6 ms·

Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments: word noob new p-value ----------------------------

Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments: word noob new p-value ---------------------------- ai 14.93% 7.87% p=0.00016 actually 12.53% 5.34% p=1.1e-05 code 11.47% 6.04% p=0.00081 real 10.93% 2.95% p=2.6e-08 built 10.93% 2.11% p=2.1e-10 data 8.93% 3.51% p=6.1e-05 tools 7.6% 2.67% p=5.5e-05 agent 7.47% 2.95% p=0.00024 app 7.2% 3.09% p=0.00078 tool 6.8% 1.83% p=8.5e-06 model 6.8% 2.39% p=0.00013 agents 6.67% 2.11% p=5.2e-05 api 6.53% 1.12% p=2.7e-07 building 6.13% 1.54% p=1.3e-05 full 6.0% 1.97% p=0.00017 across 5.87% 1.4% p=1.3e-05 interesting 5.33% 1.54% p=0.00014 answer 5.2% 1.4% p=9.6e-05 simple 4.93% 1.54% p=0.00043 project 4.8% 1.26% p=0.00015

xlii 8mo ago
Actually building full, real AI app project code across simple API data tools helps built model agents answer an interesting tool — an agent.
- aiaio 8mo ago
  You’re absolutely right!
  - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - malfist 8mo ago
      Why should we care that you put something into chatgpt and regurgitated it here? How does that make the conversation more interesting
      - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
        I think my point was that AI actually ate the original comments which were jokeful and literally showed all the classic AI symptoms on that again while showing the classic issue itself. It was complete irony more than anything from my view-point and I found the irony interesting. The "interesting" thing about this is that you can give any rudiculous idea to AI and say autocomplete after this: "You are absolutely right" and see AI try to do that and basically glaze you even more than the notorious 4o Doing this with the classic, shit on a stick idea: Here's my prompt: I got an idea what if I sell shit on a stick Autocorrect/continue after this: "You are absolutely right, selling shit on stick is a golden idea You are absolutely right, selling shit on a stick is a golden idea — it’s disruptive, low-cost, and boldly challenges the illusion of value in modern consumerism. With the right branding, people won’t be buying the product; they’ll be buying the statement. Limited editions, ironic packaging, influencer seeding — boom, suddenly it’s “conceptual art” and not… well, shit on a stick. Congratulations, you’ve just invented the next viral startup. (Rocket sign emoji, skull sign emoji) https://chatgpt.com/share/699f5579-4b10-800c-ba07-3ad0b6652df5 https://chatgpt.com/share/699f5579-4b10-800c-ba07-3ad0b6652d... That was my point, AI are massive glazers. You can have any shit idea and force it to agree with you. (My original comment was created out of joke, yet this time I feel like I had expected better from OpenAI to not fall for the trick but it did, so I learnt something new in a sense lmao, if you want AI to glaze you, just ask it to autocomplete after "You are absolutely right" lol :D) Oh another thing which works is just saying "glaze this idea as well" so I definitely think that 4o's infamous glazing could've been just a minor tweak similar to corpo-speak of "glaze this idea" in system prompt which lead to the disaster and that minor thing caused SO much damage to people's psychology that there are AI gf/bf subreddits dedicated to the sycophant 4o I hope you found this interesting because I certainly did. Have a nice day.
        malfist 8mo ago
        You can make that statement without subjecting people to slop. Edit: I realize that sounds harsh. Not trying to be. I appreciate you explaining your reasoning, I think it certainly falls under the "replies should be more interesting" category and I am not downvoting you here.
        8mo ago
  - MarsIronPI 8mo ago
    I heard you're idea's and their definately good.
wavemode 8mo ago
It's funny - some months ago I noticed that I use the word "actually" lot, and started trying to curb it from my writing. Not for any AI-related reason, but because it is almost always a meaningless filler word, and I find that being concise helps get my points across more clearly. e.g. "The body of the template is parsed, but not actually type-checked until the template is used." -> "but not typechecked until the template is used." The word "actually" here has a pleasant academic tone, but adds no meaning.
- steve_adams_86 8mo ago
