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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 on

by johnfn 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
      Everyone's replaceable in capitalism
  - ath3nd 4mo ago
    [dead]
- vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
  100% this. Disrupting and killing the jobs of others is good. Now that we are killing our own jobs, disruption is not so good anymore.
  - happytoexplain 4mo ago
    100%? So everybody who has any negative opinion of or experience with AI is now a "tech bro" who believes killing jobs is good? That's hideous. Why even have an HN account if you harbor this kind of black-and-white hate against people in software? You shouldn't want HN to look like the rest of the internet (flame wars, petty back-and-forth rhetoric, immaturity, etc).
    - vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
      I don't have a hate against people in software. I am one of them. I just find it hypocritical to throw a fit now that AI has the potential to kill a lot of our own jobs. But we happily created tools that cost a lot of other people's jobs. In the end the real problem isn't AI but the way our economic system is set up. For a while it was accepted and worked to some degree that society should be structured to allow capitalists gain maximum profit and then use that money to hire people. AI and robotics will probably break this and we will either have a permanent underclass or we will have to think about a society where all citizens gain from technological progress. You can't hold up technological progress. If once country doesn't do it, another will.
    - foxes 4mo ago
      Ive seen HN been filled with plenty of vitrol and hatred. Dang etc does clean it up mostly, but its still often here behind a veneer. Ive also seen really good opinions and ideas. It isnt black and white. And no I dont think that generally, but it just seems like so many tech people here have been kinda mid/upper class/well off. I think a core issue around AI, around a new technology, is the class/capitalism issue, because that is the system we are stuck in. But maybe some also havent quite connected the dots, and are starting to wake up to the reality of the situation. It probably also gets astroturfed.
rpcope1 4mo ago
There's probably a lot to say about it's merits or problems, but given the demographics (or my perception of them) is largely "software people" can you really be that surprised or angry given that this could snuff out a _lot_ of people's livelihoods like nothing we've probably seen in our lifetimes?
- claytongulick 4mo ago
  At least in my case, I don't think that's where the anger is coming from. If LLMs were truly able to replace me, I'd be disappointed, sure - I've spent 30 years developing mastery of a craft, it's sad to see it go. But I'd resign myself and move on. But that's not what makes me mad. I get angry because I simply don't believe it is true. I have a reasonable math and tech background to where I grok how this stuff works at a fundamental level, and I'm utterly unconvinced that it is performing any sort of reasoning. Call it a stochastic parrot, a token extrusion machine, whatever, but these things are not thinking or reasoning. That doesn't mean they aren't useful- they clearly are very useful for many tasks. My anger comes from the global attempt to replace things that require human reasoning with LLMs. There's this push to use this stuff way past the point of "helpful accelerator" to "why do we need programmers/doctors/lawyers/etc..." I think it's incredibly dangerous. So while the tool is useful, I don't think we've figured out how to use it appropriately. For all the short term appearance of productivity boost it provides (whether this is real in a total-cost sense is still an active question), I think the risks to skill development and quality outweigh those benefits in many cases, and are being overlooked.
YZF 4mo ago
Same experience. But that's simply because you think you're experienced but the OP knows that you're just deluding yourself. Just kidding. More seriously, I think this is a true reflection of a cultural phenomena. All discussions have become more polarized. There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance. To complicate this even further there is a real diversity of experiences depending on many factors. I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil. When we had tabs vs. spaces flamewars (or whatever the fun topic of the day was) everyone knew they were in a flame war (and often acknowledged that). Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic/biased. I see the anti-AI sentiments in my work place. I think people are genuinely worried/concerned and don't know how this is going to change our world or even where we are exactly. This is also spilling into adjacent areas where people have strong emotional responses to (the rich, the economy, job market, politics, environment etc.).
- SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
  > There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance. The youth are facing an enormous employment crisis. Many have found themselves completely unemployable through no fault of their own. And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in. There's no loss of nuance, the situation has just escalated a lot.
  - senordevnyc 4mo ago
    And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in. This is a good example of anti-AI bias. This didn’t happen. Out of thousands of commencement speeches across the country, a handful of speakers, none of whom are “AI leaders”, mentioned AI in passing and students booed. So yeah, I’d say there’s a loss of nuance.
    - SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
      "This didn't happen, except for that few times where it did happen and massively blew up in the media" That you fail to understand why those students took such great offense to what was said at those speeches doesn't make it "anti-AI bias". Those students reacted like that, and I used it as an example, because it's very emblematic of how tech companies and leading figures act.
arjie 4mo ago
It is just a few people. Any time people are unpleasant to others or post in an uninteresting way I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. Rapidly the site becomes more usable. The negativity is from a few highly polarized individuals. I know others also do this - though often they are kind enough to auto-fold.
- SyneRyder 4mo ago
  > ... I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. I think this would be a very useful feature to add to HN itself. I nearly emailed dang a few weeks ago to suggest it myself rather than roll my own browser extension to do it, though maybe it's my own responsibility to roll my own software too. The Gearspace forums (vBulletin based?) have an "Ignore User" feature that helps make that forum vastly more tolerable.
  - happytoexplain 4mo ago
    I think it's probably not palatable because it reduces the friction too much on removing large amounts of content for yourself - it's too easy to "delete" a person forever based on one or two things they said, or just based on not liking their opinion, and thereby reducing your exposure to differing thoughts, which is one of the tenants of HN.
ThrowawayR2 4mo ago
I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze. I recall various submissions asking "Why is HN so anti-crypto?" as well.
- peteforde 4mo ago
  The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale. It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense. You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.
