> My mistake was trying to combine .tar.gz files using cat. gzip plays ball, but tar throws a strop.
> gzip happily combines the compressed members into a single stream, but when tar tries to read the decompressed stream, it finds the first archive’s EOF marker and stops reading.
> gzip would be happy to carry on, but tar has given up.
There was no reason to say this three times consecutively. But when an AI wrote the blog post for you then this is the level of quality HN readers have to put up with.
In this case, the emdashes are just tip of the iceberg. The writing is so Claude that it’s painful to read (and in fact I stopped reading to save my mental health).
I would say the design is the most human thing about this page. (It has its charm somehow, even if it’s obviously “flavour of the week LLM design”. Also, I don’t think an LLM would choose colours so poorly unless nudged in that direction – accidentally, I suppose.)
If you think (or care), that the LLM wrote all of the subheaders, the category names etc, then you might be spending too much time focused on the wrong thing.
I don’t think anybody really cares, the reaction is because you praised some copy that was obviously written by an LLM and either not edited or barely edited.
├─ chill radio, classical, and guest stations
├─ the arcade (2048, sudoku, nonograms, solitaire)
├─ collaborative artboard
├─ daily challenges & streaks
├─ live chat
├─ share & discuss news
└─ multiplayer games (coming soon)
^This didn’t feel like LLM to me.
& for the category descriptions, I’m used to way more convoluted word-choice places like…here, lol, so that didn’t stand out to me the way it did for everyone else.
I don’t really care. I’m just... disappointed a bit? It seems like a cool project, but those “concise sentences” don’t make it easier to learn about it.
no passwords. no OAuth. no accounts.
your ssh key is your identity.
chats, scores, and streaks are tied to your public key fingerprint. same key, same data.
No accounts? How is that possible? You literally store my data! Is that not an account?
And what the fuck is OAuth? (Okay, this clearly is oriented at developers, but on its own the sentence just doesn’t make sense. For me as a user, what pain is removed by not having a “Sign in with GitHub” button? Why should I care?)
How about you tell me why you decided to do it that way:
all your data – chats, scores, streaks – is tied to your ssh public key.
no need to come up with a password or verify your email – just ssh in.
It took me a couple of minutes to write this, sure, but at least it now makes sense. And it’s more concise, no? (It still sounds llm-y to me, but whatever.)
Now, for bonus points, there’s two obvious questions to answer:
• what do I do if I lose my SSH key?
• what do I do if I use more than one device?
(The obvious answers are “you can add other SSH keys in your account settings” and “you can add other SSH keys in your account settings”.)
---
Okay, one more, and then I need to go grab a beer.
a read-only peek at the TUI in your browser.
tab around, see what's inside.
no typing, no chat, no games — just a window
into a shared demo session.
for the real thing, `ssh late.sh`.
Concise?
a read-only preview of late.sh in your browser.
poke around and see what's inside. `ssh late.sh` when you’re ready to chat and play.
> The goal of the lander is to get you to use the clubhouse. Not get you to become a contributor, or intrigued/turned away by their stack choice.
Yep! That’s the idea. When writing, think about what your users want to know. If there is some technical detail you want to clarify – show how it helps the user.
> use the same key across devices!
That’s easier for sure! But if I lose a device, revoking one key on every server/service is a PITA already, and reissuing and replacing it on every server and client is even more so. (Also, this wouldn’t work with HSM-backed key stores like https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive :-)
There's maybe 100 words on the page. It would have taken someone 5 minutes to type that out. But apparently the creator didn't even care enough to do that.
See thats the difference, i don't core personally. Its a page to tell you to connect to the ssh server (or install their script). Why does it have to be a philosophical masterpiece? Its just word on a page saying click here, better looking then the majority of the SEO garbage that has plagued the internet for the last 15 year thanks to google and friends.
I've always used a lot of semi-colons in my writing, especially in my technical writing. So I did a search on this pdf for semi colons, and there are 260 in a 264 page document. I then repeated this for the last book I read, Candide by Voltaire, and there were 507 semi colons in a 189 page book.
I read parts of it, being first hand involved in all this, and it seems like it was written by AI to me. If you used an AI to write it or help with it, why not just admit to it?
the argument was that use of semi-colons indicates AI usage..
what do you mean by "being first hand involved in all this"? what part did you take if you don't mind sharing, this was an incredibly interesting turn of events.
You'd know that if you'd done any research at all.
Compare this to Jeff Guo (NPR) or Henry van Dyck (Veritasium) or my contact at the WSJ. They all investigated this story, interviewed key people (more people were interviewed for the Veritasium video than appeared), and fact-checked everything with subject matter experts. The NPR story took about 3 months of work and the Veritasium video took 5 months. I was interviewed in total for over 6 hours across all of them.
