8 ms·

It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from

by dang 5mo ago

It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174. Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to bring out one side or other. As for why the community is divided, there's always a temptation to come up with HN-specific explanations, but society as a whole is divided about AI. Surely that is the only explanation one needs. As I've been saying for years, HN can't be immune from macro trends: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20immune%20macro%20trend&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

dang 5mo ago
As an aside, the variety of examples in that other thread is impressive. Here are some that I noticed: Fixing my furnace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845 New software for a retro keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158 Customizing my camper van: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379 Porting my astronomy app from an old Nokia phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242 Fixing my kid’s science fair project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419364 Unborking the family printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419480 Learning to draw anatomy (!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418716 Lowering my electrical bill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417949 Making classic guitar pedals programmable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418006 Avocado armchair guy victory lap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417658 (<-- oops, wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418274) Putting an overlay on enemies in a video game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420635 It just goes on and on. I was a little nervous when I saw that post originally, but it's amazing what happens when a title is somehow just right.
- jimmygrapes 5mo ago
  I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!
  - TylerE 5mo ago
    Lemme give another. I was formerly quite anti-AI but bought a cheap Claude plan just to play around with it a bit. First thing I built with it was this - https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano, in about an hour and maybe 10 prompt cycles. It replaced, for my specific use case, the 10% of the functionality of an increasingly-unreliable commercial app. That's including building the website, setting up actions for mac and windows builds... My next project was a 2d game with random terrain, physics, sound, music, multiple levels, a day/night cycle with transitions high score tracking... (not uploaded anywhere, but it works, and I refined it a good bit.). That was more like 8 hours and maybe a 100 prompts. Here are a few screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/vhUXBu3 https://imgur.com/a/vhUXBu3 One thing that I have found to make a pretty big difference is using both the latest models and higher thinking levels. Opus 4.8 with thinking on Extra or even Max is genuinely mind blowing. The thing I hadn't really appreciated, having a sort of naive impression formed mainly from using free early versions of stuff like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion was sort of that "Type a big ass prompt and it craps out a result" experience. But Claude is really great at refining from feedback, and it's way more flexible and responsive than I would have ever expected. I can do something like take a screenshot of a small portion of the running app or website or whatever and just say "This button needs to be bigger" or "make this red" or something like that, or even sometimes just "fix this", and Claude both correctly identifies what I'm talking about, and actually does the thing. here I've found it really, incredibly game changing is my health. I have a pretty, to put it mildly, complex medical profile at this point. I haven't worked in over a year and pretty much every sign is pointing towards permanent disability at this point. Tons of symptoms, long med list, and I live in a smaller town with not great access to care. I'm also autistic and have not the greatest verbal communication, especially under stress or time pressure. I dumped all my info at it, in bits and bobs over several days (Side note... it's memory is pretty limited, but it will quite happily right out everything it knows from a session into a markdown file it can later re-read. I've found it very good for things like screening for drug interactions, or talking through and logging symptoms (and it can log those into human readable markdown files too). Biggest win (other than having unlimited time and interactions) is that it thinks across specilaties, versus the "real world" where the gastro only wants to deal with gastro stuff, neurology only wants to do neuro. I certainly don't (and wouldn't) use it as a replacement for a doctor, but as an adjunct it's phenomenal. For instance, it flagged a possible drug interaction with a symptom I was having, and then offered to draft a portal message to my GP about it. I have poor executive function so lowering the friction from "type up a message and send it" to "copy and paste" is actually a pretty big deal. Turns something (I probably won't do) later into something I will do now. It wouldn't surprise me if my very direct, literal, autistic communication style is particularly well suited to interacting with AI. I actually find talking to it rather refreshing as, while of course it's not perfect, it tends to actually respond to what I say rather than the all the assumed subtext NTs tend to expect/react to.
jonas21 5mo ago
Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7. And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page? HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremely anti-AI to create the impression that it is. EDIT: And now it's back.
- dang 5mo ago
  Not flagged. It set off the flamewar detector. We monitor those and eventually reverse the false positives. Mostly. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22flamewar%20detector%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - jonas21 5mo ago
    Ah, thanks for the clarification. :)
datsci_est_2015 5mo ago