    - FabHK 4mo ago
      Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".
      - trumpdong 4mo ago
        Enabling crime is massive. You have to remember that "crime" includes things like "selling abortion pills", "selling LSD", "selling ivermectin" and of course "supporting Palestine Action"
        FabHK 4mo ago
        Yes. And while the law sometimes gets things wrong, in general it is good that it tries do distinguish between useful and harmful things, morally right and morally wrong. And a tool that serves only to subvert the law (at enormous expense) does not strike me as valuable or worth supporting. NB: I support the outcome of the 1990's crypto war (in the good old days when "crypto" meant cryptography, not crime-token), namely the right to private uncensored unrestricted communication. But a private uncensored unrestricted way of sending around money is a terrible idea, as we can see empirically.
mook 4mo ago
I think there's definitely groups on both sides, and I feel like it's similar to cryptocurrency a few years back. There's people really into it, and in response there's people really against it. On a smaller scale, see for example rust. In contrast there isn't as much vitriol against, say, world hunger because there isn't people very obviously pro-that to push against.
dang 4mo ago
I say "simply" because, as I mentioned, it's an invariant—possibly the most consistent phenomenon we've observed on HN [1]. But if it's so consistent, how can it go unnoticed for long (as you've reported) and/or get perceived as one-sided ("HN is so anti-A") when in fact it is usually two-sided ("HN users are divided on A")? The answer is that what you notice depends on how you feel [2]. If you like A, or (more precisely) if you dislike anti-A, you are far more likely to notice anti-A posts. Not only that, but you will weight them more heavily, meaning they make a stronger impression on you than the median post does—even the median pro-A post. These two variables, frequency and impact, combine to produce a picture of the site as anti-A—so strongly that people often use universals like "always" and "never" when describing it. In reality, HN is a statistical cloud, but your pre-existing feelings determine which datapoints you happen to notice (frequency) and how strongly they affect you (impact). [3] This is why people with opposing views feel the same about how biased HN is, but in opposite directions: A is certain that the site is anti-A, and B is just as certain that it's anti-B. Their feelings cause them to notice different datapoints. Abstract out the directional bit (pro- or anti-, A or B), and their perceptions become isomorphic. Unfortunately for us, HN is more afflicted by this than other sites of comparable or larger size, because all of them organize the community into silos [4], meaning they're sharded by social group (like Twitter's follow lists), or by content (like Reddit's subreddits), and so on. HN is non-siloed, meaning everyone is in the same place: all the As, all the anti-As, all the Bs, all the anti-Bs - we're all roaming the same threads and bumping into each other. You are therefore more likely to run into datapoints you find disagreeable, and thus to feel that the community is biased against your view, and - what's worse - more biased the more strongly you feel! Once or twice a year, some reply I'm writing gets hijacked by my sadness about this and turns into a digressive lament. Why sadness? because although I believe that in reality HN is somewhat (<-- not to exaggerate) more thoughtful and tolerant than other communities of the same or greater size, this dynamic means it inevitably gets perceived as less so. [5] I believe this is why one so often hears about how toxic, nasty, negative HN is—not that it isn't those things! but the relative level of them gets distorted. Humans can't take much of what we dislike and disagree with before resorting to generalization and other internal barriers. This is essentially an immune response. It often takes only a handful of datapoints (3, or 2, or maybe even just 1) before the impression burns into the retina and becomes permanent [6]. This is most painful when the topic is close to one's heart—for example, when one's own work is being criticized. In cases like that, it doesn't take much before one feels wounded, and such impressions rarely go away. In one case I saw, some people were agreeing about how terrible and mean Hacker News is, and to prove the point, one of them linked to a vile reply he had received. That reply, however, was from Twitter—not from HN at all! He hastened to add "HN is the same"—somewhat self-refutingly, since if it were true, an actual example would not have been hard to find. In reality, while such vile comments do show up on HN, the community quickly flags most of them, and moderators eventually flag most of the rest. That is an example of the skew in perception I'm talking about, and even though it made me feel terrible, I can't be too critical because I understand where it comes from. It comes from fundamentals [7]: specifically, how HN's design interacts with human hard-wiring. Because those are fundamentals, this is not going to change, nor can it be affected by argument. Sad! Or rather, it could only change if we changed the foundation of HN's design—in this case, by sharding the site into silos—but (a) I'd be scared to tamper with DNA at that level, and (b) if the above is correct, then it's good for the world that this place exists. It just can't expect to be perceived as such [5]. End of this season's lament. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20consistent%20phenomenon&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] I don't mean "you" personally, of course—everyone does this. It's a double whammy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion, sometimes described in this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect. [3] Lots of past explanation here if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20site%20silo&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [5] I wrote a thing about this a few years ago, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 [6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20retina%20burn&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [7] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20fundamentals&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
numpad0 4mo ago
IMO it's because AI outputs don't pass "is this corpses" test and trigger uncanny valley response. There's something in AI that instantly cause unsuspecting viewers to become alert and hostile. At the same time, cut raw steaks don't alert people in the same way as corpses do, and that is a double standard, in a way, I guess.
tactlesscamel 4mo ago
Did You build it? Or did you manage the build of it? Could you have done it without AI? If not, you didn't do it. A drill is just a tool. You can screw a screw without one. AI is just a tool, you can do things without it, too. But AI applied in a manner you could not otherwise complete on your own is not a tool. It's a slave. None of the ideas or creations presented in that instance are your own. You just cheated someone out of a paycheck they may have otherwise earned.
- johnfn 4mo ago
  Your comment is a perfect example of the low-quality reflexivity negativity AI I am talking about. Yes, of course I built it! Why do I have to defend myself? What does it even mean that I "cheated someone out of a paycheck" -- it's my own hobby project!
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
sieabahlpark 4mo ago
[dead]

