frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

The cardinal sin of software architecture

https://functional.computer/blog/the-cardinal-sin-of-software-architecture
1•speckx•1m ago•0 comments

I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool

https://evanhahn.com/i-set-all-376-vim-options-and-im-still-a-fool/
1•todsacerdoti•1m ago•0 comments

Diosdado Banatao, Chip Designer, Investor and Entrepreneur, Dies at 79

https://www.wsj.com/wsjplus/dashboard/articles/diosdado-bantao-chip-designer-dead-79-f205c32b
1•melling•1m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Which system would you trust to run a business you can't afford to lose?

1•cutterlayers•3m ago•0 comments

Closing the Door on Net-NTLMv1: Releasing Rainbow Tables

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/net-ntlmv1-deprecation-rainbow-tables
1•linolevan•8m ago•1 comments

Technology and Wealth: The Straw, the Siphon, and the Sieve [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxvRx7sQNxc
1•measurablefunc•10m ago•0 comments

We're more patient with AI than one another

https://www.uxtopian.com/journal/were-more-patient-with-ai-than-one-another
1•lucidplot•10m ago•0 comments

Stop Pulling Yourself Down

https://buanasalf.com/blog/stop-pulling-yourself-down/
1•moh20•11m ago•0 comments

Human code review is a crutch

https://deadneurons.substack.com/p/human-code-review-is-an-outdated
1•nr378•11m ago•0 comments

Kusto Query Language

https://github.com/microsoft/Kusto-Query-Language
1•tosh•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made a phone in between a smartphone and dumbphone

https://bouchardindustries.com
1•bouchardio•12m ago•1 comments

Fast Concordance: Instant concordance on a corpus of >1,200 books

https://iafisher.com/concordance/
1•evakhoury•12m ago•0 comments

Microsoft killing tech debt with agents [audio]

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/microsoft-killing-tech-debt-with-agents/id1621165150?i=1000...
1•azhenley•13m ago•0 comments

Demystifying Evals for AI Agents

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/demystifying-evals-for-ai-agents
2•theptip•13m ago•0 comments

Claude Code Scheduler

https://github.com/jshchnz/claude-code-scheduler
1•jshchnz•13m ago•0 comments

OpenAI Introduces Ads to ChatGPT

https://twitter.com/sama/status/2012253252771824074
2•strzalek•14m ago•1 comments

DuckDB's CSV Reader and the Pollock Robustness Benchmark

https://duckdb.org/2025/04/16/duckdb-csv-pollock-benchmark
1•tosh•14m ago•0 comments

Low-Tech

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_technology
1•tux•15m ago•0 comments

Fastmail Is Down

https://fastmailstatus.com
2•safe_duck7727•19m ago•3 comments

Billionaires demand more babies but make parenthood unaffordable

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/16/billionaires-demand-more-babies-but-make-parenthood-...
2•Qem•20m ago•0 comments

How children lost the right to roam in four generations

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
2•mhb•22m ago•0 comments

Ammobia says it has reinvented a century-old technology

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/13/ammobia-says-it-has-reinvented-a-century-old-technology/
1•rmason•23m ago•1 comments

Polar Vortex Breakdown May Trigger Weeks of Extreme Cold

https://www.j-c-a.org/polar-vortex-breakdown-may-trigger-weeks-of-extreme-cold/
1•amichail•25m ago•0 comments

A16Z: The Power Brokers

https://www.notboring.co/p/a16z-the-power-brokers
1•rmason•25m ago•0 comments

Book Review: The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester

https://www.eleanorkonik.com/p/review-the-perfectionists-by-simon
1•paulpauper•25m ago•0 comments

The truth Elon left out

https://openai.com/index/the-truth-elon-left-out/
12•colesantiago•26m ago•5 comments

The Great Divergence

https://johnlawrenceaspden.substack.com/p/the-great-divergence
1•paulpauper•26m ago•0 comments

An app can be a meal kit

https://ammil.industries/log/an-app-can-be-a-meal-kit/
1•cjlm•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI health agent that nags you on WhatsApp instead of a dashboard

https://app.vitalify.ai/
2•erenkaradag•33m ago•3 comments

The Engineer to Executive Translation Layer

https://refactoring.fm/p/the-engineer-executive-translation
6•lucidplot•36m ago•5 comments
Open in hackernews

Slop Is Everywhere for Those with Eyes to See

https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/slop-is-everywhere-for-those-with-eyes-to-see/
75•speckx•1h ago

Comments

lotsofpulp•1h ago
>Creativity isn't scalable. Content creation has a hard productivity ceiling. Every human-created video on our feeds require some level of writing, production, and editing. Yet the For You Page has made the content consumption so efficient, that perhaps demand has exceeded supply.