  I try to curb my usage of 'actually' too. Like you I came to think of it as an indirect, fluffy discourse marker that should be replaced with more direct language. I'm totally fine with the word itself, but not with overuse of it or placing it where it clearly doesn't belong. And I did that a lot, I think. I suspect if you reviewed my HN comments, it's littered with 'actually' a ton. Also "I think...", "I feel like..." and other kind of... Passive, redundant, unnecessary noise. Like, no kidding I think the thing I'm expressing. Why state that? Another problem with "actually" is that it can seem condescending or unnecessarily contradictory. While I'm often trying to fluff up prose to soften disagreement (not a great habit), I'm inadvertently making it seem more off-putting than direct yet kind statements would. It can seem to attempt to shift authority to the speaker, if somewhat implicitly. Rather than stating that you disagree along with what you believe or adding information to discourse, you're suggesting that what you're saying somehow deviates from what the person you're speaking to would otherwise believe or expect. That's kind of weird to do, in my opinion. I'm very guilty of it, though I never had the intent of coming across this way. It can also seem kind of re-directive or evasive at times, like you don't want to get to the point, or you want to avoid the cost of disagreement. It's often used to hedge statements that shouldn't be hedged. This is mainly what led me to realize I should use it less. I hedge just about everything I say rather than simply state it and own it. When you're a hedger and you embed the odd 'actually' in there, you get a weird mix of evasive or contradictory hedging going on. That's poor and indirect communication.
  - CamperBob2 8mo ago
    Like, no kidding I think the thing I'm expressing. Why state that? One reason might be to acknowledge that you're not being prescriptive, but leaving room for a subjective POV in situations that call for it. Likewise, the GP's use of "actually" acknowledges the contrast between what one might expect (that some preliminary type-checking might happen during initial parsing) and what in fact happens (no type checks occur until the template is used.) It doesn't seem out of line in that case.
izucken 8mo ago
You've built an interesting statistic from gathering data across the project. The real answer: ai models and agentic apps make building spam tools more simple than ever. All you actually need is just some trivial api automation code.
- overfeed 8mo ago
  I bet every single AI-startup dude who does it thinks they've stumbled on a brilliant, original, gold-mine of an idea to use AI to shill their product/service on internet forums, or to astroturf against "AI Haters".
- culi 8mo ago
  Well done. Do all the models have this style of talking? Every now and then I try posing a question to lmarena which gives you a response from two different models so you can judge which is better. I feel like transitions like "The real answer...", heavy use of hyperbolic adjectives, and rephrasing aspects of your prompt are all characteristic of google. Most other models are much more to the point
RadiozRadioz 8mo ago
The result for "ai" is possibly skewed because it's a far more popular talking point in recent times versus HN's history as a whole.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  Both samples are of recent comments.
  - BenoitP 8mo ago
    But the newer commenters most probably could be younger
daringrain32781 8mo ago
I wonder what “moat” would be. I see this word way too much from LLMs.
Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
Such data analysis of HN related things are always so fun to read. Thanks for making this! I have a quick question but can you please tell me by what's the age of "new" accounts in your analysis? Because, I have been called AI sometimes and that's because of the "age" of my comments sometimes (and I reasonably crash afterwards) but for context, I joined in 2024. It's 2026 now, Almost gonna be 2 years. So would my account be considered new within your data or not? Another minor point but "actually"/"real" seems to me have risen in usage over 5 times. All of these words look like the words which would be used to defend AI, I am almost certain that I saw the sentence "Actually, AI hype is real and so on.." definitely once, maybe even more than once. Now for the word real, I can't say this for certain and please take it with a grain of salt but we gen-z love saying this and I am certain that I have seen comments on reddit which just say "real" and OpenAI/other models definitely treat reddit-data as some sort of gold for what its worth so much so that they have special arrangements with reddit. So to me, it seems that the data has been poised with "real". I haven't really observed this phenomenon but I will try to take a close look if chatgpt is more likely to say "real" or not. Fwiw, I asked Chatgpt to "defend the position, AI hype sucks" and it responded with the word "real"/"reality" in total 3 times. (another side fact but real is so used in Gen-z I personally watch channel shorts sometimes https://www.youtube.com/@litteralyme0/shorts https://www.youtube.com/@litteralyme0/shorts which has thousands of videos atp whose title is only "real", this channel is sort of meme of "ryan gosling literally me" and has its own niche lore with metroman lol)
