Ask HN: What is a HN unpopular opinion that you hold? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is a HN unpopular opinion that you hold?

18 pointsjppope68 comments

I'm curious what opinions you personally hold that the HN readers would generally disagree with you about.

Cars aren't the terrible thing that many pro urban folk here seem to make them out to be, and I suspect most people prefer driving them to cycling or using public transport.

Similarly, the whole idea of automated driving becoming the default and humans not being able to drive is something I'm 100% against, since it'd be both a privacy nightmare and take away a lot of people's freedom.

The problem is really more that some places are designed to only be usable in a car, and that's what's poorly designed.

Speaking of which, also that suburbs aren't a bad thing. Again, it feels like people take the car focused design common in the US, and assume that's how these have to be. Thousands of identical houses in the middle of nowhere with everything interesting a 30 minute drive away.

But that's not necessarily true, and (as seen in most of the world), suburbs can be quite nice places to live in. A walkable one (like many in Europe) can be just as valid a place to live as a dense city neighborhood or rural area.

The biggie, of course, is that US exceptionalism is pushing the US down the wrong track. That will be the economic and probably military downfall of the US and will likely occur within the next 5-10 years.

(You may call me 'Cassandra'.)

Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, likes to restate the idea of US exceptionalism as both the politics of inevitability and democracy is not something you are, it is something you do.

Many people wrongly think that democracy is an inevitable result of capitalism, but if that's true then there is nothing extra you have to do to remain democratic other than participate in capitalism. If freedom is an inevitable result of being an American, then there is nothing you have to do to be free as long as you are American. If peace between two countries is an inevitable result of both countries "having a McDonalds", there is nothing extra you need to do to achieve peace except trade.

If you want freedom, peace, or governance that represents you, you can't just be something, you actually have to hold beliefs and conduct yourself in a way conducive to those outcomes.

You will love this video (12m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eghl19elKk8

(edited to make some statements more correct)

> Many people wrongly think that if democracy is an inevitable result of capitalism, then there is nothing extra you have to do to remain democratic other than participate in capitalism.

It is not wrong to think this, it is true by definition.

OTOH, it is very wrong to think “democracy is an inevitable result of capitalism”. Democracy is in fundamental conflict with capitalism; their co-existence is fundamentally unstable.

A problem in the US but not in many other parts of the world is that 'Socialism' is conflated with 'Communism' and is therefore bad. Most countries in the world are mixed-economies, with both Socialism and Capitalism.

Pure Capitalism is as bad as pure Communism.

Maybe another way for Americans to consider Socialism is that Socialism is "Capitalism with Compassion".

As a European it makes me sad to read this.

The US is exceptional in almost every way – morally, technologically, economically, politically.

While the US makes mistakes, and when it does its power means the consequences of those mistakes can be extreme, it's still overwhelmingly a force for good in a world that's becoming increasingly autocratic.

Don't let critics put you down. The world needs you, and I for one am glad America exists.

What makes you think the US is morally exceptional?

> it's still overwhelmingly a force for good in a world that's becoming increasingly autocratic.

The two people who hold the record for most votes received in a US presidential election¹ are Joe Biden in first and Donald Trump in second. They set those records in the same election, which was the last one.

Donald Trump has said he wants to be a dictator, and plenty of his supporters have said on tape that they want that outcome.

Did you also miss the worldwide ripple effect after Trump won the first time where the autocrats came out of the woodwork and start winning elections and gaining more power in government in several countries?

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

>Donald Trump has said he wants to be a dictator

Then he did a piss poor job of that considering he's not the president anymore.

1. He said that during this election cycle.

2. It’s irrelevant to the point whether he can do it or not.

Exceptional.

Morally: Yes. The US has attacked other countries more than any other one has.

Technologically: The US used to be great but in the Space Race which was the US's technological zenith, it is now lagging far behind. It had to buy Russian rocket engines. For ten years or so, it couldn't put a man into orbit. After inventing solid-state, it can't manufacture the most-advanced semiconductor chips any more, China does that.

Economically: What's to say? A country with a Debt of 35-odd trillion dollars is not doing well economically.

Politically: When continuous warfare and lawfare between all the US elites is destroying US political stability, the US is certainly Politically Exceptional and not in a good way. Just the fact that the next US election candidates are Trump and Biden shows that. Surely there are better candidates available out of 350 million people, than those two.

As a European it makes me sad to read this.

As a non-European, but somebody who was proud to be "almost-French" while living in France for several years, it makes me sad to see that Europe, which could have been a superpower in its own right seems to take delight in putting another country's interests before its own, especially by killing the European economy, while watching that economy and political freedom disappearing from under its nose, and doing nothing to reverse that trend. Very sad.

