[johnfn]

While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the decade+ I have previously been on HN, happily sharing other things I built with other interesting technology -- and many of those things were much worse than what I built with AI!

I did see your thread earlier today and I admit was pleasantly surprised. Maybe HN is turning over a new leaf? I hope so. I honestly considered switching to X it was getting so bad :P

[ThrowawayR2]

I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze. I recall various submissions asking "Why is HN so anti-crypto?" as well.

[peteforde]

The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.

It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.

You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.

[happytoexplain]

Consider that the GP said,

>Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023

And the parent said,

>I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze

And your response was,

>The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.

The parent in fact said a very straightforward, non-controversial thing, and you responded in anger, as if they said something like "AI is the same as crypto".

[peteforde]

Yeah, I didn't reply in anger. Pointing out false equivalency != angry unless you are deep in the "words I don't like are violence" camp.

Feel free to respond to what I actually said, though!

[johnfn]

I'm with GP here, there is nothing to respond in what you actually said because you misunderstood the comment you replied to.

[overfeed]

> It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift

Was it universally obvious? Hindaight is 20/20 There were many block-chain startups funded, and even FAANG got caught up in the hype. FWIW, I was a crypto sceptic, but I had many arguments with believers online and in my social circles. Side note: a crypto enthusiast colleague bought a house off their crypto gains, it may be a grift, but a small number of crypto-believwrs got really wealthy, and you're not going to convince them.

[thunky]

> Was it universally obvious?

Yes. Crypto was never productive.

But nice that your buddy financed a house with other people's dumb money.

[trumpdong]

Crypto is the best way to pay for illegal things online, which is a really big business.

In fact as the act of paying itself has become more restricted, it's often also a good way to make illegal payments for completely legal goods and services.

[peteforde]

My point is that regardless of who got rich, the web 3.0 pitches themselves did not pass even the most casual review.

I was asked to audit a few proposals during that era and in every case I had to go back to the person asking me to say that it was a technical architecture L. Ron Hubbard would have admired. Just straight up making up words in most cases.

Far beyond "wait, is this actually a parody? how is this not a parody?" territory. 80% of them were effectively "tamagotchis + pyramid scheme".

This is why I say that you don't have to love LLMs, but you also can't compare them in terms of also bad. Jay-walking is bad and Jeffrey Dahmer was bad; they are not "both bad".

[trumpdong]

Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.

[FabHK]

Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".

[trumpdong]

Enabling crime is massive. You have to remember that "crime" includes things like "selling abortion pills", "selling LSD", "selling ivermectin" and of course "supporting Palestine Action"

[FabHK]

Yes. And while the law sometimes gets things wrong, in general it is good that it tries do distinguish between useful and harmful things, morally right and morally wrong.

And a tool that serves only to subvert the law (at enormous expense) does not strike me as valuable or worth supporting.

NB: I support the outcome of the 1990's crypto war (in the good old days when "crypto" meant cryptography, not crime-token), namely the right to private uncensored unrestricted communication. But a private uncensored unrestricted way of sending around money is a terrible idea, as we can see empirically.

[hunterpayne]

It solves a CS problem called the Byzantine Generals problem. That problem was thought to have no solution before blockchains were created. The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

[FabHK]

That is complete nonsense, indicative of your lack of knowledge, and utterly typical of crypto hype: mendacious or ignorant or both.

The State Machine Replication problem in distributed computing has been studied since the 1960s or so, and indeed can be solved using Byzantine Broadcast. That has been solved for various settings:

* Permissioned (+ PKI), synchronous: SMR possible for any f (Dolev Strong 1983)

* Permissioned (no PKI), synchronous: SMR impossible if f≥n/3 (PSL 1980, FLM 1985)

* Permissioned, asynchronous setting: SMR impossible even with f=1 (FLP 1985)

* Permissioned, partially synchronous: deterministic SMR with "eventual liveness" possible if f<n/3 (late 1990s), stochastic if f<n/2, impossible otherwise.

The theory to achieve reliable state machine replication even in the presence of byzantine failures was sorted out in the 1980s, and the practice followed in the late 1990s (PBFT (Castro Liskov 1999), byzantine Paxos, etc.)

So, just to drive the point home: the Byzantine Generals problem (more precisely: Byzantine Broadcast & SMR) was a solved problem by the late 1990s.

