The innovation here is, I think, the use of union types. The problem with errors as standard algebraic data types (ADTs) is you end up with lots of boilerplate to transform from one ADT to another, as errors propagate through the system. With union types (as found in Typescript and Scala 3) you can add and remove types from the union in an ad-hoc manner. IIRC Elm doesn't have union types, so I think the blog post is a bit inaccurate.
I mean union types in the programming language theory sense, not in the "we called this language feature union types" sense. Elm's union types are algebraic data types (ADTs). Union types in the PLT sense are what Typescript has. The main difference is that an ADT must be declared upfront, whilst a union type can be constructed in an ad-hoc manner based on whatever types are used together at a particular point in the program.
I used to think the same but after having many discussions just like this I accepted that there’s no agreed upon formal definition for what is a union type and what isn’t. Being created ad hoc or not seems like a made up on the spot distinction. If you do think there is a definition that most researchers agree on that’s distinct from ADT, do provide some sources.
Here's Types and Programming Languages on union types. My take away is that the preferred terminology is union types for non-disjoint unions and sum types for disjoint unions.
"Sum and variant types are sometimes called disjoint unions. The type T1+T2 is
a “union” of T1 and T2 in the sense that its elements include all the elements
from T1 and T2. This union is disjoint because the sets of elements of T1 or
T2 are tagged with inl or inr,respectively, before they are combined, so that
it is always clear whether a given element of the union comes from T1 or T2.
The phrase union type is also used to refer to untagged (non-disjoint) union
types, described in §15.7." p142
"The dual notion of union types, T1 ∨ T2, also turns out to be quite useful.
Unlike sum and variant types (which, confusingly, are sometimes also called
“unions”), T1 ∨T2 denotes the ordinary union of the set of values belonging
to T1 and the set of values belonging to T2, with no added tag to identify the
origin of a given element." p207
They seem to both agree that union types are about being possibly non-disjoint, and ADT being always disjoint, with values tagged as of a single type. I can accept that since it defines union as the same concept as in set theory. There’s nothing there regarding types being ad hoc, though that is arguably a consequence of the syntax since using a symbol between different types to “union” them cannot be expected to result in a disjointed type union. So, I think that’s a useful and defensible position, but I don’t think many people will use these definitions consistently given there’s already a lot of confusion in the use of these terms.
Can anyone describe how this differs from Tangled (https://tangled.org/)? Both seem very interesting, but I'm not deep enough into either to understand how they differ.
Radicle is architecturally local-first: you run your own node, sync repositories from a P2P gossip network, and then everything—browsing code, creating issues, reviewing patches—happens against your local data store. There's no round-trip to a server. Issues and patches are stored as signed Git objects (COBs) that replicate with the repo itself. The network is only involved when you choose to sync. This makes it extremely performant for day-to-day work and fully functional offline.
Tangled to my understanding is federated in theory but centralized in practice. It relies on "knots" (servers that host Git repos) and a central AppView at tangled.sh that aggregates the network. Issues and social artifacts live on Personal Data Servers, not locally. While you can self-host a knot, the default experience routes through Tangled's managed infrastructure. The architecture is fundamentally client-server: your operations go over the network to wherever your data lives.
That implementation sounds really awesome but it raises a few questions for me (that I didn't immediately see when skimming the landing page although I realize answers might be in the docs somewhere).
I found the answer to one of them (how automatic pinning works) which I'll paste here because others are likely to wonder as well. Related, I assume there's a way to block overly large files if you run a seed node?
> They can vary in their seeding policies, from public seed nodes that openly seed all repositories to community seed nodes that selectively seed repositories from a group of trusted peers.
Suppose I'm A and I collaborate with B, C, ... Z. If I file an issue locally and sync to C, am I able to see if and when that propagates through the network to everyone else? I guess what I'm wondering about is what the latency, reliability, and end user understandability are like when using this to collaborate in practice. Like if I file an issue on GitHub I know that it's globally visible immediately. How does that work here?
