When did AI take over Hacker News?

Part of this is driven by people who have realized that they can undermine others' thinking skills by using the right emotional language.

For instance, in a lot of threads on some new technology or idea, one of the top comments is "I'm amazed by the negativity here on HN. This is a cool <thing> and even though it's not perfect we should appreciate the effort the author has put in" - where the other toplevel comments are legitimate technical criticism (usually in a polite manner, no less).

I've seen this same comment, in various flavors, at the top of dozens of HN thread in the past couple of years.

Some of these people are being genuine, but others are literally just engaging in amigdala-hijacking because they want to shut down criticism of something they like, and that contributes to the "everything that isn't gushing positivity is negative" effect that you're seeing.

“If you enjoyed the {service}, please rate me 5-Stars, anything less is considered negative poor service”

Not sure if part of a broader trend, or a simply reflection of it, but when mentoring/coaching middle and high school aged kids, I’m finding they struggle to accept feedback in anyway other than “I failed.” A few years back, the same age group was more likely to accept and view feedback as an opportunity so long as you led with praising strengths. Now it’s like threading a needle every time.

This is such a good comment. I have nothing but positive things to say about it. It's amazing!

Most people do not realize it, but the tech industry is largely predicated on a cult which many people belong to without ever realizing it, which is the cult of "scientism", or in the case of pro-AI types, a subset of that, which is accelerationism. Nietzsche and Jung jointly had the insight that in the wake of the enlightenment, God had been dethroned, yet humans remained in need of a God. For many, that God is simply material power - namely money. But for tech bros, it is power in the form of technology, and AI is the avatar of that.

So the emotional process which results in the knee-jerk reactions to even the slightest and most valid critiques of AI (and the value structure underpinning Silicon Valley's pursuit of AGI) comes from the same place that religous nuts come from when they perceive an infringement upon their own agenda (Christianity, Islam, pick your flavor -- the reactivity is the same).

HN is a great site, but (at least currently) the comments section is primarily populated by people. I agree with what you've said, and it applies far wider than HN.

Are you saying this based on the dataset shared? Like you inspected some randomized subset of the sentiment analysis and this is what you found?

There is a relevant number of power users that also flag everything that is critical of big tech and won’t fit their frame as well, sending it into oblivion, regardless of the community rules and clear support from other voting members. But also calling that out is seen as negative and not constructive, and there goes any attempt at a discussion.

I think OP just means that in the sentiment analysis parlance, not in the critical of the post sense.

Though it does sort of show the Overton window that a pretty bland argument against always believing some rich dudes buckets as negative even in the sentiment analysis sense.

I think a lot of people have like half their net worth in NVIDIA stock right now.

The search is rails, were you being funny with the 'gems' bit?

https://github.com/algolia/hn-search

You can already access all your upvotes in your user page, so this might be an easy patch?

Neat, worth a try. Thank you!

This one has been convenient for filtering posts: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered But not threads

It's sad you feel this way. I find the commentary here the most enjoyable part of the internet. On balance, folks are thoughtful and knowledgeable about a wide variety of subjects. They are respectful even when disagreeing.

It's interesting that we can have polar opposite perspectives.

"Has to" endure? Why are you here if you find the commentary so worthless?

No, you didn't see anything. I've been writing like that since very long before LLMs did it, mostly because I'm considerably older than that. I'm sure if you go back to 2008, the first year that I participated in HN you'll find plenty of examples.

That's not an emdash, and I don't think LLMs use dashes for emphasis that way? It's not a grammatical use.

Ironically, the most prominent advances have not actually been in cryptocurrencies themselves but rather in the traditional financial institutions that interact with them.

For instance, there are now dozens of products such as cryptocurrency-backed lending via EMV cards or fixed-yield financial instruments based on cryptocurrency staking. Yet if you want to use cryptocurrencies directly the end-user tools haven't appreciably changed for years. Anecdotally, I used the MetaMask wallet software last month and if anything it's worse than it was a few years ago.

Real developments are there, but are much more subtle. Higher-layer blockchains are really popular now when they were rather niche a few years ago - these can increase efficiency but come with their own risks. Also, various zero-knowledge proof technologies that were developed for smart contracts are starting to be used outside of cryptocurrencies too.

You wont find net-positive discussion around cryptocurrency here, even if it is academic. It's hard to point a finger exactly how things got this way, but as someone on the engineering side of such things it's maybe just something I'm able to see quickly, like when you buy a certain vehicle, you notice them more.

bought a president mostly

No news is good news. A boring article like "(Visa/USDC) settles trillions of dollars worth of transactions, just like last year" won't get clicks.

If you want to build something not related to finance, why do you want to use cryptocurrency tech? There's already plenty of decentralized building blocks, everything from bittorrent to raft, that might be more suitable.

And magic tricks look like magic. Turns out they’re not magical.

I am so floored that at least half of this community, usually skeptical to a fault, evangelizes LLMs so ardently. Truly blows my mind.

I’m open to them becoming more than a statistical token predictor, and I think it would be really neat to see that happen.

They’re nowhere close to anything other than a next-token-predictor.

Our brains are ultimately made out of elements from the food we are eating.

yeah like we are living in the dawn of the future. science fiction is now real. aliens live among us, locked in sillicon.

I personally don't dismiss or advocate for AI/LLMs, I just take what I actually see happening, which doesn't appear revolutionary to me. I've spent some time trying to integrate it into my workflow and I see some use cases here and there but overall it just hasn't made a huge impact for me personally. Maybe it's a skill issue but I have always been pretty effective as a dev and what it solves has never been the difficult or time consuming part of creating software. Of course I could be wrong and it will change everything, but I want to actually see some evidence of that before declaring this the most impactful technology in the last 100 years. I personally just feel like LLMs make the easy stuff easier, the medium stuff slightly more difficult and the hard stuff impossible. But I personally feel that way about a lot of technology that comes along though, so it could just be I'm missing the mark.