The political posts have definitely increased and the front page is increasingly filled with negative sentiment posts that leaves one angered and not filled with a positive light. For years I didn’t flag anything. Now I’m daily flagging political posts.
> filled with negative sentiment posts that leaves one angered and not filled with a positive light
You mean the negative sentiments that you get when people uncover how big tech/monopolies/government really works ? I guess you would rather read la-la-land stories about the entrepreneurial aces of the 2010s when techies and the general populace were still gullible for that.
Negativity doesn't have to fill every space, even if you can find negativity everywhere. Maybe what HN has implicitly (and maybe explicitly) nurtured is intellectual curiosity for the sake of intellectual curiosity, which, in mi opinion es very orthogonal to negativity (even if it's intellectual adjacent).
I understand that maybe this is not what everyone wants (or understands) from HN, but I do sympathize with the other comment: after visiting HN I'd rather be happy and curious that angered and curious
Yes. That’s not what I want to read on hn. You can go to Reddit or many other places for that and fill yourself with anger all you want. I personally do not want that for me and if hn continues the way it’s headed then I’ll block it like I did Reddit.
There’s a difference between on-topic discussions relevant to the post and “discussions” that veer off into the same emotional tribal rants that we see constantly now. We try to ignore it but the constant negativity and “us vs them” is not healthy, let alone meaningful discussion.
As I'm always telling people, the phenomenon you're noticing is that the President of the United States wishes to increase negative sentiment and widen the scope of things which are subject to politics. It's not something that HN or its users get a choice in. If you don't like it, I'm with you, but you're going to have to take it up with him.
Generally the comments are heavily anti AI to the point where it almost seems like it’s a foreign adversary trying to mold the public opinion to be anti ai to slow the progress of AI advancement in the USA
I think this is some sort of built-in bias we all have. I'm pretty bearish on AI, and to me I get the impression that generally most comments are heavily pro-AI, or pro-OpenAI/Anthropic. I think we're just biased to see and remember what we disagree with.
Just subjectively making it up, but my feeling is that people are not so much against AI in principle as they are against the american-capitalist approach to it: steamroll its rollout everywhere, risk the entire economy (both jobs and stock market), for dubious net benefits to anyone but the wealthy.
The US earned themselves very little goodwill from the world (and many of their own citizen), to the point that people even in the West are happy seeing China challenging the US on the AI front. Whether China is wielding AI for better or worse outcomes than the US is up for hindsight.
Possibly the only more totalizing steamrolling approach to development than the American-capitalist is the socialist-big-push. This complaint is nonsense.
I'm not anti-AI; I'm anti-centralization of power. If the Chinese models were closed source and developed with the same strategy as the US labs then I'd be rooting against them, too.
As an avid fsd user, your list makes me more comfortable using fsd than not. If there were more you’d parrot it around, but in the end, fsd is safer than humans at the wheel. As much as you dislike it because of Musk, fsd will continue to march forward and improve and millions will use it. You are beta testing fsd even if you don’t want to be.
> You are beta testing fsd even if you don’t want to be.
Exactly, that's precisely the wrong way to do ethical, responsible engineering. It's one thing to put your own life in the hands of a beta test, but it's another to put all of our lives at risk without our consent.
Distinguish a beta test from a learner driver or first year licensed driver. Why should I share the road with anyone who isn’t an experienced and competent driver?
Consent. We've consented to people learning to drive. Everyone is aware of those risks and they act accordingly. Often, to make other drivers aware of the driver's learning status, it's customary to affix a sticker to the car.
On the other hand, the public generally is not aware that these FSD machines are operating without critical safety equipment, and if they knew and were properly informed I'm not sure they would agree to be part of the test. I think Elon Musk knows that as well which is why he hasn't bothered to ask.