It’s not even a dichotomy, A vs B, especially when you consider “AI” is incredibly poorly defined. There are many new technologies available, and I have nuanced opinions about all of them. I’m happy that my friend who works in plastics manufacturing can move his monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet to something more predictable and maintainable. I’m deeply annoyed by my coworker who’s trying to put a chatbot in our UI.
johnfn 5mo ago
While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the decade+ I have previously been on HN, happily sharing other things I built with other interesting technology -- and many of those things were much worse than what I built with AI! I did see your thread earlier today and I admit was pleasantly surprised. Maybe HN is turning over a new leaf? I hope so. I honestly considered switching to X it was getting so bad :P
- foxes 5mo ago
  Its divided because its the first time the previously more class unaware techbros have been critically challenged by the consequences of their actions - oh shit we might lose our jobs. 10 years ago "Disrupting X" was seen as a good thing. Now its come for them its a different story.
  - scarab92 5mo ago
    I suspect there is a lot of selection bias going on as well. Forums like this, reddit, X, readers of news sites etc tend to be filled with people that don’t have much going on in their lives, have a lot of free time to comment, are less likely to exploit the benefits of AI, and more likely to have simpler skills sets that are replaceable with AI. Talking to people in real world, I would say the overwhelming majority are excited by AI and interesting in using it more rather than less.
    - foxes 5mo ago
      Probably not the best way to reduce complicated feelings. Do those people not deserve to be able to live and survive or are they all just replaceable?
      - trumpdong 5mo ago
p4bl0 5mo ago
Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the opposite.
- swat535 5mo ago
  I think generally, extremist views tend to echo further than nuanced ones. This goes for any major topic really: whether it's politics, religion, arts, etc. The AI discussion on HN is exhilarated by the fact that it can have a tangible impact on people's lives on this forum. You add to this the possibility of a minority extracting an unfathomable amount of wealth from the hype train and we lose all hope for a moderate discussion. My own views on this are rather boring. After having tried various models, I've reached the conclusion that it adds minor benefits to my workflows, but I don't have to lose sleep from Claude reaching singularity anytime soon..
  - rootusrootus 5mo ago
    I'm using Claude Code at this moment to do some work for me. It's doing a pretty great job, if I'm being honest. It's going faster than I would, overall, but it's not some kind of 10x magic. It does things faster and in some cases better on the first shot, but it misunderstands and needs guidance on plenty of things, tweaks, etc. Even if I don't necessarily tweak the actual code and just ask Claude to go clean up it's shit, that still takes time. I think the folks who say 20-40% faster is typical are definitely in the right ballpark. And that's best case. There are plenty of times where my biggest blockers are not anything Claude will ever be able to fix. Maybe the result of this whole experience will be grudging appreciation from management that software developers aren't just coders. Maybe. I'm an optimist, though. And my manager already knew that.
    - IggleSniggle 5mo ago
      For me, one of the big improvements is the ability to legitimately work via text message. That probably sounds dystopian in a bunch of ways to some people. But there are times that I want to work, but couldn't, previously. Now I can work from wherever, whenever, by speaking into my headphones, and have it persist. Sure, I want to be in front of a screen to do final syntax review, but I don't mind planning out architecture and guiding an LLM towards a cohesive result while going for a walk or jog. That's just not a workflow that would have been viable 3 years ago.
oceanplexian 5mo ago
Saying that society is divided on AI therefore HN, being society, should also be divided is an absurd take. I expect the people in here to be domain experts, understand simple concepts like closed loop water cooling, deterministic vs non-deterministic systems, maybe some basic concept of how a GPU and vector math works and most notably the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient. Unfortunately, like OP that’s not the case and it’s the same talking points I could read in my local paper. Then everyone’s talking points change in unison like they are waiting on the latest instructions from headquarters.
- enaaem 5mo ago
  I find that the more you know about a subject the worst impression you will have of AI. What it knows is kinda shallow and basic, and if you have a more difficult question the answers are confidently random.
  - dang 5mo ago
    That's something we've probably all noticed - Gell-Mann amnesia à la LLM. But the opposite is also true: shallow basic knowledge about almost anything, instantly available in a form that directly applies to one's problem, is an incredible resource. Not only can you get pretty far on that alone, it also gets you moving in a way that inertia would otherwise have prevented. That's my experience at least.
- Dylan16807 5mo ago
  > the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient "Exponential" is very clearly not true.
- jschveibinz 5mo ago
  You are getting negative feedback, maybe because of tone; but I am up-voting for the message which is in line with HN guidelines and expectations: 1. Comments should be thoughtful even if not coming from a place of expertise 2. Better comments have something useful to share behind the passion 3. "Me too" comments are usually not as interesting to read and rarely add to the discussion I have personally been both praised and attacked for making detailed, reasoned comments. It's more about the mood and attitude of the reader(s) that determines which way it goes. AI is a complicated issue because it is creating change very quickly--as many predicted it would 20-30 years ago--and that change is still accelerating. In your words, the change is exponential--and this may indeed be demonstrated by the performance data over the past several years. It's hard to contemplate or predict when that change will plateau, but we definitely aren't there yet. The ultimate impact on the world society is likely to be profound. Whether you like it or hate it, it is happening. Those who lose a job to AI may find that their mother is saved by a medicine or doctor aided by AI. It's complicated. Perhaps there are ways to legislate compromises into its use or expansion in some parts of the world--but it is likely a technology that has at least as much positive potential for humanity as it does negative--so legislation is going to have to address the good and the bad and no country is an island unto itself. Thanks for the opportunity to comment.
