them until somebody reports it or mentions it in the comments.
* **Generic AI content** that [isn't](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1chll2o/ai_still_hasnt_figured_out_branding_yet_heres_why/) technical in content. "Does Devin mean that programming is over?", "Will AI put farmers out of work?", "Is AI art?". For a few weeks these were the titles of about 20 articles per day, some scoring high and some low. Fashions like this come and go but I'm keeping an eye on it.
* **Newsletters**: There are a [few people](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1cho9ye/big_tech_digest_15_introducing_meta_llama_3_at/) that post every edition of their newsletter to reddit, where that newsletter is really just aggregating content from elsewhere. It's clear that they are trying to grow a monetised audience using reddit, but that's okay if it's providing valuable curation or if the content is good and people like it. So we'll see.
* **Career posts**. Personally I'd like r/programming to be a deeply technical place but as mentioned there's clearly an audience for career advice. That said, the posts that are scoring the highest in this category are mostly people upvoting to agree with a statement in the title, not something that anybody is learning from. ("Don't make your engineers context-switch." "Everybody should get private offices." "Micromanaging sucks.") The ones that one could actually learn from with an instructive lean mostly don't do well; people seem to not really be interested in how to have the best 1:1s with their managers or how you went from Junior to Senior in 18 hours (though [sometimes they are](https://www.reddit.com/domain/highgrowthengineer.com/)). That tells me that there's some subtlety to why these posts are scoring well and I'm keeping an eye on the category. What I don't want is for "vote up if you want free snacks" to push out the good stuff or to be a farm for the other 90% of content that's really just personal brand builders.
I'm sure you're as annoyed as I am about these but they're fuzzy lines and difficult to come up with objective criteria around. As always **I'm looking for feedback** on these and if I'm missing any and any other points regarding the subreddit and moderation so let me know what you think.
------
## The rules!
With all of that, here is the current set of the rules with the above changes included so I can link to them all in one place.
✅ means that it's currently allowed, 🚫 means that it's not currently allowed, ⚠️ means that we leave it up if it is already popular but if we catch it young in its life we do try to remove it early.
* ✅ Actual programming content. They probably have actual code in them. Language or library writeups, papers, technology descriptions. How an allocator works. How my new fancy allocator I just wrote works. How our startup built our Frobnicator. For many years this was the only category of allowed content.
* ✅ Academic CS or programming papers
* ✅ Programming news. ChatGPT can write code. A big new CVE just dropped. Curl 8.01 released now with Coffee over IP support.
* ✅ Programmer career content. How to become a Staff engineer in 30 days. Habits of the best engineering managers. These must be related or specific to programming/software engineering careers in some way
* ✅ Articles/news interesting *to* programmers but not about programming. Work from home is bullshit. Return to office is bullshit. There's a Steam sale on programming games. Terry Davis has died. How to SCRUMM. App Store commissions are going up. How to hire a more diverse development team. Interviewing programmers is broken.
* ⚠️ General technology news. Google buys its last competitor. A self driving car hit a pedestrian. Twitter is collapsing. Oculus accidentally showed your grandmother a penis. Github sued when Copilot produces the complete works of Harry Potter in a code comment. Meta cancels work from home. Gnome dropped a feature I like. How to run Stable Diffusion to generate pictures of, uh, cats, yeah it's definitely just for cats. A bitcoin VR metaversed my AI
* **Generic AI content** that [isn't](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1chll2o/ai_still_hasnt_figured_out_branding_yet_heres_why/) technical in content. "Does Devin mean that programming is over?", "Will AI put farmers out of work?", "Is AI art?". For a few weeks these were the titles of about 20 articles per day, some scoring high and some low. Fashions like this come and go but I'm keeping an eye on it.
* **Newsletters**: There are a [few people](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1cho9ye/big_tech_digest_15_introducing_meta_llama_3_at/) that post every edition of their newsletter to reddit, where that newsletter is really just aggregating content from elsewhere. It's clear that they are trying to grow a monetised audience using reddit, but that's okay if it's providing valuable curation or if the content is good and people like it. So we'll see.