Moreover, I'm shocked and horrified by the number of people going around "beta testing" new versions of FSD. You'll see someone go to an area where a previous FSD version is known to fail just to see if the new one works. How is that a good idea at all? The last time you were here the car lurched into oncoming traffic unexpectedly and went down a one way, so let's see if it does it again, fingers crossed?
If we're using that definition of consent, it is an absolute unequivocal red herring. Roads are full of vehicles and full of drivers which, if you understood exactly what and who they are, you would absolutely refuse to consent sharing the road with. I didn’t consent to share the road with someone who failed to tighten their wheel nuts. I didn’t consent to share the road with that tourist in a rental car. I didn’t consent to sharing the road with a deer. I didn’t consent to sharing the road with Mercedes Drive Pilot or Ford BlueCruise or Mercedes SuperCruise or Nissan ProPILOT or any vehicles operated by Zoox or Waymo.
The dangerous you're talking about have been around for a long time, have been depicted in many forms over decades in all kinds of popular media media, have actually impacted people which has birthed reforms and new safety measures, and that is all part of the constant education and training the public receives.
None of that is done for FSD or tesla cars. People don't know how they work, what the dangers are, what their failure modes are, how to approach them, and no one is telling them!
If you want to lament a general lack of awareness and progressive education, then I'm fully on board. Perhaps we should require operators to pass an additional driver test to be legally permitted to supervise any L2+ system from any manufacturer. No BlueCruise or SuperCruise unless you've got the extra marking on your license.
But as far as "consent" is concerned, if you wish to use the public roads, consent necessarily means accepting the roads as a commons. This means, at minimum, accepting the presence of anything the relevant government authority deems legal.
I'm not really talking about formal education here.
> This means, at minimum, accepting the presence of anything the relevant government authority deems legal.
All that means if you have enough money you can put whatever death machines on the road you want. I don't think that's a good way to manage a road network, and will not ultimately lead to greater safety for all.
>> Consent. We've consented to people learning to drive. Everyone is aware of those risks and they act accordingly. Often, to make other drivers aware of the driver's learning status, it's customary to affix a sticker to the car.
It's not juts customary. Some jurisdictions (probably outside the US) require a special sign meaning "new driver" to be displayed in the car for a period.
E.g. in Greece where I stay an "N" (for "νέος" or "new") must be displayed for 12 months after a driver first obtains their license provided they're 18 or over:
It’s happening not just in Spain but across most of Europe, the USA, and East Asia. But lots of Europe and the USA have immigration to offset the population decline. China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, are in dramatic population declines. Even India has stared to level off and expected to decline.
To degrees, but Spain's fertility rate is appalling even by modern western standards. ~1.1 vs ~1.6 in the US. It's a huge difference and closer to the East Asia collapses than to the US.
One thing to look for in the EU is free movement of people. Young people can and do migrate to regions that pay them more. It would be interesting to look at Spanish youth migration to see if the younger workers (i.e. those more likely to have children) have moved elsewhere. That would create a further dent on the stats.
Isn't Spain one of the desired places for young people in Europe? I always saw people going to Spain, Germany or Switzerland for bigger salaries (e.g., people emigranting from Portugal)
I believe (perhaps incorrectly) that the GP was asking should population just keep increasing .. many people have been looking to slow population growth for some time and would see it finally starting to slow and perhaps peak and then fall in 2050 as a good outcome.
I consider this a typical case of statisticians massaging the data. In fact, I believe the Gini coefficient itself is flawed modeling. Even statisticians don't really use it much these days, right? The Gini index on Wikipedia actually reflects consumption inequality.
Also, high-fertility countries fundamentally have low contraception usage, low women's rights, and short periods of education. This is because labor is crucial in typical agrarian to light-industry economies.
Conversely, low-fertility countries are characterized by extended education and delayed job stability. The reason is simple: work that generates high added value requires a significant amount of time spent on education. Generally, the OECD doesn't view the decline in fertility rates in developed countries as being driven by just a single variable either.