These are real journalists who worked on these stories and they produced novel work and new findings. I have huge respect for them, especially after being involved with it and seeing what work it took to add something new to the story. At the same time they managed to tell that story to a lay audience which is another skill in itself.
> You'd know that if you'd done any research at all.
I'm not in the habit of researching the people who respond to me before I ask them about what their role was in something they seem proud of. I thought I was being polite by asking about it.
That's really cool that you were interviewed, which of the interviews do you think most represents your hand in this? I wouldn't mind checking it out. I also really like Veritasium's channel, that's pretty awesome.
ah my mistake, those are a bit uncommon in my writing, I feel like they seem pretentious. i just use the semi-colons because it's closer to the way I pause, and alternate, in my thoughts.
In last month or two I noticed semicolons getting used where previously it would be em-dash, in both cases excessively and often incorrectly.
I assumed some of my coworkers added "replace all em-dashes with semicolons" into their CLAUDE.md as a really crappy attempt at hiding their inability to write a single sentence without assistance.
But prompting an AI adds nothing. Journalism is about research, interviewing the people involved, finding new facts, and then presenting that to your audience in a way they can understand. Getting an AI to write about something is just diluting the signal for future researchers.
You can have an AI help write it while still having done research yourself, they're not mutually exclusive. I'm not claiming whether he actually did that or not.
Like, for me personally, I'm terrible at writing, so I'll gladly have some AI throw together a draft, which I then verify and edit.
exactly. If I am writing a free book with solid information, well, I am not writing it, because I am not writing free books -- I don't have time. But if AI can arrange my data, thoughts, perspective, and articulate it effectively, then I will let AI write the free book. If the book contains new, or previously unarticulated data and insight, then why not? But I see the very thought is hotly contested here.
You think if he gave you the "prompt" you'd be able to produce that book?
Heck, I should put money on this. Start a competition: I give folks a prompt, and tell them to write a book about a subject with AI. I'm the sole judge of quality. Winner gets $2000. Then let's examine the variance in the entries.
In short: using AI is a skill. It's silly to pretend otherwise.
Are you the only reasonable person on HN today? Others are framing this author as some official journalist who must be held to rigorous standards and has violated every rule of the trade, with wanton contempt. The author has failed to produce new data. The author is bad. This seems deranged and extraordinarily unfair. The front page explicitly states the book is for general readers and is non-technical. I do not see anything claiming official original research or boasting academic credentials. No ads. Free. No download registration. Just there. The result of work, tokens, time -- didn't 'just happen'.
The Gladwell-style of conceptual-synthesis is the foundation for half the popular-science books in the world, and the bedrock for the majority of general-reader material out there. And this book happens to have a truly fascinating and extremely relevant and rich theme at its core, sufficiently rich that any motivated idiot could churn out half-decent content with. Yet it gets flagged, insulted and framed as abuse of AI, a tool specifically designed as a force multiplier and tool. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, and how dare anyone generate something of value with it.
I sincerely find this all highly suspicious. The only explanation is hypersensitive AI allergy in a highly unstable immune system, or the topic itself is making some nervous and, ironically, insecure...
I could totally understand disagreement, and complaining. But a comment that simply states acceptance of the book as possibly of value, being flagged? Who not hiding something trounces on a friendly comment to flag it? It's gray already, but that's not dead enough? Kill it til it's dead!? I say this because on a completely different post, I mentioned Jia Tan and several of the very concepts highlighted in this book, and I was flagged for it. I have said some stupid shit around here and not been flagged. But this subject really seems to bring out seriously inspired opponents. One would think, gee wiz, security, potentially many lives or billions of dollars or FOSS at stake -- there's no such thing as too much security, by all means, obsess on it, stay focused and talk about it, there are real world dangers here. But no.
Something seems fishy.
Anyway, glad someone had the courage to question the outrage. And I will promptly warn my author friends of the coming witch-hunt and to be very quiet about the tools they're using.
The HN crowd is generally skeptical, but "shallow dismissals", which are specifically called out in the guidelines, are still extremely common. These dismissals are not as clever as they tend to seem to those skimming the comments, but folks have developed a bunch of thought-terminating cliches to empower this: calling anything involving AI "slop" is the most common, but more catchy (but fundamentally incoherent) phrases have also emerged:
> If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I read it?
I mean, fundamentally you read things if they bring value. It doesn't actually matter if a human wrote it. It matters if it is correct and useful. One implementation is to have a human review, but you can imagine others. Fundamentally anyone who reads and leverages the output of AI knows this. The phrase seems reasonable because it is a good refutation of folks literally copying and pasting AI output from their ChatGPT session in the comments, which I think everyone agrees isn't good hygiene for online discussion. Because the guideline is "right" in that case, it seems easy to apply everywhere, but I think that's overly broad.