torben-friis 5mo ago
Also, "AI good" and "AI bad" are very silly camps to describe a topic. You might have seen some comments by me receiving votes lately that some might classify as anti-AI. I'm not for banning it, I use it at work and at home, I learn about it. Here a few positions I hold, for example: - There is a fundamental deviation between what we should be seeing if we were surrounded by 100x enabled engineers and reality. We're not seeing previously untackable, complete open source projects pop up everywhere like someone coding an open-source, iphone-compatible OS in a year, or companies providing 10x more. Just POCs and small apps. LLMs have been around enough that this is pointing towards inflated claims of success, even if they are actually useful, which I'm not denying. - LLMs provide users with a strong psychological reward (making mental workload disappear). They do so only sometimes, in a chance-based outcome. Anyone with a passing interest in psychology should realize how similar that is to the mechanics of gambling, and thus how risky it is that a user misjudges when it is reasonable to use them. Mind that I'm not saying that the tool isn't worth it, just pointing at a source of major deviation between perceived and actual outcomes that few people consider. - There are a lot of signals that humans rely on that are broken by LLMs. "Well formatted text -> text written with careful consideration" no longer works. "Large document -> significant effort" does not hold. "Good grammar -> educated speaker" is broken as well. "decent code practices -> the PR is safeish to approve" no longer true. Some of these barriers being broken can be enablers for people, but on the whole this is going to disrupt society in fundamental and unpredictable ways. - I think the industry is drawing unreasonable and dangerous conclusions from the advent of AI. As some commenters pointed out, if code generation is now cheap we should be seeing engineers freed to deal with non coding tasks like automated QA, user research, architecture or design, and being more able to handle bug resolution for example. We are instead seeing a push for _creating code faster_, and proposing ignoring tasks like review and quality control in pursue of speed, which is fundamentally inconsistent with speed being less of a problem. To use a flawed analogy, if your car is now 10x as fast you should be putting way more attention to how you steer, rather than asking everyone to go pedal to the metal. - LLMs products have the potential to be extremely user hostile if enshittified. We could have probabilistic insertion of promoted material. We could have subtle political steering of people. We could have a model's performance reduced without much SLA recourse. We are not tackling those issues before they appear when it is obvious that they will appeare, and society will pay the price. If you read with attention you'll see that no point of mine is arguing against AI usage. I don't want to bury my head in the sand and pretend LLM's don't exist or are useless. I don't want to ban them. I'm just not willing to fully allign with marketing speech and turn my brain off.
aaron695 5mo ago
[dead]
ksec 5mo ago
Thanks for pointing it out. I guess HN is at worst ( or best ) 70% Anti AI. I personally put it roughly 50/50. There are plenty of post and comments suggest how AI is good for something and but also pointing out its flaws, rather than simply just Anti AI. I can tell what HN is Anti though, in 80/ 90%+ if not higher. Ads, Oracle, Facebook, MPEG Codec, MySQL,
potsandpans 5mo ago
Except on one side, it's apparently perfectly acceptable for folks to fulminate, make llm generation accusations, and brigade with minimal to no moderation attempts.
- dang 5mo ago
  I'd need to see links to specific examples to say anything concrete, but from long experience I can say two general things with high confidence... Edit: scratch that - I was going to link you to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018271 but it turns out you were the user I was replying to there! I don't suppose repeating it would help.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
_0ffh 5mo ago
Thoughtful comment, and I'd like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are "divided" on the question as well. I can speak from myself as an example (although n=1): I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes especially obvious once projects go much beyond "private toy" size. For me personally the consequence is that I try to make my projects even more modular, and the modules even more clearly delineated. With proper guidance, current LLMs work mostly fine when working on isolated modules. That doesn't mean they don't sometimes fail even there, but they also on rare occasions come up with surprisingly clever solutions when you let them loose on a code base, as long as the problem you want them to fix is mostly isolated in a couple of modules. So long story short, you can be all for LLMs and still be conscious of their shortcomings, and that just vibe coding applications you intend to let loose on unsuspecting customers is probably a bad idea, and possibly outright immoral. We have already seen more than enough examples of vibe coded applications dumping sensitive user data into the lap of anyone who is inclined to pick up a stick and prod them a little bit.
- thierrydamiba 5mo ago
  There’s also the uncomfortable reality that a lot of people spent a lot of time learning how to do things that anyone can prompt now… We tend to ignore that reality but it hangs above all these discussions like a dirty cloud
  - rootusrootus 5mo ago
