This has to be one of my favorite hacking articles I’ve read on HN. The analysis, concept, and execution :chefskiss:
Readit Newsordinaryradical commented on Website is served from nine Neovim buffers on my old ThinkPad vim.gabornyeki.com/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
ordinaryradical commented on AI vs. Professional Authors Results mark---lawrence.blogspot.... · Posted by u/biffles
We're at a key milestone in the IP wars; IP was inducted into our civilization to protect the few who had the ability to create.
This idea is well past it's due date. We should move to a liberal IP regime, with copyright strictly reduced to 7-10 years, with all works then entering public domain. Our society will universally thrive with the abundance that will come.
I understand and empathize that a class of vocations today will go away, but so did lamplighters. The roles may become extinct; but we will endure as a people.
There are hundreds of years of art already in the public domain and society is not “universally thriving?” Why would adding a couple more recent years change that?
Seems very utopian magic thinking to me.
Why does the company get to keep on existing? Why are its owners not financially annihilated (as in, all their assets seized, etc.)?
It seems to me that if the end result of exploiting a million families/individuals for cartel rents is you get told, “Don’t do it again,” but no one who did it suffers any consequences… this is going to keep happening.
The participants in this scheme should be facing jail time and a financial reset. Oppression of the vulnerable should blow up underneath any who try it. Otherwise this country is going to explode.
ordinaryradical commented on Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers fortune.com/2025/08/03/ai... · Posted by u/robtherobber
Take this entire paragraph and read carefully, and it explains how to kill this trend:
> “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune. “If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn’t find the tool useful… This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we’re just not seeing that—we’re seeing the opposite.”
Great. So he is explicitly telling us that a boycott will work. There you go folks, you have your marching orders.
Correct, and the second subtext is that every company using one of these is actually filtering for desperation, not talent. So these companies are actually screwing themselves
Think about it: if you’re talented, why would you ever put up with this bullshit?
I hired for my team this year and I read every single one of the hundreds of applications. HR was experimenting with an AI recommendation software which missed a ton of quality candidates, one of which was the one I hired. Everyone loves them and they’ve been a huge boost to the team. And I think we had an easier time courting them because they saw how much work their future manager was putting into finding a great fit.
If you use this kind of software to hire, you are the loser. The good talent doesn’t need you—it’s the other way around.
ordinaryradical commented on The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong derekthompson.org/p/the-a... · Posted by u/rbanffy
Empty properties barely exist as a percentage of total housing supply in high cost of living areas in the US. You’re looking at no more than a few tenths of of a percentage point of NYC’s more than 4 million units.
Examining empty ownership as a percentage of overall housing in America, which has tens of millions of units, is not a very helpful way of categorizing a highly localized and locally felt phenomenon.
The real effect of this type of ownership is that it distorts the high end of the market and the effects ripple downstream. They force cash to move elsewhere in search of housing, which inflates those markets, so then those who could afford those markets move elsewhere, etc.
Despite all of the data that gets lobbed around on this topic, we don’t seem to have a very good mental model for how small changes in one segment of the market explode into the others and cascade dramatically.
It’s just not very meaningful to examine this as a percentage of units.
I think people here on HN keep underestimating the relevance of crypto for four reasons:
What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox.
What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s.
Yes, nerds were already excited about the internet in the 70s. Have a look ath the "Mother of all demos": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos It takes decades to iron out the details of how to use fundamentally new technology.
Fear of change. Is there any new technology that HN is in favour of?
It has to have better use cases than fraud and gambling for the first ten years of exploration for me to buy this argument.
The problem is not factuality. The problem is assuming that the entire World should now and forever be judged through the moral lens of post-war America.
Whose morality counts?
Are there moralities worth entertaining that place no value on human life or its enslavement?
ordinaryradical commented on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 mbh4h.substack.com/p/neur... · Posted by u/keiferski
> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
> static-filled “dead channels.”
I don't think Gibson was referring to static (which is bland grey and not cyberpunk at all). I think he was referring to SMPTE on a "dead channel", which is a colorful skyline reminiscent of Blade Runner. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_color_bars
I agree with the author of this article that Neuromancer is a precursor for modern sci-fi, and it serves as inspiration for so much popular culture. But it's a terrible book IMO. The characters are shallow and uninteresting (Cage), the plot is boring (Wintermute), expository dialogue is rattled off without any setup or motivation (the female character explaining her backstory), it's chock full of nonsequiters (shark-head, something about horses being extinct), and new concepts are introduced not because they're engaging but because they're "just so sci-fi bro" (Turning police).
“I actually composed that first image with black and white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost painful, a whopping anachronism right at the very start of my career,in the imaginary future, but an invisible one, interestingly. One that revels a particular grace shared by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future where we all must go.”
You misunderstood from the first sentence. The rest of your read is similarly flawed if not worse.
ordinaryradical commented on US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/gausswho
Why does it have to be China and why does it have to be any one country? Why can’t it be China, EU, and the US all having about the same influence?
But besides, with the rightward, populist/religious nut tilt of the US and corporations being able to bribe the President to get what they want without repercussions (Disney, Paramount, Meta, X, etc), I don’t see how the US is much better. All of the branches of government are giving power to the President that should be theirs.
Because there will always be someone with an advantage over the others.
Equilibriums in geopolitics are inherently unstable, states naturally compete for their own self-interest. No state will be willingly co-equal with another unless some actor with greater power forces it into that position.
To your last point, given the state of the US, it would probably be better for the world if the EU were on top at the moment. But they will not be.
ordinaryradical commented on US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/gausswho
As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
If it’s not America it will be China and I don’t think you want to live in that world.