this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Also the hivemind seems to have taken against ~~tweets~~Xeets, a stunning reversal from last year when St. Elon was gonna usher in a new Dawn of civilized discourse.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just because a Twitter said it's over doesn't mean it's over. Prediction markets still think there's a ~1/5 chance of it being legit.

This is basically the epitome of postmodernism these people love dunking on. There's no external truth, only utterances. When prediction markets have hegemony, that will be Truth.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 1 year ago

unlike you, science-believing simpletons, i get truth about the world from the only reliable source: weighted average of gut feelings of gamblers pretending to be day traders

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 1 year ago

I nominate the term "orange poster" (and possibly "orange poaster" for the rats) henceforth

[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

A based take on markets. I agree with this statement.

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 1 year ago

It is a very highly resistive poor quality material. Period. No point in fighting with the truth. Data have spoken.

The way this phrase is worded is weird in my opinion. It sounds more like a political statement rather than a scientific one.

This isn't the first unprofessional message from that Twitter account during the lk99 saga. Their biased tone makes them untrustworthy. Even more than anime girl et al

I keep seeing posts exactly like these from the orange site’s top minds. it’s not doing what they think it’s doing for their reputation as science understanders. shit, anyone who’s hung around in a lab when a result won’t replicate knows the tone of that tweet

[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe I should subscribe to this community. I've been falling further and further out of love with Hacker News with all sorts of tech illiterate / science illiterate takes that get lifted to the top. Its getting to the point that I assume any top ranked comment will be demonstrated absolutely wrong in 5 years

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

it’s very frankly well worth stepping out of the Y Combinator bubble. I dropped the site for anything other than as a target for sneering years ago because I started to see a lot of dangerous patterns emerge in the community (general scientific illiteracy is one thing, as you mentioned; for me, the site’s general undercurrent of thinly veiled racism got very hard to stomach).

on a more personal note, not being immersed in HN’s bad ideas did wonders for my mental health. the only thing I feel I really lost was the ability to easily get an audience for my open source projects, but there are other outlets for that.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yeah similar. I only skim the link source as a semi-aggregator of stuff (because it's where a lot of people will share shit), but even that needs significant filtering.

otherwise a strict policy of Don't Read The Comments

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Allow me to sum up my relationship with the orange site with a lightly edited quote of Dennis Ritchie from The UNIX-HATERS Handbook:

Here is my metaphor: your ~~book~~ website is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain ~~life for some~~ interest to computerniks like me. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of ~~contempt and of envy~~ silicon valley chauvinism.

[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago
[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

mostly Nix code lately: a flake that turns any desktop into an old Lisp machine, another flake that turns any desktop into a new Lisp machine (a Lisp-based workbench that enables system-wide recursive self-improvement), a module that mostly auto-configures a high performance windows gaming VM with dedicated hardware (one of the non-proton ways to game on Linux), and a flake that implements an efficient technique for templating/static website generation

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That stuff is guaranteed karma bait on lobste.rs, just fyi

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

maybe… mostly I’m looking for non-toxic contributors, since these are all projects that do best with community input

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nix sounds very interesting tbh.

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

I recommend it! this notawfultech post links to a gentle introduction to Nix if you’d like to give it a try. awful.systems also runs on and is deployed by plain NixOS, mostly because it’s a lot of fun to work with in a way devops almost always isn’t

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

someone has to pick up the fallen mantle of , RIP

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I dare wish for TechTakes to embody its spirit, not in the sense of replicating all of its problematic aspects, but possibly in the sense of using "a hackernews" and to a lesser extent "an internet" as a somewhat (very) derogatory pronoun.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago

after that Urbit thread of hackernewses incorrecting each other,

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Haha it's [flagged] now. The fragile orangicity :D

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

Hard to say if it's violent disagreement or that the link is perceived to be "broken".

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 1 year ago

that thread is mind numbingly stupid even for HN

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

superior rationalists trained by EY are obviously better than anyone else, how they dare to come against them with some flimsy "empirical evidence" smh

it's like with metamed but without the actual thing

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and also, that alleged levitation video on bilibili, author already admitted that it was fraud. wonder how orange site reacts to that development https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lk-99-video-fraud-taken-down

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 1 year ago

the orange site seems to have flagged the linked thread to death, but check out the currently active thread for more of the worst takes available on why this having all of the hallmarks of scientific fraud doesn’t matter, how dare we make value judgements

[–] raktheundead@fedia.io 7 points 1 year ago

I'm wryly amused that of all people, the rats putting their dismal hopes into the prediction markets not going to zero are the ones screeching about scientism.

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 5 points 1 year ago

The Russian grifter was weird.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looking through the threads most people only read the last tweet in the x thread and didn't see the link to evidence.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 1 year ago

Ignoring HN illiteracy that might be mostly on Elon Musk. Xitter [ˈʃɪɾ.ɚ] as of now doesn't show the full thread unless you're logged in. Surely this will have no impact on its (already inflated) perceived credibility and usefulness as a news source.

[–] pja@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This Twitter post from the guy who was synthesising the stuff in the US seems convincing: https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1689476909208600576

Not a superconductor - the hints of superconductor-like properties were due to a combination of iron contamination in the Pb forming iron fragments which (surprise!) show ferromagnetism & Copper Sulphide which shows a very similarly anomalous temp/resistivity profile (but is not a superconductor).

The most likely outcome (i.e., not a superconductor, lab error due to honest scientists being fooled by their own experiments) seems to be probably the true one.