It feels wrong but I can't quite put my finger on the reason why... It will make version control more hectic, for sure. It also seems to be conflating identification with configuration which seems non-ideal. What about versioning and upgrading? How do I find a "well-known" entry point with a file name of flags? Every read now becomes an expensive find and grep lesson... Yeah, I don't like it.
There's a whole host of problems with it. I'm almost on the side of saying this is a well written troll post but...
To have two different things you need to run, now you need to have multiple copies of the same thing.
What does the parsing? How do you split out a URL, what order are the "flags" in? Do you have named arguments, etc? Well now you need to have your own custom parsing library instead of just using exactly what anyone else would use.
Where do you go for help? Do you rename it to my_program_help.exe then rerun it?
What about chaining things together? Anything dynamic? Is the caller script expected to rename your program before running it?
> Imagine install_PY3_MODULE_NAME.exe. It reads the filename, extracts the Python module name, downloads dependencies, sets up Python if needed, and creates a launcher. Rename it, and you have a new installer for a different project. Icons, mirrors, or other metadata can also live in the file as resources – all self-contained, all shareable.
Imagine changing that to "install_python.exe --module module_name".
The thing you really want to do instead is have a single executable, then have scripts or even aliases that are named for what they do that are super thing wrappers. One copy, no moving, renaming, anything.
It's unexpected. When trying to understand a system it's beneficial if it adheres to expectations, as it means we're not forced to consider the entire possibility space of what a program can be. Utilizing the entire possibility space is usually the domain of malware, which tries to be surprising.
It feels wrong because it's strictly less efficient and inconvenient.
Instead of doing foo --bar you are now doing ln foo foo--bar && foo--bar. It's less efficient on the file system level. It's less efficient on the program level. It's less efficient to type. Why
This strikes me more as a matter of taste, i.e. more art than something which can be provably wrong, or correct for that matter. The concerns you outlined might be concerns the author doesn't have to worry about for whatever reason -- if this fits neatly and seamlessly into their existing workflows then that's great, and I for one appreciate learning about other peoples' approaches like this even if they don't immediately work for me
IMV it's a clever trick, and like you my instinct is that if I attempted to integrate this into my own workflows, I would endure some sort of hardship down the line but it's not immediately obvious when or how. Or maybe for certain things it would be fine and less painful than other options, like other similarly clever tricks I felt uneasy about at first
If the rename changes the entire behavior (see busybox comment) it makes sense. But defining multiple arguments? Now the author had to use -- in the file name where using space would do (and the OS splits it for you)
And good luck trying to run the same programs with different arguments. You'll have to take turns renaming the file, or create hardlinks just for ephemeral arguments.
It can be useful but there's time and place to do it.
The beauty is that often used parameters don't live (and die) in .bash_history. They live on the file system. Sure, the same can be achieved by wrapping in a script, but that needs both a name and content and they better stay in sync on changes or else....
> And good luck trying to run the same programs with different arguments
I don't read the idea as trying to replace arguments as in remove, "don't ever use arguments anymore", but as a DSL for _allowing_ to pull supported arguments into the filename. Basically an args list preprocessor. That would only take away your freedom of including triple-dashes in your file name without there being consequences.
You could just fix whatever is wrong with your bash history and/or learn to use the history properly. Bash also supports programmable completion so you could also use that than come up with some weird hack.
For me its more his attitude that puts me off.
He might be intelligent, but his EQ doesnt seem that high.
The condescending way he references the "malcolm in the middle"-episode "hot dumb girl" couldve been just the explaination of the "1 dollar = 1 million dollar".
I agree with this take. What does this bring to the table that can't be done with pretty much any preexisting toolset? Hell, even bash and chroot jail...
I think I saw Gaius Baltar implement this on Battlestar Galactica. It went well. /s Honestly seems more like a protocol for encoding a popularity contest, which is already what social media signalling does. How do you defend against self-reinforcing botnets and bad actors "cancelling" other people? I can dilute your human signal by creating massive amounts of LLM-generated noise.
I don't understand how this is supposed to solve anything, and I've seen it suggested as a solution multiple times. If you restrict comments to older accounts, all it's going to do is make the bot creators speculatively open and proactively age accounts for future use.
I would argue that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Adding a cost to commenting that requires aging accounts I think might discourage fly by night operations and "experiments".
This already happens now. Go look through a few of the "Show HN" authors - you'll inevitably see around several accounts that are 50-100 days old with a karma of 1 to avoid a green label.
The OP is talking about posts, not comments. The simplest solution might be to prevent someone from posting a "Show HN" until they’ve earned twenty-five or fifty karma, to demonstrate that they’ve been actively participating on Hacker News rather than using it solely to promote themselves.
Yeah I considered that - but any friction is better than none. Maybe integrate an additional consideration by which low karma (threshold < 5 karma) accounts cannot upvote other low karma accounts.
Honestly, we don’t really have the same cold start problem that a brand new social media site would. We already have plenty of reputable active users here. So HN could restrict new accounts to only being able to comment initially. As they participate, their comments receive upvotes, allowing them to build up enough karma (even a small amount of 25) which unlocks the ability to upvote, and then, finally, the ability to create posts.
