"Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside."
But that doesn't mean that they really are all that different in the end. It reminds me a of joke as told by Emo Philips that I think is quite apropos:
==-==-=
A man was walking across a bridge when he saw someone about to jump. He ran over and said, "Don't do it! There's so much to live for!"
"Like what?" the person asked.
"Well, are you religious?"
"Yes."
"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"
"Christian."
"Me too! Protestant or Catholic?"
"Protestant."
"Me too! What denomination?"
"Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
"Northern Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative or Northern Baptist Liberal?"
It's good game theory. You're much more likely to be able to bully a Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879 members into joining your cult than anybody else.
This true, but you can write the two separately if you want.
The disadvantages of writing them together are listed in the various parent posts. But some code authors really like the convenience of having the two in the same file.
I suspect most people would be ok with this if they could only do it at the rate and frequency you yourself can do it. The problem is largely one of scale.
e.g. a prompt of "fetch <article URL> and summarise it for me" is very close to what a human would be doing with a web browser, and doesn't seem to involve any kind of scaling issue.
Sure, but all the time I'll ask Claude a question, and then I'll see it fetch 5-10 different URLs to come up with answer. I certainly would not be fetching those URLs at that rate if I were doing it myself. I would probably be visiting those pages, one by one, over the span of 10-20 minutes.
As would I when researching anything myself. I'll do a web search, and if I see some highly relevant results, I'll middle-click them so they open in a new tab, and I'll easily do 5+ at a time, before then going to read the first one.
Same with browsing HN, btw. I have a row of 9 HN tabs open, all of them opened at the same time, as I scrolled the front page and middle-clicked on thread link to anything interesting.
It’s easy to write instructions that have the agent check once every fifteen minutes, or even once an hour, in perpetuity, which never sleeps. And people do write such instructions. A human can’t do that by hand for very long.
The problem is that it is hard to distinguish your one off (which seems perfectly fine) from the tidal wave of bad actors.
Because not enough people do this earnestly, and many more do it maliciously (bot endpoints that lie, or provide significantly less information than people endpoints) or put it behind a business contract (yes, APIs), so the bots or agents can't trust it in general.
Also let's not forget that innocent sites suffering from floods of scrapers are actually the minority here - this is just a special case; the main reason for the tension is simply that most websites and businesses on-line rely on users wasting their time, and cannot abide any form of end-user automation. Their business plans hinge on their ability to force themselves on you.
Not to mention that it solves none of the rate issues. If the scrapers are hitting your site 10,000 times a day, adding markdown isn’t going to change that at all.
Bit too early for me unfortunately, I was 6/7 then! I was still having a lot of fun up until about 2005, before I went off to university. The past week I've been trawling the Internet Archive to try and find things I vaguely remember - it's remarkably hard. So much of that era is missing, though thankfully one of my own sites was indexed and I'm able to fan out a bit from there. Albeit mostly to French anime fansites, but I'll take it.
1993 Was where the internet was still niche that barely any content existed outside of chats.
Up to the social media era was a nice intersection between a good amount of content, good quality, and enough people to where you could legitimately find a community for almost any niche.
As I write this, the submitter has six comments out of twelve, most somewhat defensive. And all of them in less than thirty minutes. This seems very much like a marketing play, where the submitter is pretty determined to steer the narrative.
The submitter's replies are defensive because people are accusing them of coordinated voting, which is not evident to us. The post hit the front page due to the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), then quickly got upvotes that seem completely authentic.
It would look a lot less like astroturf if the submitter let the discussion evolve instead of answering every criticism within seconds of it being posted.
They're entitled to defend themselves against accusations of things they haven't done, and also to respond to questions or assertions about their project. We encourage project creators to engage in the discussions about their projects. This is a normal part of building and launching a project.
From what I've seen of other AI-enabled projects interacting with forums in my field of work, it's very common for the AI people to jump in and answer every possible question and respond to every possible interaction, very quickly.
Could be just a bot doing it, but it could also be a sign of an inexperienced person trying to engage with an existing community without being part of that community. I know in my area it took years for me to learn that I shouldn't jump into every conversation, and that doing that rubbed people the wrong way, and I've seen others (many years before AI) wreck themselves by being unable to learn this lesson.
In some places responding bumps the thread so it's outright manipulative. HN doesn't sort threads like that.