* **Career posts**. Personally I'd like r/programming to be a deeply technical place but as mentioned there's clearly an audience for career advice. That said, the posts that are scoring the highest in this category are mostly people upvoting to agree with a statement in the title, not something that anybody is learning from. ("Don't make your engineers context-switch." "Everybody should get private offices." "Micromanaging sucks.") The ones that one could actually learn from with an instructive lean mostly don't do well; people seem to not really be interested in how to have the best 1:1s with their managers or how you went from Junior to Senior in 18 hours (though [sometimes they are](https://www.reddit.com/domain/highgrowthengineer.com/)). That tells me that there's some subtlety to why these posts are scoring well and I'm keeping an eye on the category. What I don't want is for "vote up if you want free snacks" to push out the good stuff or to be a farm for the other 90% of content that's really just personal brand builders.
I'm sure you're as annoyed as I am about these but they're fuzzy lines and difficult to come up with objective criteria around. As always **I'm looking for feedback** on these and if I'm missing any and any other points regarding the subreddit and moderation so let me know what you think.
------
## The rules!
With all of that, here is the current set of the rules with the above changes included so I can link to them all in one place.
✅ means that it's currently allowed, 🚫 means that it's not currently allowed, ⚠️ means that we leave it up if it is already popular but if we catch it young in its life we do try to remove it early.
* ✅ Actual programming content. They probably have actual code in them. Language or library writeups, papers, technology descriptions. How an allocator works. How my new fancy allocator I just wrote works. How our startup built our Frobnicator. For many years this was the only category of allowed content.
* ✅ Academic CS or programming papers
* ✅ Programming news. ChatGPT can write code. A big new CVE just dropped. Curl 8.01 released now with Coffee over IP support.
* ✅ Programmer career content. How to become a Staff engineer in 30 days. Habits of the best engineering managers. These must be related or specific to programming/software engineering careers in some way
* ✅ Articles/news interesting *to* programmers but not about programming. Work from home is bullshit. Return to office is bullshit. There's a Steam sale on programming games. Terry Davis has died. How to SCRUMM. App Store commissions are going up. How to hire a more diverse development team. Interviewing programmers is broken.
* ⚠️ General technology news. Google buys its last competitor. A self driving car hit a pedestrian. Twitter is collapsing. Oculus accidentally showed your grandmother a penis. Github sued when Copilot produces the complete works of Harry Potter in a code comment. Meta cancels work from home. Gnome dropped a feature I like. How to run Stable Diffusion to generate pictures of, uh, cats, yeah it's definitely just for cats. A bitcoin VR metaversed my AI
Reddit
From the programming community on Reddit: AI Still Hasn’t Figured Out Branding (Yet) — Here’s Why
Explore this post and more from the programming community
and now my app store is mobile social local.
* 🚫 Politics. The Pirate Party is winning in Sweden. Please vote for net neutrality. Big Tech is being sued in Europe for *gestures broadly*. Grace Hopper Conference is now 60% male.
* 🚫 Gossip. Richard Stallman switches to Windows. Elon Musk farted. Linus Torvalds was a poopy-head on a mailing list. The People's Rust Foundation is arguing with the Rust Foundation For The People. Terraform has been forked into Terra and Form. Stack Overflow sucks now. Stack Overflow is good actually.
* ✅ Demos with code. I wrote a game, here it is on GitHub
* 🚫 Demos without code. I wrote a game, come buy it! Please give me feedback on my startup (totally not an ad nosirree). I stayed up all night writing a commercial text editor, here's the pricing page. I made a DALL-E image generator. I made the fifteenth animation of A* this week, here's a GIF.
* 🚫 AskReddit type forum questions. What's your favourite programming language? Tabs or spaces? Does anyone else hate it when.
* 🚫 Support questions. How do I write a web crawler? How do I get into programming? Where's my missing semicolon? Please do this obvious homework problem for me. Personally I feel very strongly about not allowing these because they'd quickly drown out all of the actual content I come to see, and there are already much more effective places to get them answered anyway. In real life the quality of the ones that we see is also universally very low.
* 🚫 Surveys and 🚫 Job postings and anything else that is looking to extract value from a place a lot of programmers hang out without contributing anything itself.
* 🚫 Meta posts. DAE think r/programming sucks? Why did you remove my post? Why did you ban this user that is totes not me I swear I'm just asking questions. Except this meta post. This one is okay because I'm a tyrant that the rules don't apply to (I assume you are saying about me to yourself right now).
* 🚫 Images, memes, anything low-effort or low-content. Thankfully we very rarely see any of this so there's not much to remove but like support questions once you have a few of these they tend to totally take over because it's easier to make a meme than to write a paper and also easier to vote on a meme than to read a paper.
