3 ms·

All: quite a few comments in this thread (and another one we merged hither - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

by dang 9mo ago

All: quite a few comments in this thread (and another one we merged hither - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099160) have contained personal attacks. Hopefully most of them are [flagged] and/or [dead] now. On HN, please don't cross into personal attack no matter how strongly you feel about someone or disagree with them. It's destructive of what the site is for, and we moderate and/or ban accounts that do it. If you haven't recently, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure that you're using the site as intended when posting here.

fullstackchris 9mo ago
[flagged]
- kovek 9mo ago
  What is there to be furious about?
  - aeve890 9mo ago
    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.
    - rvz 9mo ago
      Well said. Remember MCPs? I don't.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
    - th0ma5 9mo ago
      [dead]
    - mikkupikku 9mo ago
      Stop taking work so seriously. You're getting paid to deal with other people's nonsense, and if you're in tech you're getting paid better than most to deal with less than most. The next time you're about to have a cry session about your meanie boss asking you to use AI, try to remember that you're allowed to walk straight out the door, without so much as two weeks notice if the request is really so offensive to you. You can get a job flipping burgers instead, lots of people make ends meet with jobs like that. And instead of your boss asking you to use a claw or some other silly AI thing, maybe he'll ask you to clean up the diarrhea some degenerate sprayed on the bathroom walls. A little perspective for you. If you want to learn what the word "exhausting" really means, quit tech.
      - aeve890 9mo ago
        Fuck. thanks for the reality check. Sometimes this cozy job makes me lost perspective. Damn I feel stupid right now.
      - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
        > You're getting paid to deal with other people's nonsense, and if you're in tech you're getting paid better than most to deal with less than most. The problem is that you are paid for two things that are often contradictory to each other 1. writing good code 2. dealing with other people's nonsense Many good coders really care about 1, so of course they are complaining. --- Concerning the argument that tech pays so well: this is very US-specific; in many other countries working in tech is rather some job that may pay the bills, but not more. So people who work there often do it because they are insanely passionate about programming. This again, as I already outlined above, means that they really care about good code, and if "other people's nonsense" means sacrificing this, it will make the respective employees really furious.
Razengan 9mo ago
[flagged]
- simondotau 9mo ago
  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.
  - michaelmrose 9mo ago
    I really like the idea of multiple vectors although nobody seems apt to pick up the idea other than Slashdot.
    - Loughla 9mo ago
      The reason I left there was the down vote brigade that really killed most genuine criticism that disagrees with the sites pre formed opinions on certain topics. So I'm not sure it's a solved problem. Unless it's gotten better since 2011?
      - michaelmrose 8mo ago
        I think the specific community and some of the ways it does moderation and voting are seperable and I would love to see the latter tested on an open source discussion platform
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
SilverElfin 9mo ago
[flagged]
- art-12937 9mo ago
  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-things-about-the-ai-that-i-just-invested-a-billion-dollars-in https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/please-dont-say-mean-thi...
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  > 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.
  - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
    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.
    - bigyabai 9mo ago
      This is also a strawman. Both platforms are irrelevant to this discussion.
      - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
        Not to what I was responding to.
colbyn 9mo ago
I’m confused can someone please explain to me why he or she is so controversial?
- dang 9mo ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - colbyn 9mo ago
    Okay I see. Are people being attacked for engaging in AI research/dev irrespective of their character or other personal attributes?
    - irthomasthomas 9mo ago
      I saw simonw getting attacked for sharing his bloglink about it, only it was not even simonw who shared the link here.
      - paganel 9mo ago
        Saw that, too, but at some point one cannot just stand like sheep in the slaughterhouse, the reaction was to be expected (even though it could have happened in a more civilized way, not via personal-ish attacks, I agree with that). More generally, there are now literally trillions of dollars being invested in this madness/tsunami/whatever-one-wants-to-call-it, which means that it has now become impossible to follow said money so as to follow the conflicts of interests (it’s easy to assume a conflict of interest for a guy like Karpathy given his past and recent employment history, but I do think that Simon is more on the genuine side), so this is why that counter-reaction is now manifesting itself so chaotically, hitting left and right with not necessarily any logic behind it, which means that there are going to be collateral “casualties” during it all (such as Simon in this case).