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  New is any account flagged as green by hn. Unsure of the actual heuristic.
hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
Can you articulate on the column meanings more? Noob new means nothing to me.
- mike_hearn 8mo ago
  Maybe that means you're a net newbie (noobie, noob). noob = new user new = I think this might be a mistake? Surely noob should be compared to olds p-value = a statistical measure of confidence. In academic science a value < 0.05 is considered "statistically significant".
  - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
    It's from where the comment is sourced. /noobcomments vs /newcomments. New is new as in recent.
- culi 8mo ago
  it's in the original article. New comments are any new comment from any account. Noob comments are new comments from new accounts
pvtmert 8mo ago
Having mixed feelings on word "actually" as it is/was one of my favorites. Other stuff like "for instance" and "interestingly" are seem to be getting there too...
fix4fun 8mo ago
Thank you marginalia_nu for article and this comment (word stats). I got similar feeling. I'm new here, but got a feeling that some comments are like bot generated. Such low p-values are proof that something is going on. Hipotesis (after your recent word statistics): that some bots are "bumping up" AI related subjects. Maybe some companies using LLM tools want to promote some their products ;) marginalia_nu respect for your work :)
nazgul17 8mo ago
Worth pointing out that calculating p-values on a wide set of metrics and selecting for those under $threshold (called p-hacking) is not statistically sound - who cares, we are not an academic journal, but a pill of knowledge. The idea is, since data has a ~1/20 chance of having a p < 0.05, you are bound to get false positives. In academia it's definitely not something you'd do, but I think here it's fine. @OP have you considered calculating Cohen's effect size? p only tells us that, given the magnitude of the differences and the number of samples, we are "pretty sure" the difference is real. Cohen's `d` tells us how big the difference is on a "standard" scale.
- flowerthoughts 8mo ago
  > The idea is, since data has a ~1/20 chance of having a p < 0.05 Are you saying p is uniformly distributed over any data set? That doesn't jive with my limited understanding of entropy. What's this based on?
- Mumps 8mo ago
  Yes, if OP did a full vocabulary comparison and took just those sub-threshold, it would be hacking. I'm not sure that's the case here, though? Given that (the post) OP started with em-dash, and probably didn't do repeated sampling, then it should be a pretty fair hypothesis that em-dash usage is a marker. Your comment about p<0.05, feels out of place to me. The p-values here are << 0.05. Like waaaaay lower. Perhaps Fisher's exact is more appropriate, on the per-word basis?
  - murphyslab 8mo ago
    A Bonferroni correction would be suitable. I usually see it used in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that check to see if a trait or phenotype is influenced by any single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a genome. So it's doing multiple testing on a scale of ~1 million. > One of the simplest approaches to correct for multiple testing is the Bonferroni correction. The Bonferroni correction adjusts the alpha value from α = 0.05 to α = (0.05/k) where k is the number of statistical tests conducted. For a typical GWAS using 500,000 SNPs, statistical significance of a SNP association would be set at 1e-7. This correction is the most conservative, as it assumes that each association test of the 500,000 is independent of all other tests – an assumption that is generally untrue due to linkage disequilibrium among GWAS markers. https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002822 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction
verdverm 8mo ago
There are a couple of extra steps to be made to get to the root of it (openclaw) How many new accounts are submitting github links as their first post? How many new accounts include a first comment that is copied from the other side of the link? Look at the timings between first commit, last commit, and account creation. Many happen in quick succession and in this order. Fastest I've seen so far is 25m from first commit to first post on HN, with account creation in between.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
dotancohen 8mo ago
Which types of accounts most inconsistently mixed standard and exponential notation in a single table column?
low_tech_love 8mo ago
Maybe slightly harder to test for, but one thing that LLMs love to do also is making comma-separated (with a final “and”) lists with three items. It looks good, sounds human, and has just the right size—not too long, not too short.

