3 ms·

While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think there is a "true" spirit of HN. His sentiment as much as yours are in its spirit.

newswasboring 4y ago
I don't know man, maybe I'm wrong. I've been using HN for over a decade now, I've found constructive criticism to be a huge part of the positive culture here. It can of course be selection bias as I try to read more of that stuff and collapse a thread as soon as it gets into less constructive direction. But on the other hand, this is what the guidelines say > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. I don't think these type of comments teach us anything. But these are guidelines and not rules for a reason.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  > I don't think these type of comments teach us anything. Comments like the one at the root of this thread teach people that the current/approximate generation of LLM’s are poorly suited for certain kinds of tasks and remind us that many people don’t yet seem to understand what their systemic limitations are. LLM’s are statistical models over their training data and aim responses mostly towards the most dense, data-rich, and redundant centers of their corpus. Summarizing novel, esoteric or or expert material is something they’re poorly suited for because it inherently has poor representation in that data. Scoping is very constructive feedback.
  - newswasboring 4y ago
    It's not like everyone on HN is not aware of these issues. There is an article about this almost every day. It would be constructive feedback, in my view at least, if they actually showed what's wrong. Basically why can it not useful even if an expert person will look at it. Targeting arXiv gives us the opportunity to assume certain things about our users.

3 ms·

While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think there is a "true" spirit of HN. His sentiment as much as yours are in its spirit.

by rat9988 4y ago

newswasboring 4y ago
I don't know man, maybe I'm wrong. I've been using HN for over a decade now, I've found constructive criticism to be a huge part of the positive culture here. It can of course be selection bias as I try to read more of that stuff and collapse a thread as soon as it gets into less constructive direction. But on the other hand, this is what the guidelines say > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. I don't think these type of comments teach us anything. But these are guidelines and not rules for a reason.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  > I don't think these type of comments teach us anything. Comments like the one at the root of this thread teach people that the current/approximate generation of LLM’s are poorly suited for certain kinds of tasks and remind us that many people don’t yet seem to understand what their systemic limitations are. LLM’s are statistical models over their training data and aim responses mostly towards the most dense, data-rich, and redundant centers of their corpus. Summarizing novel, esoteric or or expert material is something they’re poorly suited for because it inherently has poor representation in that data. Scoping is very constructive feedback.
  - newswasboring 4y ago
    It's not like everyone on HN is not aware of these issues. There is an article about this almost every day. It would be constructive feedback, in my view at least, if they actually showed what's wrong. Basically why can it not useful even if an expert person will look at it. Targeting arXiv gives us the opportunity to assume certain things about our users.