I am really shocked at the tone of so many of the comments here. Did HN become a breeding ground for xenophobia at some point? Has it always been that and is it just way more mask off now?
A few of the comments in question have a bad tone - but most of them are reasonable opinions about valuing one's people, culturally or socially, or about the effectiveness of immigration.
I’ve noticed this too. I think it started around the time of the first round of big tech layoffs in the US, and when the US ratcheted up the price for H1B(?) visas.
Seems like economic uncertainty or fear of it breeds xenophobia. Who knew
The article paints immigration as something undoubtedly negative:
> They are willing to accept a smaller economy, strained pensions, and dead rural towns as the price for keeping their core cities safe, clean, and culturally familiar.
I'll not pretend that immigration is an easy, uncontroversial and solved topic. But can we maybe not equate immigration with dirty and dangerous cities? Yes that has been the rhetoric for thousands of years, but it's most often the rhetoric of those with a dubious track record of saying true things. Trump is famously anti-immigration, why trust what he says? Since 9/11 the stereotype of a terrorist in the USA has been a brown Muslim. The facts tell us the majority of domestic terrorism is done by white christian dudes. I get that xenophobia is an emotional topic for many, but that doesn't excuse racism.
I was on a GLP-1 a few years ago and lost 70 lbs. After I got off, I kept a ton of diet changes (no more Pepsi or Gatorade and a lot of water instead, switching to whole grains and fiber/protein variants on pasta, etc.) and gained the weight back in a year and a half. The literature backs this up: keeping up weight loss is hard.
If people can figure out how to write RFCs about IP over carrier pigeons for April Fools, they can figure out how to conceive of LLMs as a layer of abstraction beneath a protocol as well.
You need to be able to define exactly what it's abstracting.
ex: std::shared_ptr is abstracting over raw pointers, and does refcounting. It is abstracting something but you can actually know exactly what that thing is. An LLM is an abstraction over the space of all possible computer programs. If an abstraction doesn't constrain you in some way, it's not an abstraction.
There's a lot of people in this thread that assume that Sam Altman is the one who is being dishonest here, and I kind of understand, but the other two parties who could just as easily be lying are Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, and of the three of them if you think sama is the _most_ likely to lie I feel like you have not been paying attention.
Codex now lets you tell the LLM tgings in the middle of its thinking without interrupting it, so you can read the thinking traces and tell it to change course if it's going off track.
That just seems like a UI difference. I've always interrupted claude code added a comment and it's continued without much issue. Otherwise if you just type the message is queued for next. There's no real reason to prefer one over the other except it sounds like codex can't queue messages?
Codex can queue messages, but the queue only gets flushed once the agent is done with whatever it was working on, whereas Claude will read messages and adjust accordingly in the middle of whatever it is doing. It sounds like OP is saying that Codex can now do this latter bit as well.
The problem is if you're using subagents, the only way to interject is often to press escape multiple times which kills all the running subagents. All I wanted to do was add a minor steering guideline.
That is so annoying too because it basically throws away all the work the subagent did.
Another thing that annoys me is the subagents never output durable findings unless you explicitly tell their parent to prompt the subagent to “write their output to a file for later reuse” (or something like that anyway)
I have no idea how but there needs to be ways to backtrack on context while somehow also maintaining the “future context”…
Ironically they had the foresight, they were just too early/didn't execute. They ran an online service (co-owner with IBM and CBS) called Prodigy that competed with AOL and CompuServ, and they tried to do online shopping there.
They invented almost all of that a century earlier. Amazon improved their warehouse management and, later, delivery times but that happened later. If Sears management had been earning their pay in the 90s that would have been much harder because Sears had a huge inventory and unmatched local presence for returns, support, etc. if they hadn’t been AWOL moving the catalog online. Amazon was shipping at regular postal speeds then, too, so Sears could even have beat them if they shipped from their warehouses.
This wasn’t uncommon back then: we had several clients in the 90s who just couldn’t wrap their heads around how quickly many of their customers would switch to email or online forms when it saved them a few days on the transaction.
People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront.
How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
> People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. [...]
> How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know
Sears discontinued its general mail order catalog (which had declined in relevance for years) in 1993, the same year NCSA Mosaic was released, while the web had about 0 public penetration and no commercial use.
So, it wouldn't have been a matter of adapting the catalog business to the web, it would have been rebuilding it from scratch.
people underestimate how slow picture loading was back then. Online storefronts seem to live and die by their product images. It wasn’t really feasible to sell anything other than books until DSL came along.
It wasn’t perfect but we had plenty of successful sites where most users used dialup. You’re talking small, heavily compressed JPEGs but it was manageable and especially important to remember that people didn’t expect it to be super fast. For browsing, it was slower than paging through a full catalog but still days faster than mailing an order and less stressful for a surprising number of people than calling an order phone line, especially if they weren’t certain about what they wanted. Web pages had room for a lot more text than a printed catalog, too.
Online ordering from the paper catalog would have worked well enough to bootstrap. For items in the catalog, you don't need a lot of pictures, and they don't need to be big. If you want to have a few more pictures on a details page, you would put them behind a more photos link and show one at a time so you don't trash the connection.
After that, when the internet buzz was really picking up (around Win95 release cycle)... The prevailing opinion from their leadership was "the internet is a fad." and they just didn't try moving into that space at all until it was way too late.
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