by johnfn 4mo ago

foxes 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
    Everyone's replaceable in capitalism
- ath3nd 4mo ago
  [dead]
vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
100% this. Disrupting and killing the jobs of others is good. Now that we are killing our own jobs, disruption is not so good anymore.
- happytoexplain 4mo ago
  100%? So everybody who has any negative opinion of or experience with AI is now a "tech bro" who believes killing jobs is good? That's hideous. Why even have an HN account if you harbor this kind of black-and-white hate against people in software? You shouldn't want HN to look like the rest of the internet (flame wars, petty back-and-forth rhetoric, immaturity, etc).
  - vjvjvjvjghv 4mo ago
    I don't have a hate against people in software. I am one of them. I just find it hypocritical to throw a fit now that AI has the potential to kill a lot of our own jobs. But we happily created tools that cost a lot of other people's jobs. In the end the real problem isn't AI but the way our economic system is set up. For a while it was accepted and worked to some degree that society should be structured to allow capitalists gain maximum profit and then use that money to hire people. AI and robotics will probably break this and we will either have a permanent underclass or we will have to think about a society where all citizens gain from technological progress. You can't hold up technological progress. If once country doesn't do it, another will.
  - foxes 4mo ago
    Ive seen HN been filled with plenty of vitrol and hatred. Dang etc does clean it up mostly, but its still often here behind a veneer. Ive also seen really good opinions and ideas. It isnt black and white. And no I dont think that generally, but it just seems like so many tech people here have been kinda mid/upper class/well off. I think a core issue around AI, around a new technology, is the class/capitalism issue, because that is the system we are stuck in. But maybe some also havent quite connected the dots, and are starting to wake up to the reality of the situation. It probably also gets astroturfed.

rpcope1 4mo ago

There's probably a lot to say about it's merits or problems, but given the demographics (or my perception of them) is largely "software people" can you really be that surprised or angry given that this could snuff out a _lot_ of people's livelihoods like nothing we've probably seen in our lifetimes?