* ⚠️ Posts that we'd normally allow but that are obviously, unquestioningly super low quality like blogspam copy-pasted onto a site with a bazillion ads. It has to be pretty bad before we remove it and even then sometimes these are the first post to get traction about a news event so we leave them up if they're the best discussion going on about the news event. There's a lot of grey area here with CVE announcements in particular: there are a lot of spammy security "blogs" that syndicate stories like this. Pretty much all listicles are disallowed under this rule. 7 cool python functions. 14 ways to get promoted. If you found 15 amazing open source projects that will blow my mind, post those projects instead.
* ⚠️ Extreme beginner content. What is a variable. What is a `for` loop. Making an HTPT request using curl. Like listicles this is disallowed because of the quality typical to them, but high quality tutorials are still allowed and actively encouraged.
* ⚠️ Posts that are duplicates of other posts or the same news event. We leave up either the first one or the healthiest discussion.
* ⚠️ Posts where the title editorialises too heavily or especially is a lie or conspiracy theory.
* Comments are only very loosely moderated and it's mostly 🚫 Bots of any kind (Beep boop you misspelled misspelled!) and 🚫 Incivility (You idiot, everybody knows that my favourite toy is better than your favourite toy.)
However the number of obvious GPT comment bots is rising and will quickly become untenable for the number of active moderators we have.
https://redd.it/1chs4ib
@programmingreddit
* 🚫 Politics. The Pirate Party is winning in Sweden. Please vote for net neutrality. Big Tech is being sued in Europe for *gestures broadly*. Grace Hopper Conference is now 60% male.
* 🚫 Gossip. Richard Stallman switches to Windows. Elon Musk farted. Linus Torvalds was a poopy-head on a mailing list. The People's Rust Foundation is arguing with the Rust Foundation For The People. Terraform has been forked into Terra and Form. Stack Overflow sucks now. Stack Overflow is good actually.
* ✅ Demos with code. I wrote a game, here it is on GitHub
* 🚫 Demos without code. I wrote a game, come buy it! Please give me feedback on my startup (totally not an ad nosirree). I stayed up all night writing a commercial text editor, here's the pricing page. I made a DALL-E image generator. I made the fifteenth animation of A* this week, here's a GIF.
* 🚫 AskReddit type forum questions. What's your favourite programming language? Tabs or spaces? Does anyone else hate it when.
* 🚫 Support questions. How do I write a web crawler? How do I get into programming? Where's my missing semicolon? Please do this obvious homework problem for me. Personally I feel very strongly about not allowing these because they'd quickly drown out all of the actual content I come to see, and there are already much more effective places to get them answered anyway. In real life the quality of the ones that we see is also universally very low.
* 🚫 Surveys and 🚫 Job postings and anything else that is looking to extract value from a place a lot of programmers hang out without contributing anything itself.
* 🚫 Meta posts. DAE think r/programming sucks? Why did you remove my post? Why did you ban this user that is totes not me I swear I'm just asking questions. Except this meta post. This one is okay because I'm a tyrant that the rules don't apply to (I assume you are saying about me to yourself right now).
* 🚫 Images, memes, anything low-effort or low-content. Thankfully we very rarely see any of this so there's not much to remove but like support questions once you have a few of these they tend to totally take over because it's easier to make a meme than to write a paper and also easier to vote on a meme than to read a paper.
* ⚠️ Posts that we'd normally allow but that are obviously, unquestioningly super low quality like blogspam copy-pasted onto a site with a bazillion ads. It has to be pretty bad before we remove it and even then sometimes these are the first post to get traction about a news event so we leave them up if they're the best discussion going on about the news event. There's a lot of grey area here with CVE announcements in particular: there are a lot of spammy security "blogs" that syndicate stories like this. Pretty much all listicles are disallowed under this rule. 7 cool python functions. 14 ways to get promoted. If you found 15 amazing open source projects that will blow my mind, post those projects instead.
* ⚠️ Extreme beginner content. What is a variable. What is a `for` loop. Making an HTPT request using curl. Like listicles this is disallowed because of the quality typical to them, but high quality tutorials are still allowed and actively encouraged.
* ⚠️ Posts that are duplicates of other posts or the same news event. We leave up either the first one or the healthiest discussion.
