Amazing, exactly what Workers lacked, I was quite annoyed that a worker would spin up when 99% of my requests then return a cache. Waste of 3ms, times millions.
> Known generative-AI crawlers are disallowed in robots.txt. This is a research catalogue assembled from primary sources; it is not training data, and a model fine-tuned on these paragraphs would launder out exactly the part — the citations — that gives the prose its value.
This reads like distaste for LLMs - but generally website reads (and is designed as!) very LLMy.
Is there enough of new blood on HN? For me it was the best place, my favorite website, when I was entering startup scene. Loved it. I don't think a lot of young founders I know ever go here...
Even if that's true, that sub-minute videos are not the apex content, that only goes to prove inevitability. Every idea will be tested and measured; the best-performing ones will survive. There can't be any coordination or consensus like "we shouldn't have that" - the only signal is, "is this still the most performant medium + algorithm mix?"
I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple:
> Tiktok is not inevitable.
TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in Instagram and Snapchat. Global content discovery is a natural next experiment after extended follow graph.
> NFTs were not inevitable.
Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable (for a while), but once we got there, a lot of things were very much inevitable. Explosion of alternatives like with Litecoin, explosion of expressive features, reaching Turing-completeness with Ethereum, "tokens" once we got to Turing-completeness, and then "unique tokens" aka NFTs (but also colored coins in Bitcoin parlance before that). The cultural influence was less inevitable, massive scam and hype was also not inevitable... but to be fair, likely.
I could deconstruct more, but the broader point is: coordination is hard. All these can be done by anyone: anyone could have invented Ethereum-like system; anyone could have built a non-fungible standard over that. Inevitability comes from the lack of coordination: when anyone can push whatever future they want, a LOT of things become inevitable.
HN already has a “reply” link below the comment. Adding “upvote” would solve both the timing (noticing upvote after reading the comment) and usability (solves touch target size on mobile).
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