claytongulick 4mo ago
At least in my case, I don't think that's where the anger is coming from. If LLMs were truly able to replace me, I'd be disappointed, sure - I've spent 30 years developing mastery of a craft, it's sad to see it go. But I'd resign myself and move on. But that's not what makes me mad. I get angry because I simply don't believe it is true. I have a reasonable math and tech background to where I grok how this stuff works at a fundamental level, and I'm utterly unconvinced that it is performing any sort of reasoning. Call it a stochastic parrot, a token extrusion machine, whatever, but these things are not thinking or reasoning. That doesn't mean they aren't useful- they clearly are very useful for many tasks. My anger comes from the global attempt to replace things that require human reasoning with LLMs. There's this push to use this stuff way past the point of "helpful accelerator" to "why do we need programmers/doctors/lawyers/etc..." I think it's incredibly dangerous. So while the tool is useful, I don't think we've figured out how to use it appropriately. For all the short term appearance of productivity boost it provides (whether this is real in a total-cost sense is still an active question), I think the risks to skill development and quality outweigh those benefits in many cases, and are being overlooked.

YZF 4mo ago

Same experience. But that's simply because you think you're experienced but the OP knows that you're just deluding yourself. Just kidding. More seriously, I think this is a true reflection of a cultural phenomena. All discussions have become more polarized. There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance. To complicate this even further there is a real diversity of experiences depending on many factors. I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil. When we had tabs vs. spaces flamewars (or whatever the fun topic of the day was) everyone knew they were in a flame war (and often acknowledged that). Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic/biased. I see the anti-AI sentiments in my work place. I think people are genuinely worried/concerned and don't know how this is going to change our world or even where we are exactly. This is also spilling into adjacent areas where people have strong emotional responses to (the rich, the economy, job market, politics, environment etc.).

SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
> There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance. The youth are facing an enormous employment crisis. Many have found themselves completely unemployable through no fault of their own. And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in. There's no loss of nuance, the situation has just escalated a lot.
- senordevnyc 4mo ago
  And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in. This is a good example of anti-AI bias. This didn’t happen. Out of thousands of commencement speeches across the country, a handful of speakers, none of whom are “AI leaders”, mentioned AI in passing and students booed. So yeah, I’d say there’s a loss of nuance.
  - SlinkyOnStairs 4mo ago
    "This didn't happen, except for that few times where it did happen and massively blew up in the media" That you fail to understand why those students took such great offense to what was said at those speeches doesn't make it "anti-AI bias". Those students reacted like that, and I used it as an example, because it's very emblematic of how tech companies and leading figures act.

arjie 4mo ago

It is just a few people. Any time people are unpleasant to others or post in an uninteresting way I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. Rapidly the site becomes more usable. The negativity is from a few highly polarized individuals. I know others also do this - though often they are kind enough to auto-fold.

SyneRyder 4mo ago
> ... I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. I think this would be a very useful feature to add to HN itself. I nearly emailed dang a few weeks ago to suggest it myself rather than roll my own browser extension to do it, though maybe it's my own responsibility to roll my own software too. The Gearspace forums (vBulletin based?) have an "Ignore User" feature that helps make that forum vastly more tolerable.
- happytoexplain 4mo ago
  I think it's probably not palatable because it reduces the friction too much on removing large amounts of content for yourself - it's too easy to "delete" a person forever based on one or two things they said, or just based on not liking their opinion, and thereby reducing your exposure to differing thoughts, which is one of the tenants of HN.

ThrowawayR2 4mo ago

I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze. I recall various submissions asking "Why is HN so anti-crypto?" as well.

peteforde 4mo ago
The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale. It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense. You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.
  - FabHK 4mo ago
    Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      Enabling crime is massive. You have to remember that "crime" includes things like "selling abortion pills", "selling LSD", "selling ivermectin" and of course "supporting Palestine Action"
      - FabHK 4mo ago
        Yes. And while the law sometimes gets things wrong, in general it is good that it tries do distinguish between useful and harmful things, morally right and morally wrong. And a tool that serves only to subvert the law (at enormous expense) does not strike me as valuable or worth supporting. NB: I support the outcome of the 1990's crypto war (in the good old days when "crypto" meant cryptography, not crime-token), namely the right to private uncensored unrestricted communication. But a private uncensored unrestricted way of sending around money is a terrible idea, as we can see empirically.

mook 4mo ago

I think there's definitely groups on both sides, and I feel like it's similar to cryptocurrency a few years back. There's people really into it, and in response there's people really against it. On a smaller scale, see for example rust. In contrast there isn't as much vitriol against, say, world hunger because there isn't people very obviously pro-that to push against.