Currently, with Radicle still under active development, we already reach convergence times that are negligible for async collaboration (like working on code or issues). Working on a well-seeded repo, my changes sync to ~10 nodes within a tenth of a second and with ~80 nodes within 3 seconds.
This is obviously not fast enough for sync collaboration, like writing on a virtual whiteboard together, but that's also not what Radicle is designed for. Also, if you share larger files (e.g. you attach a screenshot to your issue) the above times might not be a good estimation anymore, but that's the exception for now.
It's really strange to see that people assume that peer to peer networks somehow must be slow. In my experience, since everything runs locally, working with Radicle feels way more snappy than any web interface, which has lots of latency on every so-odd click.
As the network scales, it'll of course take some care to keep the speed up, but that's known and there are a few models to take inspiration from.
It's not that I assume it must be slow, but rather that from experience being slow is a distinct possibility so I know to ask about it. But I also asked about reliability and visibility into the process. The latter is what I'm most curious about.
I'm not meaning to suggest that I have a problem with any of it. It's just that when I see anything P2P that's mutable I start wondering about propagation of changes and ordering of events and how "eventual consistency" presents to end users in practice. Particularly in the face of a node unexpectedly falling off the network.
I realize I could browse the docs but I figure it's better to ask here because others likely have similar questions and we're here to discuss the thing after all.
There's `rad sync status` which will show you (for a particular repository) which other nodes have echoed back to you that they have received and verified the most recent state of your namespace of that repository. So, if you expect some other node to have received your changes, you can use this command to verify that.
When the user explicitly asks to sync, then by default the process will be considered to have completed successfully as soon as three other nodes have echoed that they have received your changes. This threshold is configurable. Further, one can define a list of nodes that they care particularly much about, in which case the process will only be considered to have completed successfully if all these nodes also signaled that they have received your changes.
For anything deeper than that, you'd have to resort to logs. And if you connect your node to the other one your are interested, you can get a pretty good picture of what's going on.
If one node "falls off" the network, then the above mechanisms will communicate that to you, or fail after a timeout.
With Git repositories, humans establish order explicitly. They push commits which are a DAG. The collaboration around that (mostly discussions on issues, patches) is also stored in and synced by Git, but here, humans do not have to establish order explicitly. Rather, these things, in Radicle lingo called "Collaborative Objects" are CRDTs, so they will merge automatically. Nodes also opportunistically tag operations on these CRDTs with the latest operation they know, to help a bit by establishing an order where possible.
This sounds so much more appealing to me than github and co. Unfortunately I guess there's no multibillion dollar exit in the cards in this case.
Has there been any thought about how this might interact with centralized-ish hosting? For example. Suppose a large project chose to use a radicle repo as its "blessed" point of coordination. Being a major project of course there's a mirror on (at minimum) github that points back to a web page (presumably the radicle app) for filing issues, collab, wiki, whatever.
So a user that doesn't have any interest in learning about radicle wants to file an issue using the web app. When I glanced at the heartwood repo it seems to be read only with no indication of being able to log in (that's entirely unsurprising ofc). How much work / community welcome / etc is there likely to be for a project to offer a usable web front end, presumably leveraging a solution such as OIDC? Basically being able to "guest" users of centralized platforms in to the project so that they can collaborate with near zero overhead.
As a motivating example consider outfits that want to self host a git forge but also want to offer centralized services to users. Communities such as KDE and SDL come to mind. Many of them have ended up migrating to github or gitlab over the years for various reasons but in an alternate reality it didn't have to be that way!
I realize I'm effectively asking "do you have thoughts about implementing a partially federated model" but hopefully you can see the real world usecase that's motivating the (otherwise seemingly unreasonable) question.
It's a valid question, and in fact there's quite some interest in adding write features to the web app. The current version of Radicle was designed with one user per node in mind, to get things off the ground. The process of relaxing this is currently ongoing. First, to multiple users per node, which would make use-cases like the one you are sketching viable. What we'd like to avoid is to hand the key to the server, in such case, and instead generate an Ed25519 key in the browser, and sign there, with some web-compatible transport (HTTP? WebSocket?) in between. And that's just a bit more intricate than it sounds.
