Why? Why? Why? I hate how everyone seems convinced they need to adopt the latest and greatest browser features just to stay relevant. I hate oklch and I hate Tailwind popularized it. I don't care how scientifically accurate it is at representing human color perception. It's a PITA to understand a new type of color system, and learn to tweak it, especially when HSL/RGB just worked fine.

China: 358M

Both countries have roughly the same population. The IPv4 problem has been swept under the rug with CGNAT and a normal person doesn't even notice it. But it sucks. Forget having a dedicated IP, even on a broadband connection, you don't get a public IP that's truly yours. According to IPInfo[1], there are around 1,000 users sharing my IP. I get flagged for malicious activity, and online gaming is impossible without a Tailscale relay.

Of course, much of this comes down to the bad luck (+ policies) of developing late, when most IPv4 blocks had already been allocated. But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks they'll probably never fully use, and may never sell. Meanwhile I am sharing a single public IP with a thousand strangers.

[1]: https://ipinfo.io/223.233.77.184

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

Right from the start, the content was as open as possible, and community ownership was a core principle. As a programmer with limited resources back in 2010, I have every reason to be grateful for Stack Overflow because back then Experts Exchange was paywalled, and most other forums were either language-specific or drowning in spam.

Stack Overflow's strict moderation was a direct response to those forums, where you often had to scroll through pages of noise to find one useful answer. Yes, it eventually became a hall-monitor type of clique obsessed with enforcing rules, but that moderation wasn't useless. People here forgot Googling a programming question and clicking StackOverflow link? We did this for years, imagine the time saved not going through manuals.

Obviously, there's much less reason to use it in the age of AI. But let's show a little gratitude for what it gave us instead of just grumbling about what it became.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50230176

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50113294

Points: 6

# Comments: 3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104986

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

There seems to be more interest in hitting some arbitrary benchmark (we proved X unsolved problems) than in genuinely contributing to mathematics. But what else is to be expected? It's become a maniacal race with too much money. Too much effort is being invested in proving that the exponential curve is still holding.

Everyone on Twitter is acting as if Adobe’s software was decompiled, rewritten, and that’s it—game over, without even trying the damn thing. Seeing software engineers themselves espouse this nonsense is particularly annoying.

Yes, AI can recreate photoshop. But Photoshop is the product of thousands of tiny design, engineering, and product decisions. The idea that all of those decisions can simply be “decoded” from compiled binaries is laughable.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49796033

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

> The issue is that much of the problematic content doesn’t violate any law but still is poison that shouldn’t be on anyone’s feed. The easiest example is painting feminism as some evil propaganda against men, and how women’s place in the kitchen is natural order of things. Such views have gained steam in the recent times purely because of social media (algorithms).

> The ideal regulation would be to ban or heavily regulate algorithmic feeds. If you don’t follow someone, or a page, or an interest, there’s no reason for you to get that stuff on your timeline. Only things that should be shown is what you explicitly choose. And if it does, it should be easy enough to nuke it from your timeline.

[1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2026/02/25/algorithmic-feeds-need-to-...

The only exception I’ve seen work is marriage-focused apps and services. This may be very India-specific, but the dating market felt far more balanced and serious in the matrimony space, provided you’re comfortable being evaluated on things like salary and eating preferences.

But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator to do basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too.

I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I remember reading The Power Broker, a 1,000+ pages tome, in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives. Possibly, being completely engrossed in a book would be an alien experience to them.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49585627

Points: 429

# Comments: 338

I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.

Why not, though? I started using OpenCode + GitHub Copilot, but I burned through my Claude Sonnet quota in just three days. I switched to GPT-5.4-mini, which uses far fewer tokens, and it’s often just as good as Sonnet. I think optimizing token usage is a good exercise. We often assume a model will be terrible, when it really isn’t.

Also, smart people are often less likely to vote when both options seem bad, whereas people driven by propaganda have no such hesitation and will turn out in droves—a problem Bertrand Russell highlighted quite clearly [1].

[1]: https://economicsociology.org/2023/11/30/in-the-modern-world...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477249

Points: 17

# Comments: 7