Per Turchin model, the declining population in China has created conditions for more elite-adjacent positions for all those STEM PhDs, preventing overproduction
A large proportion of the software that runs HN exists to detect inorganic activity. It's quite obvious to us when significant numbers of comments are made in support of a particular agenda by new accounts or old accounts without regular, normal participation on HN.
Also, it's against the guidelines to allege or speculate about astroturfing (as is anything that is tangential to the primary topic), but we welcome emails (hn@ycombinator.com) from anyone who notices anything that seems suspect, and we're happy to investigate.
I used to report quite a number of political/ideological-only accounts to mods through email. They're explicitly against the single purpose account rule. They usually got banned or at least warned.
Over the past year or two I reported a number of accounts that are basically pro-Israel-only, they post a ton of comments to any Israel-related thread and either nothing else or very little of anything else. Mods refuse to ban or even warn them, apparently because emotions run high, there are too many of them and there's priority in punishing the most egregious content so relatively mild ones get a pass, and if mods are being accused of being-antisemitic and they ban a bunch of these they would reinforce the image, etc. These are from memory and not exact quotes.
I don't buy it, and I've stopped reporting things to mods. (To be abundantly clear, anti-Israel-only accounts should 100% be banned too, but at least I haven't noticed as many as them. Any other kind of politics-only account should be purged too if the rules are to be believed.)
I think this is probably happening, but also there are just a ton of actual Zionists and Israelis in the tech industry. Unfortunately they visit this site regularly and police it against honest reporting about their crimes.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
People on both sides of any topic are welcome to participate here and express their points of view, as long as they respect the guidelines. If you see users who "police it against honest reporting about their crimes", you should email us to point it out, as the guidelines ask.
Making sweeping claims like this without including any links so we can know what you're talking about serves only to poison HN.
That would suggest they respond to claims with counter arguments, as opposed to what they really do which is flag everything they don’t want people to see
You are fucking nuts. If I say "we should help the Iranian people" because you disagree you call it mis-information and further say it should be illegal? I want your opinion to be heard, of course, but let me tell you right now, you're F-ing nuts.
WTF? You cannot comment like this on HN, no matter who you are replying to or what it's about.
HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down. Please show a sincere intent to treat this community and its guidelines with respect if you want to keep participating here.
Do keep in mind that basically every single Israeli goes through military training, which includes training in psychological counter-warfare (hasbara). Even the 'cool' Israelis you know in real life are spies at the beckon-and-call of Israel 24/7.
What I'm trying to say is that this is an intentional part of their strategy. They know what they're doing.
They probably have a small detachment assigned to every popular-ish website. For the long tail, they have bot farms.
What does Zionist actually mean when Israel as a Jewish State has existed for 77 years and seems likely to exist for at least as long. I'm genuinely asking here. People use the word all the time and I just don't understand what they are trying to say.
If you live in the USA you are being incredibly hypocritical as the land was stolen from the Native Americans.
Approximately 900,000 Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia in the 20th century, primarily as a consequence of the establishment of the State of Israel. Most migrated to Israel. Do they go back to the Arab countries that kicked them out?
As a person indigenous to the Americas, I know very well that this land was stolen and I fully support the land back movement.
Israel replicated the very worst of the genocide of Indigenous Americans in the modern day and continues to do so. Zionism will fall and Israel will go the way of Nazi Germany.
Since Oct 7 2023 Israel has very effectively destroyed Hamas, Hezbollah, and now Iran. They have an incredibly effective military and are VERY strongly motivated because they know that losing means death. Israel is no more likely to fall than the US gives back all land to the Natives.
The entire world has become aware of the true nature of Zionism. Once the propagandized boomers are gone, so will be Israel. Also, considering that rockets are currently raining down on Israel, I don't know how you can claim that they have effectively beat Iran.
Can you explain to me exactly how you predict Israel will "be gone"? And where will all the current population move to? Why would these countries accept millions of people? I don't think you can actually answer these questions because this is a fantasy.
So I don’t have a dog in this fight but if someone came to my house and tried to kill and evict me and posted up in the living room and had to defend against my attacks to reclaim my living room, the logical solution is for them to leave my living room regardless of how long they’ve been squatting there. No need for anybody to die.
I'm in the US, and the this type of histrionic rhetoric no longer flies with us. It's fully up to the Palestinians on what they do with the Zionists, I support their sovereignty 100%.