Tangled is built on top of the AT Protocol, and "mediates" between what they call "knots". Git servers. Their strength is to use AT Protocol to make communication across multiple Git servers work smoothly.
Radicle is completely peer to peer. There are no such things as servers and clients, only nodes. However, there are quite a few nodes that then act as HTTP servers to offer convenient access via the browser.
Also, Tangled is VC-funded. I cannot find information about Radicle, but considering the authorship is not advertised on their website, and that P2P is not easily monetizable, I would bet it is not VC-funded.
All in all, seems like an awesome project and instantly more trustworthy and rugpull-resistant than Tangled.
quite ironic, radicle seems to have raised 7m$ from "radworks", some sort of crypto foundation.
that being said, why is it being not monetizable a good thing? their website says radicle has been in development for 4 years already. without more money in the bank, how would they continue to build the thing?
Radicle is a free software project, not a company or commercial product. Many other open source projects are also not monetizable in the narrow sense, and still manage to attract enough contributors and funding to flourish. Sometimes these projects even get adopted so widespread that multiple companies build consortia/foundations to fund the development, even if there is no direct revenue stream from that.
As long as someone is willing to fund the development of Radicle, the developers just will have a stronger incentive to work on it. Without any more funding, of course it will join the (very large) club of less well funded free software projects.
If enough people join and contribute now, and then some companies make the switch, it might well be feasible to pay a small team to continue working on it, financed by donations.
Just don't think about it as a commercial product, only because someone decided to use their money towards its development. If you don't like that it's not a company, then that's okay. I am just trying to give another perspective.
Speaking of prolific Racketeers... Noel! Just an hour ago, on a walk, I was thinking, "I should work through that one LLM book, and implement it in Racket." (But have started job-hunting, so will probably be Python.)
I've got so much other stuff I'd rather learn and code I'd rather write (C/wasm backend for my language), but I've also started job hunting and probably should understand how this latest fad works. Neural networks have long been on my todo list anyway.
Interesting stuff. I didn't read the whole paper in detail. I'm unclear on how FIP differs from adding uniqueness types to a language. A number of languages are exploring this (Rust being the most well known) so what's the novelty that FIP brings?
Whereas uniqueness qualifiers on values or references are a semantic component of a languages terms, FIP is more akin to a polymorphic System F based language having restrictions on term formation to enable decidable type inference.
Uniqueness types (which Rust can only be said to have as an implementation detail of the borrow checker’s running, as opposed to having programmer assignable uniqueness qualifier syntax for construction of types) are semantic constructs that a user places on types which then restrict the operations available for that object. In this paper and in Koka, the language that semi-inspired the exploration here, the functional-in-place mutation scheme is an optimization performed by the compiler in those cases where the resulting code is probably equivalent to the surface level syntax. Said surface level syntax presenting a logical view of the program as only have persistent, immutable objects.
The implicit novelty, although this paper is more an exploration of existing concepts in a specific environment (i.e. no GC at run time), is that there is no annotation burden or conceptual distinction to be made by users of the language to receive the performance benefits of mutation where available.
This, Local-first Software [1], the Humane Web Manifesto [2], etc. make me optimistic that we're moving away from the era of "you are the product" dystopian enshittification to a more user-centric world. Here's hoping.
* These articles always say that hardware is amazing but software sucks. Let's not forget that hardware has its problems. Intel's management engine is a pile of complexity: https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op.... The x86_64 instruction set is hardly inspiring, and I imagine we lose a pile of performance because it fails to adequately represent the underlying hardware. (E.g. there are hundreds of registers on modern CPUs, but you can't access them directly and just have to hope the hardware does a good job of register allocation.)
* Languages unlock performance for the masses. Javascript will never be truly fast because it doesn't represent the machine. E.g. it doesn't have distinct integer and floating point types. Rust represents the machine and is fast, but is not as ergonomic as it could be. OxCaml is inspiring me lately as it's an ergonomic high-level language that also represents the machine. (Scala 3 is also getting there with capture checking, but that is still experimental.) If we want more performance we have to give a way to efficiently write code that can be turned into efficient code.
