Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have lobsters invites?
Sure do - invite sent to the email indicated by your HN profile.
Thanks!
How much of HN is AI?
201–210 of 370 posts
Re: How much of HN is AI?
#202This is categorizing with a pretty broad brush, it seems. I took a look at a random day, and the articles that are claimed to be AI are Waymo publishing a model for self driving cars and a post about scams in Apple News ads. Sure, Waymo’s model is AI and the scams in Apple News are often AI generated, but this isn't some sort of monoculture of LLM articles. Ironically, this article could have been improved by using a…
The article already states that distinction. It doesn’t say that everything is written by AI, the heatmap even has a legend with different colors for “article about ai” and “written by ai”
The articles I cite were in the “about ai” category not “written by ai”.
Re: How much of HN is AI?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to. There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction. To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits…
i just gotta say that i find it hard to believe that this comment is true for you but you hang out on hackernews. almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs. > even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about. >he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn…
> they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs
I assure you they do not, many truly do not care and don't want to. That's just what the hype and the article and the stories tell you. The HN bubble tells you that's true, but 90% of my co-workers don't even want to touch Claude, despite being given a license.
And again, if e.g. ChatGPT is providing so much value, why aren't people buying?
Re: How much of HN is AI?
#204Democratization of access has its victims. I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes. 15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars. 10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce. 5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter. Now it is a blurry view into the future…
I'm nostalgic for the new JS framework every day era. Say what you will about that era but people were writing the code by hand, so looking back it all feels "hand-crafted" and quaint. You had to copy paste that express app from a medium.com article instead of prompting an LLM to scaffold a whole project in one second.
At least there was some genuine effort involved there. What I find most disheartening about the current wave of AI-generated projects is that there's often very little personal involvement - someone had a general idea and asked Claude (or whatever) to implement it for them, and the results are much more representative of the AI agent's tendencies than the author's intent.
Re: How much of HN is AI?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Links?
I aint got none.
That's fine, but it would be helpful to see examples. People often make generic claims about astroturfing, bots, etc. that don't hold up in practice when we look at the data.
Bots and genai comments also exist, of course, and are not allowed here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated).
Re: How much of HN is AI?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish there was a way to filter out discussions about AI on HN. It feels like lately they take up a good 1/3 of posts on the front page. I don't want to hear about some new AI startup.
https://www.unslop.news/ https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
Writing to remember this
Re: How much of HN is AI?
#207My reaction is: that's an appropriate amount. AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse.
It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to. There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction. To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits…
LLMs have helped us keep HN up and still (relatively) fast amid a huge onslaught of new traffic over the last year or so. We've been able to solve problems and find opportunities for optimization that we'd never have gotten to without the help of Claude or ChatGPT.
Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely look at it anymore—a popular local sport for 15 years or more—but to the extent anyone still reads the site, there must be some positive impact in having it running and rendering pages, even if you don't like what's on them!
Re: How much of HN is AI?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
i just gotta say that i find it hard to believe that this comment is true for you but you hang out on hackernews. almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs. > even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about. >he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn…
> they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs I assure you they do not, many truly do not care and don't want to. That's just what the hype and the article and the stories tell you. The HN bubble tells you that's true, but 90% of my co-workers don't even want to touch Claude, despite being given a license. And again, if e.g. ChatGPT is providing so much value, why aren't people buying?
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Re: How much of HN is AI?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to. There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction. To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits…
I don't think that AI has to influence every single person's daily life to make a huge impact. I think for probably 90% of people it's pretty useless out side of being a better search engine. But that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on science and technology at large. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen trying to stick it into everyone's face, but I don't think that should be conflated with the real progre…
I would say 90% of people do not yet realize how useful it is. It is not useless to them, they just don’t understand yet what it can do.
And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years.
ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
Re: How much of HN is AI?
#210I disagree, the most important source of tech discussion on the internet right now is /g/ board on 4chan.