When did AI take over Hacker News? (opens in new tab)

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.

I find asking questions on the internet are increasingly seen as a negative, right out of the gate, no other questions asked.

I get it to some extent, a lot of people looking to inject doubt and their own ideas show up with some sort of Socratic method that really is meant to drive the conversation to a specific point, not honest.

But it also means actually honest questions are often voted or shouted down.

It seems like the methodology of discussion on the internet now only allows for everyone to show up with very concrete opinions and your opinion will then be judged. No opinion or honest questions... citizens of the internet assume the worst if you're anything but in lock step with them.

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

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.

Whenever there's a submission about something unpleasant or undesirable happening in the real world, the comment section fills with people trying to connect those things to their preferred political hobby-horses, so that their outgroups can take the blame as the ultimate cause of all that's wrong with the world. Contrarily, stories about human achievement won't simply draw a crowd of admirers in my experience, but instead there's quite a bit of complaint about outgroup members supposedly seeking to interfere with future successes (by following their own values, as understood from outside rather than inside).

And most people here seem to think that's fine; but it's not in line with what I understood when I read the guidelines, and it absolutely strikes me as negativity.

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.

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).

It's ok to be negative sometimes. Not just ok, but a necessary mechanism for course-correction. So even if sometimes comments might be negative, that is fine.

Now of course I'm not including aggressive or rude posts, because they are a different category.

I would generally file questioning and criticism under "negative". Are you interpreting "negative" as a synonym for bad or something?

Always has been. It's a VC chumbox.

Hey, why so negative man?

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?

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.

I tend to agree with this. I just the "pretty negative" adjective jarring in this case and wanted to get a sense of what some in the community here think. Seems mostly in line with your sentiment

If it were just any regular tool people (speaking for myself here mostly, but I see similar sentiments on HN) would be less annoyed and argumentative about it.

Instead it's being shoved down our throats at every turn and is being marketed at the world as the Return of Christ. Whenever anyone says anything even slightly negative the evangelists crawl out of the woodwork to tell you how you're using the wrong model, or not prompting good enough, or long enough, or short enough, or "Well I've become a 9000000x developer using 76 agents in parallel!" type of posts.

It's a tool that we can use and discuss, but it's baffling to claim there aren't also a bunch of charlatans trying to peddle an AI future that is varying degrees of unrealistic and dystopian.

Any number of Sam Altman quotes display this: "A child born today will never be smarter than an AI" "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence" "ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived" "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies."

Every bit of this is nonsense being peddled by the guy selling an AI future because it would make him one of the richest people alive if he can convince enough people that it will come true (or, much much much less likely, it does come true).

That's just from 10 minutes of looking at statements by a single one of these charlatans.

I think that's the point, the author isn't trying to get into the weeds of the debate itself, just the way the debates are usually framed and how most people might not realize it. It is a "meta" article in that sense and yes you're right, you can apply it in many other contexts where novel and advanced technology is being debated

It even works for Safari, which I didn't expect, and it's free.

Thank you so much!

Neat, worth a try. Thank you!

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?

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

Earlier this year I made some good progress on creating an automated weekly (or monthly) topical digest of HN with the use case being that a person could just check if there were posts on a particular topic of interest to them.

I've paused development on it for a bit to work on something else, but let me know if you have an interest and I'll post some sample output to github.

I've never seen an app whose dev calls it "beautiful" that doesn't look like dogshit...

Surprised by how much job postings decreased, in the span of 3 years. Great Graph.

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.

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.

on the commerce front, it's really easy to find small-to-medium size vendors who accept Bitcoin for just about any category of goods now.

on the legal front, there's been some notable "wins" for cryptocurrency advocates: e.g. the U.S. lifted its sanctions against Tornado Cash (the Ethereum anonymization tool) a few months ago.

on the UX front, a mixed bag. the shape of the ecosystem has stayed remarkably unchanged. it's hard to build something new without bridging it to Bitcoin or Ethereum because that's where the value is. but that means Bitcoin and Ethereum aren't under much pressure to improve _themselves_. most of the improvements actually getting deployed are to optimize the interactions between institutions, and less to improve the end-user experience directly.

on the privacy front, also a mixed bag. people seem content enough with Monero for most sensitive things. the appetite for stronger privacy at the cryptocurrency layer mostly isn't here yet i think because what news-worthy de-anonymizations we have are by now being attributed (rightly or wrongly) to components of the operation _other_ than the actual exchange of cryptocurrency.

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.

Yes. No claims on social benefit, only evidence supporting thesis that cryptocurrency is advancing

- Stablecoins as an alternative payment rail. Most (all?) fintechs are going heavy into this

- Regulatory clarity + ability to include in 401(k)/pension plans

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.

I don't think this is that much more different than comments in earlier times saying "this could be a really good application for the blockchain!" except the volume of them. Almost everything can have the soul and humanity crushed out of it by AI if we let it, and almost every idea already has a YC applicant.

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.

Well, is the computer revolution bigger than the electricity revolution? They just build on each other. But it might be interpreted as the next new abstraction that causes major changes in the industry.

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.

yes, but I don't remember nearly so much social media buzz about the dot com era.

Got it.

It’s the weekend, just wait until Monday and you will see at least 50% of the front page is AI-domain related content until Friday afternoon.

In my experience, people who lead with "I got censored for just sharing a dissenting opinion" are not very reliable narrators of their experiences, to put it gently. Very much depends of course, which is extra annoying, but it does unfortunately make even more sense.