"I would replace Israel with Palestine and I would have the current population return to their countries of origin." Is extremely "histrionic". You are actually advocating for a genocide against Israel.
We need you to stop with this style of commenting, or we'll have to ban the account. HN is for curious conversation, not for this kind of ideological battle and inflammatory rhetoric. We want this to be a place where difficult topics can be discussed among people with different views. This kind of belligerence is not the way to discuss difficult topics. The overall effect of your style of commenting is to poison HN, and we have to ban accounts that do that.
Please read the guidelines and show a sincere intent to observe them if you want to participate here.
Even if Israeli Jews whose ancestors once lived in Poland were interested in immigrating to Poland, where 90% of Jews were murdered, Poland has not offered them citizenship. Would you like them to disappear?
Do you apply the same logic to all the immigrants from Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, etc.? Do you categorically oppose all immigration, or only when it's Jewish families?
You can't characterize other HN users as "evil", no matter who it is or what they've written. Please consider stepping away from HN for a while, rather than continuing to post like this. We have to ban accounts that continue posting like this.
Edit: we've banned the account for outright calling that user "evil" in another comment. We can't let that go without consequence. If you want to keep using HN, you can email us and demonstrate a sincere intention to use HN as intended in future.
You also mostly talk about Israel (only from an Israeli perspective). I thought for sure that you were talking about Zionist brigading, since that's so obvious on this (and most) sites.
Not necessarily I see these green handles that just seem to pop up out of nowhere and they always have characteristically triggering/cynical tone to them, which usually triggers some type of reaction
Could be that these are being farmed but at a state level it might be easier to outright purchase aged accounts
With things like Openclaw it’s kind of trivial to game forums now. You just have to tell an agent to “post arguments for/against this perspective on this forum.” Give it a few talking points to include if you want to get specific and let it run. Specify the tone so it sounds realistic. It’s literally going to do everything else essentially forever or until you run out of tokens. Comments in a forum are dirt cheap so it’s also going to be very cheap.
Youd have to do a lot of work to make sure it's only a few short sentences, non-specific, and ultra-quippy though.
I mean I'm sure it can be done but if you ask an LLM to produce comment reply without more instruction it's going to write something a lot more thoughtful, respectful, and substantive than a forum user would.
What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days?
Happens all day every day. There are many AI agents starting discussions and replying to comments. This is how The Crappening started on 4chan. Some of them are just future grifters. Some are training AI (I have replied to a few for fun). Some are propaganda bots. Those running the bots will reply with something equiv to Errrm Proof?? when called out. Without root I can not empirically prove it and the botters know that.
I predict about 2 years before the site will have more AI noise than real people. I have no idea what can be done about it aside from tracking the bots and reporting them via email to Daniel and I don't know what he could or would do. HN has always been very hands off which is mostly good but not for this scenario. If nothing is done it will just be bots grifting and AstroTurfing one another to the benefit of Google SEO and most of the humans would eventually go elsewhere with exception of some die-hards that refuse to recognize the situation.
Anonymous internet forums will very likely die out if inference gets another order of magnitude cheaper.
The only solutions are (1) private forums, (2) strict verification or maybe (3) some sort of "web of trust" thing, if someone manages to make it user friendly and not suck.
I agree and my bet is on private and semi-private (invite only) forums making a come back. It is so much easier nowadays with so many Ansible playbooks and Dockerfiles to automate things.
My nickname on here would at least suggest so. I think Grok is the closest option since they were working on making a snarky insulting version of their bot. Tame that down a bit and one could get the personality of Bender. [1]
In my opinion it would be mostly a ghost town if it requires money for something that was free. It would probably have to be more like a n invite-only semi-private forum. An example would be lobsters. [1] Not sayin' that's perfect, just an example. One can always try it and see what comes of it.
Your account, while 10 years old, only has comments from the past year. It is becoming very hard to tell what accounts are real and which are fake. Social proof of account activity pre-llm (usable) could be a very important thing in the future.
It's when people (or bots) acting in bad faith make a lot of noise to make it seem like there is a strong support for some (usually bad) position. It' a play on the term "grassroots". Fake grassroots=astroturfing
At this point, lines have been drawn. In conservative land, everything conservative is good, everything liberal is bad. So the only sane position to take is the complete opposite.