    That does not seem like it should be controversial. I have known for quite a long time that a motivated high school kid could learn to code well enough to be perfectly useful. Especially with popular languages like Python. This is just an object lesson for everyone who thought all that software guys did was write code that there is just a little bit more to the job than that. Actual developers should already have known.
    - 5mo ago
LogicFailsMe 5mo ago
I think society is divided on AI because we've let the billionaire tech bro class rawdog power resources and AI deployments and I welcome the pushback on those 2 axes. The water nonsense OTOH saps my will to live. But also, the algorithms push enragement equals engagement and that favors pushing content to the product (us) that enrages the product to drive up their engagement numbers so they click on more ads. Meanwhile, the medical applications of AI alone are astounding. But that doesn't get people mad so it doesn't get promoted as near as much as the latest clueless word salad from a rich dude. Election season is going be to very interesting this year IMO. https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-medical-ai-implementation https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-medical-ai-i...
- trumpdong 5mo ago
  When people complain about"AI" they almost always mean general purpose LLMs and media generators. Nobody is complaining about OCR, MNIST trials, or machine translation.
  - LogicFailsMe 5mo ago
    Not in my experience. The rabbit hole is 9/11 truther deep here. And anything that isn't a mindset about either letting the billionaires billionaire the crap out of us or the American Butlerian Jihad gets shot down by both sides. What's my position? GenAI will be subsumed into media toolchains. And reasoning is clearly no longer a hallmark of sentience or consciousness. That's going to take some time to sink in. Token costs are only going to drop further from here: https://www.navyaai.com/reports/ai-cost-report-token-prices-vs-ai-bill https://www.navyaai.com/reports/ai-cost-report-token-prices-.... And there's opportunity to build businesses to bring down the rest of the costs in the article I cited. Also, I'm with Martina Scorsese and Dua Lipa on GenAI. And having worked in and around Hollywood in the past, it blows my mind that such a corrupt oligarchy would be considered worth protection. Above the lines thrive while below the lines would be borderline homeless without the guilds. And the ones outside the guilds are. Finally, build datacenters in the Dakotas, the Texas panhandle, and any other place far away from people where power can be generated onsite by whatever means suit the location best that's not coal.
bartread 5mo ago
I think the community is divided. But I think it’s less A/B and more a spectrum. There are plenty of more balanced comments rolling in from people who’ve been using it for a while and have experienced both the advantages and disadvantages. E.g., agentic development is great for solo projects and prototyping, but can become overwhelming alarmingly quickly when you’ve got multiple devs involved, especially if they’re not all super-disciplined and consistent about how they use their agents. And we’re all learning how to deal with that.
sanderjd 5mo ago
Yep. It has a lot to do with which comment threads you click on. I often read one and think "wow, I can't believe the people here are so negative" and then on another on the same front page at the same time and think "wow, I can't believe the hype here". It's just different people participating on different articles.
spoaceman7777 5mo ago
"Divided" is a bit of a strong word. The true state of things is that the anti-AI folks are FAR more vocal about their opposition, meanwhile, the people who like AI are busy being productive and accomplishing a truly staggering amount of work. The 84% stack overflow "currently use AI" number from a _year_ ago almost certainly still holds true today. Just look at the absurdly long and very incomplete list of "tainted by AI" projects that the list-making activists are maintaining over on Codeberg. Software is not "divided", it is simply being occupied by angry protesters. Hacker news skews significantly older and whiter, and the blogs and such that circulate come primarily from the "established" English-speaking old-guard "white people" software days. Opposition to AI is highly concentrated among the white, first world, left-wing, established engineers. This group punches far their weight in terms of the volume of their activism compared to the actual percentages of humans on earth. That's all it is. Anti-AI hatred is just a noisy echo-chamber of those who are privileged enough to not need to modernize their skills.
- dang 5mo ago
  I'd push back a bit on the assumptions here, partly because (as I just spent a rabbit hole's worth of time describing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800), such perceptions are strongly conditioned by one's pre-existing feelings, but more because (to my view at least) HN obviously is divided on AI. That is, HN gets plenty of comments criticizing AI for various reasons, and plenty of comments expressing positive views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 has almost 1000 comments now, and by far most are positive. You make a good point about the asymmetry in content: the negative ones are mostly just critical, and often denunciatory, while the positive ones are less likely to be generic, and more likely to be about specific work people are doing. That's not a new dynamic, though, and long pre-dates what today is called AI.
- DeepSeaTortoise 5mo ago
  Right, of course it's those who had the most time to accumulate wealth in the wealthier nations and professions who are most opposed to one of the most expensive subscriptions in history taking over more and more professions.
throw10920 5mo ago
I think that the "group attribution error"[1]/"goomba fallacy"[2] are what's going on - someone will sample ~10 comments out of a thread of 500 on a site with tens of thousands of users and assume that those 10 comments are representative of the thread or all of HN. (and a different person will do a similar sampling technique but come away with the opposite conclusion, that HN is super pro-AI) This is why neglecting statistics in favor of vibes is a bad idea. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035600 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035860

