What if English is my second language? Undoubtedly being well spoken is associated with higher class. Your arguments will come of as stronger to the reader.
Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
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Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#152What if English is my second language? Undoubtedly being well spoken is associated with higher class. Your arguments will come of as stronger to the reader.
Post the translation as best you can manage, and below it put the same comment in your original language. If someone has qualms with your comment having broken english/mistranslations they are welcome to run bits of original language themselves.
We're all here to talk about tech, and we aren't all perfect little english robots.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#153The only question is is the entity interesting and/or correct. Those properties are in the eye of the beholder. If they're human or not is beside the point. After all, no one knows I'm a dog.
When someone posts:
> You could use Redis for that, sure, I've run it and it wasn't as hard as some people seem to fear, but in hindsight I'd prefer some good hardware and a Postgres server: that can scale to several million daily users with your workload, and is much easier to design around at this stage of your site.
then the beholder is trusting not just the correctness of that one sentence but all of the experiences and insights from the author. You can't know whether that's good advice or not without being the author, and if that's posted by someone you trust it has value.
An LLM could be prompted to pretend they're an experienced DBA and to comment on a thread, and might produce that sentence, or if the temperature is a little different it might just say that you should start with Redis because then you don't have to redesign your whole business when Postgres won't scale anymore.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#154I would amend to: "Don't post comments that are not human originated at this time. We want to see your human opinion shine through." This gives people some amount of leeway and allows just rhe right amount of exceptions that prove the rule. (That said, to be frank, some of the newer better behaved models are sometimes more polite and better HN denizens than the actual humans. This is something you're going to have to…
The real point isn't stopping bad grammar, it's preserving the vibe. HN feels different because it's messy humans arguing, not optimized algorithms trying to be helpful.
Once we allow "good enough" AI content, the community stops feeling like a town square and starts feeling like a customer service chatbot. We need real people with actual stakes in their opinions, not just perfect outputs. Let's keep it human or leave it.
This comment may or may not have been generated with an LLM, but I won't tell and you can't prove it either way.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#155Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#156I don't get it. We use tools to assist in written communication all the time. If someone wants to ask an LLM to check their grammar or edit for clarity or change the tone, it's still a conversation between humans. Everyone now has access to a real time editor or scribe who can craft their message the way they want it to sound before sending it off. Great.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#157You may also notice that I don't have much common history here. I mostly comment on Reddit.
Here's where I draw the line. If you are not reading the text that is produced by the LLM, then I don't want to read whatever it is that you wrote. I will usually only do one or two iterations of my comment, but afterwards I will usually edit it by hand.
Technically, there is light AI editing of this comment because FUTO keyboard has the ability to enable a transformer model that will capitalize, punctuate, and just generally remove filler words and make it so that it's not a hyper-literal transcription.
Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#158Re: Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
#159Not sure I agree with the AI edited comments. Using AI to improve the readability and clarity is fine. Sometimes a well structured comment is much better than a braindump that reads like ramblings. And AI is quite good at it (and probably will get better). To make the point, here is how this comment would have looked if edited: "I don't fully agree with banning AI-edited comments. Using AI to improve readability and…