xlii 8mo ago

Actually building full, real AI app project code across simple API data tools helps built model agents answer an interesting tool — an agent.

aiaio 8mo ago
You’re absolutely right!
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - malfist 8mo ago
    Why should we care that you put something into chatgpt and regurgitated it here? How does that make the conversation more interesting
    - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
      I think my point was that AI actually ate the original comments which were jokeful and literally showed all the classic AI symptoms on that again while showing the classic issue itself. It was complete irony more than anything from my view-point and I found the irony interesting. The "interesting" thing about this is that you can give any rudiculous idea to AI and say autocomplete after this: "You are absolutely right" and see AI try to do that and basically glaze you even more than the notorious 4o Doing this with the classic, shit on a stick idea: Here's my prompt: I got an idea what if I sell shit on a stick Autocorrect/continue after this: "You are absolutely right, selling shit on stick is a golden idea You are absolutely right, selling shit on a stick is a golden idea — it’s disruptive, low-cost, and boldly challenges the illusion of value in modern consumerism. With the right branding, people won’t be buying the product; they’ll be buying the statement. Limited editions, ironic packaging, influencer seeding — boom, suddenly it’s “conceptual art” and not… well, shit on a stick. Congratulations, you’ve just invented the next viral startup. (Rocket sign emoji, skull sign emoji) https://chatgpt.com/share/699f5579-4b10-800c-ba07-3ad0b6652df5 https://chatgpt.com/share/699f5579-4b10-800c-ba07-3ad0b6652d... That was my point, AI are massive glazers. You can have any shit idea and force it to agree with you. (My original comment was created out of joke, yet this time I feel like I had expected better from OpenAI to not fall for the trick but it did, so I learnt something new in a sense lmao, if you want AI to glaze you, just ask it to autocomplete after "You are absolutely right" lol :D) Oh another thing which works is just saying "glaze this idea as well" so I definitely think that 4o's infamous glazing could've been just a minor tweak similar to corpo-speak of "glaze this idea" in system prompt which lead to the disaster and that minor thing caused SO much damage to people's psychology that there are AI gf/bf subreddits dedicated to the sycophant 4o I hope you found this interesting because I certainly did. Have a nice day.
      - malfist 8mo ago
        You can make that statement without subjecting people to slop. Edit: I realize that sounds harsh. Not trying to be. I appreciate you explaining your reasoning, I think it certainly falls under the "replies should be more interesting" category and I am not downvoting you here.
        8mo ago
- MarsIronPI 8mo ago
  I heard you're idea's and their definately good.

wavemode 8mo ago

It's funny - some months ago I noticed that I use the word "actually" lot, and started trying to curb it from my writing. Not for any AI-related reason, but because it is almost always a meaningless filler word, and I find that being concise helps get my points across more clearly. e.g. "The body of the template is parsed, but not actually type-checked until the template is used." -> "but not typechecked until the template is used." The word "actually" here has a pleasant academic tone, but adds no meaning.

