Sure, some debate is missing here. But I think it's fair to posit that the debate in question is of low value, and that we're better off without it. Or, at worst, that losing it is a wash in the grand scheme of things.
In either case, the owners/operators of HN set a standard for the kind of discourse they want to encourage, and they take steps to encourage it. Nothing wrong with that. Reddit, Slashdot, 4chan, Twitter, and countless other sites exist for people with different tastes.
On Facebook, there's been this running gag/joke/meme/whatever going for at least the last year, where anytime the official North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission page posts anything, a large portion of the comments quickly turn into a discussion of the merits (or lack thereof) of pet raccoons[1].
I don't know exactly how it started. Somebody innocently asked "How do I get a permit for a pet raccoon?" and the page replied "You can't, they are illegal in NC" or something prosaic like that I imagine. But it became a big "thing" and now raccoon talk is everywhere. The page controllers play along with it, which is part of why it's kept going so long I guess. But sometimes they'll get semi-serious and post something like
"Look, all joking aside, the reason pet raccoons are not allowed is because no matter how friendly raccoons look, they are wild animals, not domesticated, and they can be a hazard to you, and your family and <blah, etc, etc>".
Soooo... I'm just waiting to see somebody post this very article in a comment on that page with a note saying "Suck it, NCWRC!" (all in a spirit of good fun, of course).
[1]: or one or more of another of a small set of topics, including flounder, pet alligators, armadillos, UFO's, and the possibility that the person running the page is the product of secret government genetic engineering experiments involving "all of the above". It's... complicated.
EDIT:
Welp ,that took about as long as I expected. ROFL.
I just click on https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mindcrime a few times a day and scroll to the end of the first page. If there's anything interesting going on, I reply. Anything old enough to have fallen off the first page I deem irrelevant and never check any further.
I tried OpenCode and want to like it, but there were major issues[1] running it in Konsole (and most other Linux terminals that I tried). So I gave up on that for now. I spent a little bit of time evaluating Codex and that seems OK. But so far, to the extent that I use any "coding agent" it's usually GHCP in Agentic mode. But truth be told, I still mostly code directly and just use Copilot for automated completions. Maybe eventually Codex or one of these other agents will win me over. I'll be happy to try OpenCode again if they fix the terminal issues.
As a counter point to this. I have been using opencode for months and it has been stable for me. Also on linux and tried it on alacritty, ghostty and kitty works without a problem in all of them. To me its as good as claude code but i have spent some time tinkering with it and set stuff up the way i like and developed some plugins i needed for it also.
Cool. Thanks for the tip. I gave alacritty a try and that seems to work fine. I'm probably not going to adopt a different terminal program just to use opencode, but at least I can give it a fair evaluation in isolation now. If and when they get it working with Konsole, I may make it a more common part of my workflow.
Still messing around with Codex as well, of course.
I am once again shilling the idea that someone should find a way to glue Prolog and LLMs together for better reasoning agents.
There are definitely people researching ideas here. For my own part, I've been doing a lot of work with Jason[1], a very Prolog like logic language / agent environment with an eye towards how to integrate that with LLMs (and "other").
Nothing specific / exciting to share yet, but just thought I'd point out that there are people out there who see potential value in this sort of thing and are investigating it.
On that particular day I was going through a bunch of different books, trying to work out what my plan was going to be for the next little while. Of those ones, I wound up finishing A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance and the Sensation and Perception one. I also knocked out a pretty good chunk of the one titled just Memory. The rest got bumped down the stack a bit.
I kinda getting back to the place now where I want to revisit The Organization of Behavior. That's the seminal work by Hebb that introduced Hebbian Learning and I'm on this big quest now to revisit a lot of old school approaches to learning & neural networks (in something at least approximating chronological order, although I won't be super strict about it) and code up implementations of each. So basically, some sort of Hebbian Learning system, a "McCulloch & Pitts Neuron", a Perceptron with the Perceptron Convergence Algorithm, Selfridge's Pandemonium Architecture, and so on, gradually working my way up to the current SOTA.
I'm about to finish up the Minsky & Papert Perceptrons book, and once I finish that I will probably read Volume 2 of the Parallel Distributed Processing series, then go back to Hebb.
FWIW, that Memory book was pretty fascinating. The general subject of human memory is, both simply taken for its own sake, and taken as inspiration for approaches to AI. I'm slightly more interested in AI than human memory qua human memory, but in either case it's fascinating material.
I'm not really here to defend OR condemn Mitnick. I was just always fascinated with his story, from the first time I read that Hafner & Markoff book Cyberpunk back in the early 1990's. Anyway, one of the notable aspects of his story was the way he was held for a rather long time without even so much as a bail hearing... something many people believed (and still believe) was blatantly unconstitutional. That was, as I recall, the motivation for a fair amount of the "Free Kevin" rabble-rousing, even among people who acknowledged that he had broken the law and deserved some sort of punishment.
By the time I bought that particular laptop and put that sticker on it, (about 3 years ago now, I guess) Kevin had long since been out of jail, had gone legal and was running his own security consulting company. I put one of those one mostly out of nostalgia and as a conversation starter. Perhaps surprisingly, I've had a modest number of people approach me when I was out in public and ask "Who's Kevin?" or say "Kevin Mitnick, right? Yeah, I remember that guy... I was at DEFCON this one year and ... <conversation ensues>".
If the various purported health benefits of coffee turn out to be true, then I'm pretty sure I am effectively immortal at this point. Prick me, and I bleed coffee.
And if not? Well, at least I wasn't forced to experience the living hell of a life without coffee.
FWIW, the HN Guidelines[1] expressly ask that we not do that.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I don't accept the idea that there is any universally applicable, objective answer to this question. I believe the answer varies for every individual and that each individual's answer is equally valid.
It is to deliver the maximum amount of utility to other people.
I find "utility" in this sentence to be under-specified. I like the general sentiment but it's too hand-wavy for me, to accept as "the" general principle of "what's the most important thing in life" even if it were possible to have such a general principle.
"be good and help everyone especially when they need it",
I think this is an excellent motto to live but, but I would stop short, again, of calling it "the" most important thing in life in a universal sense.
I do, as a point of fact, value helping others. Just to illustrate, I went to the local grocery store and picked up a case of cans of Campbell's Chunky Soup earlier this week and took to the local food pantry to help out with people who are struggling to get meals. Later I plan to go buy a few blankets and take over to donate for people who are homeless and need at least some way to keep warm as winter approaches. I do this kind of stuff because I like helping others. Same reason I spent a decade or so as a volunteer firefighter. I enjoy public service. But at the end of it all, I still would not necessarily agree that "deliver[ing] the maximum amount of utility to other people" is the most important thing in life. I'd just rank it pretty highly as "one of the important things".
In either case, the owners/operators of HN set a standard for the kind of discourse they want to encourage, and they take steps to encourage it. Nothing wrong with that. Reddit, Slashdot, 4chan, Twitter, and countless other sites exist for people with different tastes.