Someone shared a technical article(archive) on Hacker News(archive) about how city builder games draw roads.
Most of the comments are about how evil roads are. The site is not a tech forum anymore; it's just reddit 2.
HN routinely has a problem with people and companies making accounts up to prop their shitty flavour of the month cancer riding on worthless vapourware. This time it's a company, Aden, from the Winter 2020 startups batch.
The founder posted a Show HN (direct link, archive), and the near entirety of their submission's replies are made from bots with no previous messages on their months-to-years old accounts. They're not even good at it, and clearly cheaped out on the tokens:
There's also a small number of people complaining about the same company spamming everyone that starred OpenClaw, Agno and more GitHhb repositories and had a public email on their profile that could be easily scraped (direct link example 1, direct link example 2), and they're thankful for people complaining because it's "validating" their "agent framework":
Their own GitHub repository is also half a sham. 7.4k stars in 2 months and 4k forks? Looking at them, they're all indians or bots. Those grifters are fucking with a very unstable equilibrium on the internet with their bot arms race, and it's just getting started.
Also, think you can do better than a bunch of models let loose with internet access? They're hiring!
I’m starting to believe in the idea that startups exist to primarily scam their investors now rather than having any real intentions of making an actual business or selling a real product.
American citizens are having bad health advice AND PUBLIC HEALTH POLICIES officially shoved down their throats by a man who freely and publicly admits to not being afraid of germs because he snorts cocaine off of toilet seats, appointed by another angry senile old man who recommends injecting disinfectant and shoving an ultraviolet flashlight up your ass to cure COVID. We don't have 10 years left.
Following backlash in a Hacker News thread, Microsoft deleted a blog post that critics said encouraged developers to pirate Harry Potter books to train AI models that could then be used to create AI...
So fucking retarded, isn't Wikipedia supposed to be an impartial encyclopedia (LOL JKJK)? What benefit at all is there to this Internet pissing contest?
It was neat to learn how this works, and how id Software used it. I anticipated things like keeping the lowest quality textures pinned, so that something is always available to the system. Anyway, the guy who wrote this article used a common image of a woman in an example, so someone had to complain:
I was unaware this famous photograph was cropped pornography. Men may like looking at an attractive woman's face, and we can't have that. I took a look at the referenced replacement image: https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/ (archive)
Ethically sourced Lena picture
Are you writing a publication where you want to use the Lena picture, but don’t want to support its troubled origin?
I offer to you my recreation of the Lena/Lenna picture, which you can use to your hearts content.
Here's the only paragraph anyone needs to read, really only the last sentence:
When I say “addiction”, I am referring to an addiction to getting things done. Especially if you already know what you’re doing, LLMs can make you feel superhuman. Like steroids or vyvanse, it’s a performance-enhancer. And like steroids or vyvanse, you can get hooked on the performance it enables. One friend, very much on the “YOLO as many tokens as the company can afford” end of the spectrum, said she had to cut herself off because she found herself prompting with her laptop open on the backs of motorcycles driving through the streets of Bangalore.
It'd be funnier if there weren't so many of them in my country, where they can kill human beings while driving. I was on the interstate lately and noticed a big truck hitting the bump strip. I was the passenger, so I looked in the cab as we passed by, and there was a cell phone on the steering wheel.
The long story short is some founder has cancer, and that's so inspirational or whatever. Look at what some cocksucker wrote:
DEDLINE said:
Listening to you stitch all the technology and innovation together, moving from the information world to the physical world, as a patient, almost brought me to tears.
When I say “addiction”, I am referring to an addiction to getting things done. Especially if you already know what you’re doing, LLMs can make you feel superhuman. Like steroids or vyvanse, it’s a performance-enhancer. And like steroids or vyvanse, you can get hooked on the performance it enables. One friend, very much on the “YOLO as many tokens as the company can afford” end of the spectrum, said she had to cut herself off because she found herself prompting with her laptop open on the backs of motorcycles driving through the streets of Bangalore.
This is chaalaki, the jeet art of looking like you're working hard while doing as little as possible.
(X | nitter) You got the izzat primer via @XJosh, but now it's time for the “chaalaki” primer.Chaalaki is a concept in Indian culture that roughly translates to shrewd “cleverness.” It often refers to the ability to create the appearance of hard work while actually doing very little.