Sure x86 is an absolute mess, but I don't think it's a primary bottleneck. High end x86 cpus still beat high end ARM cpus by a significant margin on raw performance. Even supposing x86/ARM are bottlenecks... yeah a bottleneck at double digit billion ops per second.
> Languages unlock performance for the masses. Javascript will never be truly fast because it doesn't represent the machine.
C# and Go are already really fast (https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages) languages for the masses and at this point you can compile most things to WASM to get them run in the browser.
You think collapsing a comment quickly would be difficult in x86_64 assembly?
I would expect 1000's of frames of opens/closes per second. Probably an order or two more. The LCD's data bandwidth and our retina's sensitivity would be decisive bottlenecks at far slower speeds.
TLDR: CPUs, that are not getting slower, are not the reason newer software implementations often get slower.
When I read wildly insane comments on a mildly contentious issue here on HN (e.g. as a very mild example, posts on electric cars always draw out someone who needs to state they drive 1000 miles a day and so electric cars will never work for anyone) I wonder how many sock puppets accounts there are here. There must be some. The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
When you do the job we do, and spend hours each day looking at the discussions and the data, it becomes fairly easy to spot inauthentic actors on HN. It stands out when newly registered accounts (which appear in green) or older accounts without much posting history, suddenly start posting comments in support of a particular position.
This is another reason why HN's primary purpose – gratifying intellectual curiosity – is so important. Curious conversation is hard to fake. You can't really be inauthentically curious, at least not for long. So the more we can succeed at nudging the community's conduct towards curious conversation, the more it stands out when accounts are acting to promote a particular agenda, and the faster we can weed them out.
I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
It's also important to remember that (rightly or wrongly) a lot of these culture war issues are really touching a tribalism nerve rather than really touching on the issues themselves. To a lot of people, the EV debate amounts to "those _other_ people trying to force a change on _me_." Mind you, I'm not suggesting this is the right way to look at these sorts issues, but I think that's how it plays out for a lot of people. I had a real-life friend who was very anti-environmentalist, and his view was effectively that it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people.
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
This is a zero-barrier-to-entry forum (not even an email required!) that has the eyes of a people prone to being involved with startups. Why would you think in any way this would be better than an average equivalent? Because you don't personally notice it?
There's little barrier to entry, but for the most part the community does good internal policing. Stupid emotional comments are pushed down, and the worst ones are flagged. (I've had a few moments of weakness here, so I'm not trying to be sanctimonious here)
I see a lot of people who conflate "my opinion, which is the correct opinion just won't fly here, so how can you say the community does a good job of self-policing?" I really don't agree with this. Any community is going to hold some opinions you disagree with, and will hold some bad or even wrong opinions. What I generally (but not always) see is HN upvoting comments that are thoughtful and intelligent, not necessarily ones that I think might be correct.
Partisan tribalism is such an odd phenomenon, and it has a very obvious deranging effect on people. They no longer pay attention to principle or policy. Instead, everything becomes a matter of some vacuous “groupism”. Parties become little jingoist nations unto themselves. Our of weakness, people are unable to maintain a position rooted in honesty and truth, and instead search for some Borg cube to join in order to receive “protection”, as long as they chant the party’s mantras. Very often, it crosses over into cult of personality territory. People make idols of the party and the party leader.
The tragedy of it all is that it completely misses the point. Politics is in service of the common good of the polity. True loyalty is to that common good as an objective good. Loyalty to a party is a false loyalty, as parties are not proper objects of loyalty. They are merely convenient political instruments, not the objects of the good pursued. Things become doubly absurd when this party loyalty remains intact despite a party’s errors.
> it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people
The fact is that environmental issues - like almost any political issue - can be used by any party to push an agenda in parallel to the actual issue. So, here, environmental concerns can be used by any party as a cudgel and an instrument, whether negatively (e.g., painting all environmental concern as subterfuge in order to push through policies aimed at private profit at the expense of quality of life) or positively (e.g., stopping critical projects proposed by a political opponent by commissioning bogus ecological studies to create impediments).