Rather, there is a clear established relationship: higher housing costs correspond to a lower TFR (Total Fertility Rate) [1]. Classes exempt from these housing expenses—namely, individuals whose parents hold substantial real estate and assets—clearly have more children.
Actually, this kind of research has been conducted extensively in East Asian countries like Korea and Japan, yielding very similar conclusions.
> Rather, there is a clear established relationship: higher housing costs correspond to a lower TFR (Total Fertility Rate) [1]. Classes exempt from these housing expenses—namely, individuals whose parents hold substantial real estate and assets—clearly have more children.
This report is 122 pages. A cursory search did not turn up anything to support either of your claims. What page of the report are you drawing this conclusion from?
>
Fertility
The total fertility rate (TFR) indicates the average number of children born per woman over a lifetime given current age‑specific fertility rates, assuming no female mortality during reproductive years. The population is replaced at a total fertility rate of about 2.1 children per woman.
Let's consider programming, which represents an entry into a high value-added industry.
To monetize programming, you fundamentally need to offer something more valuable than existing open-source software, or target a niche that open-source fails to address. However, this industry has now matured, and countless talented young individuals in the US have already contributed heavily to the open-source ecosystem.
As a result, it is exceedingly difficult for developers in non-English speaking countries to sell programs that are inferior to free open-source alternatives. This is exacerbated by the very nature of software, which can be instantly and perfectly replicated.
(Physical capital, on the other hand, is much easier for the establishment to control through protectionism. For instance, to foster the growth of Hyundai Motors, my country, South Korea, restricted American car imports, effectively forcing citizens to drive lower-quality domestic cars. That kind of national sacrifice was required.)
Consequently, citizens of non-English speaking countries face a double burden: the time required to master English, added to the time needed to learn programming and accumulate foundational experience. By the time they build this experience and reach a stable level of professional competency, they are typically in their early 30s. This inherently forces a delay in marriage and family formation.
I find that unlikely, as it happens in countries with somewhat balanced wealth as well (and countries with the highest fertility rates have the highest wealth imbalance).
I generally don't think highly of people who make this argument. It relies on the simplistic framing of the "end of absolute poverty." In fact, this is the exact same rhetoric used by CCP apologists. While it is true that the modern poor enjoy better consumption, this argument completely ignores the economic concepts of positional goods and relative deprivation.
Consider the biological imperative of finding a mate. The competitive factors for securing a partner are now broadcast and scaled across the entire society. The core of what kings of old enjoyed wasn't "air conditioning" or "refrigerators." Kings owned territory (real estate), wielded power, and monopolized the infrastructural capital that allowed them to pass down an overwhelming survival advantage to their lineage. Does a modern immigrant live like a king just because they use an iPhone? The modern poor merely consume cheap manufactured goods; they have been completely stripped of the physical foundation required to form a family (housing) and the control over their generational reproduction.
The idea that Elon Musk amassing wealth has nothing to do with the working class is laughable. When wealth concentrates at the very top, that capital inevitably flows into supply-constrained, zero-sum assets—namely, real estate in prime locations and elite educational opportunities. Why do you think the cost of living in Silicon Valley is so absurdly high? The capital accumulated by billionaires like Musk and other asset holders astronomically pumps up (inflates) the prices of these "positional goods."
Human family formation is not determined by comparing oneself to a 16th-century serf. It is strictly determined by one's "relative status" within their contemporary community. No matter how much absolute caloric intake increases, if you cannot secure the asset advantage required to raise a child to a "middle-class standard" within your current community, a rational human being will simply give up on reproduction.
I would think the argument is more that the average worker living under a king would not even own their property, but would be renting a hovel, living in abject squalor, and having lots of children in order to bring in enough to pay the rent and taxes.
I know for sure in which timeline I'd prefer to be the average worker.
EDIT: For clarity, in no way am I simping for the billionaire class. I think it'll have to change. But people who think serfs in the middle ages had it better are crazy.
