Comment by sealeck
5 days ago
> I've been reading this website for probably 15 years, its never been this bad... all the actual educated takes are on X
Almost every technical comment on HN is wrong (see for example essentially all the discussion of Rust async, in which people keep making up silly claims that Rust maintainers then attempt to patiently explain are wrong).
The idea that the "educated" takes are on X though... that's crazy talk.
With regard to AI & LLMs Twitter/x is actually the only place with all of the industry people discussing.
There are a bunch of great accounts to follow that are only really posting content to x.
Karpathy, nearcyan, kalomaze, all of the OpenAI researchers including the link this discussion is on, many anthropic researchers. It's such a meme that you see people discuss reading Twitter thread + paper because the thread gives useful additional context.
Hn still has great comment sections on maker style posts, on network stuff, but I no longer enjoy the discussions wrt AI here. It's too hyperbolic.
that people on here dont know alot of the leading researchers only post on X is a tell in itself
I see the same effect regarding macroeconomic discussions. Great content on X that is head and shoulders (says me) above discussions on other platforms.
I'm unconvinced Twitter is a very good medium for serious technical discussion. I imagine a lot of this happens on the sidelines at conferences, on mailing threads and actually in organisations doing work on AI (e.g. Universities, Anthropic). The people who are doing the work are also often not the people who have time to Twitter.
Have you published in ML conferences? I'm curious because I have ML researcher friends who have and they talk about Twitter a lot but I'm not an ML researcher myself.
Too hyperbolic for, against, or either way?
It honestly depends on the headline.
I think hn probably has a disproportionate number of haters while Twitter has a disproportionate number of blind believers / hype types.
But both have both.
Not sure how this compares to YouTube (although my guess is the thumbnails + titles are most egregious there for algorithm reasons)
Yup! People here are great hackers but it’s almost like they have their head up their own ass when it comes to AI/ML.
Most of HN was very wrong about LLMs.
This is true of every forum and every topic. When you actually know something about the topic you realize 90% of the takes about it are garbage.
But in most other sites the statistic is 99%, so HN is still doing much better than average.
No on AI, this is really a fringe environment of relatively uninformed commenters, compared to X. X has its craziness but you can curate your feeds by using lists. Here I can't choose who to follow.
And like said, the researchers themselves are on X, even Gary Marcus is there. ;)