Of course, that’s different than the extreme position that all environmental concern is part of some conspiracy (the Left has its own share of analogous conspiratorial crackpottery).
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
We're much, much worse. "Most communities" are built around consensus. Show up at your Facebook group organized around your favorite hobby and you'll find that everyone has a bunch of similar opinions about most things, and that's the way most people like it. Walk off the reservation and try to pick fights over something controversial and you'll find the community walks away.
That sounds bad, right? What if consensus is wrong? Don't we need free thinkers?!
HN is an enclave of antisocial nerds[1] who think they're smarter than the rest of society. We live for disagreement. Discovering that we disagree with our peers isn't a mark of shame, it's evidence that we've discovered a Magical Great Truth, that our "peers" at HN are all sheep, and that we're therefore smarter than the herd.
Sure, Facebook fishing groups or knitting sites or whatever breed senseless group think. But on the whole "group think" usually works out pretty well and keeps people from wandering off into the scarier weeds of the thoughtscape.
HN? We breed radicals. And therefore we're more susceptible to deliberately radicalizing sockpuppetry, not less.
[1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
Doesn’t that also create a kind of immunity, though? If what I see is a cacophony of differing views, then I am unlikely to be influenced by any particular sock puppet account.
Whereas a community that tends towards groupthink might have a narrower range of views, but if those views begin to shift in a particular direction then it’s much harder for those who are disadvantaged by that shift to resist, because to do so requires violating the norms of groupthink.
I’m not sure which is better. My own preference is to tolerate a wide range of views in return for robust disagreement being the norm, but I can imagine some (most?) people preferring the opposite.
About your last point, you hit the nail for me. HN is 4chan without the pure chaos, with people talking smartly. Here you can find all the political spectrum (including nazis), but people will try to not be as inflammatory as 4chan users (most of the time, at least). There's no limit to what people will defend here. I don't think that it's something necessarily bad for HN, but it opened my eyes about how tech billionaires are a bunch of HN users that got a lot of power.
Its really ironic that I read the term radicalism in Hackernews as being against tech billionaires and this is the sentiment that I usually see here reasonably (atleast in my opinion)
But your comparison to HN radicalism to equating tech billionaires as HN users themselves flips my whole comment upside down.
I don't know much about the political biases here but I like to think that most people are pro open source and that they dislike the manipulative characteristics deployed by some infamous tech billionaires or those companies. Usually I think that's the case unless of course someone might have a bias themselves I suppose.
That is something we are susceptible to indeed. Our job is to grok complex systems, and that easily leads us to hubris like we can push historians and sociologists away.
I think the same can be observed in econometric circles, where I see inevitable complexity arising from human social dynamics, be it historic, cultural, sociological, or religious in nature, often gets ignored.
I feel like people are radicalizing in Hackernews because partially tech is becoming at forefront of finance for many cycles and this combination of tech and finance [for better or for worse] and they are very predatory for the average person (Crypto scams, AI bubbles and the list goes on)
They are also very sneaky in their predatory nature at times so the average person either doesn't know the extent or doesn't look out for alternatives (Open Source) and other issues
Most people on Hackernews are able to realize predatory nature of Big tech (I think) and are usually very supportive of Open source.
Personally I may be wrong but one of the most common things we can discuss in Hackernews is the extent that big tech or such aspects genuinely harm the average person.
If we try to talk about this nuance or other related topics with friends and family, they suffer from the same issue and as such Hackernews becomes a place where people discuss this more frequently
I don't know if this counts as radicalism but a lot of my political viewpoints stand from that one of the easiest ways to bring as such good points is when country can support Open source and can fight against unethical practices in a fair and square way in general.
