This never happens in real life....."rewriting software" is the introverted programmer's wet dream because it gives them relevance and the idea of respect. No serious business "rewrites software in something else" once they start to take off.
You don't do it for fun*, but because the rapid development duck-typed dynamic language you used to get to MVP quickly is not the language you need to keep it working under load and a growing feature set.
It's a terrible and difficult transition that makes you question if the first language was really such a good choice after all, although it did get you where you are right now, which is more than you can say for a bunch of companies trying to do everything future proof from day 0
(* well, some people do, but they don't tend to survive)
I can point to plenty of companies that have rewritten products at scale. That said, specifically relevant to the article, I believe Shopify and GitHub continue to run Ruby on Rails.
This sound be the top comment, and the discussion should be around why this is the case (how Congress appropriates money like this), what alternatives there could be, and what are the pros/cons of each different option. Sadly HN is no longer a place where this can happen.
An MSN repost of a Fox Business article, that lifted a specific sentence from a NYTimes article, where the source was "people familiar with the meeting".
This is likely as accurate as the game of broken telephone that kids play.
More than once it has happened where some NYT article will discuss some private meeting at the White House and attribute it to someone like, "According to a credible source at that meeting, blah blah". Later it is confirmed that that well placed source was the President, or the secretary of state, etc. Credible news organizations don't just repeat whatever some random guy claims to have heard.
So it is two articles that both ultimately source from NYT? They are not commonly flat out incorrect, and when they are tend to correct the record. So I would say your statement is hyperbole and wrong. NYT sources are likely quite a bit more trustworthy than eight year olds whispering to each other for fun.
This is a typical HN "marketing is stupid" post. TikTok organic and paid are some of the best drivers of leads and sales for businesses, same like FB and Google are as well.
Handwaving TT away as "another social media platform" is like comparing Friendster or MySpace with the ad machine that FB has built. There are countless businesses that will be impacted by this.
I would be happy if all social media was wiped out tomorrow. The eagerness of advertisers to throw money at these platforms frankly sickens me. So many of the internet's current ills originate in how social media platforms operate.
I don't give two shits how many leads these platforms drive, just like I don't care how many farmers the tobacco industry employs.
Python package management has always seemed like crazyland to me. I've settled on Anaconda as I've experimented with all the ML packages over the years, so I'd be interested to learn why uv, and also what/when are good times to use venv/pip/conda/uv/poetry/whatever else has come up.
NeutralCrane has a really helpful comment below[0], would love to have a more thorough post on everything!
If you use conda, and can use conda for what you need to do, use conda w/ conda-forge. It has a much better story for libraries with binary dependencies, whereas PyPI (which `uv` uses) is basically full of static libraries that someone else compiled and promises to work.
Note, I use PyPI for most of my day-to-day work, so I say this with love!
Really cool, you might want to update the main above the fold summary stats to include the unrealised gains, because it looks like nothing is working / nothing has happened until you scroll and read around a bit.
I remember a study as well where folks who were much more religious also had a lower rate of Alzheimer's. The purported cause was that remembering the hymns/chanting verses forces your brain to be more supple and active, staving off whatever causes it. Will try find it and link later.
Off topic from the video AI thread, but to elaborate on your point: people believe what they want, based on what they have been primed to believe from mass media. This is mainly the normal TV and paper news, filtered through institutions like government proclamations, schools, and now supercharged by social media. This is why the "narrative" exists, and news media does the consensus messaging of what you should believe (and why they hate X and other freer media sources).
By the time the politician says it, you've been soaking in it for weeks or months, if not longer. That just confirms the bias that has been implanted in you.
If anything I'd say the opposite. Look at the last US elections, a lot of the criticisms against the side that lost were things people "thought" and "felt" they were for/against, without them actually coming out and saying anything of the like. It was people criticising them for stuff that wasn't actually real on X, traditional TV, and the like that made voters "feel" like that stuff is real.
And X is really egregious, where the owner shitposts frequently and often things of dubious factuality.
You say offtopic, but I think AI video generation is the most on-topic place to bring up the subject of falsified politically charged statements. Companies showcasing these things aren't exactly lining up to include "moral" as one of the bullet point adjectives in a limitations section.
It's not impossible, but of course they're not homegrown.
Putin's apologists always demand he be given the benefit of the doubt. That's akin to convicting a spy beyond a reasonable doubt. That standard is meant to favor false negatives over false positives when incarcerating people. Better to let a thousand criminals go free than to imprison an innocent person.
If we used that for spies, we'd have 1000 of them running around for each convicted one. Not to mention that they have a million ways to avoid detection. They rely on their training, on the resources of the state, and on infiltrators who sabotage detection efforts. The actual ratio would be much higher.
In the case of opinion manipulation, the balance is even more pernicious. That's because the West decided a couple decades ago to use the "it's just a flesh wound" approach to foreign interference.
The problem is that we're not just protecting gullible voters. We're also defending the reputation of democracy. Either democracy works, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we're philosophically no better than Russia and China.
But if it was possible to control the outcome of elections by online manipulation alone, that would imply that democracy doesn't really work. Therefore online manipulation "can't work." Officially, it might sway opinion by a few points, but a majority of voters must definitionally be right. If manipulation makes little difference, then there's not much reason to fight it (or too openly anyways.)
Paradoxically, when it comes to detecting Russian voter manipulation, the West and Putin are strange bedfellows. Nothing to see here, move along.
My sense is that the "hivemind" is, in a symbiotic way, both homegrown and significantly foreign-influnced.
More specifically: the core sentiment of the hivemind (basically: anti-war/anti-interventionist mixed with a broader distrust of anything the perceived "establishment" supports) is certainly indigenous -- and it is very important to not overlook this fact.
But many of its memes, and its various nuggets of disinformation do seem to be foreign imports. This isn't just an insinuation; sometimes the lineage can actually be traced word-for-word with statements originating from foreign sources (for example, "8 years of shelling the Donbas").
The memes don't create the sentiment. But they do seem to reinforce it, and provide it with a certain muscle and kick. While all the while maintaining the impression that it's all entirely homegrown.
And the farther one goes down the "multipolar" rabbit hole, the more often one encounters not just topical memes, but signature phrases lifted directly from known statements by Putin and Lavrov themselves. E.g. that Ukraine urgently needs to "denazify". The more hardcore types even have no qualms about using that precious phrase "Special Military Operation", with a touch of pride in their voice.
It's really genuinely weird, what's happening. What people don't realize is that none of this is happening by accident. It's a very specific craft that the Russian security services (in particular) have nurtured and developed, literally across generations, to create language that pushes people's buttons in this way.
The Western agencies and institutions have their own way of propaganda of course, but usually it's far more bland and boring (e.g. as to how NATO "supports fosters broader European integration" and all that).
Would we have the same kind of hivemind without Putin? There's always some kind of a hivemind -- but as applies to Eastern Europe, it does seem that the general climate of discourse was quite different before his ascendancy. And that it certainly took a very sharp, weird bend in the road after the start of Special Military Operation.
What are you talking about? News media LOVE twitter/X, it is where they get all their stories from and journalists are notoriously addicted to it, to their detriment.