??The statistics speak for themselves. In Spain, the top 1% holds 21% of the total wealth, 30% of the low-income demographic are the working poor, and 45% are irregular workers.
Isn't the US in a similar situation? Regardless of other arguments, when you consider the OECD statistics demonstrating the impact of housing costs on fertility rates, I firmly believe that wealth inequality is indeed the root cause.
I think almost all of tech is bloated and massive layoffs wouldn’t phase most companies (though it would be harmful to people’s lives so it seems cruel to do this). Fewer people per teams means less context switching and devs own more. They don’t have to look for work, it will be in front of their face. In so many of these big tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen too many not having enough work to do. They end up creating meetings and other wasteful things (doc writing) to occupy their time. Managers and directors seem to want big bloated teams, the larger their head count the more they can demand and push for a promo.
I wish people would create more and better docs. Pour as much time into a meticulously written doc details as they discuss indentation and variable naming style.
But instead, just like with your attitude, it's considered second grade or even useless work, and as a result docs always suck if they even exist. They don't get that code is made for people to consume just as much as for the machine, and docs are just an extension of that. That's one reason LLMs are so popular, they actually tell you what you'd have found in the doc, had it existed. But LLMs are restricted to the what and don't cover the why. I some places that makes good docs even rarer. In others it makes them easier since the machine generates the "fluff" and the human just fills in the rationale.
Inefficient allocation of work aside (where you end up with people doing nothing, despite I suspect a substantial amount of work in the backlog), I think the mindset of "just reduce devs so there's not so much context switching/they can own more" is short-sighted from a business perspective.
Even in projects that could objectively be owned by 1-2 people but are allocated to a 5-10 person team instead, I've encountered cases where velocity gets absolutely obliterated by a sub-domain "owner" dev being on vacation. Now imagine this is not a fairly small sub-domain but half the project, and instead of a vacation your one-of-two dev gets hit by a bus.
yea this was the case even before ai. fighting for scope is 80% of the job now. Ppl like OP dont really need to "Act like a sponge" and figure out "problems to work on" if there is natural demand for stuff they are building work will present itself.
There is also crazy ladder climbing with all these titles and difference in payscale. So ppl like the author are trying to optimize what a role X is supposed to be doing. Everyone is just the same thing everywhere.
Everywhere you go its the same ppl, same ladder , same tools same sucking up to boss blah blah. Cant wait to get out of this shit.
Very different. Lots of cars other than Tesla have cameras. Cars record the surroundings on streets (and if Tesla, there’s no audio). Meta glasses are in your face and in very private social settings recording people in vulnerable situations, and as seen on TikTok vids, often used to get embarrassing reactions from people who don’t realize they are being recorded. Cameras on cars have a real purpose, self driving and to record accidents/vandalism
Not exactly. Much of the anti-datacenter population got that way from hearing about the irresponsible ones and don't want it happening in their area. If they never heard about it because it was in the middle of nowhere, then they wouldn't be involved. It's NIMBY - data center or houses, don't build it near me.
A datacenter has way more impact on it’s surroundings than housing, I don’t think it’s fair to say they are both coming from the same NIMBY sentiment. Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no
"Anti-housing NIMBY are afraid to see their overvalued houses reduce in price, while anti-datacenter folks see how loud and damaging they can be and say no"
This is an oversimplification. Many people who are NIMBY on housing are that way because they don't want higher density, low income housing, more traffic, more noise, etc. The reasons for NIMBY doesn't really matter as it's still the same concept and outcome - opposition to building in a specific area. The only thing that changes is one's subjective opinion on which is justified or not.
>A datacenter has way more impact on it’s surroundings than housing,
On the flip side a datacenter never showed up to a town meeting to screech about how my way of life ought to be illegal, how the businesses I patronize ought to be punitively regulated, how I ought to pay more taxes so that the city can do things I don't want done, etc, etc.
And I say this as someone who already lives near a bunch of industrial sites.
reply