I know others also do this - though often they are kind enough to auto-fold.

I think this would be a very useful feature to add to HN itself. I nearly emailed dang a few weeks ago to suggest it myself rather than roll my own browser extension to do it, though maybe it's my own responsibility to roll my own software too.

The Gearspace forums (vBulletin based?) have an "Ignore User" feature that helps make that forum vastly more tolerable.

If LLMs were truly able to replace me, I'd be disappointed, sure - I've spent 30 years developing mastery of a craft, it's sad to see it go. But I'd resign myself and move on.

But that's not what makes me mad.

I get angry because I simply don't believe it is true. I have a reasonable math and tech background to where I grok how this stuff works at a fundamental level, and I'm utterly unconvinced that it is performing any sort of reasoning.

Call it a stochastic parrot, a token extrusion machine, whatever, but these things are not thinking or reasoning.

That doesn't mean they aren't useful- they clearly are very useful for many tasks.

My anger comes from the global attempt to replace things that require human reasoning with LLMs.

There's this push to use this stuff way past the point of "helpful accelerator" to "why do we need programmers/doctors/lawyers/etc..."

I think it's incredibly dangerous.

So while the tool is useful, I don't think we've figured out how to use it appropriately. For all the short term appearance of productivity boost it provides (whether this is real in a total-cost sense is still an active question), I think the risks to skill development and quality outweigh those benefits in many cases, and are being overlooked.

It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.

You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.

And a tool that serves only to subvert the law (at enormous expense) does not strike me as valuable or worth supporting.

NB: I support the outcome of the 1990's crypto war (in the good old days when "crypto" meant cryptography, not crime-token), namely the right to private uncensored unrestricted communication. But a private uncensored unrestricted way of sending around money is a terrible idea, as we can see empirically.

The State Machine Replication problem in distributed computing has been studied since the 1960s or so, and indeed can be solved using Byzantine Broadcast. That has been solved for various settings:

* Permissioned (+ PKI), synchronous: SMR possible for any f, Dolev Strong (1983)

* Permissioned (no PKI), synchronous: SMR impossible if f≥n/3 (PSL 1980, FLM 1985)

* Permissioned, asynchronous setting: SMR impossible even with f=1 (FLP 1985)

* Permissioned, partially synchronous: deterministic SMR with "eventual liveness" possible if f<n/3 (late 1990s), stochastic if f<n/2, impossible otherwise.

The theory to achieve reliable state machine replication even in the presence of byzantine failures was sorted out in the 1980s, and the practice followed in the late 1990s (PBFT, byzantine Paxos, etc.)

So, just to drive the point home: the Byzantine Generals problem (more precisely: Byzantine Broadcast & SMR) was a solved problem by the late 1990s.

What Bitcoin (ie LCR + PoW) added was to do it in the permissionless setting, just as I've said. (It also increased f from n/3 to n/2, modulo "selfish mining", and while earlier solutions were consistent always, available eventually, LCR + PoW is available always, consistent eventually, which is arguably the wrong tradeoff for finance.)

> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

You don't say.

Was it universally obvious? Hindaight is 20/20 There were many block-chain startups funded, and even FAANG got caught up in the hype. FWIW, I was a crypto sceptic, but I had many arguments with believers online and in my social circles. Side note: a crypto enthusiast colleague bought a house off their crypto gains, it may be a grift, but a small number of crypto-believwrs got really wealthy, and you're not going to convince them.

Yes. Crypto was never productive.

But nice that your buddy financed a house with other people's dumb money.

In fact as the act of paying itself has become more restricted, it's often also a good way to make illegal payments for completely legal goods and services.

I was asked to audit a few proposals during that era and in every case I had to go back to the person asking me to say that it was a technical architecture L. Ron Hubbard would have admired. Just straight up making up words in most cases.

Far beyond "wait, is this actually a parody? how is this not a parody?" territory. 80% of them were effectively "tamagotchis + pyramid scheme".

This is why I say that you don't have to love LLMs, but you also can't compare them in terms of also bad. Jay-walking is bad and Jeffrey Dahmer was bad; they are not "both bad".

>Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023

And the parent said,

>I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze

And your response was,

>The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.

The parent in fact said a very straightforward, non-controversial thing, and you responded in anger, as if they said something like "AI is the same as crypto".

Feel free to respond to what I actually said, though!

More seriously, I think this is a true reflection of a cultural phenomena. All discussions have become more polarized. There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance.