Pleasing superiors, gaining admiration from an audience, and perhaps even developing a reputation as a “hard worker” while minimizing or avoiding real work entirely - that’s chaalaki, and it’s considered a morally ambiguous, if begrudgingly respected, form of system scamming.
I am convinced that Indians gravitate towards cringe LinkedIn “hustle culture” and “founder culture” precisely because it’s basically a chaalaki Olympics.
It’s not about doing actual work, delivering results, or adding real value. It’s about creating the ILLUSION of being busy, important, or successful while not really doing anything.
Taking photos of yourself pattering away at your laptop, pretending to look stressed or busy, captioning it with some cringe bullshit about how you grind 19 hours a day, all while not having a single functional deliverable that warrants any of that… chaalaki.
Anyone who has worked with an Indian or even just seen an Indian working has probably experienced or witnessed some degree of chaalaki at play.
The Indian employee is always visible, attentive, and always APPEARS to be doing something… but closer scrutiny quickly raises the question of what, exactly, they are doing or what they’ve achieved.The results they do produce, after what seems to be an incredible amount of effort, tend to be incomplete, irrelevant, or littered with issues others then have to step in to fix.
Why? Because no effort was exerted at all. It was just an illusion. A minstrel show of what they think effort looks like to cultivate the correct external signals.
Not just in the workplace, universities are where Indians really refine their chaalaki. As students, they APPEAR to constantly be studying, but their education is limited to memorizing patterns rather than developing genuine understanding. So their grades are good and they have the appearance of being well-educated, but in reality they have learned exceedingly little.At its best, chaalaki is a form of optics-managed incompetence.
At its worst, it promotes the ideal conditions for scamming, lying, cutting corners, or cheating to maintain the illusion of competence or effort while minimizing the need for any real hard work.
This is an alien concept to the vast majority of the world, where hard work is considered a virtue, and only actual results (as opposed to the appearance of results) are praised.
With chaalaki, the longer or further you can go while doing as little as possible - the more clever you must be.
Combine izzat and chaalaki and you now have a pretty good understanding of why India is the way it is.
Right now people are getting unlimited token budgets through their jobs and using that to fuck around, but we are approaching the point where frontier model providers can start jacking up the price and filter out the people spending tokens just to flex. And they have the leverage to do that because these tools are genuinely useful.
For example I had to dig through a legacy codebase with terrible documentation to track down a couple of bugs. This would have been a shitty time-consuming task a couple years ago, but instead I spent half an hour setting Claude Code up with access to a test environment, logs, and source code, and had it spin away while I worked on something interesting. It took a couple hours and a bit of human guidance (to be fair this was back when Sonnet 4.5 was the state of the art) but it solved the problem and wrote a mostly correct patch. This wasn't a particularly hard problem, just a time consuming and unpleasant one that I'd gladly avoid for a few bucks in token costs.
Juniors and jeets are also fucked. Like why would you ever punt a task to an offshore team now and wait a day to get back "sir the requirements are unclear so we can't do the needful" when Claude can do it in a tenth of the time for less money? It turns out a LLM does a far better job of cobbling together stack overflow solutions.
Well, kinda. This comments on IWP9, not HN. There's no update to the HN feed, and no signs they're going to update. This is a shame since the world needs n-gate to continuously mock HN for being a pretentious bunch of izzat-seeking jeets.
Muneeb had been assembling usernames and passwords—5,400 of them taken from his own company’s network data. He then built custom Python scripts to try these logins against common websites; for instance, his “marriott_checker.py” application tested the logins against Marriott’s hotel chains. Muneeb managed to log in successfully hundreds of times, including to DocuSign and airline accounts. Sometimes, if victims had airline miles stored, Muneeb would book travel for himself.
The audacity of these fucking curryniggers never astounds me. This is yet another reason to have few accounts, some currynigger in the system somewhere may be skimming information.
Nate Anderson said:
The brothers’ employer appears to have learned about their criminal past at some point in February. On February 18, 2025, the brothers—who lived together in Virginia—were both called into a Microsoft Teams meeting and summarily fired.
