7 stories
Webb has photographed a billion-solar-mass black hole just 650 million years after the Big Bang, feeding at 40 times the limit physics allows, plus hundreds of enigmatic 'little red dots.'
The problem isn't too little data but too many theories. ZeroTier's founder is betting on primordial black holes; another reader dug up the paper testing whether the red dots are just brown dwarfs.
The top HN threads: facts from the discussions, both sides, insider voices. Email, Telegram, or RSS.
He didn't reach the rule on principle first. Auditing dependencies, he found large LLM-generated changes reverted with no explanation, incoherent commit messages, and questionable code-copying — then spent ~100 hours drawing a clean line around his supply chain.
The thread split hard. Some users said the practical price — abandoning the world's dominant version-control tool over a disclosure tag — is one they won't pay. A ZeroTier founder went after the premise itself: reliable AI-code detection, he argued, is 'today's polygraph test pseudoscience.'
The author's "Logging on today" section walks through 17 steps of friction just to read a headline: OS update nags, a Chrome AI summary, a cookie banner, an age-verification wall, a captcha.
The thread split: one founder independently landed on the same turning-point year, while a web developer argued the old web never left and people simply walked to the platforms.
The EFF reads the KIDS Act (built around KOSA, H.R.7757) as age verification by indirection. Instead of mandating ID checks, it sets a 'know or should have known' negligence standard for under-13 and 13-16 users, pushing every covered service to verify all ages to avoid liability. The result, EFF argues, is a less private internet for adults too.
The most-cited voice was a founder who dislikes the bill yet explained its support: for non-tech-savvy homes the real choice today is no devices or kids raised by addictive feeds, because the industry refuses to give parents working tools.
Paul Krugman argues the public didn't sour on AI by accident. The same executives now soothing customers spent two years warning their product could erase half of entry-level white-collar work. Krugman calls it deliberate: scare Wall Street into financing, scare companies into adopting, then act surprised when voters revolt.
The thread's loudest counter says he has the motive backwards. The doom wasn't a marketing trick, a few argued: the executives meant it, and only hired PR to walk it back once the hatred set in.
The essayist concedes he discounts post-2022 work 'especially from authors I haven't heard of', while admitting LLMs 'can create great results' and that he has no solution.
The counter that cut deepest: pre-2022 wasn't carved in stone. LinkedIn slop was human-generated before it was AI-generated. The problem was never the author, it was the slop.
The essay's image: when rent is on the line, you pick the shift over the youth club, the present parent, the visited grandparent. The value is real but spills sideways, so the market prices it at zero and people get coerced into marginal paid work.
The thread split on the cure. UBI plus a land-value tax, said some. Just changing tastes, said others, pointing to Roblox and Discord as the new clubhouse. The ZeroTier founder named the trap: market fundamentalism.