by dang 5mo ago

dang 5mo ago

As an aside, the variety of examples in that other thread is impressive. Here are some that I noticed: Fixing my furnace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845 New software for a retro keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158 Customizing my camper van: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379 Porting my astronomy app from an old Nokia phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242 Fixing my kid’s science fair project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419364 Unborking the family printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419480 Learning to draw anatomy (!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418716 Lowering my electrical bill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417949 Making classic guitar pedals programmable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418006 Avocado armchair guy victory lap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417658 (<-- oops, wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418274) Putting an overlay on enemies in a video game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420635 It just goes on and on. I was a little nervous when I saw that post originally, but it's amazing what happens when a title is somehow just right.

jimmygrapes 5mo ago
I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!
- TylerE 5mo ago
  Lemme give another. I was formerly quite anti-AI but bought a cheap Claude plan just to play around with it a bit. First thing I built with it was this - https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano, in about an hour and maybe 10 prompt cycles. It replaced, for my specific use case, the 10% of the functionality of an increasingly-unreliable commercial app. That's including building the website, setting up actions for mac and windows builds... My next project was a 2d game with random terrain, physics, sound, music, multiple levels, a day/night cycle with transitions high score tracking... (not uploaded anywhere, but it works, and I refined it a good bit.). That was more like 8 hours and maybe a 100 prompts. Here are a few screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/vhUXBu3 https://imgur.com/a/vhUXBu3 One thing that I have found to make a pretty big difference is using both the latest models and higher thinking levels. Opus 4.8 with thinking on Extra or even Max is genuinely mind blowing. The thing I hadn't really appreciated, having a sort of naive impression formed mainly from using free early versions of stuff like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion was sort of that "Type a big ass prompt and it craps out a result" experience. But Claude is really great at refining from feedback, and it's way more flexible and responsive than I would have ever expected. I can do something like take a screenshot of a small portion of the running app or website or whatever and just say "This button needs to be bigger" or "make this red" or something like that, or even sometimes just "fix this", and Claude both correctly identifies what I'm talking about, and actually does the thing. here I've found it really, incredibly game changing is my health. I have a pretty, to put it mildly, complex medical profile at this point. I haven't worked in over a year and pretty much every sign is pointing towards permanent disability at this point. Tons of symptoms, long med list, and I live in a smaller town with not great access to care. I'm also autistic and have not the greatest verbal communication, especially under stress or time pressure. I dumped all my info at it, in bits and bobs over several days (Side note... it's memory is pretty limited, but it will quite happily right out everything it knows from a session into a markdown file it can later re-read. I've found it very good for things like screening for drug interactions, or talking through and logging symptoms (and it can log those into human readable markdown files too). Biggest win (other than having unlimited time and interactions) is that it thinks across specilaties, versus the "real world" where the gastro only wants to deal with gastro stuff, neurology only wants to do neuro. I certainly don't (and wouldn't) use it as a replacement for a doctor, but as an adjunct it's phenomenal. For instance, it flagged a possible drug interaction with a symptom I was having, and then offered to draft a portal message to my GP about it. I have poor executive function so lowering the friction from "type up a message and send it" to "copy and paste" is actually a pretty big deal. Turns something (I probably won't do) later into something I will do now. It wouldn't surprise me if my very direct, literal, autistic communication style is particularly well suited to interacting with AI. I actually find talking to it rather refreshing as, while of course it's not perfect, it tends to actually respond to what I say rather than the all the assumed subtext NTs tend to expect/react to.

jonas21 5mo ago

Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7. And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page? HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremely anti-AI to create the impression that it is. EDIT: And now it's back.

dang 5mo ago
Not flagged. It set off the flamewar detector. We monitor those and eventually reverse the false positives. Mostly. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22flamewar%20detector%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- jonas21 5mo ago
  Ah, thanks for the clarification. :)

datsci_est_2015 5mo ago

It’s not even a dichotomy, A vs B, especially when you consider “AI” is incredibly poorly defined. There are many new technologies available, and I have nuanced opinions about all of them. I’m happy that my friend who works in plastics manufacturing can move his monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet to something more predictable and maintainable. I’m deeply annoyed by my coworker who’s trying to put a chatbot in our UI.