> [1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
Teenager from High school here. 4chan is genuinely a cesspool where trolling is the key purpose. I feel like hackernews is much more on the knowledge side of things so much so that I feel more confident about knowing certain projects or gluing things together and just this make shift attitude of make things work and curiosity with great influence to Hackernews and I cannot be thankful of it enough
Perhaps I try to be more agreeable though and see other person's perspective because I may be wrong I usually am and I think I just get this kick in having an agreeable conversation in the end. I think I can treat hackernews as a book for open source projects which are cool and interesting tidbits. I have found some really really great software which I must not have found if it were not for Hackernews and I am grateful for it
Ooh I got a question
Let's rephrase it this way, What would you prefer more, if your child used HackerNews or used tiktok?
I 100% agree and I wanted to write something like this but In the end I chose not to, to point out all the other issues first
The reality of the situation is that in many places like Reddit or even twitter which are radicalized, firstly they become echo chambers and secondly, instead of being radical for bringing change for all people (Think focus on open source but I think its not a radical idea but still) but what ends up happening in those places is that they literally treat each other as another species and the rift grows even further and secondly that they also mostly don't have ideas but rather ideologies to implement.
In this sense, Hackernews is far more effectively radical atleast in my opinion. I must admit that I am a little surprised about the comment of HN being radical because usually, its mostly knowledge based and sure there are some political comments but nobody's forcing somebody to acknowledge those
So in essense, a lot of people are being radicalized, either some just dont know how to approach things or they try to focus absolutely on the us vs them dynamic where the major systemic issues are just not focused on (inequality,poverty etc.)
The world is radicalizing also because its leaders are usually radicalizing it too.
I must admit that the world feels like on the brink of war and no this time its not hyperbole. There are systemic issues in world and instead of addressing them, we are trying to force the focus outside these by all the recent political issues happening and I am not even sure if somethings can be done or the domino has fallen already and I am sure I must not be alone in this when we see massive wars erupt all around the world.
> Teenager from High school here. 4chan is genuinely a cesspool where trolling is the key purpose.
Middle aged curmudgeon here. And the older I get the more I realize that the hyperliterate technomagical credential flinging you see in the comments here is... basically just trolling. We do it to make ourselves feel smart.
Sure sure, we all want to imagine ourselves geniuses changing the world with the power of our intellect. But that's hard, and most of us settle for getting in a good barb or three in the comments.
Yes, you might be right. Still I feel like there are people who share some genuine info on products and other interesting projects for fun.
I think I can agree with you that perhaps sometimes comments might be getting barbs (first time I heard this phrase, I guess a still lot to learn xD) but also that this behaviour isn't rewarded in the context of an article or anything usually.
Most articles are about coding related software and the pretext around it thus makes comments mostly helpful, or atleast have genuine reasons that one can weigh against
And that behaviour is what's rewarded even in somewhat political posts on HN as compared to something like reddit which might not be helpful in a general stance and especially so in its political posts (or anything related to it)
Any site that becomes sufficiently popular will attract sock puppets, shills, paid agitators, paid astroturfers, spammers, scammers, people paid to warm up accounts and to vouch for their alternate accounts, accounts pretending to ask questions with alternate accounts that suggest a solution that they own and operate and many many other shenanigans. There are also no shortages of people that try to influence the thinking of others or trick them into buying something or voting a particular way. Some of them get nullified in /newest by some of us. Some make it through. Some even get massive responses and that is is a chance they are rolling the dice on.
Mr. Andreessen has been involved with high level politics for a long time. This is not "random radicalization". I will not comment on the quality of the politics but it feels fairly deliberate.
Just search and you'll find a million articles about his "dark enlightenment" (or whatever stupid name is used) views. I think "Chatham House" was the name of a private group chat he was in that helped this process along, and there are several articles about this.
Chatham house are famous for the rule that if you're invited, you agree that if you talk about what they talked about in their meetings, you must not say who said it.
Most political manipulation of influential people isn't sophisticated at all, it's 3rd grade bullying level. For instance, getting invited to an exclusive meaning as proof of your importance/"seriousness". Brazen flattery, but it works.
And the secrecy grooms them into betraying outsiders in favor of insiders. It's not such a big betrayal to give cover to powerful people's ugly opinions, but it's a start. And once you've done one bad thing with the gang, you're easier to persuade to do worse things with the gang. Again, really banal stuff.