by dang 9mo ago

fullstackchris 9mo ago

[flagged]

kovek 9mo ago
What is there to be furious about?
- aeve890 9mo ago
  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.
  - rvz 9mo ago
    Well said. Remember MCPs? I don't.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - th0ma5 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - mikkupikku 9mo ago
    Stop taking work so seriously. You're getting paid to deal with other people's nonsense, and if you're in tech you're getting paid better than most to deal with less than most. The next time you're about to have a cry session about your meanie boss asking you to use AI, try to remember that you're allowed to walk straight out the door, without so much as two weeks notice if the request is really so offensive to you. You can get a job flipping burgers instead, lots of people make ends meet with jobs like that. And instead of your boss asking you to use a claw or some other silly AI thing, maybe he'll ask you to clean up the diarrhea some degenerate sprayed on the bathroom walls. A little perspective for you. If you want to learn what the word "exhausting" really means, quit tech.
    - aeve890 9mo ago
      Fuck. thanks for the reality check. Sometimes this cozy job makes me lost perspective. Damn I feel stupid right now.
    - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
      > You're getting paid to deal with other people's nonsense, and if you're in tech you're getting paid better than most to deal with less than most. The problem is that you are paid for two things that are often contradictory to each other 1. writing good code 2. dealing with other people's nonsense Many good coders really care about 1, so of course they are complaining. --- Concerning the argument that tech pays so well: this is very US-specific; in many other countries working in tech is rather some job that may pay the bills, but not more. So people who work there often do it because they are insanely passionate about programming. This again, as I already outlined above, means that they really care about good code, and if "other people's nonsense" means sacrificing this, it will make the respective employees really furious.

Razengan 9mo ago

[flagged]

simondotau 9mo ago
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.
- michaelmrose 9mo ago
  I really like the idea of multiple vectors although nobody seems apt to pick up the idea other than Slashdot.
  - Loughla 9mo ago
    The reason I left there was the down vote brigade that really killed most genuine criticism that disagrees with the sites pre formed opinions on certain topics. So I'm not sure it's a solved problem. Unless it's gotten better since 2011?
    - michaelmrose 8mo ago
      I think the specific community and some of the ways it does moderation and voting are seperable and I would love to see the latter tested on an open source discussion platform

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

SilverElfin 9mo ago

[flagged]

art-12937 9mo ago
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-things-about-the-ai-that-i-just-invested-a-billion-dollars-in https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/please-dont-say-mean-thi...
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
bigyabai 9mo ago
> 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.
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  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.
  - bigyabai 9mo ago
    This is also a strawman. Both platforms are irrelevant to this discussion.
    - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
      Not to what I was responding to.

colbyn 9mo ago

I’m confused can someone please explain to me why he or she is so controversial?

dang 9mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- colbyn 9mo ago
  Okay I see. Are people being attacked for engaging in AI research/dev irrespective of their character or other personal attributes?
  - irthomasthomas 9mo ago
    I saw simonw getting attacked for sharing his bloglink about it, only it was not even simonw who shared the link here.
    - paganel 9mo ago
      Saw that, too, but at some point one cannot just stand like sheep in the slaughterhouse, the reaction was to be expected (even though it could have happened in a more civilized way, not via personal-ish attacks, I agree with that). More generally, there are now literally trillions of dollars being invested in this madness/tsunami/whatever-one-wants-to-call-it, which means that it has now become impossible to follow said money so as to follow the conflicts of interests (it’s easy to assume a conflict of interest for a guy like Karpathy given his past and recent employment history, but I do think that Simon is more on the genuine side), so this is why that counter-reaction is now manifesting itself so chaotically, hitting left and right with not necessarily any logic behind it, which means that there are going to be collateral “casualties” during it all (such as Simon in this case).