johnfn 5mo ago

While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the decade+ I have previously been on HN, happily sharing other things I built with other interesting technology -- and many of those things were much worse than what I built with AI! I did see your thread earlier today and I admit was pleasantly surprised. Maybe HN is turning over a new leaf? I hope so. I honestly considered switching to X it was getting so bad :P

foxes 5mo ago
Its divided because its the first time the previously more class unaware techbros have been critically challenged by the consequences of their actions - oh shit we might lose our jobs. 10 years ago "Disrupting X" was seen as a good thing. Now its come for them its a different story.
- scarab92 5mo ago
  I suspect there is a lot of selection bias going on as well. Forums like this, reddit, X, readers of news sites etc tend to be filled with people that don’t have much going on in their lives, have a lot of free time to comment, are less likely to exploit the benefits of AI, and more likely to have simpler skills sets that are replaceable with AI. Talking to people in real world, I would say the overwhelming majority are excited by AI and interesting in using it more rather than less.
  - foxes 5mo ago
    Probably not the best way to reduce complicated feelings. Do those people not deserve to be able to live and survive or are they all just replaceable?
    - trumpdong 5mo ago

p4bl0 5mo ago

Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the opposite.

swat535 5mo ago
I think generally, extremist views tend to echo further than nuanced ones. This goes for any major topic really: whether it's politics, religion, arts, etc. The AI discussion on HN is exhilarated by the fact that it can have a tangible impact on people's lives on this forum. You add to this the possibility of a minority extracting an unfathomable amount of wealth from the hype train and we lose all hope for a moderate discussion. My own views on this are rather boring. After having tried various models, I've reached the conclusion that it adds minor benefits to my workflows, but I don't have to lose sleep from Claude reaching singularity anytime soon..
- rootusrootus 5mo ago
  I'm using Claude Code at this moment to do some work for me. It's doing a pretty great job, if I'm being honest. It's going faster than I would, overall, but it's not some kind of 10x magic. It does things faster and in some cases better on the first shot, but it misunderstands and needs guidance on plenty of things, tweaks, etc. Even if I don't necessarily tweak the actual code and just ask Claude to go clean up it's shit, that still takes time. I think the folks who say 20-40% faster is typical are definitely in the right ballpark. And that's best case. There are plenty of times where my biggest blockers are not anything Claude will ever be able to fix. Maybe the result of this whole experience will be grudging appreciation from management that software developers aren't just coders. Maybe. I'm an optimist, though. And my manager already knew that.
  - IggleSniggle 5mo ago
    For me, one of the big improvements is the ability to legitimately work via text message. That probably sounds dystopian in a bunch of ways to some people. But there are times that I want to work, but couldn't, previously. Now I can work from wherever, whenever, by speaking into my headphones, and have it persist. Sure, I want to be in front of a screen to do final syntax review, but I don't mind planning out architecture and guiding an LLM towards a cohesive result while going for a walk or jog. That's just not a workflow that would have been viable 3 years ago.

oceanplexian 5mo ago

Saying that society is divided on AI therefore HN, being society, should also be divided is an absurd take. I expect the people in here to be domain experts, understand simple concepts like closed loop water cooling, deterministic vs non-deterministic systems, maybe some basic concept of how a GPU and vector math works and most notably the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient. Unfortunately, like OP that’s not the case and it’s the same talking points I could read in my local paper. Then everyone’s talking points change in unison like they are waiting on the latest instructions from headquarters.

enaaem 5mo ago
I find that the more you know about a subject the worst impression you will have of AI. What it knows is kinda shallow and basic, and if you have a more difficult question the answers are confidently random.
- dang 5mo ago
  That's something we've probably all noticed - Gell-Mann amnesia à la LLM. But the opposite is also true: shallow basic knowledge about almost anything, instantly available in a form that directly applies to one's problem, is an incredible resource. Not only can you get pretty far on that alone, it also gets you moving in a way that inertia would otherwise have prevented. That's my experience at least.
Dylan16807 5mo ago
> the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient "Exponential" is very clearly not true.
jschveibinz 5mo ago
You are getting negative feedback, maybe because of tone; but I am up-voting for the message which is in line with HN guidelines and expectations: 1. Comments should be thoughtful even if not coming from a place of expertise 2. Better comments have something useful to share behind the passion 3. "Me too" comments are usually not as interesting to read and rarely add to the discussion I have personally been both praised and attacked for making detailed, reasoned comments. It's more about the mood and attitude of the reader(s) that determines which way it goes. AI is a complicated issue because it is creating change very quickly--as many predicted it would 20-30 years ago--and that change is still accelerating. In your words, the change is exponential--and this may indeed be demonstrated by the performance data over the past several years. It's hard to contemplate or predict when that change will plateau, but we definitely aren't there yet. The ultimate impact on the world society is likely to be profound. Whether you like it or hate it, it is happening. Those who lose a job to AI may find that their mother is saved by a medicine or doctor aided by AI. It's complicated. Perhaps there are ways to legislate compromises into its use or expansion in some parts of the world--but it is likely a technology that has at least as much positive potential for humanity as it does negative--so legislation is going to have to address the good and the bad and no country is an island unto itself. Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