Remember in Snowden's biography, he mentioned being involved in a plot to get some diplomatic person to drunk drive, so they could swoop in and "help" him. That wasn't just targeted at the diplomat. It was also targeted at rookie CIA agent Ed: first do iffy things with us, so that you have firmly rationalized and justified it to yourself once we ask you to do uglier stuff.
This post really reads like a C.S. Lewis novel - the whole fear of being an outsider and laughed at, and the gradual but slippery slope towards more substantial clearly bad stuff.
Chatham House is openly the sort of "inner ring" Lewis warned about.
To get the topic back more on topic for HN, I think that the fear of AI manipulation of the public is misplaced. Not because it can't be a thing, but because private AI-fueled manipulation will be far more destructive. If you fake a video of some horrific crime and post it on the internet, a thousand people will be examining it for mistakes - and a thousand people will claim mistakes which aren't there, and it'll create a lot of noise and certainly that's not a small problem. But if you fake a video and show it to your super-exclusive private circle and explain to them that of course you must not talk about this for the sake of the victims etc. then it's far less likely the mistakes will be spotted. Our leaders can be radicalized by propaganda we're not even allowed to see - that scares me.
He initially supported the Democratic Party but because of crypto and AI he donated millions to super PACs for Trump, supported DOGE and said that children are now being readicalized to hate capitalism as well as directly messaging the Trump administration to put pressure on Universities like NSF, SU and MIT because of DEI or something like that.
One can support a party and then change to not supporting a party for a variety of reasons. Such as disagreeing with the direction the party is going, especially locally, or even as simple as eschewing the previously supported party because you are betting the other one will win and need to curry favor.
I haven't studied Andreessen's views and actions, so I was just positing a strategic reason for a change in political support for a high profile person. (as opposed to a drastic change in their thoughts which is what I take to mean as "radicalized")
For example, I have always preferred most of Democrats' positions on the national level, but on the local/state level, especially in California/Oregon/Washington, I disagree with a lot of the Democrat leaders, more and more since 2010 (I would say my views have not changed much, but the party's priorities at the state and local level have).
Of course, I'm nowhere near as influential as Andreessen nor do I have interests that would warrant a say in national politics, but I can see why if one is against local leadership, they would cozy up to someone who they think can help you fight against them, without being "radicalized", per the above definition.
He’s a “sewer socialist”, his most radical pitch is… making buses free. It’s easy to get outraged by labels but when you strip them away and look at the actual politics it’s all pretty middling. Which is a large part of why he won.
His actual policies aren't that radical to be honest. Yeah the subsidized grocery store idea is one thing, but making busses free or telling hedge fund centibillionaires that it might be a good thing for American capitalism long term if they paid another 2-5 million dollars in tax isn't exactly the workers taking complete ownership of the factories.
For all intents and purposes, he's a milquetoast centrist who wants his city to be a bit better, and thinks it could be a bit better by doing things like making transportation cheaper.
You don't see him advocating for firebombing the NYSE or arresting Met Gala attendees.
And fuck, he's trying. God forbid someone care about their constituents, or their own city. Nope, let's smear him for not kowtowing to a country on the other side of the planet. Eric Adams just wanted to line his own pockets. Bloomberg wanted to line his own pockets. And now we blast a dude who grew up in NYC who just wants to do some really basic things to try to make life a bit better?
They're different economic philosophies, but most Western countries have a mixed system incorporating elements from both. Voting for Momdani doesn't necessarily mean you want total public ownership of the means of production. His manifesto is only moderately more socialist than the status quo.
> the core tenet of Socialism replacing capitalism
You can say Mamdani is a socialist. You can say the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism. But you can't say both. If Mamdani is a socialist, then replacing capitalism is not the core tenet of socialism. If the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism, then Mamdani is not a socialist. Those two things do not go together.
No, not at all. Socialism is a reaction to extreme capitalism, and basically a call for socialism today is just saying "capitalism is cool and all, but there needs to be some guardrails so capitalism doesn't eat itself".
