Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When did AI take over Hacker News?

zachperk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 245 posts

Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?

#111

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

popalchemist wrote: post #102
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird what counts as "negative" on HN. Question something politely? You're being negative. Criticize something? Negative. Describe it in a way someone might interpret badly? Negative. Sometimes it seems like anything that's not breathless, unconditional praise is considered being negative and curmudgeonly. It's turning into a "positive thoughts only" zone.

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 simp…

your Nietzsche reference made me wonder about one of his other sayings that if you stare into the abyss for too long the abyss will stare into you. And that seems fitting with how AI responses are always phrased in a way that make you feel like you're the genius for even asking a specific question. And if we spend more time engaging with AI (which tricks us emotionally) will we also change our behavior and expect everyone else treating us like a genius in every interaction? What NLP does AI perform on humans that we haven't become aware of yet?

Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?

#112

Post by do_not_redeem »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #43
snowwrestler wrote: post #21

Would be fun to do similar analysis for HN front page trends that peaked and then declined, like cryptocurrency, NFTs, Web3, and self-driving cars. And actually it’s funny: self-driving cars and cryptocurrency are continuing to advance dramatically in real life but there are hardly any front page HN stories about them anymore. Shows the power of AI as a topic that crowds out others. And possibly reveals the trendy na…

Is cryptocurrency advancing dramatically? Maybe this is an illustration of this effect, but I haven't seen any news about any major changes, other than line-go-up stuff.

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.

Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?

#113

Post by hodgehog11 »

mattbuilds wrote: post #60
Spivak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and they don't have to revolutionize the world to be revolutionary in our industry. it might be that the use-cases unlocked by this new technology won't move the needle in an industrial revolution sense but it's nonetheless a huge leap for computer science and the kinds of tasks that can be done with software. i don't understand people who seem to have strongly motivated reasoning to dismiss the new tech as just a to…

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 diffi…

> I have always been pretty effective as a dev

> LLMs make the easy stuff easier

I think this is the observation that's important right now. If you're an expert that isn't doing a lot of boilerplate, LLMs don't have value to you right now. But they can acceptably automate a sizeable number of entry-level jobs. If those get flushed out, that's an issue, as not everyone is going to be a high-level expert.

Long-term, the issue is we don't know where the ceiling is. Just because OpenAI is faltering doesn't mean that we've hit that ceiling yet. People talk about the scaling laws as a theoretical boundary, but it's actually the opposite. It shows that the performance curve could just keep going up even with brute force, which has never happened before in the history of statistics. We're in uncharted territory now, so there's good reason to keep an eye on it.

Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?

#114

Post by do_not_redeem »

akk0 wrote: post #41
snowwrestler wrote: post #21

Would be fun to do similar analysis for HN front page trends that peaked and then declined, like cryptocurrency, NFTs, Web3, and self-driving cars. And actually it’s funny: self-driving cars and cryptocurrency are continuing to advance dramatically in real life but there are hardly any front page HN stories about them anymore. Shows the power of AI as a topic that crowds out others. And possibly reveals the trendy na…

What's the status on cryptocurrency tech and ecosystem right now actually? I did some work in that area some years back but found all the tooling tobe in an abysmal state that didn't allow for non-finance applications to be anything but toys so I got out and haven't looked back, but I never stopped being bullish on decentralized software.

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.

Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?

#115

Post by lagniappe »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #43
snowwrestler wrote: post #21

Would be fun to do similar analysis for HN front page trends that peaked and then declined, like cryptocurrency, NFTs, Web3, and self-driving cars. And actually it’s funny: self-driving cars and cryptocurrency are continuing to advance dramatically in real life but there are hardly any front page HN stories about them anymore. Shows the power of AI as a topic that crowds out others. And possibly reveals the trendy na…

Is cryptocurrency advancing dramatically? Maybe this is an illustration of this effect, but I haven't seen any news about any major changes, other than line-go-up stuff.

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.

Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?

#116

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

snowwrestler wrote: post #21

Would be fun to do similar analysis for HN front page trends that peaked and then declined, like cryptocurrency, NFTs, Web3, and self-driving cars. And actually it’s funny: self-driving cars and cryptocurrency are continuing to advance dramatically in real life but there are hardly any front page HN stories about them anymore. Shows the power of AI as a topic that crowds out others. And possibly reveals the trendy na…

The last time I was looking for a job, I wrote a little scraper that used naive regex to classify "HN Who's Hiring" postings as "AI," "full time," etc.

I was looking for a full time remote or hybrid non-AI job in New York. I'm not against working on AI, but this being a startup forum I felt like listings were dominated by shiny new thing startups, whereas I was looking for a more "boring" job.

Anyway, here's:

- a graph: https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hn-whos-hiring-stats.html

- the filtered listings: https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hn-whos-hiring.html

- the code: https://github.com/dgoffredo/hn-whos-hiring

Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?

#117

Post by seadan83 »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #42
dgfitz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 I'm more shocked that so many people seem unable to come to grips with the fact that something can be a next token predictor and demonstrate intelligence.…

> I'm more shocked that so many people seem unable to come to grips with the fact that something can be a next token predictor and demonstrate intelligence.

Except LLMs have not shown much intelligence. Wisdom yes, intelligence no. LLMs are language models, not 'world' models. It's the difference of being wise vs smart. LLMs are very wise as they have effectively memorized the answer to every question humanity has written. OTOH, they are pretty dumb. LLMs don't "understand" the output they produce.

> To them, if something is a token predictor clearly it can't be doing anything impressive

Shifting the goal posts. Nobody said that a next token predictor can't do impressive things, but at the same time there is a big gap between impressive things and other things like "replace very software developer in the world within the next 5 years."

Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?

#118

Post by tallytarik »

I thought this was going to be an analysis of articles that are clearly AI-generated.

I feel like that’s an increasing ratio of top posts, and they’re usually an instant skip for me. Would be interested in some data to see if that’s true.

Re: When did AI take over Hacker News?

#120

Post by seabass-labrax »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #43
snowwrestler wrote: post #21

Would be fun to do similar analysis for HN front page trends that peaked and then declined, like cryptocurrency, NFTs, Web3, and self-driving cars. And actually it’s funny: self-driving cars and cryptocurrency are continuing to advance dramatically in real life but there are hardly any front page HN stories about them anymore. Shows the power of AI as a topic that crowds out others. And possibly reveals the trendy na…

Is cryptocurrency advancing dramatically? Maybe this is an illustration of this effect, but I haven't seen any news about any major changes, other than line-go-up stuff.

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.

Post reply on HN