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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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HN refuses to believe reputable research institute disproves superconductivity of LK99, mostly based on tone and the fact that prediction markets haven't crashed to zero (news.ycombinator.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Also the hivemind seems to have taken against ~~tweets~~Xeets, a stunning reversal from last year when St. Elon was gonna usher in a new Dawn of civilized discourse.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

it’s very frankly well worth stepping out of the Y Combinator bubble. I dropped the site for anything other than as a target for sneering years ago because I started to see a lot of dangerous patterns emerge in the community (general scientific illiteracy is one thing, as you mentioned; for me, the site’s general undercurrent of thinly veiled racism got very hard to stomach).

on a more personal note, not being immersed in HN’s bad ideas did wonders for my mental health. the only thing I feel I really lost was the ability to easily get an audience for my open source projects, but there are other outlets for that.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yeah similar. I only skim the link source as a semi-aggregator of stuff (because it's where a lot of people will share shit), but even that needs significant filtering.

otherwise a strict policy of Don't Read The Comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Allow me to sum up my relationship with the orange site with a lightly edited quote of Dennis Ritchie from The UNIX-HATERS Handbook:

Here is my metaphor: your ~~book~~ website is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain ~~life for some~~ interest to computerniks like me. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of ~~contempt and of envy~~ silicon valley chauvinism.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Well put.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What kinda projects?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

mostly Nix code lately: a flake that turns any desktop into an old Lisp machine, another flake that turns any desktop into a new Lisp machine (a Lisp-based workbench that enables system-wide recursive self-improvement), a module that mostly auto-configures a high performance windows gaming VM with dedicated hardware (one of the non-proton ways to game on Linux), and a flake that implements an efficient technique for templating/static website generation

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That stuff is guaranteed karma bait on lobste.rs, just fyi

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

maybe… mostly I’m looking for non-toxic contributors, since these are all projects that do best with community input

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nix sounds very interesting tbh.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I recommend it! this notawfultech post links to a gentle introduction to Nix if you’d like to give it a try. awful.systems also runs on and is deployed by plain NixOS, mostly because it’s a lot of fun to work with in a way devops almost always isn’t