People voted for the mayor in NYC because capitalism started to eat itself in NYC, and the non-billionaires who actually make up the vast majority of the city wanted a change.
A simple, and reasonably small increase in taxes on the wealthiest of the wealthiest (who are in NYC because its a world class city and their businesses couldn't really "make it" as easily elsewhere) is not socialism. It's saying to the hedge fund billionaires "hey - we don't appreiciate that you're operating your businesses here yet refusing to help pitch in financially in order to keep our world-class city world-class". If Ken Griffin can afford to drop a quarter billion dollars on an apartment he spends ~25 days a year in, or Bill Ackman wants to continue to hire people educated at Colombia and NYU, they can afford to pay another 2-5 million dollars a year in tax".
extremely anecdotal but whenever I see a racist on Twitter, there's a non-insignificant likelihood that I click on their profile and see Marc Andreesen following them.
I remember a time when entire discussion threads were swiftly culled from HN based on the magnitude of their political content.
These days, it’s pretty clear that the direction matters a lot more than the magnitude, and “flamebait” is only a problem when the flames blow a certain way.
The reason political discussion needs to be limited is exactly for comments like these. Low effort characterizations of mainstream politics as racist or fascist is purely inflammatory, and only going to further turn HN into Reddit but for tech.
Whether or not this is true, it's also true that a very popular way to dismiss someone and their beliefs is to insist they're one of these accounts. Happens to me all the time.
Looking at various discussions, I'd say there's enough to attempt to steer narrations. In some cases users bury comments from such accounts rightfully with downvotes. But it's not just discussions - there are accounts submitting nothing but single-themed content to spread particular themes.
My account isn't that much old but I was lurking around for years and I can say that quality of content and comments has significantly dropped in last 5 years. I'd guess it's because people running away from reddit settled here, because HN serves more generic stuff - with help of notorious spammers who surely get paid for uploading content from big media outlets every few hours.
If there are sock puppets around here they are probably native internet crazies or maybe lazy covert software salesman. Most of the posters just represent the wide variety of opinions on a planet with 8 billion people competing with each other. There isn't much evidence of it and political propagandizing of HN through bots is pointless anyway - most readers have practically no money or power, there aren't that many of them and they aren't trying to coordinate to achieve anything politically interesting.
> The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
He's a billionaire. They come pre-radicalised and detached from reality by default. A body don't get to be a billionaire by just going with the flow and not having any particular interest in influencing the world around them.
This place allows throwaway accounts, although it also greentexts them so they're easy to spot, and if they get controversial they tend to get downvoted/flagged. HN basically restricts politics to a narrow drip feed of one or two stories a day, a situation which has advantages and disadvantages.
I don't much like MA. I want more from our VCs than the glib one-liner-and-no-thought-beyond-that EdwardSnowdenIsATraitor. Especially if they're going to fund multiple companies
Unfortunately, yes there are. This is a interesting demography. But I think there are also cases of genuine stubborn blindness. For example, discussion topics that are critical of political state of things like ICE and the marriage of tech and fascism often get actively flagged.
For some, reality can't fit in their belief systems, and they have to suppress any challenging information. "Everything is fine/Don't make me think".
For others, it is highly inconvenient, because they have a stake in it. I think for something like the YCombinator audience in general it is a hard subject, as the business model seeks to pick out the winners to take it all. The monopolist playbook is so deeply ingrained and normalized, that it cannot face the higher order effects of this modus operandi.
So bots and sockpuppets yes, but I think some of the stupid flagging, the obvious poor argumentation and general context blindness also can be explained as people being unable to adjust their belief systems.
Indeed, this thread is very contentious. Although my top-level post has a lot of upvotes, one of my comments is bouncing up and down. Very strange to me.
Do I agree with your post? No, I think >50% is too high. Do I think you should be downvoted? No, I don't think your comment is in bad faith or inflammatory.
Nope. Only Firefox and Chrome have it, in their latest versions. No Safari or Edge support yet. So this article is a bit premature (unless you use the polyfill.)
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