Hacker News Reader

Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I'm sure you didn't mean to, but you've crossed into being aggressive with another user. Please don't do that on HN—not with anyone, and least of all new users who deserve to be welcomed and treated charitably, not harrassed for not already knowing HN's arcane and rather primitive formatting rules*.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* (which, btw, are at https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

Apologies that I caused a situation you had to deal with, genuinely.

Something I'm chewing on: we're in a bit of a sticky wicket if new accounts can post LLM-generated content and saying as such is aggressive.

(First, thanks for this reply, which was nicer and more receptive than I was expecting!)

We don't want LLM-generated content any more than you do, and I'm confident that the vast majority of the community agrees. The problem is that there are lots of nuances yet to be worked out, so we shouldn't be heavy-handed.

Is it ok, for example, for a non-native speaker to use an LLM to fix up their English? I'd say it's clear that HN would be better off with what they originally wrote; non-native speakers are totally welcome, nearly always do just fine, and we want to hear people in their own voice, not passed through a mechanical filter. But someone who doesn't know HN very well and is nervous about their English couldn't know that.

People need to be treated gently. The cost of being hostile to newcomers, instead of focusing on what's interesting about their work, drowns out the benefit of enforcing conventions. It drives away people we ought to embrace. The community's zeal for protecting HN is admirable, but can easily turn unhelpful. The biggest threat to this site is not that its quality will collapse (it has been relatively stable for years now*), but that it will die due to lack of new users.

Like I said, I'm sure you didn't mean to have that effect. The problem is that most of us underestimate such effects in our own comments, so we end up propagating it without meaning to. The fact that several users replied indicating that they felt this way (edit: I mean that they felt your original post was too hostile) is a strong indicator.

* not that it's all that great, but these things are relative

I think we can cut the guy some slack for using machine translation given that English isn't his native language.

I bet I sound a lot dumber than this when I'm renting servers in Hong Kong in Cantonese.

Edited to add space between the enumerated list.

Hi HN, I was evaluating IDEs for a personal project and decided to test Trae, ByteDance's fork of VSCode. I immediately noticed some significant performance and privacy issues that I felt were worth sharing. I've written up a full analysis with screenshots, network logs, and data payloads in the linked post. Here are the key findings:

1. Extreme Resource Consumption: Out of the box, Trae used 6.3x more RAM (~5.7 GB) and spawned 3.7x more processes (33 total) than a standard VSCode setup with the same project open. The team has since made improvements, but it's still significantly heavier.

2. Telemetry Opt-Out Doesn't Work (It Makes It Worse): I found Trae was constantly sending data to ByteDance servers (byteoversea.com). I went into the settings and disabled all telemetry. To my surprise, this didn't stop the traffic. In fact, it increased the frequency of batch data collection. The telemetry "off" switch appears to be purely cosmetic.

3. What's Being Sent: Even with telemetry "disabled," Trae sends detailed payloads including: Hardware specs (CPU, memory, etc.) Persistent user, device, and machine IDs OS version, app language, user name Granular usage data like time-on-ide, window focus state, and active file types.

4. Community Censorship: When I tried to discuss these findings on their official Discord, my posts were deleted and my account was muted for 7 days. It seems words like "track" trigger an automated gag rule, which prevents any real discussion about privacy.

I believe developers should be aware of this behavior. The combination of resource drain, non-functional privacy settings, and censorship of technical feedback is a major red flag. The full, detailed analysis with all the evidence (process lists, Fiddler captures, JSON payloads, and screenshots of the Discord moderation) is available at the link. Happy to answer any questions.

Thanks for watching out for a fellow user!

By coincidence, I was just doing the same thing on the original comment. Since it's more or less identical now to what you posted, I'm going to move this subthread underneath https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44703481, where it will probably make more sense.

(Incidentally, mostly all we both did was add newlines, and it's on my list to see if I can get the software to do this automatically without screwing up other posts.)

or maybe hn shouldn't have special formatting and support markdown

I don't think the post you're replying to deserves what feels like an aggressive dressing-down. The reality is that post formatting on HN is really janky and it's hard to get it to do what you want. I don't blame someone for failing to master HN formatting on one of their first tries.

Promise to try better next time, its really first post ever i have made on here, sorry!

(I'm a mod on HN) - We're both happy and lucky to have you, and I hope you'll stick around!

Also, I hope getting to #1 on the front page with your first post led to more positive vibes than getting harangued led to negative ones :)

Don’t worry at all. Thank you for the content, and thank you for your time.

Don't worry about it. I was able to read and understand your message clearly, even with the unimportant formatting mistakes.

You're doing fine! In general the best trick for HN posts is just to add

extra

line breaks

so that there's enough space between your sentences.

I've been here since like 2008 and I still screw it up sometimes. I'd have a not do it but HN comments are one of my "zero AI" zones. To echo sibling, its time to support markdown, its a standard now and even in arc, a reasonable subset is a pittance on anyone's time budget. It doesn't need to match GH bug for bug, that's a real project, but code formatting `backticks` is table stakes.

I wonder if its healthy to end up at aggressive dressing down is when we review peoples submitted work and point out the second half is LLM-generated 4 item lists.

Time for some self-reflection, I think.

You think so? Sounds a bit overwrought.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com