from https://hackernews.hn/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
As a general rule when it comes to this pattern of replying to "this is AI generated" with that link: the people that write these posts often read HN and attach a certain amount of importance to the opinions presented here, and it's important that people express their opinions about trends in how the majority of technical writing submitted to this website is either generated or presented, before they become well and truly entrenched as being problems "too common to be interesting".
There's a difference between criticisms of the content or the reader's ability to view it and complaints about "tangential annoyances" surrounding it.
The typical counterpoint to this NIMBYism isn't, communism, but rather most of Texas (where there's loosening zoning law) or West Virginia (where there's abundant poverty and social problems but also abundant housing).
The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".
Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).
Have you ever been to a great restaurant that happened to be on the wrong corner? Or been at a company where one change in execution made or broke the company? My guess: the founder lost interest but the employees still believed in the [impressive] tech. Because of the lack of traction: the cost of the tech wasn't prohibitive for the employees?
fwiw I don't have a problem with LLM posts. But I do agree that this is pretty generic. If you want to use an LLM to post comments: find a better prompt / workflow
LLM-generated comments are not wanted on HN; we want to preserve it as a place for discussion between humans.
Also, comments of the format "here's what an LLM said about this topic:" are best avoided. We don't want to normalise a style of discussing issues in which we generate an LLM output and make that the central conversation topic; we prefer original human thought here.
I guess if we're gonna do monkey's paw/work to rule type of interpretations, HN should just add "we value authentic human experiences as opposed to posting simply for the sake of it" in the guidelines. I'll shoot off an email to the mods about this later today.
I’d much rather a useful AI-aided post that gives me insight than the almost daily pedantic unrelated gripe “interesting post but I hate the font”. This AI slop is bad but is it worse? In any case “bad” should be a reasonable bar to get over.
I'm not sure it's so simple as "making it pretty costs more". I'd bet there are hidden utilitarian cost benefits as well. E.g., murals prevent graffiti. (No judgment concerning graffiti, but municipalities tend to pay to remove it.)
Or: maybe there is no large cost trade-off. Do beautiful manhole covers seen all over the world significantly affect the total cost of ownership?
I really like the slightly silly writing style! Reminds me of a toned-down Douglas Adams. Honestly, I'm not particularly interested in Janet but the style sucked me in.
I don't think the article touches on internal vs external hiring at all. They tried it but eventually didn't do it. But there's no value judgement -- it just seemed like they couldn't find a great candidate and then the author was eventually promoted.
Fwiw the same thing happened at my last startup. We did a search for a VP eventually promoted from within. I hereby claim, that statistically speaking, it definitely happens sometimes.
I guess the author disagrees with your last statement,
> If you start at the bottom then you remain there because your skills are not valuable in the top leadership roles.
She says that she had the space to think more about strategy because the "people at the bottom" were doing an good job of keeping the company's infrastructure stable as they scaled. Maybe it's less about top and bottom and more about what types of problems people are good at solving. My tip: if you like planning and management and strategy, you should try to get roles, in the top, bottom, and middle using those skillsets. Lots of even introductory roles involve "manager", and lots of non-management roles are a great career path for many.