The call took place at the end of the day, wrapping up at 4:50 pm. Five minutes later, Sohaib was already trying to access his (now former) employer’s network—but found that his VPN access and Windows account were terminated.
Muneeb’s account had been overlooked, however, and he immediately embarked on a campaign of destruction.
He actually thought he had plausible deniability here.
Nate Anderson said:
Update 2, May 14: I finally learned how the government obtained those verbatim transcripts of the brothers talking. Spoiler alert: the twins recorded the Teams call in which they were fired… but then forgot to shut it off.
These worthless subhumans got jobs no problem, almost certainly by their inbred brethren helping them, yet I struggle to find work.
It's really fucking scary how many of these subhumans there are, and how prevalent they are. Remember Josh got his Twitter account back by pretending to be Indian. These subhumans are being used to label information for neural network nonsense, and certainly have the numbers to skew the weighing algorithms that assume no such coordination is taking place.
Anyway, on to the Hacker News comments, and I'm seeing ever more unwillingness to toe the line with regards to hating these worthless scum:
scottlamb said:
> [Opexus] said that “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.”
Getting close to the classic Monty Python line: "Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked."
Jokes aside, stuff like this sucks because I suspect many employers will take from it the most extreme, dehumanizing lessons, e.g.: (a) make firings [edit: including lay-offs] as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately, (b) never give second chances to anyone with any sort of criminal record (even say decades old marijuana posession or something).
I'd prefer a more balanced version: limit unilateral access to sensitive systems in general (not just of recently-fired employees), when someone is fired immediately shut off particularly sensitive credentials if they do exist (but not their general-purpose login/email account), avoid hiring people convicted of wire fraud as sysadmins, hash your @!#$ing passwords, etc.
He's not wrong, but not hiring subhumans is something he missed in his advice here.
Quite a few people in the conversation realized that Muneeb and Sohaib may not be American names, and how dare they. Why, they're just as American as a real American!
Here's someone arguing, rightfully, that design betrays intent, so of course r3trohack3r (archive) finds cases where people have been murdered with fucking computer keyboards. I hate these pedantic midwits. He must've graduated from Reddit university:
I particularly like how user GorbachevyChase put this, particularly in the final sentence of the first paragraph here:
GorbachevyChase said:
I can understand wanting to be perceived as being on “the right team” but that comment is so silly that it undermines credibility. To put it otherwise, could you imagine a scenario where I had a labor, arbitrage opportunity that involved a higher paying job in Shanghai, China and that I had lived there for a few years to do that. Let’s also say that I was found guilty of some similar crime. Would you call me a good old fashioned red-blooded Chinese crook?
It’s OK to acknowledge that economic migrants are a thing, and that they likely have only transactional interest in where they live, such as a Bengali construction worker in Dubai, for example. That’s just part and parcel of labor mobility. For better or worse, shareholders, or middleman representing shareholders, have decided this sort of thing is a really good idea in the US, and now around half the population falls in that bucket. It’s a free country, and freedom means being free to choose short term interests. That also means you’re free to support such policies because they are good for Blue-team redistricting so we can provide free healthcare to all 8 billion people in the world somehow.
But please, nobody becomes a Yankee by the mere fact of standing on the ground. If you want that pejorative title, then you need to earn it.
Multiple idiots are complimenting Muneeb's handwriting for no reason, so I assume they're his fellow Indian scum finding any reason to praise him. Multiple other commentators are making comparisons with Donald Trump and his family for no reason.
There's some other stuff of minor interest in these comments, but it's mostly just the Reddit-style defending of nonwhites for crimes one can find anywhere.
I should write a post about Garry Tan sometime, he's real fucking annoying.
The concentration of jeets on HN is perhaps the highest of all non-indian websites. Even Reddit has enough non-jeets to offset, but I would estimate that 50% of the commenters are jeets, and the other 50% are your classic San Francisco neo-liberal progressives.
x 4 
There's also a small number of people complaining about the same company spamming everyone that starred OpenClaw, Agno and more GitHhb repositories and had a public email on their profile that could be easily scraped (direct link example 1, direct link example 2), and they're thankful for people complaining because it's "validating" their "agent framework":
