participation is not necessarily a good thing, high religious participation among populations also coincided with religious wars where massive scale atrocities or genocide occurred.

4) increased drug use is generally not even a new trend, if anything just a change in what drugs are used. In use United States, Opioids currently are far less prevalent than nicotine was during most of the 1900's, weight loss fad drugs have been recorded as far back as Ancient Greek society. the increase in prescription drug use over the last 100 years has also coincided with a large increase of the average American lifespan.
Good.

If mods want to withhold their own work and resign in protest, power to them. But right now they're hanging this all on mass censoring the work of their users. Screw that.

Now, if users want to take down their own content in protest, also power to them.
I disagree. Data center ops have been completely reinvented by the devops practices. Sure it's a bunch of sysadmins at the start, but a bunch of sysadmins really trying hard to take themselves out of the loop so that things can scale.

A good example is how software releases work. Where I worked 15 years ago, releases were something we could afford to do about four times a year, at night, on the weekends, doing the rollout by logging onto machines and starting them back up, babysitting the rollout. Because rollbacks were catastrophic, an insane amount of time went into QA, so the time between a code change and a release could be easily multiple months. Now I'm at a place where releases are done every day of the week. Rollout steps are largely automated. Rollbacks are mostly drama free. Risk is mitigated through automated canarying (and automated testing before that).

And certainly the business has successfully gotten rid of paying people to log in to servers on a Saturday night to perform a release (which frankly not a lot of people are into in the first place, so everyone wins).