I would have thought the opposite, the supply exceeded demand, driving the price so low so as to not be able to reward quality creators and/or curators. After all, demand has a hard ceiling at 24 hours per day.

kiba•1h ago
The scarcity is in the originality and creativity.

Once you watch LotR, you watched like 20 percent guesstimate of all fantasy content because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough.

Which is why sometime when I wonder why there's nothing to watch on YouTube despite the sheer abundance, it's time to work on something.

hvs•59m ago
And also why a large percentage of the "content" on YouTube is YouTubers reactions to other YouTubers.
MrGilbert•50m ago
> ... because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough.

I think there is still demand for an elvish court show, somewhere.

chuckadams•17m ago
Too much elaborate flowery argument. I want to see Orc Court.
martin-t•54m ago
> After all, demand has a hard ceiling at 24 hours per day.

I agree consumption is capped. I constantly struggle with whether to watch a given video or read a given article. I have an ever increasing to-watch and to-read list and unfortunately human life is too short to learn all the things I would want to.

That being said, on the production side, it's a complex interplay between quality, quantity and discoverability. If it takes 10x the effort to increase quality 2x, then it might economical to produce 10x the number of videos with 1x the quality. I say might because those videos will be shared less, rated worse and will therefore have lower discoverability. But by how much?

And you can't judge quality until after you've consumed the "content"[0]. So if the goal is to serve as many ads as possible, it's more economical to just make more "content". That's why I much prefer individual "creators" who clearly do what they do because they enjoy it.

[0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...

daotoad•1h ago
Off topic and doesn't impact the validity (or lack thereof) of the post. Just reactionary whining really...

For the love of all that is good, "exacerbated" and "exasperated" are different words.

We've already screwed up "home in on" by allowing the horrid "hone in" to horn in our lexicons. On a side note, watch out for those honing pigeons, they've got very sharp beaks.

isoprophlex•1h ago
I've got a few well-homed knives in my kitchen. They're really happy where they are. I can leave them hone alone, too, which is nice.
nkrisc•53m ago
To be fair, there is a logic behind “hone in on” that is at least plausible that relates to the intended meaning, and is perhaps somewhat responsible for it sticking around besides simply the similarity between “home” and “hone”.
schrectacular•44m ago
As much as it angers me to say it, I do believe it is an eggcorn.
csallen•47m ago
I used to feel similarly whenever people would say "begs the question" to mean "raises a question." But now I've just given up. It's more common for people to mess this one up than not.
mnhnthrow34•24m ago
This lossy mingling of expressions that sound similar is a natural process always present in the evolution of a language. Giving up is a correct and healthy response imo.

"Begging the question" is a great example - its intended meaning as a specific fallacy descriptor lose to face-value interpretations that are "wrong" but also extremely fair for somebody to make. All this means is that "begging the question" is a weak name for the fallacy, because if you don't know what it means, a wrong assumption is easily available and contextually often seems to fit.

The language crushing out these expressions is a feature. Better all around to say the argument is circular or it assumes the conclusion. Doing those things may _actually_ "raise questions" as well as "begging the question" which makes things even worse.

It's not the fault of the casual language users that this expression is poorly understood, it's just bad naming in the first place.

Sharlin•8m ago
Yeah, we should probably standardize on "assuming the conclusion" or just "circular logic" when talking about the logical fallacy.
JamesTRexx•43m ago
Now imagine everyone using get only for its true meaning: to receive.
amatecha•25m ago
Ah yeah I noticed that too while pouring over the post :D
roadside_picnic•14m ago
We will never recovered from the fact that "literally" now means "figuratively but with emphasis".
ryandrake•10m ago
Glad to see someone fighting the good fight, no matter how lost the battle is online. I'd add:

    your/you’re
    who’s/whose
    were/we’re/where
    to/too/two
    are/our
    then/than
    lose/loose
    wary/weary
    affect/effect
    aloud/allowed
    definitely/defiantly
    complement/compliment
mikepurvis•8m ago
No "effects" discussion is complete without https://xkcd.com/326/

(At least "defiantly" is an actual word, unlike "definately" which doesn't even pass spell check)

mikepurvis•8m ago
Intriguing. I'm normally pretty careful about this kind of thing but I had thought "hone in" was correct. Apparently not:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/home-in-or-hone-in

behnamoh•1h ago
Side note: I love the imperfect fonts and old school design of the website. For years I've been looking for ways to re-create old book style text and graphs in the digital era. This gets so close to that vision.
watersb•19m ago
I generally like it, too, but on my iPhone that very first sentence puts a spotlight in the lack of an 'fl' ligature in the word, "influence".

Now I'm reconsidering my resolve to look for AI slop - my enthusiasm for topography is getting in the way.

https://wondermark.com/c/650/

rjsw•13m ago
You might be interested in the resources [1] on the H.P.Lovecraft Historical Society website.