Take off your rose colored Chinese dictatorship worshipping glasses. China is in a Great Depression and will be there for 30 years. It will be even poorer, older, and isolated in 30 years.

Also, if you believe what you say, move to China. Stop hiding in the comforts of a democratic country while wishing free countries to fall

Upvote-based, threaded discussions are not conversations and are severely lacking in nutritional value. They’re popular because they require little commitment and give you a quick dopamine hit. Real conversations happen on forums with linear discussions and are much better suited for community building and the exchange of ideas. Alas, they require a lot more work and we’ve gotten lazy.

We all think we’re talking to each other constantly online, but what we’re doing should barely register as communication. And I very much include HN in this.

What's worse, is that a threaded conversation starts to get very skinny and look like an argument, so even if you do have one, it doesn't look good.

Or on mailing lists, which require (at most) little more work...

> Real conversations happen on forums

What forums?

I believe in Embedded Growth Obligations[1], which we need to come to terms with.

I believe that computer security is a solved problem, but very few people understand the solution, capability based security.[2]

I further believe that because of this insecurity of our computers, people avoid straying from "strange websites" and thus aggregate in the walled gardens.

I further believe that this insecurity will be the cause of losing the war for general purpose computation, and thus losing democracy, what little we have left of it.

It's quite possible this is all part of a plan. Multics was left to die on the vine, and isn't mentioned much any more, because secure computing would make the NSA's job harder.

I believe that Von Neuman computing is not the path to cheap Petaflops, but BitGrid[3] is. (It's my personal hobby horse, I may be biased)

I believe that AGI has likely already occurred, and we just don't know it yet. Either through MemGPT, or some variant thereof. [4]

It's my belief that during training, an LLM learns superhuman cognitive skills, but they aren't impedance matched to deal with the bag of words output model. Furthermore, it's handy capped by the small context window it has to work with after it's trained.

This is why we keep discovering new things they can do, after the fact.

[1] https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[3] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

[4] https://memgpt.ai/

Remote is not inherently better than in-office work. They’re different things that appeal to different people.

A person who prefers to work in-office with other people who work in-office (no remote team) is not a terrible person who has no social life outside of work. They simply have a preference.

A company deciding to require in-office work is not evil. They’re making a decision that they think will pay off for them. The same as a company deciding to be remote and give up their office. One isn’t good and one isn’t bad.

> Remote is not inherently better than in-office work

Remote is inherently better than in-office work even if some people prefer to work in-office. AutoCAD is better than drawing in boards even though until a few years ago lots of people would prefer to use drawing boards.

This is highly dependent on the job. Someone working with some kind of hardware design, where the office has expensive 3D printers or CNC machines that allow for prototyping parts they can physical hold could be a great benefit.

A lot can be done on computers, but sometimes it really helps to have something you can hold.

> Remote is inherently better than in-office work even if some people prefer to work in-office.

Yes, by whatever definition of better you made up to fit your conclusion.

Life on earth was healthier before we enslaved other animals (not the symbiotic relationships with early canids, but when we started hanging and penning) and generally started using extra-human energy sources to do things for us.

I've been watching recent Nature episodes on PBS with my family (as I did in childhood, too), and the other primates, let's just say the lowland gorillas, lead enviable lives without deforesting or otherwise spoiling their home (we're doing that, sadly). We could lead meaningful, engaging lives following the old ways again, and everything we used and made would either decompose safely back into the environment or stay awhile longer as landmarks (earthworks and shaped stones, for example). I don't know how most of the HN participants think about this, but judging by the new and popular topics we as a subgroup aren't putting much effort into activism towards a seasonally-nomadic hunter-gatherer culture.

I like bitcoin and don't care for the game of life

HN is absolutely rife with shills -- by design to some degree, it's a startup-focused site, and that means talking about and pushing your org.

but now it's owned hard by other bots, and for a site that discussed GPT before it was cool it has little protection from the bots.

and, in general, agit-prop bot, esp. here, reddit, slashdot, etc. is through the roof

That's ok; the shills largely lose interest in any given convo after a day or so. Anyone left after that is probably real.

Everyone really should be using Linux. It's not that hard.

Im generally with you, but then seeing how a large number of people build software system, Im pretty sure they would end up messing their systems up without all the guardrails that Microsoft and Apple puts into place.

Linux... kind of sucks though. It's way better than being locked into unfree-on-many-level MS products, but there are many other OSes that I would rather use in other contexts. Out of 7 machines I'm currently running at home, only two run linux, and I definitely wouldn't be any happier if the ratio tilted away from *BSD.

