Best of HN comments, part 1
NOTE: the text was not written by me and is from various HN users. Links to the original comments are below.
I really love HN. It’s the only social media site I participate in. It is heavily moderated and users build trust among each other over time. It’s an amazing place.
Below are some of my favorite comments in recent months. Ordered by most recent first.
jp56:
Much of middle age (and beyond) is a struggle to find meaning in the face of the realization of the finiteness of your remaining days. I think that, by and large, I’m doing a fair job at that, but I still struggle a bit with travel, for the very reason above. I used to imagine myself living in whatever place I visited, and those imaginings were plausibly something more than fantasy.
Now, not so much. It would be a huge undertaking for my wife and me to uproot our lives and move to someplace exotic and different, but even if we were to do so, we couldn’t move to everywhere exotic and different. And anyway, we wouldn’t be “starting a new life” there in the same way that a young person would.
There’s a lot that can be said about this like how we got here, what’s really going on and what we do about it but honestly, it’s all pretty pointless. Nothing is going to change.
We had 60 years of near-total Democratic control of Congress until, in the 1990s, the Democrats abandoned New Deal policies in favor of neoliberalism. Even this was a culmination of what began decades earlier, specifically that real wages stagnated and the wealth and income gaps grew starting around 1971.
On the other side we have the Republican Project, a 50+ year effort to take over the government and reshape America as a Christian theocracy. Why? White supremacy, never getting over the end of chattel slavery, manifest destiny, all that. And it all started with the end of segregation and the effort to fight that using the issue of abortion as a weapon.
We have a Supreme Court that will go down in history as with the likes of Dred Scott. Citizens United, Dobbs, the historical tradition test, major questions doctrine and of course completely inventing presidential immunity out of thin air. But it’s not just them. It’s every layer of the courts thanks to pushing “originalist” propaganda (which was invented in the 1980s). Certain judges completely slow-walked prosecutions to benefit Trump directly. And brazenly.
Thanks to the takeover of states in 2010 in particular, districts are gerrymandered to hell to the point where, for example, Republicans managed a supermajority in Wisconsin despite getting 38% of the vote.
But what makes this fatal is there is absolutely no opposition to any of it. The Democratic Party are complicit in all of it. They are controlled opposition. They are more concerned with lining up their post-political lobbying and consulting careers than effecting any real change or opposition. In fact, the biggest threat to the Democratic Party isn’t fascism, it’s progressives. If the DNC opposed Trump half as well as they opposed Bernie Sanders, we’d be living in a very different world.
In the last election, Kamala Harris offered absolutely nothing to voters. Every policy was vetted by her brother to make sure Wall Street approved. Kamala Harris would rather lose an election to Trump tha adopt any progressive policies, desppite progressive policies doing incredibly well in ballot iniatives (eg minimum wage increase passed in Missouri, a deep red state).
The Democratic establishment will tell you progressive ideas aren’t popular despite electroal evidence to the contrary, namely Obama’s 2008 campaign, which was an electoral blowout. Sadly, Obama quickly abandoned any such policies.
None of what is happening now is intended to make anything more efficient. It’s just destruction of the state that regulates and occasionaally holds billionaires accountable. Food, drugs, health, housing, education… everything is going to get worse. And it’s nothing to do with the deficit either. The budget blueprint has $2 trillion in cuts and (drum roll please) $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
These people and the voters idolize (even fetishize) a very narrow window in history: the 1950s. Yet they never look at the policies that were in effect at that time, specifically much higher taxes. Plus, all these middle class families had underpaid help thanks to segregation and other forms of institutionalized racism.
And on the foreign policy front, the administration is destroying the instruments of its own soft power (eg USAID). They keep telling us “China is the enemy” while creating a massive power vacuum China will happily fill.
At least in China you have better infrastructure, public transit, high speed rail, affordable health care and better access to education.
“College campuses are the bane of our existence. You would think that college kids would be smart about these things but they are the absolute worst.”
This is a huge misconception about GenZ. Unlike Millennials and GenX who had to hack around on PC’s to figure out how to torrent, run games, build our own lans for local multiplayer, and generally avoid our parent’s prying eyes. GenZ has grown up on devices. You don’t modify the OS on devices. You don’t hack around on devices; Apps tend to just work with little configuration. GenZ is entering the workforce with lower baseline computer / computer security skills than people think they have.
LLMs coding performance is directly proportional to amount of stolen data for the learning process. That’s why frontend folks are swearing by it and are forecasting our new god dominance in just a few years. That’s because frontend code is literally out there mostly, just take it and compile into a dataset. Stuff like SQL DBs is not laying on every internet corner and is probably very underrepresented in the dataset, producing inferior performance. Same with rare or systems languages, like Rust for example, LLMs are also very bad with it.
I’ve accidentally been using an AI-proof hiring technique for about 20 years: ask a junior developer to bring code with them and ask them to explain it verbally. You can then talk about what they would change, how they would change it, what they would do differently, if they’ve used patterns (on purpose or by accident) what the benefits/drawbacks are etc. If they’re a senior dev, we give them - on the day - a small but humorously-nasty chunk of code and ask them to reason through it live.
Works really well and it mimics the what we find is the most important bit about coding.
I don’t mind if they use AI to shortcut the boring stuff in the day-to-day, as long as they can think critically about the result.