[1] https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php#fonts

Levitating•5m ago
Oh thats great.

I also use the wallpaper on https://hplovecraft.com/ as my actual wallpaper.

maerF0x0•1h ago
From the Article:

> Olive oil, wasabi, saffron, vanilla, Wagyu, honey, champagne, and truffle,...reality TV

from AI:

> lobster was once considered "garbage meat," so abundant in colonial America that it was fed to prisoners, slaves, and servants, sometimes leading to complaints and even laws limiting its servings

The decision that something is slop or good is subjective and ever changing.

turtletontine•31m ago
The authors point is not that these things are “slop” in and of themselves, it’s that the demand for each of these so outpaces supply that the market is full of low quality (sometimes fraudulent) knock offs. AKA… slop.
FarmerPotato•8m ago
Yes, and before modern leisure time, beaches were uncanny haunts. The borderland where shipwrecks were found and dead things floated ashore.

Beaches and lobster are real things in the natural world. Slop is something else.

onion2k•1h ago
If you spend your time worrying about what TikTok videos other people watch you've probably got too much time on your hands.
ottah•27m ago
Seriously, stop worrying about what people do in their free time, and find you're own joy. It's not like your distaste is going to have any effect on the people who enjoy it, so stop worrying about it.
nomel•19m ago
If you like absurdist humor, there's a really good chance you'll enjoy some of the humor focused AI video "algorithm tracks" (what's the proper name?) on TikTok.
47thpresident•50m ago
> If it were up to TikTok and Meta, our feeds would be exclusively robot-made. Humans are a variable they cannot control, and I think they despise us for it.

OpenAI’s Sora mobile app is the experiment to see if human beings will tolerate total AI content consumption. We’ll see how that will go.

not_ai•31m ago
Not really, it’s just the interface OpenAI gave for creating short videos with their AI. They push people to it hoping for engagement, but it’s not the sole reason people go — unlike TikTok.
kgwxd•28m ago
AI has made me hate real people even more that I already did. Constantly seeing human behavior emulated amplifies how much real people are on auto-pilot, even (especially?) the parts that make them "them".
OGEnthusiast•28m ago
The upshot is that having everything be AI slop could be what breaks our collective addiction to chronic screen time/usage.
dashundchen•17m ago
The only winning move is not to play.

First I removed the Instagram app from my phone, because it was full of dark patterns meant to keep users scrolling.

Endless reposted stories from people you follow, endless suggested posts when you ran out of posts from people you actually know, and then the slop bucket known as reels. I found myself sucked in too often.

I used the web app version on my phone for a bit, which has a lot fewer dark patterns, but eventually I ditched that too because I found myself checking it out of habit.

Now I still have a login on my desktop browser, because for whatever reason some businesses insist on only sharing hours/menus etc via an Instagram post. But I'm close to pulling the plug on Instagram altogether.

Is there an xcancel equivalent for Instagram that lets me bypass the login wall in a pinch?

I also added a ublock origin filter list for tuning out social media distractions. Now my YouTube and Reddits are essentially blank feeds - no suggested posts, stories or recommendations.

https://github.com/BevizLaszlo/UBlock-Filters-for-Social-Med...

FarmerPotato•13m ago
Perhaps you meant 'upside' .. if so, well played.
numpad0•6m ago
Nothing will happen to it. Someone will eventually complete the loop between slop generators to human reward systems to turn the first order derivative of content supply back up to pre-COVID levels.
abdibrokhim•22m ago
umm,
erelong•9m ago
If you don't like the "slop" you can probably "avert thine eyes"
jfengel•2m ago
You really can't, not without also swearing off a ton of genuine content. You can swear off the Internet entirely, and maybe that's a net win, but other than that you're almost certain to encounter slop. And it may take longer than you like to sort the wheat from the chaff.
alexpotato•8m ago
From a personal perspective:

I have a niche Instagram account that goes out to find content and then "reposts" it. There were several fun aspects of this e.g. finding good content, writing my own little algorithm to prioritize contents from older posts on smaller accounts etc.

Lately, much as others have said, you are seeing entire accounts of AI generated images that are high quality, near photo realistic and consistent e.g. it looks like the same person in different scenes/times of day etc

You sometimes hear the quote about "pre-war steel" that hadn't been hit by radiation and that's EXACTLY what it feels like looking for an account with posts from before ~2022.

I wonder if the above means that people are going to spend less time online and prioritize "in real life" events or if the slop is just going to get more addicted.

Probably a mix of both in the same way that Tough Mudder/Spartan Races became popular while at the same time the number of other people NOT leaving their houses went up.

will_pseudonym•7m ago
the great bifurcation will continue apace