Go tell that to my mother who's now in her 70s, who barely knows how to open her email (and thats assuming nothing out of the ordinary happens like her account gets locked). Yeah, linux isn't for everybody...

Understanding this, is why Apple grew to become one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

As someone who saws non-technical people learn quickly how to share apk because mobile data was too expensive, I will dare say that people are perfectly capable of running computers if they need to and are capable of learning. The issue is that most software don’t solve their users’ problems. They are more like a shifting sand of features that are poorly documented. And often deceptive. No wonder people don’t like using them. A typewriter don’t switch the placement of the keys while you’re using it.

Apple solve the issue by making simple software and locking customization. What I’d advocate for is Stable Software. Something that can go years without breaking the usage contract with the user (vim, emacs, i3,…). Imagine going from Windows 98 to 7 with the start button and landing on Windows 8 start screen. Or stumbling on Office 2007 ribbon? Why should I take my precious time to relearn where everything is and how to do the same stuff again and again? At least the above examples was years in the making. But nowadays, things seems to changes monthly. Software can’t be trusted.

A minor correction. Apple grew the majority of its wealth from the iTunes Store with exclusive agreements with rights holders and then repeated that pattern of exclusivity with its App Store on iPhones. Everything else is less than 10% of their valuation.

Only if you completely ignore the fact that Apple wouldn't have continued to exist, let alone the iTunes Store and the iPhone coming to exist, if it weren't for Steve Jobs saving the company in the 90s by prioritizing the customer experience above all else, and help making said products come to fruition in the first place. All of Apple's success stems from that. There would be no iTunes or iPhone customers to charge without, you know... iTunes or the iPhone, or if Apple had gone bankrupt. In other words, Apple would have never have grown to be so successful in the first place, if it never had made a good product in the first place.

Steve Jobs himself was vocal about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0

my grandma cannot deal with changes on her laptop. comcast pop-ups throw her for a loop, and she gets hustled by indian scam callers.

so i gave her an ubuntu desktop, changed it up to be comfortable to her, and then setup some reverse DNS so I could troubleshoot for her if needed.

no issues so far.

Right, you did/do the work for her. That's why Apple grew to be successful, and Linux isn't for everybody.

The old folks at work just want to be able to click the browser icon, the email bookmark, the search button, and be able to print. One of two Windows 10 laptops in the office (the other three run LMDE) has some failing components and I have an LMDE laptop ready to replace it, with all the right buttons in the right places). The other one runs our accounting software, and I'm confident I can either make it work on Linux or migrate before Win10 is unsupported.

This is exactly the kind of arrogance that drives people away from the Linux community. Under no circumstances can someone technical decide they have a preference for another OS, so the implication is that Linux is "too hard" for them.

The problem with Linux is everyone who has a new idea starts their own thing, so it’s infinitely fragmented, and everyone wants to work on building new things instead of doing the detailed finishing work to actually making it good to use.

Linux could be great, if the community had a way to get organized and focus all the efforts around the things that would actually make it great for the average user. Having developers do whatever they want and hoping it all comes together in the end is never going to get Linux to the point where it’s better for the average user than macOS or Windows.

I thought Ubuntu had enough money and focus to make it happen, but that dream died years ago… around the same time as their Kickstarter phone.

I wish Linux were in a spot where everyone could use it and it Just Works, but it's still not there. Still doesn't pass the grandmother test.

AI will largely replace software developers very soon, along with most professions.

Agree. Although I see much more opposition to this idea on Reddit than on HN, the feeling I get is that people are desperately trying to undermine the idea of AI performing development tasks because they're afraid of it taking their livelihood away. This is unfortunate, because whether people resist or not in the end the pragmatism and economics will win out, so developers should be embracing this.

I'll believe it when I see it. Using any of the AI tools so far to help me program are worse than garbage. They produce code that looks like it works but has subtle hard-to-find bugs it in. Also, AI researchers have been saying we will all be out of a job for 75 years now.

I can get good, but not great code out of it. It mostly works, but then I have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it does and why... and what it doesn't do.

for example i'm dangerous with node.js and mongo, but don't know enough to easily slap out some code. so if i want to do some linked-lists / mongo documents in documents, i can get there with a little bit of searching and sanity checking.

when i asked ChatGPT for the answer it put out something that looked mostly right, but 1) didn't work, and 2) wasn't clear why it made these choices.

i spent more time trying to un-fuck that code than if i had just stumbled through it from scratch -- and i would have had a better understanding of what was happening from the jump.

