Do proof-of-work pages actually stop AI bots? Big AI companies have enough compute to solve these challenges at scale. And if their bots are already doing much heavier work to fetch, read and process each page, then solving a small challenge first seems unlikely to be a serious barrier. Who are these proof-of-work challenges actually helping?
The multiple levels of abuse here are astounding. That grown adults can think projects like this are acceptable, let alone promote them, is hard to believe. I am 90% sure this is yet another vibecoded project. Has vibecoding really corrupted people?
First, I am fairly certain this violates Github's ToS. Second, it effectively amounts to a denial of service. Third, are people seriously using the .charity TLD to host something this frivolos? Have people got no sense of propriety anymore?
This "Code is cheap. Show me the talk." punchline gets overused as a bait these days. It is an alright article but that's a lot of words to tell us something we already know. There's nothing here that we don't already know. It's not just greedy companies riding the AI wave. Bloggers and influencers are also riding the AI wave. They know if you say anything positive or negative about AI with a catchy title it will trend on HN, Reddit, etc.
Also credit where credit is due. Origin of this punchline:
I don't know what >1M subscribers have got to do anything. It is the case that many YouTubers pushing a specific propaganda have >1M subscribers. YouTube may be a little better than Twitter or Facebook but if you land upon any propaganda, the algorithm will loop you in and keep supplying more and more propaganda videos. 1M subscribers or 1000 subscribers doesn't matter once you are stuck in the loop.
I see you have not been around in London for over 10 years. How was it back when you were in London? I've been in London for 10 years, so I probably came when you left. Never once I have been in any part of London where English was not the lingua franca. Yes, people speak their native languages too among themselves but I haven't met anyone anywhere in my 10 years who couldn't speak English. I don't think this is any different from any other megacity of the world.
I have done a lot of social work with Bangladeshi community. What many people don't know that the Bangladeshi wives who come as dependants speak better English than their husbands and sometimes as good as the natives.
I was surprised the first time I got into volunteer work. Figured that these wives have never spoken English in their home country. So when they moved to London, they learnt English from scratch and picked up the local accent and speaking style. Their grammar may not be perfect sometimes but whose is?
Where are you pulling this random 15% number from? And a ridiculous number too. It's more like 2% to 3% unless you spend your entire day traveling.
I just checked how much I pay for travel. My monthly travel expenses is £150 total. That's like between 2% to 3% of someone's net income (depends on how much net income you make).
Worst case scenario, you are traveling too much every week to max out the fare cap across all travel zones. Your monthly total would be £244. That's like 3% to 6% of your net income. But this is the worst case scenario. If you are spending 6% of your net income on travel, maybe you should reconsider which zone you live in.
So seriously where are you pulling out this ridiculous 15% number from?
> How much of this navel-gazing junk do we need? See also, from the same author:
Seriously! I'll admit the first post was mighty fun. But now this is turning into an AI-spam-fest! I objected in the 2nd thread but got downvoted. Apparently the community here thinks this kind of low effort Reddit-style humor is now on-topic for this place!
Not to mention the systematic downvoting of every comment that is critical of these spam posts!
It is and I said as much. I'm sure these experiments are fun for the creator. From the downvotes I'm getting, I'm sure it's fun for the community too. It was fun for me too the first time. It's not fun if this type of experiments are on the front page every week. There's already a good home for these posts at /show. Pages can reach /show without reaching front page. This could have been one of them. But anyway others here disagree with me. So I'll go take a break now.
Of course it is boring and silly for me. That's why I commented. The downvotes show the community agrees with you and disagrees with me. That's fine. I'm here to speak my opinion. I'm not here to speak your opinion.
I know about lucky 10000. It's the XKCD joke that is increasingly being used as an excuse to support every low-effort banal post. It's like modus operandus now. Party A makes a low-effort banal post. Party B questions why a banal post deserves to be on the front page. Party C says 'lucky 10000'.
There may be lucky 10000 but it's boring and silly for me. Good for the lucky 10000, but it's distracting to me when this kind of AI spam hits the front page every week. Show HN posts already gets special appearance at /show which I think is enough for this kind of stuff.