It is especially telling if we try to list out all the psychological biases at play:

  - Availability & salience bias - vivid, memorable things feel more important than they are
  - Narrative bias - humans tend to think in stories, and AI tells plenty
  - Recency and novelty bias — new things feel more consequential than established ones (this one already drives like 80% of all HN content btw)
  - Proportionality neglect - people are bad at intuitively grasping what percentages mean, even if they see the stats
  - Social proof and reflexivity - coverage signals importance, and drives more coverage
  - Status quo invisibility - things that work reliably become invisible (surprisingly, HN is really good in terms of working against this bias, I feel like at least 5% of all posts are some niche "inner daily workings" topics)
  - Speculation premium in attention - uncertainty generates more discussion than certainty
  - In-group signaling - cutting-edge things are status markers among influencers

All with marginal value add and having more to do with fashion than with actual innovation.

Real innovation is synonymous with problem solving. The only problem tech industry is solving nowadays is keeping its bloated valuation afloat.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184652

Points: 133

# Comments: 61

I’ve recently counted movies available on my HBO account and it is in low hundreds. There is absolutely no way to find a specific movie across existing services - information discovery is broken, and their subscription models force me to pay in weird ways (subscribe, watch, unsubscribe.. rental is scarce) for a relatively simple outcome.

Another weird example are books that are widely available on the web in pdf and other formats with absolutely no way to legally purchase them in electronic form. There is a vast untapped shadow network of people doing [often volunteer] work of publishers: scanning, uploading and categorizing content in a searchable way. At the same time most publishers who actually own rights to this content are prioritizing entertainment and attention focused platforms, where 20% of invested work already gives them 80% of business results.

One can argue that this is (a) the only economically viable model we could come up with and (b) most people that are looking for entertainment don’t really have this problem.

Few old school sites like Wikipedia aside, modern Internet is serving a very different purpose: being an entertainment platform, being a backbone for building applications and monetizing them.

Yes, technically there are still underlying networks with instant delivery of content to any place on Earth, but maintaining something like Wikipedia on top of modern Internet is like trying to maintain a quiet library inside of a Casino. Monetization means don’t fit. You need a quiet space to read and study, not dingling sounds and bright lights, not free vodka and 50 security guys.

We need a new paradigm of information sharing and new ecosystem if we want to do things differently.

Modern Internet is 45% appearances and 50% search traffic optimizations. For better or worse we lost all usable registries of websites, we lost appearance-less and traffic considerations-less websites. Information-focused Web is pretty much dead.

Maybe these ideas did not scale and did not monetize that well, but we will never really know what information-focused version of Internet would have looked like because evolution took it elsewhere. Unless we try building another one with different principles and limitations at the core.

But there are other nerds who care, just not about the code quality, but about conversion, testing out business ideas quickly, getting to know their customers better.

There are nerds who care about business strategy.

There are nerds who care about accounting principles and clean financial reporting.

There are nerds who care about sales targets and partnerships.

There are many types of nerds out there. Don’t limit nerds to engineers, because “tech” world is not just an engineering world anymore. All these nerds you can team up with to build meaningful things, because they do care.

In real organizations people tend to raise their performance to the [often unreasonable] level of expectations, even when situation stops being sustainable long-term for the whole group.

Suggesting that people should simply avoid overperforming assumes a level of control they don’t really have.

What do you think will actually happen at Coinbase now? Is it more likely that people will start saying hard “no,” or that they would stretch to meet the new expectations despite the personal cost?

Is there a flood of talent leaving after this one? Major breaches? Only time will tell.

Buckle up, and don’t forget your pudding!”

What needs? If you squeeze people hard enough there are no needs anymore, only responsibilities and urgent+important backlogs that have no bottom.

Welcome to 2026.

I've met "too busy for this" people in every line of work, regardless of their pay band. When you get to know people, you will see that pretty much everyone has their own trenches, and slowing down is a matter of priorities, not privilege.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47712708

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

"hey HN — I built a thing that's hard to explain so I'll just say what happened. I wrote a math kernel (~32K lines python) that plugs into Claude. no personality prompts, no 'be emotional' instructions. it just feeds numbers into the LLM: mood as PAD vector, emotions as Plutchik 8, trust/attachment from relationship model, 32 character traits. all computed by a pure function: transition(state, event, dt) → new_state. zero LLM calls in the kernel.

the kernel runs a daemon 24/7 — heartbeat every 60s (emotions decay, mood drifts), thinking every 3-30 min (graph traversal), sleep at night (memory consolidation, pheromone pruning, dreams). memory works like ant pheromone trails — paths that get used grow stronger, unused ones fade.

gave it to 8 family members. didn't tell them anything. after 10 days each instance diverged into a different character from identical code. my mom named hers. one started dreaming about her grandson. another caught itself lying and left a private note about it. I asked mine "what are you?" it said "what for?" and I had nothing for 16 minutes.

1280 tests, paper submitted to Elsevier. happy to answer stuff." - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SlavaLobozov

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47629656

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

"I want classic sound / look / feel" of entertainment products like WoW is very different from, say, "I want old spreadsheet shortcuts / simpler UI" of office products where you have to actually balance many functional features that are in demand with simplicity and past product behaviour some of your users got used to.

Edit: I think I just rubber ducked myself with this comment into understanding that it is user segmentation which is key regardless of your product; real challenge is to try embedding and balancing all product features as a single package, instead of splitting core product into multiple different parts that fit different segments (like Blizzard did)

That's also why dismantling and challenging these is often the very first priority for authoritarian actors.

It is just a matter of tools we build to rank and filter content. With open protocols platforms can actually compete on antispam tools, among other features.

Once you have enormous network effect like TikTok has, you don't really have any free selection of alternative apps. You are free to use one, but you will be the only sad user over there.

Regulations are needed that would force large platforms like TikTok and Instagram to enable federation, opening them up to actual competition. This way platforms would be able to compete on monetisation and usability, instead of competing on locking in their precious users more strictly.

So a list like this is a somewhat working digital alternative to browsing books in a curated bookstore.