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

Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

karpathy.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 285 posts

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

#31

Post by latexr »

jeffbee wrote: post #27
moultano wrote: post #10

Notable how this is only possible because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade. They contain a whole conversation. You don't have to log in to see anything. The value of old proper websites increases with our ability to process them.

There are things that you have to log in to see, and the mods sometimes move conversations from one place to another, and also, for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp.

> for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp.

What do you mean?

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

#32

Post by doctoboggan »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #23

> But if intelligence really does become too cheap to meter, it will become possible to do a perfect reconstruction and synthesis of everything. LLMs are watching (or humans using them might be). Best to be good. I cannot believe this is just put out there unexamined of any level of "maybe we shouldn't help this happen". This is complete moral abdication. And to be clear, being "good" is no defense. Being good often…

I've had the same though as Karpathy over the past couple of months/years. I don't think it's good, exciting, or something to celebrate, but I also have no idea how to prevent it.

I would read his "Best to be good." as a warning or reminder that everything you do or say online will be collected and analyzed by an "intelligence". You can't count on hiding amongst the mass of online noise. Imagine if someone were to collect everything you've written or uploaded to the internet and compiled it into a long document. What sort of story would that tell about who you are? What would a clever person (or LLM) be able to do with that document?

If you have any ideas on how to stop everyone from building the torment nexus, I am willing to listen.

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

#33

Post by embedding-shape »

jeffbee wrote: post #27
moultano wrote: post #10

Notable how this is only possible because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade. They contain a whole conversation. You don't have to log in to see anything. The value of old proper websites increases with our ability to process them.

There are things that you have to log in to see, and the mods sometimes move conversations from one place to another, and also, for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp.

> and the mods sometimes move conversations from one place to another

This only manipulates the children references though, never the item ID itself. So if you have the item ID of an item (submission, comment, poll, pollItem), it'll be available there as long as moderators don't remove it, which happens very seldom.

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

#34

Post by jeffbee »

latexr wrote: post #31
jeffbee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are things that you have to log in to see, and the mods sometimes move conversations from one place to another, and also, for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp.

> for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp. What do you mean?

There is some action that moderators can take that throws one of yesterday's articles back on the front page and when that happens all the comments have the same timestamp.

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

#35

Post by embedding-shape »

latexr wrote: post #31
jeffbee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are things that you have to log in to see, and the mods sometimes move conversations from one place to another, and also, for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp.

> for some reason, whole conversations get reset to a single timestamp. What do you mean?

Submissions put in the second-chance pool briefly appear (sometimes "again") on the frontpage, and the conversation timestamps are reset so it appears like they were written after the second-chance submission, not before.

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

#36

Post by karpathy »

doctoboggan wrote: post #32
collinmcnulty wrote: post #23

> But if intelligence really does become too cheap to meter, it will become possible to do a perfect reconstruction and synthesis of everything. LLMs are watching (or humans using them might be). Best to be good. I cannot believe this is just put out there unexamined of any level of "maybe we shouldn't help this happen". This is complete moral abdication. And to be clear, being "good" is no defense. Being good often…

I've had the same though as Karpathy over the past couple of months/years. I don't think it's good, exciting, or something to celebrate, but I also have no idea how to prevent it. I would read his "Best to be good." as a warning or reminder that everything you do or say online will be collected and analyzed by an "intelligence". You can't count on hiding amongst the mass of online noise. Imagine if someone were to co…

Thank you

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

#38

Post by latexr »

dang wrote: post #26
lapcat wrote: post #18

Does anyone else think that HN engages in far too much navel-gazing? Nothing gets upvotes faster than a HN submission about HN.

It's true that meta is the crack of internet forums, so we, er, crack down on it quite a bit. That's a longstanding view: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Alternate metaphor: evil catnip - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... But yesterday's thread and this one are clearly exceptions—far above the median. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212180 was parti…

I love it when you share some insight about HN or internet communication for which you have relevant searches at the ready to explanations of the concept.

A personal favourite is “the contrarian dynamic”.

Do you have a list of those at the ready or do you just remember them? If you feel like sharing, what’s your process and is there a list of those you’d make public?

I imagine having one would be useful, e.g. for onboarding someone like tomhow, though that doesn’t really happen often.

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

#39

Post by thatguy0900 »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #23

> But if intelligence really does become too cheap to meter, it will become possible to do a perfect reconstruction and synthesis of everything. LLMs are watching (or humans using them might be). Best to be good. I cannot believe this is just put out there unexamined of any level of "maybe we shouldn't help this happen". This is complete moral abdication. And to be clear, being "good" is no defense. Being good often…

Well the companies that facilitate this have found themselves in a position where if they go down they take the US economy with them, so the maybe this shouldn't happen thing is a moot point. At least we know this stuff is in stable, secure hands though, like how the palantir ceo does recorded interviews while obviously blasted out of his mind on drugs.

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

#40

Post by modeless »

This is a cool idea. I would install a Chrome extension that shows a score by every username on this site grading how well their expressed opinions match what subsequently happened in reality, or the accuracy of any specific predictions they've made. Some people's opinions are closer to reality than others and it's not always correlated with upvotes.

An extension of this would be to grade people on the accuracy of the comments they upvote, and use that to weight their upvotes more in ranking. I would love to read a version of HN where the only upvotes that matter are from people who agree with opinions that turn out to be correct. Of course, only HN could implement this since upvotes are private.

Post reply on HN