torben-friis 5mo ago

Also, "AI good" and "AI bad" are very silly camps to describe a topic. You might have seen some comments by me receiving votes lately that some might classify as anti-AI. I'm not for banning it, I use it at work and at home, I learn about it. Here a few positions I hold, for example: - There is a fundamental deviation between what we should be seeing if we were surrounded by 100x enabled engineers and reality. We're not seeing previously untackable, complete open source projects pop up everywhere like someone coding an open-source, iphone-compatible OS in a year, or companies providing 10x more. Just POCs and small apps. LLMs have been around enough that this is pointing towards inflated claims of success, even if they are actually useful, which I'm not denying. - LLMs provide users with a strong psychological reward (making mental workload disappear). They do so only sometimes, in a chance-based outcome. Anyone with a passing interest in psychology should realize how similar that is to the mechanics of gambling, and thus how risky it is that a user misjudges when it is reasonable to use them. Mind that I'm not saying that the tool isn't worth it, just pointing at a source of major deviation between perceived and actual outcomes that few people consider. - There are a lot of signals that humans rely on that are broken by LLMs. "Well formatted text -> text written with careful consideration" no longer works. "Large document -> significant effort" does not hold. "Good grammar -> educated speaker" is broken as well. "decent code practices -> the PR is safeish to approve" no longer true. Some of these barriers being broken can be enablers for people, but on the whole this is going to disrupt society in fundamental and unpredictable ways. - I think the industry is drawing unreasonable and dangerous conclusions from the advent of AI. As some commenters pointed out, if code generation is now cheap we should be seeing engineers freed to deal with non coding tasks like automated QA, user research, architecture or design, and being more able to handle bug resolution for example. We are instead seeing a push for _creating code faster_, and proposing ignoring tasks like review and quality control in pursue of speed, which is fundamentally inconsistent with speed being less of a problem. To use a flawed analogy, if your car is now 10x as fast you should be putting way more attention to how you steer, rather than asking everyone to go pedal to the metal. - LLMs products have the potential to be extremely user hostile if enshittified. We could have probabilistic insertion of promoted material. We could have subtle political steering of people. We could have a model's performance reduced without much SLA recourse. We are not tackling those issues before they appear when it is obvious that they will appeare, and society will pay the price. If you read with attention you'll see that no point of mine is arguing against AI usage. I don't want to bury my head in the sand and pretend LLM's don't exist or are useless. I don't want to ban them. I'm just not willing to fully allign with marketing speech and turn my brain off.

aaron695 5mo ago

[dead]

ksec 5mo ago

Thanks for pointing it out. I guess HN is at worst ( or best ) 70% Anti AI. I personally put it roughly 50/50. There are plenty of post and comments suggest how AI is good for something and but also pointing out its flaws, rather than simply just Anti AI. I can tell what HN is Anti though, in 80/ 90%+ if not higher. Ads, Oracle, Facebook, MPEG Codec, MySQL,

potsandpans 5mo ago

Except on one side, it's apparently perfectly acceptable for folks to fulminate, make llm generation accusations, and brigade with minimal to no moderation attempts.

dang 5mo ago
I'd need to see links to specific examples to say anything concrete, but from long experience I can say two general things with high confidence... Edit: scratch that - I was going to link you to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018271 but it turns out you were the user I was replying to there! I don't suppose repeating it would help.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]

_0ffh 5mo ago

Thoughtful comment, and I'd like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are "divided" on the question as well. I can speak from myself as an example (although n=1): I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes especially obvious once projects go much beyond "private toy" size. For me personally the consequence is that I try to make my projects even more modular, and the modules even more clearly delineated. With proper guidance, current LLMs work mostly fine when working on isolated modules. That doesn't mean they don't sometimes fail even there, but they also on rare occasions come up with surprisingly clever solutions when you let them loose on a code base, as long as the problem you want them to fix is mostly isolated in a couple of modules. So long story short, you can be all for LLMs and still be conscious of their shortcomings, and that just vibe coding applications you intend to let loose on unsuspecting customers is probably a bad idea, and possibly outright immoral. We have already seen more than enough examples of vibe coded applications dumping sensitive user data into the lap of anyone who is inclined to pick up a stick and prod them a little bit.

thierrydamiba 5mo ago
There’s also the uncomfortable reality that a lot of people spent a lot of time learning how to do things that anyone can prompt now… We tend to ignore that reality but it hangs above all these discussions like a dirty cloud
- rootusrootus 5mo ago
  That does not seem like it should be controversial. I have known for quite a long time that a motivated high school kid could learn to code well enough to be perfectly useful. Especially with popular languages like Python. This is just an object lesson for everyone who thought all that software guys did was write code that there is just a little bit more to the job than that. Actual developers should already have known.
  - 5mo ago