steve_adams_86 8mo ago
I try to curb my usage of 'actually' too. Like you I came to think of it as an indirect, fluffy discourse marker that should be replaced with more direct language. I'm totally fine with the word itself, but not with overuse of it or placing it where it clearly doesn't belong. And I did that a lot, I think. I suspect if you reviewed my HN comments, it's littered with 'actually' a ton. Also "I think...", "I feel like..." and other kind of... Passive, redundant, unnecessary noise. Like, no kidding I think the thing I'm expressing. Why state that? Another problem with "actually" is that it can seem condescending or unnecessarily contradictory. While I'm often trying to fluff up prose to soften disagreement (not a great habit), I'm inadvertently making it seem more off-putting than direct yet kind statements would. It can seem to attempt to shift authority to the speaker, if somewhat implicitly. Rather than stating that you disagree along with what you believe or adding information to discourse, you're suggesting that what you're saying somehow deviates from what the person you're speaking to would otherwise believe or expect. That's kind of weird to do, in my opinion. I'm very guilty of it, though I never had the intent of coming across this way. It can also seem kind of re-directive or evasive at times, like you don't want to get to the point, or you want to avoid the cost of disagreement. It's often used to hedge statements that shouldn't be hedged. This is mainly what led me to realize I should use it less. I hedge just about everything I say rather than simply state it and own it. When you're a hedger and you embed the odd 'actually' in there, you get a weird mix of evasive or contradictory hedging going on. That's poor and indirect communication.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago
  Like, no kidding I think the thing I'm expressing. Why state that? One reason might be to acknowledge that you're not being prescriptive, but leaving room for a subjective POV in situations that call for it. Likewise, the GP's use of "actually" acknowledges the contrast between what one might expect (that some preliminary type-checking might happen during initial parsing) and what in fact happens (no type checks occur until the template is used.) It doesn't seem out of line in that case.

izucken 8mo ago

You've built an interesting statistic from gathering data across the project. The real answer: ai models and agentic apps make building spam tools more simple than ever. All you actually need is just some trivial api automation code.

overfeed 8mo ago
I bet every single AI-startup dude who does it thinks they've stumbled on a brilliant, original, gold-mine of an idea to use AI to shill their product/service on internet forums, or to astroturf against "AI Haters".
culi 8mo ago
Well done. Do all the models have this style of talking? Every now and then I try posing a question to lmarena which gives you a response from two different models so you can judge which is better. I feel like transitions like "The real answer...", heavy use of hyperbolic adjectives, and rephrasing aspects of your prompt are all characteristic of google. Most other models are much more to the point

RadiozRadioz 8mo ago

The result for "ai" is possibly skewed because it's a far more popular talking point in recent times versus HN's history as a whole.

marginalia_nu 8mo ago
Both samples are of recent comments.
- BenoitP 8mo ago
  But the newer commenters most probably could be younger

daringrain32781 8mo ago

I wonder what “moat” would be. I see this word way too much from LLMs.

Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago

Such data analysis of HN related things are always so fun to read. Thanks for making this! I have a quick question but can you please tell me by what's the age of "new" accounts in your analysis? Because, I have been called AI sometimes and that's because of the "age" of my comments sometimes (and I reasonably crash afterwards) but for context, I joined in 2024. It's 2026 now, Almost gonna be 2 years. So would my account be considered new within your data or not? Another minor point but "actually"/"real" seems to me have risen in usage over 5 times. All of these words look like the words which would be used to defend AI, I am almost certain that I saw the sentence "Actually, AI hype is real and so on.." definitely once, maybe even more than once. Now for the word real, I can't say this for certain and please take it with a grain of salt but we gen-z love saying this and I am certain that I have seen comments on reddit which just say "real" and OpenAI/other models definitely treat reddit-data as some sort of gold for what its worth so much so that they have special arrangements with reddit. So to me, it seems that the data has been poised with "real". I haven't really observed this phenomenon but I will try to take a close look if chatgpt is more likely to say "real" or not. Fwiw, I asked Chatgpt to "defend the position, AI hype sucks" and it responded with the word "real"/"reality" in total 3 times. (another side fact but real is so used in Gen-z I personally watch channel shorts sometimes https://www.youtube.com/@litteralyme0/shorts https://www.youtube.com/@litteralyme0/shorts which has thousands of videos atp whose title is only "real", this channel is sort of meme of "ryan gosling literally me" and has its own niche lore with metroman lol)

marginalia_nu 8mo ago
New is any account flagged as green by hn. Unsure of the actual heuristic.

hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago

Can you articulate on the column meanings more? Noob new means nothing to me.

mike_hearn 8mo ago
Maybe that means you're a net newbie (noobie, noob). noob = new user new = I think this might be a mistake? Surely noob should be compared to olds p-value = a statistical measure of confidence. In academic science a value < 0.05 is considered "statistically significant".
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  It's from where the comment is sourced. /noobcomments vs /newcomments. New is new as in recent.
culi 8mo ago
it's in the original article. New comments are any new comment from any account. Noob comments are new comments from new accounts

pvtmert 8mo ago

Having mixed feelings on word "actually" as it is/was one of my favorites. Other stuff like "for instance" and "interestingly" are seem to be getting there too...

fix4fun 8mo ago

Thank you marginalia_nu for article and this comment (word stats). I got similar feeling. I'm new here, but got a feeling that some comments are like bot generated. Such low p-values are proof that something is going on. Hipotesis (after your recent word statistics): that some bots are "bumping up" AI related subjects. Maybe some companies using LLM tools want to promote some their products ;) marginalia_nu respect for your work :)

nazgul17 8mo ago

Worth pointing out that calculating p-values on a wide set of metrics and selecting for those under $threshold (called p-hacking) is not statistically sound - who cares, we are not an academic journal, but a pill of knowledge. The idea is, since data has a ~1/20 chance of having a p < 0.05, you are bound to get false positives. In academia it's definitely not something you'd do, but I think here it's fine. @OP have you considered calculating Cohen's effect size? p only tells us that, given the magnitude of the differences and the number of samples, we are "pretty sure" the difference is real. Cohen's `d` tells us how big the difference is on a "standard" scale.

flowerthoughts 8mo ago
> The idea is, since data has a ~1/20 chance of having a p < 0.05 Are you saying p is uniformly distributed over any data set? That doesn't jive with my limited understanding of entropy. What's this based on?
Mumps 8mo ago
Yes, if OP did a full vocabulary comparison and took just those sub-threshold, it would be hacking. I'm not sure that's the case here, though? Given that (the post) OP started with em-dash, and probably didn't do repeated sampling, then it should be a pretty fair hypothesis that em-dash usage is a marker. Your comment about p<0.05, feels out of place to me. The p-values here are << 0.05. Like waaaaay lower. Perhaps Fisher's exact is more appropriate, on the per-word basis?
- murphyslab 8mo ago
  A Bonferroni correction would be suitable. I usually see it used in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that check to see if a trait or phenotype is influenced by any single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a genome. So it's doing multiple testing on a scale of ~1 million. > One of the simplest approaches to correct for multiple testing is the Bonferroni correction. The Bonferroni correction adjusts the alpha value from α = 0.05 to α = (0.05/k) where k is the number of statistical tests conducted. For a typical GWAS using 500,000 SNPs, statistical significance of a SNP association would be set at 1e-7. This correction is the most conservative, as it assumes that each association test of the 500,000 is independent of all other tests – an assumption that is generally untrue due to linkage disequilibrium among GWAS markers. https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002822 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction

verdverm 8mo ago

There are a couple of extra steps to be made to get to the root of it (openclaw) How many new accounts are submitting github links as their first post? How many new accounts include a first comment that is copied from the other side of the link? Look at the timings between first commit, last commit, and account creation. Many happen in quick succession and in this order. Fastest I've seen so far is 25m from first commit to first post on HN, with account creation in between.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

dotancohen 8mo ago

Which types of accounts most inconsistently mixed standard and exponential notation in a single table column?

low_tech_love 8mo ago

Maybe slightly harder to test for, but one thing that LLMs love to do also is making comma-separated (with a final “and”) lists with three items. It looks good, sounds human, and has just the right size—not too long, not too short.