> I have tokens, too. Just give me the prompt.
As if everything generated with AI is created as a one-shot with ChatGPT. I feel like half the people writing this stuff have no clue how professionals are using AI. The model, reasoning level, skills, tools, harness all matter, and that's even if the whole thing is a one-shot and we ignore all the server-side variables (inference engine, temperature, top_k, quantization level, etc.). If not, it's the product of a (probably extensive) back-and-forth with an AI, possibly changing models for various subagent calls (Kimi K2.7 Code for the plan, MiniMax M2.7 for implementation, Deepseek v4 Flash as advisor, etc.), etc. Orchestration is as important as prompt and context, but the space has a lot of dimensions. This is why you get radically opposed takes on models, harnesses, and the even the utility of AI: everybody is doing different stuff, solving different problems, and reporting results all over the spectrum. There was a guy just today on HN claiming Opus 4.8 was terrible at agentic development, for example, with half a dozen responses asking how s/he could possibly say that.
Anyway, my post was controversial, but overall negative on points. I just don't understand how anyone can actually use these tools and then post in such a black-and-white way about AI use. I spend a ton of time refining my use of AI and I'm getting better over time, but it's a lot of trial-and-error trying various combinations of tools and trying to match them to tasks. Appreciate your response and the discussion.
In posterity, your grayed comment will benchmark the integrity of the environment here. Grayed, dead, undisputed. Out of sight, out of mind, except for persisting anyway ;)
Keep the courage. That's what it was once all about.
I have over 6gb of material resulting from interactions with AI. Even a micro-essay of mediocre quality requires dozens of prompts. Why post dozens and dozens of prompts if the final product is cleaner, and easier to process? I see utterly zero reason.
Edit: One of the things I learned quickly while working with LLMs, is that the quality of the user, the input, determines the quality of the output. Not everyone's input is of equal quality.
Tone deaf to have an (excessively verbose) LLM-generated readme for a blog product. Apparently writing a readme is too much to ask even for avid bloggers!
It would have been less effort than it took you to write this comment. Perhaps next time that you can’t be bothered, just ignore the comment and move on to another thread that meets your required spoonfeeding levels.
If you allowlist javascript then yes your annoyance is tangential, and no it is not interesting for us to read you complain about. Hence why the HN guideline (that was quoted above) exists.
(I also allowlist javascript. Regardless of your philosophical standpoint, many websites do break. If you don’t want “smacks me in the face multiple times a day” then stop allowlisting javascript.)
Interesting choice of word; I wasn’t whinging, just trying to explain to the other commenter something useful. Flagging gives zero detail or nuance. Which presumably is why you replied instead of flagging my comment ;)
No, that'd be because your comment, for better or for worse, does not break guidelines, and because I frequently make the mistake of replying when I should have flagged as well.
Regarding helpful explanations, I really don't think they'd be unaware that allowing JavaScript wholesale would cease their run-ins with JS-dependent things not working, or that they wouldn't know their configuration was uncommon (thus ~definitionally tangential, as it makes them a minority). They are asserting that despite that, it should not be considered tangential (and that they do not consider it to be), for the reasons they list off (i.e. that there's no functional reason the site/page should depend on JS). I agree with this in the sense that I do think the topic and issue matters, but I disagree in the sense that it is absolutely a sidetrack to the blogpost itself. The word "tangential" is pulling a double duty like so in-context I'd say, and I think this is what they're trying to gesture at too.
Recounting that they're willfully running into issues like this is not useful. They have to know, and so this flagrantly sidesteps their point instead of invalidating it. Their complaining is inherently and knowingly performative and principled, as they're essentially engaging in activism with it. Even you and I are participating in this theatre; using the site guidelines and features as vehicles to make certain comments disappear / prevent them from appearing outright, or hammering on about them for the love of the game, alignment and discourse quality nonwithstanding. Whether or not participating in this way is entirely intentional though, I'm sure depends.
And personally, while I understand why this rule was placed into the guidelines, I do disagree with it; I think technical issues are not any less valid to discuss than anything else, although they are meta-commentary. The rule is also de facto perma broken in my experience, exactly because nobody actually flags for it.
> My mistake was trying to combine .tar.gz files using cat. gzip plays ball, but tar throws a strop.
> gzip happily combines the compressed members into a single stream, but when tar tries to read the decompressed stream, it finds the first archive’s EOF marker and stops reading.
> gzip would be happy to carry on, but tar has given up.
There was no reason to say this three times consecutively. But when an AI wrote the blog post for you then this is the level of quality HN readers have to put up with.
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