To complicate this even further there is a real diversity of experiences depending on many factors.

I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil. When we had tabs vs. spaces flamewars (or whatever the fun topic of the day was) everyone knew they were in a flame war (and often acknowledged that). Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic/biased.

I see the anti-AI sentiments in my work place. I think people are genuinely worried/concerned and don't know how this is going to change our world or even where we are exactly. This is also spilling into adjacent areas where people have strong emotional responses to (the rich, the economy, job market, politics, environment etc.).

The youth are facing an enormous employment crisis. Many have found themselves completely unemployable through no fault of their own.

And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in.

There's no loss of nuance, the situation has just escalated a lot.

This is a good example of anti-AI bias.

This didn’t happen. Out of thousands of commencement speeches across the country, a handful of speakers, none of whom are “AI leaders”, mentioned AI in passing and students booed.

So yeah, I’d say there’s a loss of nuance.

That you fail to understand why those students took such great offense to what was said at those speeches doesn't make it "anti-AI bias".

Those students reacted like that, and I used it as an example, because it's very emblematic of how tech companies and leading figures act.

The absolute closest example is Schmidt, who was last CEO of Google more than a decade before ChatGPT launched, and is now CEO of an aerospace company. No other "AI leaders" gave commencement speeches where they were booed.

So you're blatantly lying and spreading misinformation to feed a negative narrative about the companies and executives in the AI space, then doubling down when called out. Reminds of Vance saying that he's willing to "create stories" in order to draw media attention to his cause-du-jour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Commission_o...

Pretending he's some AI nobody is a bit goofy.

I think this is probably a combination of nostalgia and/or USENET prior to 1990 or so?

Forums like this, reddit, X, readers of news sites etc tend to be filled with people that don’t have much going on in their lives, have a lot of free time to comment, are less likely to exploit the benefits of AI, and more likely to have simpler skills sets that are replaceable with AI.

Talking to people in real world, I would say the overwhelming majority are excited by AI and interesting in using it more rather than less.

Do those people not deserve to be able to live and survive or are they all just replaceable?

In the end the real problem isn't AI but the way our economic system is set up. For a while it was accepted and worked to some degree that society should be structured to allow capitalists gain maximum profit and then use that money to hire people. AI and robotics will probably break this and we will either have a permanent underclass or we will have to think about a society where all citizens gain from technological progress.

You can't hold up technological progress. If once country doesn't do it, another will.

And no I dont think that generally, but it just seems like so many tech people here have been kinda mid/upper class/well off. I think a core issue around AI, around a new technology, is the class/capitalism issue, because that is the system we are stuck in.

But maybe some also havent quite connected the dots, and are starting to wake up to the reality of the situation.

It probably also gets astroturfed.

The interesting question is, if it's so consistent, how can it go unnoticed for so long (as you've reported) and/or get perceived as one-sided ("HN is so anti-A!") when in fact it is almost always two-sided ("HN users are divided on A")?

I believe there's a clear answer: it's because what you notice depends on how you feel [2]. If you like A, or (more precisely) dislike anti-A, you are far more likely to notice anti-A posts. Not only that, but they will make a stronger impression on you than the median post—even the median pro-A post.

These two factors—frequency of impression and impact of impression—combine to create a strong picture of the site as anti-A—so strong that people often use universals like "always" and "never" and "absolutely" when describing it. In reality, HN is a statistical cloud of datapoints and your pre-existing feelings are what determines which datapoints you notice (i.e. frequency) and how strongly they affect you (i.e. impact). [3]

This is why people with strongly opposing views feel the same about how biased HN is, just in opposite directions! i.e. with the A team convinced there's a strong anti-A bias and the B team equally convinced there's a strong anti-B bias. It's simply (<-- that word again) that their feelings cause them to notice different subsets of the available datapoints. Abstract out the directional bit (pro- or anti-A), and their comments become isomorphic.

Unfortunately for us, HN is more afflicted by this phenomenon than sites which allow sharding, whether by social group (e.g. Twitter's follow lists) or content (e.g. Reddit's subreddits), and thus organize the community into silos [4]. HN is non-siloed, meaning everyone is in the same big community: all the As, all the anti-As, all the Bs, and all the anti-Bs - all roaming the same threads and bumping into each other. You are therefore more likely to run into datapoints you dislike and so more likely to feel that the community is biased against your view, and - what's worse - more biased the more strongly you feel!