Creating more friction can also lead to a higher percentage of bots. I for one immefiately leave when I realize that I need to jump through several hoops before I'm actually allowed to participate on a site. Someone building a bot farm on the other hand is probably willing to tolerate quite some friction before giving up.
I have seen accounts that were dormant for years suddenly start posting frequently, all with slop. (I don't know if this represents people having an epiphany about AI use, or accounts being compromised or just what.)
Would be fine for a personal filter but if used globally would incentivize karma gaming. You can get high karma from reposts of past popular submissions (an author who was in prison who reached the front page even half-joked/resented once how many common Wikipedia articles land on the front page for the nth time).
Have you taken a look at reddit recently? It's absolutely infested with bots farming karma, either by reposting old popular posts, or simply posting AI generated comments.
Actively encouraging this will only make things worse.
You want other people to deal with the things you don't like and filter stuff for you, to improve your own experience and shield you from the filthy masses. God beware you have to endure a comment you don't like, your royal highness.
I'd rather see you gone than the people you complain about.
Core function of HN Front page is based on "other people filtering stuff for others". Filtering out by any criteria (karma, account color, first letter of the nickname, whatever) doesn't automatically mean that someone is a jerk as you have stated in the comments nearby. It just means that someone is selecting the information to consume and does not harm anyone (perhaps besides the selective person who might miss interesting info due to selection).
The filtering is supposed to be based on the quality of the content, and it's only useful to the extent that people filter either on quality directly or closely correlated metrics.
If everyone votes purely on basis of the first letter of the username, to use your example, then the votes provide no useful information and you may as well abolish it.
Filtering is a valid form of improving signals. If there there was a reliable heuristic for users posting low effort content that was better then the user would be considering that instead.
If someone in a chatroom for example is being spammy with their messages at the expense of noticing posts one finds more relevant then blocking them isn't due to considering them some filthy pleb but improving their experience. If the user being filtered never becomes aware there's no reason to be offended, either.
Edit: also I wasn't the one to downvote you if that makes any difference.
My system has been working pretty well: using some extension or another that has mute functionality, if I see a person post an extremely low quality comment, I look at their comment history for two or three pages. If there is no comment of value in that set, I mute the user. The board gets better each day.
HN is already heavily moderated. Low-effort posters and spammers get downranked immediately, based on their behavior. OP is simply intolerant and unable to function in a social setting.
Minimum karma and account age filters are discriminatory, anti-social features that should not exist on any social site. The people asking for such features are intolerant jerks, no different from ageists or ableists. They are parasites, because they want the people who are not intolerant jerks to do their filtering for them, and keep the site alive by doing so.
What would happen if every single user enabled their minimum karma filter?
This thread is evidence that some are unhappy with the state of a core HN feature due to users posting what they judge to be low effort content, so it does get through.
The comments here are about possible mitigations. Based on this feedback dang has apparently now restricted new accounts from posting Show HN threads, so globally now there is a form of filtering users from being seen by others based on a heuristic.
Your initial comment is written with the impression that the poster wanting to improve their chances of higher effort content is making some judgement on the posters themselves as though they're conceited ('filthy masses', 'your royal highness') when they're merely considering one approach to reducing noise from their feed.
I myself in this very comment chain have already posted that I disagree that filtering by karma would help due to gaming issues but I don't see the problem with the user's goal.
>What would happen if every single user enabled their minimum karma filter?
Hacker News would be a much better place.
In fact, filter stories as well as users. I want to filter out any story with fewer than three upvotes and any flagged comments. That would improve quality tremendously.
How would any new user earn karma in that system? How would any story get upvoted?
Again, this system can only work if there are at least _some_ people that are willing to upvote newbies and read new posts.
It sounds like what you want isn't a community with collaborative filtering, like Hacker News, but a newsletter with editors, like Slashdot for example.
People will need to participate otherwise there won't be any new content. I see it as just like vouching, except someone has to vouch for green accounts. A slightly more equitable (and easier to implement) version of lobste.rs' invite tree.
What I want is for green accounts not to be abused as much as they are. The number of noxious, vitriolic troll alt accounts and bots is getting ridiculous. That is almost entirely the fault of established users of course, but there's no way to deal with them poisoning the well without affecting new users.
I think you missed @sltkr's point. HN wouldn't just have less new content; it would fail to develop new users. That kind of stagnation is how sites like this die.
Aggressively filtering to raise the average post quality is a sugar rush and it has the metaphorical long term consequences of type-2 diabetes. Things start out feeling great but the acceleration of death is effectively guaranteed.
And also invest more effort in karma farming. In other words, if we raise the bar for Show HNs we'll probably see more generated comments in the threads.
This is a pretty sexist take considering the original article was not talking about the male loneliness epidemic, but elderly, and indeed the first example used was even of an elderly woman awaiting delivery. The commentary here is really something else.
For a country unable to create enough children to replace themselves I might propose that state assigned surrogates might be by far the most pressing fix to an apocalyptic problem.
You can literally do what your generated example does using a type guard. You can also use method overloaded signatures if you dont want to expose your API consumers to union types.