* ⚠️ Posts where the title editorialises too heavily or especially is a lie or conspiracy theory.
* Comments are only very loosely moderated and it's mostly 🚫 Bots of any kind (Beep boop you misspelled misspelled!) and 🚫 Incivility (You idiot, everybody knows that my favourite toy is better than your favourite toy.)
However the number of obvious GPT comment bots is rising and will quickly become untenable for the number of active moderators we have.
https://redd.it/1chs4ib
@programmingreddit
Reddit
From the programming community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the programming community
Distracting software engineers is way more harmful than managers think
https://open.substack.com/pub/zaidesanton/p/the-biggest-problem-in-todays-work
https://redd.it/1ci99rm
@programmingreddit
https://open.substack.com/pub/zaidesanton/p/the-biggest-problem-in-todays-work
https://redd.it/1ci99rm
@programmingreddit
Leading Developers
Distracting software engineers is much more harmful than you think
Why software engineers MUST have no-distractions time
Google layoffs continue as cuts hit Flutter, Dart, and Python teams
https://www.blobstreaming.org/google-layoffs-continue-as-cuts-hit-flutter-dart-and-python-teams/
https://redd.it/1citb3e
@programmingreddit
https://www.blobstreaming.org/google-layoffs-continue-as-cuts-hit-flutter-dart-and-python-teams/
https://redd.it/1citb3e
@programmingreddit
Full Line Code Completion in JetBrains IDEs
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/04/04/full-line-code-completion-in-jetbrains-ides-all-you-need-to-know/
https://redd.it/1civfdo
@programmingreddit
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/04/04/full-line-code-completion-in-jetbrains-ides-all-you-need-to-know/
https://redd.it/1civfdo
@programmingreddit
The JetBrains Blog
Full Line Code Completion in JetBrains IDEs: All You Need to Know | The JetBrains Blog
Learn more about a new feature in v2024.1 of JetBrains IDEs – full line code completion.
AI engineers report burnout, rushed rollouts as ‘rat race’ to stay competitive hits tech industry
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/03/ai-engineers-face-burnout-as-rat-race-to-stay-competitive-hits-tech.html
https://redd.it/1cj78vc
@programmingreddit
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/03/ai-engineers-face-burnout-as-rat-race-to-stay-competitive-hits-tech.html
https://redd.it/1cj78vc
@programmingreddit
CNBC
AI engineers report burnout and rushed rollouts as 'rat race' to stay competitive hits tech industry
AI workers across the tech industry told CNBC that the pressure to roll out features and products at breakneck speed has come to define their jobs.
FIFO is Better than LRU: the Power of Lazy Promotion and Quick Demotion
https://blog.jasony.me/system/cache/2023/06/24/fifo-lru
https://redd.it/1cj2faa
@programmingreddit
https://blog.jasony.me/system/cache/2023/06/24/fifo-lru
https://redd.it/1cj2faa
@programmingreddit
Reddit
From the programming community on Reddit: FIFO is Better than LRU: the Power of Lazy Promotion and Quick Demotion
Posted by fagnerbrack - 101 votes and 12 comments
The BASIC programming language turns 60
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/the-basic-programming-language-turns-60/
https://redd.it/1cj8zqa
@programmingreddit
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/the-basic-programming-language-turns-60/
https://redd.it/1cj8zqa
@programmingreddit
Ars Technica
The BASIC programming language turns 60
Easy-to-use language that drove Apple, TRS-80, IBM, and Commodore PCs debuted in 1964.
Developers seethe as Google surfaces buggy AI-written code
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/
https://redd.it/1cj6ujt
@programmingreddit
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/
https://redd.it/1cj6ujt
@programmingreddit
The Register
Google Search results polluted by buggy AI-written code frustrate coders
Pulumi claims it has culled bad infrastructure-as-code samples
What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32186203
https://redd.it/1cj48q7
@programmingreddit
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32186203
https://redd.it/1cj48q7
@programmingreddit
Reddit
From the programming community on Reddit: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?