LogicFailsMe 5mo ago

I think society is divided on AI because we've let the billionaire tech bro class rawdog power resources and AI deployments and I welcome the pushback on those 2 axes. The water nonsense OTOH saps my will to live. But also, the algorithms push enragement equals engagement and that favors pushing content to the product (us) that enrages the product to drive up their engagement numbers so they click on more ads. Meanwhile, the medical applications of AI alone are astounding. But that doesn't get people mad so it doesn't get promoted as near as much as the latest clueless word salad from a rich dude. Election season is going be to very interesting this year IMO. https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-medical-ai-implementation https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-medical-ai-i...

trumpdong 5mo ago
When people complain about"AI" they almost always mean general purpose LLMs and media generators. Nobody is complaining about OCR, MNIST trials, or machine translation.
- LogicFailsMe 5mo ago
  Not in my experience. The rabbit hole is 9/11 truther deep here. And anything that isn't a mindset about either letting the billionaires billionaire the crap out of us or the American Butlerian Jihad gets shot down by both sides. What's my position? GenAI will be subsumed into media toolchains. And reasoning is clearly no longer a hallmark of sentience or consciousness. That's going to take some time to sink in. Token costs are only going to drop further from here: https://www.navyaai.com/reports/ai-cost-report-token-prices-vs-ai-bill https://www.navyaai.com/reports/ai-cost-report-token-prices-.... And there's opportunity to build businesses to bring down the rest of the costs in the article I cited. Also, I'm with Martina Scorsese and Dua Lipa on GenAI. And having worked in and around Hollywood in the past, it blows my mind that such a corrupt oligarchy would be considered worth protection. Above the lines thrive while below the lines would be borderline homeless without the guilds. And the ones outside the guilds are. Finally, build datacenters in the Dakotas, the Texas panhandle, and any other place far away from people where power can be generated onsite by whatever means suit the location best that's not coal.

bartread 5mo ago

I think the community is divided. But I think it’s less A/B and more a spectrum. There are plenty of more balanced comments rolling in from people who’ve been using it for a while and have experienced both the advantages and disadvantages. E.g., agentic development is great for solo projects and prototyping, but can become overwhelming alarmingly quickly when you’ve got multiple devs involved, especially if they’re not all super-disciplined and consistent about how they use their agents. And we’re all learning how to deal with that.

sanderjd 5mo ago

Yep. It has a lot to do with which comment threads you click on. I often read one and think "wow, I can't believe the people here are so negative" and then on another on the same front page at the same time and think "wow, I can't believe the hype here". It's just different people participating on different articles.

spoaceman7777 5mo ago

"Divided" is a bit of a strong word. The true state of things is that the anti-AI folks are FAR more vocal about their opposition, meanwhile, the people who like AI are busy being productive and accomplishing a truly staggering amount of work. The 84% stack overflow "currently use AI" number from a _year_ ago almost certainly still holds true today. Just look at the absurdly long and very incomplete list of "tainted by AI" projects that the list-making activists are maintaining over on Codeberg. Software is not "divided", it is simply being occupied by angry protesters. Hacker news skews significantly older and whiter, and the blogs and such that circulate come primarily from the "established" English-speaking old-guard "white people" software days. Opposition to AI is highly concentrated among the white, first world, left-wing, established engineers. This group punches far their weight in terms of the volume of their activism compared to the actual percentages of humans on earth. That's all it is. Anti-AI hatred is just a noisy echo-chamber of those who are privileged enough to not need to modernize their skills.

dang 5mo ago
I'd push back a bit on the assumptions here, partly because (as I just spent a rabbit hole's worth of time describing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800), such perceptions are strongly conditioned by one's pre-existing feelings, but more because (to my view at least) HN obviously is divided on AI. That is, HN gets plenty of comments criticizing AI for various reasons, and plenty of comments expressing positive views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 has almost 1000 comments now, and by far most are positive. You make a good point about the asymmetry in content: the negative ones are mostly just critical, and often denunciatory, while the positive ones are less likely to be generic, and more likely to be about specific work people are doing. That's not a new dynamic, though, and long pre-dates what today is called AI.
DeepSeaTortoise 5mo ago
Right, of course it's those who had the most time to accumulate wealth in the wealthier nations and professions who are most opposed to one of the most expensive subscriptions in history taking over more and more professions.

throw10920 5mo ago

I think that the "group attribution error"[1]/"goomba fallacy"[2] are what's going on - someone will sample ~10 comments out of a thread of 500 on a site with tens of thousands of users and assume that those 10 comments are representative of the thread or all of HN. (and a different person will do a similar sampling technique but come away with the opposite conclusion, that HN is super pro-AI) This is why neglecting statistics in favor of vibes is a bad idea. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035600 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035860