I'm not sure this counts as astroturf, or simply evidence of a person who's not okay with letting a community opinion independently evolve. You could say 'well it's his job to fight the community if it looks like it's turning hostile' but think about that for a second. It takes some experience to know when you can let negativity be out there in the environment, and I think there'll be a lot of people who aren't capable of making such allowances.
I actually like when the submitter is present and the creator. They’re actually involved. There are lots of users here who play at being submitters of high-value content (created by others) only to later submit their own entirely AI written drivel.
Interesting how they’re not making any defensive replies to comments pointing out that they committed a federal crime by filing a false report to the FBI. Perhaps they know it is indefensible
Okay, why was this rescued from the 2nd chance pool? Was it from some sort of interesting discussion? Something novel enough to warrant it? A significant amount of petitions from legitimate users?
Can you please quit with the snarky interrogation? HN is for curiosity, not curmudgeonliness.
Nothing gets “rescued from” the second chance pool. Posts get selected for the second chance pool if moderators (or others with SCP-picking responsibilities) think they may be interesting. It’s worked like this for over a decade.
I’m sure the league has considered less drastic actions, and in reality a group of administrators dealing with an ongoing problem know way more about possible solutions that are available and can possibly work than random HN commenters.
Even further back into time, before 3.5" disks, both A: and B: were 5.25" disks. And, although my memory is hazy, 3.5's were commonly slotted into B: at first, because no one had 3.5" boot disks until the drives became somewhat common.
The floppies got A and B because hard drives were expensive and for a time a lot of people got by without them, though everybody had at least one floppy.
Even if you only had one floppy, it was both A and B, so you could say "copy a:DOC.TXT b:" and it would read the doc and then ask you to insert the floppy you're considering B (and depending on file size and available memory, sometimes switch back and forth a few more times)
You are forgetting 8” floppies. IBM used only the soft sector ones (one hole punched close to the spindle to mark sector 0) but there were also hard sector ones (a ring of 32 holes close to the spindle hole).
There was a lot of experimentation back in those days. The Wikipedia’s page on floppy disks is surprisingly long!
8" floppy drives were not compatible mechanically with IBM PC cases, but there were 8" floppy drives with their own enclosures and power supplies, which could be put on a desktop along the PC case.
IBM PCs have never supported 8" floppy drives, but it was easy to make an adapter between IBM PC floppy cables and 8" floppy drives, so there have existed IBM PC clones from countries where 5¼" floppies were scarce (e.g. Eastern Europe), which supported the attachment of 8" floppy drives.
The original 5¼" floppies had only the size advantage, but they had both a lower capacity and a lower speed than 8" floppies, so attaching 8" floppy drives would have been a higher performance option in the beginning.
Only after the IBM PC/AT introduced the high-density 1.2 Mbyte floppy disks, the 5¼" format matched (actually very slightly exceeded) the performance of the old 8" floppies.
But in the context of drive lettering, although CP/M supported 8" floppies, MS-DOS never did. MS-DOS adopted the naming scheme, but not the boot style.
Floppies, superfloppies, removable hard disks (platter-only, as opposed to modern external hard drives that incorporate the entire drive mechanism), magneto-optical disks, rewritable CD/DVD, even today magnetic tape is still used as removable storage in applications where large capacity is required and shelf life is more important than fast random access.
I have vague memories of something like this from my childhood, where my family's IBM 486SX had the 3.5" drive on A and the 5.25" drive on B but my grandparents' Epson 286 had the opposite. Also learning about disk densities when none of the disks from the 486 worked on the 286.
Many people don’t care about resale or pass-along value in the things that they own or gift.
And even if one does, then you just consider the diminished value as another cost of having the personalized item.
For many people, especially gift givers where the item is about far more than economics, it is worth it. And it is very unclear to me why "resale value" should trump about a million other considerations.
But that doesn't mean that they really are all that different in the end. It reminds me a of joke as told by Emo Philips that I think is quite apropos:
==-==-=
A man was walking across a bridge when he saw someone about to jump. He ran over and said, "Don't do it! There's so much to live for!"
"Like what?" the person asked.
"Well, are you religious?"
"Yes."
"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"
"Christian."
"Me too! Protestant or Catholic?"
"Protestant."
"Me too! What denomination?"
"Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
"Northern Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative or Northern Baptist Liberal?"
"Northern Baptist Conservative."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative Covenant or Northern Baptist Conservative Council?"
"Northern Baptist Conservative Council."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879, or Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1912?"
"Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1912."
The man stepped back, eyes narrowing, and yelled, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed the other off the bridge.
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