This is from a few years back, but etched in my memory. I am an introvert in social situations. I can present to a room, sorta, and I can manage public speech with some prep, but I just listen when there is a party going on. No talk, no intervention on jokes, just listen. My brain just works too slow to butt in to people’s conversation, and over time you get the tag of introvert or whatever. I can understand conversation well, but I need an extra second to respond and that does not fit into most conversations.
The above resonated with me a lot.
But then a few years back, we had a sendoff for a colleague, a bunch of us got together, and right across from me, or adjacent, was another colleague who was sci fi fan. We had discussed some series before in office, and this was an opportunity to continue. Bit by bit our conversation went deep, and at one point of time I recall a pointed comment from the host (the person who organized the sendoff), hey what happened to kshacker :) because I think we were talking loud and non-stop. And I realized that too, it was an unusual setup.
Since then, I left the team, that dude left the company, so I havent seen him for a few years, this was definitely pre-covid, but this discussion somehow made me think of a 2% moment, if not a 2%er.
What’s the biggest difference between a startup and a country?
Aside from the obvious distinction, Musk has no experience running existing corporations with lots on the line to lose, he comes from move fast break things, great for a social media app, who gives a shit, great for literal moonshots, go big or go home.
However when you manage something big, any upside from improving is weighed against its risk of degradation.
What I find confusing is that this is not typical of conservatism, it’s like a progressive right of political outsiders whose express goal is to destroy the government, I don’t think that’s a controversial statement. And I truly believe that’s what (at least half of) the people voted.
My best estimation is that they are conservatives in that they want to conserve power that they hold, and they see the government not as a foundation for their corps, but as an enemy, not state as a literal creator of money, but as its dilluter or robber (through taxes), not the state as the basis for the fiction that is a corporation, but as a taxer of them. And their emnity is mostly due to the redistributive role of their state.
And I believe that people vote out of aspirational belonging to a rich class, they think they are rich, or they want to aspire to become rich, or they buy into the establishes morals that entitles the rich to power.
So that’s how I wrap my heads around the conservative right overthrowing and destroying the government, they see it as a threat to their established power, or their chances to rise to power.
But I’m just some idiot on hn who hopefully will come back to delete this later
To those of you who have pushed back on the arguments that the US is heading towards authoritarianism, I hereby present Exhibit A.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Mr. Trump wrote, first on his social media platform Truth Social, and then on the website X.
By late afternoon, Mr. Trump had pinned the statement to the top of his Truth Social feed, making it clear it was not a passing thought but one he wanted people to absorb. The official White House account on X posted his message in the evening.
The quote is a variation of one sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, although its origin is unclear.
The hallmark of authoritarianism is to be above the law. (Which is why the SCOTUS ruling was so damaging and directly contributing to this.). If you’re not familiar with China, the way things work there is “rule by law” rather than “rule of law”. The difference being that “rule by law” means that those in power can do whatever they want since they make up the laws as they go (like a monarch ruling by decree). Trump’s statement is exactly that. And make no mistake this is not a one-off quip like buying Greenland. His actions so far have made it clear he believes that there should be no restraints on the power of the executive branch. In other words , authoritarianism.
Be careful, America, what you wished for.
In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Theoden king expresses his grief to Gandalf, “one should not have to bury their children”. I was in college then, unmarried and didn’t appreciate the meaning of it or could appreciate his grief.
Now that I have kids of my own I can’t get myself to read the posts such as OPs. And if I end up reading it their grief stays when me for a long time. Exactly what they have written, all those years not spent, not lived, it’s just too much to handle for me.
I read somewhere that grief is unspent love. I only wish OP more courage and continued grace as the burden only gets heavier each day.
Emphasis is mine. I wanted to highly what I liked the most about this comment.
The context of the reply below is this:
I got stuck at ”after invoking the spirit of their dead chief, they later annotated me the king of their village”. What kind of interviewer doesn’t ask a follow-up question on that anecdote?
and the answer:
tldr, most of technology in rural Ghana was considered magic, like phones and tvs, and the only explanation was that it came from “the white man”. The chief had recently died and for most of the time I was the only caucasian person in the region, and i met many that had never seen a caucasian person before. The locals started joking by greeting my as the king, the joke picked up and soon most were greeting me as the king. I always though it was a joke, and went a long with it. However, one day I was summed by the neighbouring regional kings and the elders of the village I lived in. After chatting for 30 minutes in the local language, they were convinced that the dead chief’s spirit had entered me and they asked in english, “So, do you want to be our king?”, I asked what it meant, one person said, I would be given 4 wives and they would slaughter a goat and pour the blood over me, another said I should ask the king of Sweden what it meant, every person said a different thing. I sat there utterly confused, but thought to myself, yolo. So I agreed. I still feel like it was a dream, a surreal experience. The anointing ceremony was a lot of fun, since many of the people in the village were christians, the dropped many of the accent rituals since they were considered unethical under Christianity. There were a hundred or so people, many of the regional kings attended, they offered me a new outfit, a tunic, carved a chair out of wood that only chiefs can sit on, lots of music, dancing, and regional ceremonial aspects. Here’s a pic from the ceremony.
Such a wild story.
Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be ‘smart’.
The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone ‘smarter’ than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn’t feel good. It makes smart people threatening – it breeds resentment toward them.
However, if you have a roomful of people who define their position in opposition to the ‘smart’ person, your beliefs are the ones that matter, regardless of what the truth is, so you get to feel like you’ve won the argument. Most arguments are not consequential, so this practice doesn’t really cause meaningful short-term harm so there’s no negative feedback.
Over the long-term, this herd mentality is how people learn to navigate the world, and you end up with a giant mess.