Posted by big_hole_energy - 118 votes and 32 comments
Why I'm Optimistic about the Tech Recession
https://ryanmichaeltech.net/Blog/Why+I'm+Optimistic+about+the+Tech+Recession
https://redd.it/1cjdii9
@programmingreddit
https://ryanmichaeltech.net/Blog/Why+I'm+Optimistic+about+the+Tech+Recession
https://redd.it/1cjdii9
@programmingreddit
ryanmichaeltech.net
Why I'm Optimistic about the Tech Recession
I was a damn lucky kid when I graduated college. It was 2019, and recruiters were flooding my LinkedIn messages with positions in every major city near the suburb I lived in. I had so many offers I w…
Bottlenecks that paralyse agile software development
https://open.substack.com/pub/neatstack/p/bottlenecks-that-paralyse-agile-software?r=8rnby&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
https://redd.it/1ckv0ce
@programmingreddit
https://open.substack.com/pub/neatstack/p/bottlenecks-that-paralyse-agile-software?r=8rnby&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
https://redd.it/1ckv0ce
@programmingreddit
NeatStack
Bottlenecks that paralyse agile software development
Beyond development activities and developer skills
Timezone to Location: A privacy-friendly way to get a users general location
https://statspro.io/blog/timezone-to-location-privacy-friendly
https://redd.it/1cl6b5i
@programmingreddit
https://statspro.io/blog/timezone-to-location-privacy-friendly
https://redd.it/1cl6b5i
@programmingreddit
Reddit
From the programming community on Reddit: Timezone to Location: A privacy-friendly way to get a users general location
Posted by deadfire55 - 114 votes and 23 comments
Here's What Developers Found After Testing GitHub Copilot Workspace (Early Insights)
https://favtutor.com/articles/github-copilot-workspace-insights/
https://redd.it/1clec9r
@programmingreddit
https://favtutor.com/articles/github-copilot-workspace-insights/
https://redd.it/1clec9r
@programmingreddit
FavTutor Articles
Here's What Developers Found About GitHub Copilot Workspace
We found some key insights and early reviews shared by developers about the coding productivity of GitHub Copilot Workspace.
So You Think You Know Git - FOSDEM 2024 - by the co-founder of Github
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY
https://redd.it/1cl45nv
@programmingreddit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY
https://redd.it/1cl45nv
@programmingreddit
YouTube
So You Think You Know Git - FOSDEM 2024
Scott Chacon's FOSDEM 2024 talk on Git Tips and Tricks and why he's working on GitButler now (https://gitbutler.com)
Scott talks about:
00:00 - Introduction
01:06 - About Me (well, Scott Chacon)
02:36 - How Well Do You Know Git?
05:09 - Our Agenda
06:25…
Scott talks about:
00:00 - Introduction
01:06 - About Me (well, Scott Chacon)
02:36 - How Well Do You Know Git?
05:09 - Our Agenda
06:25…
The Biggest Superpower you have is "Saying No"
https://open.substack.com/pub/thehustlingengineer/p/the-biggest-superpower-you-have-is?r=yznlc&utm_medium=ios
https://redd.it/1cl0pkp
@programmingreddit
https://open.substack.com/pub/thehustlingengineer/p/the-biggest-superpower-you-have-is?r=yznlc&utm_medium=ios
https://redd.it/1cl0pkp
@programmingreddit
The Hustling Engineer
The Biggest Superpower you have is "Saying No"
How "Saying No" can boost productivity and how to effectively deny without being rude
StackOverflow partners with OpenAI
https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/openai-partnership
https://redd.it/1cljmza
@programmingreddit
https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/openai-partnership
https://redd.it/1cljmza
@programmingreddit
stackoverflow.co
Stack Overflow and OpenAI Partner to Strengthen the World’s Most Popular Large Language Models - Press release - Stack Overflow
Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow’s public platform is used by nearly everyone who codes to learn, share their knowledge, collaborate, and build their careers.
[Video] How Wix dropped EventSourcing for simple CRUD for its 4000 microservices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyhrFpJAj8
https://redd.it/1cldl8x
@programmingreddit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyhrFpJAj8
https://redd.it/1cldl8x
@programmingreddit
YouTube
Devoxx Greece 2024 - Taming Distributed Systems: Key Insights from Wix's Large-Scale Experience
Speaker : Natan Silnitsky
Discover how Wix transitioned from complex event sourcing and CQRS to streamlined CRUD services, optimizing their vast platform for better scalability, performance, and resiliency.
Wix's platform, designed to accommodate diverse…
Discover how Wix transitioned from complex event sourcing and CQRS to streamlined CRUD services, optimizing their vast platform for better scalability, performance, and resiliency.
Wix's platform, designed to accommodate diverse…