Comment by dang
3 days ago
All: quite a few comments in this thread (and another one we merged hither - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure that you're using the site as intended when posting here.
3 days ago
All: quite a few comments in this thread (and another one we merged hither - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure that you're using the site as intended when posting here.
I’m confused can someone please explain to me why he or she is so controversial?
The personal attacks I saw were against different people, not just one. In a lot of cases it's just routine internet cynicism, which is always amplified against unusually successful or prominent people.
There's also a lot of fear and anger about the AI tsunami these days, among certain user cohorts, and that's an amplifier as well.
On HN, personal attacks aren't allowed regardless of who's being attacked, and comments are asked to make their substantive points thoughtfully and not be cynical or snarky. Here's one guideline:
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Okay I see. Are people being attacked for engaging in AI research/dev irrespective of their character or other personal attributes?
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Being rude isn't helpful. It's not their fault, it's the unavoidable reality of treating complex social signalling as one-dimensional. At minimum Hacker News would need to separate approval/disapproval signals from assessments of whether a comment is constructive. That’s not a simple change given the obvious abuse vectors. It would require reliably distinguishing good-faith participants from bad actors. It can be done, but it's not easy.
The main reason sites avoid this approach is institutional rather than technical. Adding algorithmic mediation invites accusations of algorithmic bias whenever results are unpopular.[0] Simple manual interventions are often sufficient to nudge community behaviour so that majority outcomes broadly align with the moderators’ priors, without the visibility or accountability costs of a more complex system.
[0] Case in point being X. People routinely accuse the new management of "juicing" the algorithm to favour their politics, when outcomes are adequately explained by the exodus of contributors on the other side. Isolating innate community bias from algorithms is a philosophically impossible problem.
I really like the idea of multiple vectors although nobody seems apt to pick up the idea other than Slashdot.
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When I review the link posted by @dang it says talking about downvotes is boring. Maybe that's why your comment is grey. (This comment should turn grey as well)
It's not 'downvote abuse' if it's working exactly as intended. The community decides what's 'perfectly fine and neutral.' If your comments follow the guidelines, at least they won't get deleted.
This is pretty obviously false? I get downvoted quite frequently on HN for posting comments that go against what people typically think. For instance, I find it quite difficult to discuss the productivity gains of AI because any comment I make saying that AI makes me more productive immediately gets downvotes. I am not making inflammatory comments - my comments with a similar tone about other things that boost my productivity, like Rust or whatever, never get downvoted.
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> Weirdly, he doesn’t care about the toxicity problems on Twitter/X either,
> Yet he has the nerve to call HN toxic.
That's not weird or paradoxical. They don't have to delineate every online platform they disagree with in order to criticize HN; "orange site bad" is a pretty common sentiment in my experience.
I hear about X being hateful but nobody wants to talk about how toxic BlueSky actually is. I had to stop going on there permanently. I dont think I have ever quit a social media platform as quickly and permanently as BlueSky.
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The chutzpah of complaining about the level here when most tech threads on X are primitive billionaire marketing. Why don't they complain about Musk's X?
It isn't enough that Karpathy is rich---we also need to admire him. That dynamic was satirized in the Silicon Valley show with Gavin Belson.
Also relevant:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/please-dont-say-mean-thi...
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What is there to be furious about?
Managers will be starting to ask for claws in the development flow, claws for automation, etc. Another flashy trend everyone will have to endure because an influencer is hyping the tech. It happened in 2024/2025. Every manager demanding use of "vibe coding", because they bought the lie that is what everyone is doing and is the best thing since sliced bread and whatnot. Karpathy comes up with a new shit to hype, and everyone will jump on the bandwagon. It's exhausting. It's like when there was a new frontend framework every single month and everyone just following the trend. Backbone is good enough. Then Vue. Then react. Then angular. Then svelte. Then SolidJs. Then Astro. Probably now everyone and their mothers will try to come with another abstraction layer on top of llms, then on top of agents, then on top of claws. Like I said, it's exhausting and the ROI of jumping every single fucking trend is becoming really hard to see.
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