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Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

karpathy.bearblog.dev

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Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#261
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Echo chamber of rational, thoughtful and truthful speakers is what I’m looking for in Internet forums.

flat earth creationists would describe their colleagues the same way. a group of them certainly is an echo chamber; why isn't your view?

He doesn't deny that his point of view forms an echo chamber.

Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#262

10 Years Ago, December 11, 2015 - Introducing Open AI -- very meta: https://karpathy.ai/hncapsule/2015-12-11/index.html#article-... The company has changed and it seems the mission has as well.

Yes very funny to see their own model betray them like this:

> The original “non‑profit, open, patents shared” promise now reads almost like an alternate timeline. Today OpenAI is a capped‑profit entity with a massive corporate partner, closed frontier models, and an aggressive product roadmap.

Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#263
post #50

This is a perfect example of the power and problems with LLMs. I took the narcissistic approach of searching for myself. Here's a grade of one of my comments[1]: >slg: B- (accurate characterization of PH’s “networking & facade” feel, but implicitly underestimates how long that model can persist) And here's the actual comment I made[2]: >And maybe it is the cynical contrarian in me, but I think the "real world" aspect…

I'm not so sure; that may not have been what you meant, but that doesn't mean it's not what others read into it. The broader context is HN is a startup forum and one of the most common discussion patterns is 'I don't like it' that is often a stand-in for 'I don't think it's viable as-is'. Startups are default dead, after all.

With that context, if someone were to read your comment and be asked 'does this person think the product's model is viable in the long run' I think a lot of people would respond 'no'.

Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a person's text with their actual identity to pull that off. Normally that's pretty hard, especially since you'll get different formats. Like I don't write the same way on Twitter as HN. But yeah, this stuff has been advancing and I don't think it is okay.

The AOL scandal pretty much proved that anonymity is a mirage. You may think you are anonymous but it just takes combining a few unrelated databases to de-anonymize you. HN users think they are anonymous but they're not, they drop factoids all over the place about who they are. 33 bits... it is one of my recurring favorite themes and anybody in the business of managing other people's data should be well aware of the…

I think you're being too conspiracy theorist here by making everything black and white.

Besides, the main problem of how difficult it is to deanonymize, not if possible.

Privacy and security both have to perfect defense. For example, there's no passwords that are unhackable. There are only passwords that cannot be hacked with our current technology, budgets, and lifetime. But you could brute force my HN password, it would just take billions of years.

The same distinction it's important here. My threat model on HN doesn't care if you need to spend millions of dollars nor thousands of hours to deanonymize me. My handle is here to discourage that and to allow me to speak more freely about certain topics. I'm not trying to hide from nation states, I'm trying to hide from my peers in AI and tech. So I can freely discuss my opinions, which includes criticizing my own community (something I think everyone should do! Be critical of the communities we associate with). And moreso I want people to consider my points on their merit alone, not on my identity nor status.

If I was trying to hide from nation states I'd do things very very differently, such as not posting on HN.

I'm not afraid of my handle being deanonymized, but I still think we should recognize the dangers of the future we are creating.

By oversimplifying you've created the position that this is a lost cause, as if we already lost and that because we lost we can't change. There are multiple fallacies here. The future has yet to be written.

If you really believe it is deterministic then what is the point to anything? To have desires it opinions? Are were just waiting to see which algorithm wins out? Or are we the algorithms playing themselves out? If it's deterministic wouldn't you be happy if the freedom algorithm won and this moment is an inflection in your programming? I guess that's impossible to say in an objective manner but I'd hope that's how it plays out

Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#265
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Echo chamber of rational, thoughtful and truthful speakers is what I’m looking for in Internet forums.

flat earth creationists would describe their colleagues the same way. a group of them certainly is an echo chamber; why isn't your view?

An echo chamber is a product of your own creation. If you're willing to upvote people who disagree with your and actively seek out opposite takes to be genuinely curious about, then you're probably not in an echo chamber.

The tools for controlling your feed are reducing on social media like Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, etc., but simply saying that you follow and respect the opinions of a select group doesn't necessarily mean you're forming an echo chamber.

This is different from something like flat earth/other conspiracy theories where when confronted with opposite evidence, they aren't likely to engage with it in good faith.

Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it depends on if you vote based on the quality of contribution to the discussion or based on how much you agree/disagree.

I don't think you can change user behavior like this. You can give them a "venting sink" though. Instead of having a downvote button that just downvotes, have it pop up a little menu asking for a downvote reason, with "spam" and "disagree" as options. You could then weigh downvotes by which option was selected, along with an algorithm to discover "user honesty" based on whether their downvotes correlate with others o…

You can't change it for other users, only for yourself, which is what the original comment about the extension said.

Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#267
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's current structure very much produces an echo chamber with only one main prevailing view. If everyone used an extension like this I would expect it to increase overall diversity of opinion on the site, as things that conflict with the main echo chamber view could still thrive in their own communities rather than getting downvoted with the actual spam.

Hacker News structure is identical though. Topics invite different demographics and downvotes suppress unpopular opinions. The front page shows most up voted stories. It's the same system.

HN has some built-in ways to reduce this, like not allowing everyone to downvote everything.

Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#268
What's interesting is that the hindsight it has now is not going to be what it has in 10 years either. Some of the most wrong and most prescient comments could switch as stuff unfolds. In a way some could both still be wrong and right just at different points in time.

Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#269
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Boring but right" generally means that this prediction is already priced in to our current understanding of the world though. Anyone can reliably predict "the sun will rise tomorrow", but I'm not giving them high marks for that.

I'm giving them higher marks than the people who say it won't. LLMs have seen huge improvements over the last 3 years. Are you going to make the bet that they will continue to make similarly huge improvements, taking them well past human ability, or do you think they'll plateau? The former is the boring, linear prediction.

> The former is the boring, linear prediction.

Surely you meant the latter? The boring option follows previous experience. No technology has ever not reached a plateau, except for evolution itself I suppose, till we nuke the planet.

Re: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

#270

Commenters of HN: Your past thoughts have been dredged up and judged. For each $TOPIC, you have been awarded a grade by GPT-5.1 Thinking. Your grade is based on OpenAI's aligned worldview and what OpenAI's blob of weights considers Truth in 2025. Did you think well , netizen? Are you an Alpha or a Delta-Minus? Where will the dragnet grading of your online history happen next?

Of all the people on the entire internet, I would hope HN posters understand best that anything and everything posted online already has and also will at some point be used in such ways.
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