MountDoom

I find it weird that you single out Bush. After 9/11, a military conflict was pretty much politically inevitable. The decision to expand to Iraq was stupid, but did it really shake up the post-1991 neoliberal consensus? Or was it just its final flex - "with this one trick, we can finally fix the Middle East"?

I think Russia deserves a lot of credit. It started long before Crimea. They had a military incursion into Georgia, secured a pro-Kremlin dictator in Belarus, nearly got away with the same in Ukraine and some other neighboring republics - all while buttering up the EU with energy deals. I think the European and American (non-)response to that was the death knell of that "rules-based" worldview.

While Russia acted belligerently, China played the long game to cement its geopolitical influence and make itself "too big to fail".

If there was a domestic inflection point in the US and in the EU, I think that was actually the housing crisis / the sovereign debt crisis around 2007-2009. That really undermined the optimism about supranational institutions.

Oh come on. Quanta Magazine basically writes for HN. They have very little online footprint elsewhere, but they feature here multiple times a week and I'm sure they know it. The titles are almost always in this mold, implying some profound yet vague discovery. Some real, recent examples:

  - "Researchers Discover the Optimal Way to Optimize"
  - "Origami Patterns Solve a Major Physics Riddle"
  - "A simple way to measure knots has come unraveled"
  - "The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves Crashes Into View"

I don't necessarily mind it, even if I don't find the articles very informative. But it's certainly fair game to nitpick this borderline-clickbait style.

> One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.

That's a complete non-sequitur.

Yes, and many German scientists went to great lengths to surrender to Western forces. I think von Braun was one of them.

> It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe

They also had an extensive industrial espionage program. In particular, most of the integrated circuits made in the Soviet Union were not original designs. They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs. They had pin- and instruction-compatible knock-offs of 8086, Z80, etc. Rest assured, that wasn't because they loved the instruction set and recreated it from scratch.

Soviet scientists were on the forefront of certain disciplines, but tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.

Did this article travel forward in time from the year 1999?

In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a good number of techies who were in control of the infrastructure and believed that as long as you don't mess with other people's toys, you should be allowed to roam freely online. But even then, this wasn't the universal consensus. You would still get shown the door for certain behaviors on the Usenet or on web forums. And many ISPs would still drop you for hard porn, gore, or piracy.

But today, the consensus is that tech companies are the guardians of morality. You can get deplatformed quite easily from all the major platforms just for saying things that others disagree with. Your private files in the cloud (and sometimes on the device) get scanned for contraband. Search engines and LLMs are carefully engineered to never say or encourage the wrong things, and to flag certain things for human review. You'd be hard-pressed to find an online platform or a Western ISP that doesn't bow to social pressures.

The honest answer that applies to almost everyone here is that as a kid, they liked playing computer games and heard that the job pays well.

It's interesting, because to become a plumber, you pretty much need a plumber parent or a friend to get you interested in the trade show you the ropes. Meanwhile, software engineering is closer to the universal childhood dream of "I want to become an astronaut" or "I want to be a pop star", except more attainable. It's very commoditized by now, so if you're looking for that old-school hacker ethos, you're gonna be disappointed.

The regulatory landscape here is pretty funny. In all likelihood, the worst RFI offenders in your home are LED lights, followed by major appliances. Both of these are regulated less than something like a computer mouse. For lightbulbs, I think the manufacturers just self-certify.

I guess there are two ways to look at it. Either the regulation was wildly successful, so the problems persist only in the less-regulated spaces. Or we spend a lot of effort chasing the wrong problem.

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.

First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism.

In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.

Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.

People say that, but the sales didn't really change anything. The site still looks pretty much the way it did back in the day.

I think the main thing is just that Slashdot "belonged" to the BOFH / sysadmin subculture that's largely gone. In my younger years, that was the tech career to aspire to. Nowadays, kids want to work at OpenAI / Google / a billion-dollar future unicorn, so the SF Bay Area ethos is dominant.

I get your joke, but the thesis here isn't that Neanderthals were exposed to more lead. Instead, the claim is that we might have evolved a mutation that protects our brain against lead to some extent.

HN as an aggregator of geek news is exceptional. It's not the first of its kind - Slashdot was quite similar - but perhaps because it's associated with the SF Bay Area, it managed to stay relevant while Slashdot withered away.

HN as a commenting community is markedly more hit-and-miss. We often comment without reading the articles, we are sometimes gratuitously negative for the sake of negativity, and there isn't any other place where I've seen so many people being confidently wrong about my areas of expertise. I think we'd be better off if we were more willing to say "this is okay and I don't need to have a strong opinion about it" or "I'm probably not an expert on X, even though I happen to be good with programming".

> I think you could make AGI right now tbh.

Seems like you figured out a simple method. Why not go for it? It's a free Nobel prize at the very least.

> TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society.

Inform about what? Would you tune in to hear a daily report about how many old people people died of cardiac issues today? I doubt the breakdown here is different for NPR. Or BBC, or whatnot.

It's not a failure of capitalism, it's just what we crave.