For me this is sad, because I believe that in reality HN is a somewhat (<-- let's not exaggerate) more thoughtful and tolerant community than most others of the same or greater size, but precisely because of this dynamic, ends up being perceived as less so. (I wrote a thing about this a few years ago, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.)

I believe this is why one so often hears about how toxic, nasty, negative HN is—not that it isn't those things! but the relative level of them gets distorted. Human beings simply can't take very much of what they dislike and disagree with before resorting to generalization and other internal barriers. This is basically an immune response. It often takes only a handful of datapoints (3, or 2, or maybe even just 1) before the impression burns into the retina and becomes a permanent image [5].

(Side note: in one case I saw, some people were agreeing about how terrible and mean Hacker News is, and to prove the point, one of them linked to a vile reply he had received. That reply, however, was from Twitter—not from HN at all! He hastened to add "HN is the same"—somewhat self-refutingly, since if this were true, an actual example would not have been hard to find. In reality, while such vile comments do appear on HN, the community quickly flags most, and moderators eventually flag most of the rest. This is an example of the skew in perception I'm talking about.)

This phenomenon is at its most painful when the topic is close to one's heart—for example, when one's own work is being discussed. In cases like that, it doesn't take much before one feels wounded, and such painful impressions rarely go away.

I write a long digressive post about this once or twice a year because it makes me sad, especially since I've learned that it comes from fundamentals [6] - in this case, how HN's design interacts with human hard-wiring. Because of this, it is not going to change, and cannot be affected by argument.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] I don't mean "you" personally, of course—everyone does this. It's a double whammy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion, sometimes described in this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect.

[3] Lots of past explanation here if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

When TypeScript came out and for the first couple of years, I was the biggest TypeScript zealot on the planet. I loved it! There was a point when I typed T that the autosuggestions on iPhone would suggest "Typescript" :-) This all to say: when anti-Typescript sentiment popped up, I definitely noticed it, and it definitely annoyed me. (I still think back on jashkenas saying that he didn't see any point in TS because any good engineer wouldn't make the errors it catches and I just want to throttle him! But I digress...) And there definitely was a lot of it.

But there was a difference in quality between the anti-TS sentiment and the anti-AI sentiment. No one ever attacked my abilities as an engineer for saying I liked TS; no one ever said the things I built with TS were embarrassing or intern-quality like they have with AI. It never devolved into personal attacks the way that anti-AI commentariat pull out when they run out of other arguments.

I'd make a humble suggestion. I would like to suggest that when comments get that derisive, that those comments are removed faster and those users are banned faster. I genuinely think it brings down the quality of discourse site-wide. (FWIW, I think the same about pro-AI incendiary content - very low-quality comments about how people are going to lose their jobs / become obsolete without AI should equally well be flagged, removed and banned.)

I know the HN moderator team is incredibly busy and I am very thankful for all you do!

> I completely am fine with HN being a negative place

That can't be true, or else the personal attacks, derisive and incendiary content you're describing wouldn't bother you!

Also, it isn't possible to treat comment quality and negativity as separate issues because the two are related. Negativity reduces comment quality, for many reasons. One is what when people are angry or frightened they become repetitive and uncreative. Another is that such comments evoke more, and worse, from others.

> I would like to suggest that when comments get that derisive, that those comments are removed faster and those users are banned faster.

No argument there, but this is what we're already doing, or at least trying to do, regardless of the topic. If we knew a more effective way to do it, we'd be there!

FWIW, I think we agree on almost everything, but just a clarification on this point. I am perfectly fine (in fact I delight in reading) if HN is negative in the flavor of "You are completely wrong, here are sources 1 2 and 3 that show you exactly why you are wrong". I have read plenty of anti-AI writing on HN of that form and enjoyed it. OK, I don't love it when it's directed at me, but everyone needs to be told they are wrong sometimes. But I very strongly dislike "Only an inexperienced person could hold a view like that", i.e. personal attacks.

> No argument there, but this is what we're already doing, or at least trying to do, regardless of the topic. If we knew a more effective way to do it, we'd be there!

Godspeed :)

At the same time, cut raw steaks don't alert people in the same way as corpses do, and that is a double standard, in a way, I guess.

A drill is just a tool. You can screw a screw without one. AI is just a tool, you can do things without it, too.

But AI applied in a manner you could not otherwise complete on your own is not a tool. It's a slave. None of the ideas or creations presented in that instance are your own. You just cheated someone out of a paycheck they may have otherwise earned.