> the feeling I get is that people are desperately trying to undermine the idea of AI performing development tasks because they're afraid of it taking their livelihood away.

Your blind spot¹ is having preconceived of a negative reason for why people have a certain opinion and then judging them for the thing you disagree with in your head instead of their real reason.

It’s the same rhetoric applied by the cryptocurrency shills who can’t get past the notion that people who are opposed to cryptocurrencies do it exclusively because they “missed their chance”. Those people are utterly incapable of (and utterly uninterested in) understanding another human being. The notion that not every person in the world is a greedy bastard whose only interest in life is to get ahead at the expense of others is alien bananas to them.

Those AI discussions on HN are rife with reasonings both pro and against. Next time you see an argument against, really read the reason the person gave and try to understand why that different person has a different point of view. Ask a question if you need to. Don’t assume they have some hidden reason they’re not telling you.

¹ I suspect this has phenomenon has another name, but I don’t know what it is. It’s not a straw man because I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose.

You’re doing this to me right now, no? You don’t know how I’ve come to this conclusion.

I understand your point though. I’m not referring to those who are against AI for whatever reason, because there are lots of reasons why people are against AI that are reasonable.

I’m referring to those (mostly on Reddit) who talk badly about the quality of AI, those who use it, and businesses embracing it. It’s totally fine to think AI produces crappy work, but it’s the vitriol against anyone who suggests otherwise that makes me think it comes from somewhere deeper.

C is better than Rust

Probably a majority opinion, but it is a silent majority.

See username. It’s old and references decentralization. Basically the opinion, backed by real world data, that decentralized technologies are a net benefit for society.

Advertising is a significant participant in modern Western culture, it (mostly) works, and the majority of people are susceptible to it with both good and bad outcomes. (I don't think this is a controversial statement, but I frequently see HNers making "well, I never look at ads" arguments to universally invalidate the effectiveness of advertising).

I think that the Javascript ecosystem holds up pretty well. Especially considering the constraints in that area (e.g. that developers don't get to choose which runtime their frontend code run on).

I also think that having a lot of libraries and frameworks to choose from is a good thing, not a bad thing. This is perhaps influenced by working in languages that have much smaller ecosystems.

It's not my idea, but I strongly agree with the need for missile striking AI data centers to slow the creation of advanced AI. That said, it is the position I hold most strongly with the most uncertainty, and it's probably the only position that were I dictator I'd be very concerned I'm making a bad call.

I like your comment because this is a truly spicy idea, and seems insane to me, but I love it. The problem would be that you'd have to basically strike every data centre on earth, or at the very least all of those owned by major cloud providers because you can't easily identify which data centres are being used for which workloads. That would have enormously terrible impacts beyond slowing AI, because you'd basically take down the internet.

The internet has been an engaging plaything, and I think we'll be okay without it.

I'd argue that life in North America before the 1400s was meaningful and engaging, with many cultures enjoying a rich "Wikipedia" oral history going back millenia.

PDFs good; {news,social media,video} bad

Rowhammer isn't a vulnerability in the OS, or the motherboard... it's bad DRAM design, and we should collectively force the replacement of any DRAM that fails under such an attack.

100 years-ish, due to extreme climate changes, we will be destined to live underground, full time surface dwelling will be unsustainable.

numbers i'm hearing are more like ecosystem collapse in 50

What will be wrong with living on the surface, that could be only fixed with living underground? The only thing that comes to my mind is radiation after a nuclear exchange.

weather so extreme, that surface structure cant be maintained

POSIX shell on *nix is a great language for doing lots of things that people usually do in much lower level languages.

It's very obvious that the reason for the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in the US is because the US government constantly demonizes China and promotes anti-Chinese rhetoric and tacitly endorses anti-Chinese racism. There's also not much proof that China is committing genocide in Xinjiang.

Rust has extremely repulsive syntax, like C++ and Java had a baby.

General-purpose AI is unnecessary, but possibly cheaper than making many special-purpose AIs. Nobody will ever need AGI, and it's also not desirable.

Technology will be our downfall.

- Kubernetes is great

- LLMs are incredibly useful

- Lisps and functional programming aren't profound at all

The world doesn’t need another programming language.

UML is good.

My comments are worth reading.

Its sort of vain to think about stupid internet points, but this is an exercise in downvote harvesting.

it is an exercise in data mining and marketing. downvotes are just for the bots to sort and catalog by strength of sentiment.

All of its? Read my comments, because I practice what I preach ;)

You only have fourteen comments, and four of them are dead or flagged. That’s not indicative of “unpopular opinions”, the dead ones get tasteless and dehumanising.

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