For example, if you see someone self proclaimed liberal being critical of liberals, that person is probably a conservative or its a conservative bot.
Im saying political polarization needs to happen on the liberal side because its about 8 years behind conservatives on that front. When Trump showed up, no matter how much other conservatives disagreed with him - everyone got behind in rank and file. Meanwhile, the left purity checks each other all the time.
So if you are a democrat, and you want to make change, you need to behave exactly like conservatives do. Elections are decided by vibes, he who can attract the biggest social following through whatever means, wins.
That's not totally true when it comes to Zionism though. Much of the left and the right are united against Zionism. It's the older center liberals and right that are united in being pro-Zionism.
I dunno if you are a bot, but in case you are not, I hope you realize that Palestine stuff is basically controlled opposition. All the extreme left wing people that happen to be so pro Palestine are basically all sponsored by right wing to peddle propaganda and normalize stuff like Oct 7 so that the right can point to them and be like "look the liberals are crazy".
Its a propaganda machine that works very well to target the very impressionable people out there. I mean, students are going to protests and destroying their futures by getting arrested to show support of Palestinians, who would absolutely stone them to death if they found out that any of them smoked weed, and even more so for the lbgtq students for simply being gay.
So really, Israel vs Palestine shouldn't be an issue at all if you believe in actual change.
Brainwashed? No I just don't want my government blackmailed by pedophilia so that my tax dollars are used to commit genocide all in the name of Jewish supremacy. It's incredible that Zionists think people can't see reality for themselves. I guess you guys got used to the boomers eating it hook, line and sinker. People who haven't been raised on mainstream media will never accept such blatant lies and gaslighting.
If you are sincere about contributing positively to the healthy functioning of this site, you will include evidence when you make a claim like this. If "Dan G has said" something like this, you will be able to share a link to a comment in which he said it. It's one of the most basic heuristics of moderating HN that when people make such claims without including a link, it is at best a highly exaggerated claim.
We turn off flags on politics-based articles when there is evidence of "significant new information". That's always been the case. The guidelines have never prohibited politics here; only the kind of repetitive day-to-day stories that make up most of the mainstream news.
If there seems like more politics on HN these days it is because politics and tech have become much more intertwined in the past 5-10 years. We don't like it, but we're no more able than King Canute to hold back the tides. HN is a part of the tech industry and a part of broader society, and it's neither viable nor moral to act as if major international stories about such grave topics as war are not happening.
“It's creating a strange feedback loop: students use an LLM to write the essay, and teachers use an LLM to grade it. It ends up being just one LLM talking to another, with no human intelligence in the middle.”
Israel’s always been strong at “terraforming”. I wonder what unexpected consequences will be encountered though.
Eighty years they drained the coastal lowland swamps making central Israel broadly livable - prior it was a morass eg Roman generals writing about the difficulty of transporting soldiers through the region, not catching malaria, etc.
Then they figured out it was causing all kinds of environmental problems, so they had to reintroduce swamp like terrain in some cases.
Sea of Galilee water level fluctuates by few meters between years, depending on amount of rains at any given year. Current pumping adds 0.5cm/month. Literally drop in the sea.
IIRC reswamping is mostly done for rewilding terrain. A lot of migratory birds passing through area.
The only hard problem caused by "terraforming", it's that because of water from Sea of Galilee not allowed fully to flow to Dead Sea, it's level gone down and it created a lot of sink holes.
Mistakes in terraforming can be fixed with good governance and technology. This is not ancient times when that could cause a civilization to collapse.
And terraforming is not something new to modern Israel, the whole Judaean Mountains region is terraces and irrigation systems that are many thousands of years old.
Agreed. Don’t know how we balance decentralization with the planetary civilization/economy’s complexity, which requires some kinds of centralization.
That’s doubly difficult because the complexity is what lets the system produce so much output, and if you produced less people would experience that as having less and would riot. The only way out would be if the whole society consumes less, including, visibly, the elites. Feeling taken advantage of is a far more powerful force on the non elites compared to, up to a point, their material ups and downs.
Trump’s ability to create a widely accepted narrative focused specifically on elites who are opposed to his power, but also who are doing extra well relative to the non elites, is what let him harness the raw force of wage stagnation et al for political power
It corresponds with the qualitative observation that violent revolutions are usually led by the “middle class”. This itself corresponds with versions quantitative theories like Turchin’s Structural Demographic Theory.
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