dang 4mo ago

I say "simply" because, as I mentioned, it's an invariant—possibly the most consistent phenomenon we've observed on HN [1]. But if it's so consistent, how can it go unnoticed for long (as you've reported) and/or get perceived as one-sided ("HN is so anti-A") when in fact it is usually two-sided ("HN users are divided on A")? The answer is that what you notice depends on how you feel [2]. If you like A, or (more precisely) if you dislike anti-A, you are far more likely to notice anti-A posts. Not only that, but you will weight them more heavily, meaning they make a stronger impression on you than the median post does—even the median pro-A post. These two variables, frequency and impact, combine to produce a picture of the site as anti-A—so strongly that people often use universals like "always" and "never" when describing it. In reality, HN is a statistical cloud, but your pre-existing feelings determine which datapoints you happen to notice (frequency) and how strongly they affect you (impact). [3] This is why people with opposing views feel the same about how biased HN is, but in opposite directions: A is certain that the site is anti-A, and B is just as certain that it's anti-B. Their feelings cause them to notice different datapoints. Abstract out the directional bit (pro- or anti-, A or B), and their perceptions become isomorphic. Unfortunately for us, HN is more afflicted by this than other sites of comparable or larger size, because all of them organize the community into silos [4], meaning they're sharded by social group (like Twitter's follow lists), or by content (like Reddit's subreddits), and so on. HN is non-siloed, meaning everyone is in the same place: all the As, all the anti-As, all the Bs, all the anti-Bs - we're all roaming the same threads and bumping into each other. You are therefore more likely to run into datapoints you find disagreeable, and thus to feel that the community is biased against your view, and - what's worse - more biased the more strongly you feel! Once or twice a year, some reply I'm writing gets hijacked by my sadness about this and turns into a digressive lament. Why sadness? because although I believe that in reality HN is somewhat (<-- not to exaggerate) more thoughtful and tolerant than other communities of the same or greater size, this dynamic means it inevitably gets perceived as less so. [5] I believe this is why one so often hears about how toxic, nasty, negative HN is—not that it isn't those things! but the relative level of them gets distorted. Humans can't take much of what we dislike and disagree with before resorting to generalization and other internal barriers. This is essentially an immune response. It often takes only a handful of datapoints (3, or 2, or maybe even just 1) before the impression burns into the retina and becomes permanent [6]. This is most painful when the topic is close to one's heart—for example, when one's own work is being criticized. In cases like that, it doesn't take much before one feels wounded, and such impressions rarely go away. In one case I saw, some people were agreeing about how terrible and mean Hacker News is, and to prove the point, one of them linked to a vile reply he had received. That reply, however, was from Twitter—not from HN at all! He hastened to add "HN is the same"—somewhat self-refutingly, since if it were true, an actual example would not have been hard to find. In reality, while such vile comments do show up on HN, the community quickly flags most of them, and moderators eventually flag most of the rest. That is an example of the skew in perception I'm talking about, and even though it made me feel terrible, I can't be too critical because I understand where it comes from. It comes from fundamentals [7]: specifically, how HN's design interacts with human hard-wiring. Because those are fundamentals, this is not going to change, nor can it be affected by argument. Sad! Or rather, it could only change if we changed the foundation of HN's design—in this case, by sharding the site into silos—but (a) I'd be scared to tamper with DNA at that level, and (b) if the above is correct, then it's good for the world that this place exists. It just can't expect to be perceived as such [5]. End of this season's lament. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20consistent%20phenomenon&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] I don't mean "you" personally, of course—everyone does this. It's a double whammy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion, sometimes described in this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect. [3] Lots of past explanation here if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20site%20silo&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [5] I wrote a thing about this a few years ago, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 [6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20retina%20burn&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [7] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20fundamentals&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

numpad0 4mo ago

IMO it's because AI outputs don't pass "is this corpses" test and trigger uncanny valley response. There's something in AI that instantly cause unsuspecting viewers to become alert and hostile. At the same time, cut raw steaks don't alert people in the same way as corpses do, and that is a double standard, in a way, I guess.

tactlesscamel 4mo ago

Did You build it? Or did you manage the build of it? Could you have done it without AI? If not, you didn't do it. A drill is just a tool. You can screw a screw without one. AI is just a tool, you can do things without it, too. But AI applied in a manner you could not otherwise complete on your own is not a tool. It's a slave. None of the ideas or creations presented in that instance are your own. You just cheated someone out of a paycheck they may have otherwise earned.

johnfn 4mo ago
Your comment is a perfect example of the low-quality reflexivity negativity AI I am talking about. Yes, of course I built it! Why do I have to defend myself? What does it even mean that I "cheated someone out of a paycheck" -- it's my own hobby project!
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sieabahlpark 4mo ago

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