What Bitcoin (ie LCR + PoW) added was to do it in the permissionless setting, just as I've said. (It also increased f from n/3 to n/2, modulo "selfish mining", and while earlier solutions were consistent always, available eventually, LCR + PoW is available always, consistent eventually, which is arguably the wrong tradeoff for finance.)

> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

You don't say.

[peteforde]

That is a common blockchain myth.

There were solutions before blockchain, especially in the field of Byzantine fault tolerance. The original Byzantine Generals paper was from 1982, and practical algorithms existed before Bitcoin. For example: PBFT - Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance - published in 1999.

https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/papers/castro-practical...

Blockchain solved a different version of the problem: how can a large, open, permissionless network reach agreement when anyone can join and nobody has a fixed identity?

Classic BFT is like a committee of known people voting, where the system survives some liars.

Blockchain is like letting strangers on the internet vote, but making votes costly enough that cheating becomes economically difficult.

> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

Right!?

[dang]

I say "simply" because, as I mentioned, it's an invariant—possibly the most consistent phenomenon we've observed on HN [1]. I admit I didn't add anything to substantiate that!

If it's so consistent, how can it go unnoticed for so long (as you've reported) and/or get perceived as one-sided ("HN is so anti-A") when in fact it is usually two-sided ("HN users are divided on A")?

The answer is that what you notice depends on how you feel [2]. If you like A, or (more precisely) if you dislike anti-A, you are far more likely to notice anti-A posts. Not only that, but you will weight them more heavily, meaning they make a stronger impression on you than the median post does—even the median pro-A post.

These two variables, frequency and impact, combine to produce a picture of the site as anti-A—so strongly that people often use universals like "always" and "never" when describing it. In reality, HN is a statistical cloud, but your pre-existing feelings determine which datapoints you happen to notice (frequency) and how strongly they affect you (impact). [3]

This is why people with opposing views feel the same about how biased HN is, but in opposite directions: A is certain that the site is anti-A, and B is just as certain that it's anti-B. It's simply (<-- that word again!) because their feelings cause them to notice different datapoints. Abstract out the directional bit (pro- or anti-, A or B), and their perceptions become isomorphic.

Unfortunately for us, HN is more afflicted by this than other sites of comparable or larger size, because all of them organize the community into silos [4], meaning they're sharded by social group (like Twitter's follow lists), or by content (like Reddit's subreddits), and so on. HN is non-siloed, meaning everyone is in the same place: all the As, all the anti-As, all the Bs, all the anti-Bs - we're all roaming the same threads and bumping into each other. You are therefore more likely to run into datapoints you find disagreeable, and thus to feel that the community is biased against your view, and - what's worse - more biased the more strongly you feel!

Once or twice a year, some reply I'm writing gets hijacked by my sadness about this and turns into a digressive lament. Why sadness? because although I believe that in reality HN is somewhat (<-- not to exaggerate) more thoughtful and tolerant than other communities of the same or greater size, this dynamic means it inevitably gets perceived as less so. [5]

I believe this is why one so often hears about how toxic, nasty, negative HN is—not that it isn't those things! but the relative level of them gets distorted. Humans can't take much of what we dislike and disagree with before resorting to generalization and other internal barriers. This is essentially an immune response. It often takes only a handful of datapoints (3, or 2, or maybe even just 1) before the impression burns into the retina and becomes permanent [6].

This is most painful when the topic is close to one's heart—for example, when one's own work is being criticized. In cases like that, it doesn't take much before one feels wounded, and such impressions rarely go away.

In one case I saw, some people were agreeing about how terrible and mean Hacker News is, and to prove the point, one of them linked to a vile reply he had received. That reply, however, was from Twitter—not from HN at all! He hastened to add "HN is the same"—somewhat self-refutingly, since if it were true, an actual example would not have been hard to find. In reality, while such vile comments do show up on HN, the community quickly flags most of them, and moderators eventually flag most of the rest.

That is an example of the skew in perception I'm talking about, and even though it made me feel terrible, I can't be too critical because I understand where it comes from. It comes from fundamentals [7]: specifically, how HN's design interacts with human hard-wiring. Because those are fundamentals, this is not going to change, nor can it be affected by argument. Sad!

Or rather, it could only change if we changed the foundation of HN's design—in this case, by sharding the site into silos—but (a) I'd be scared to tamper with DNA at that level, and (b) if the above is correct, then it's good for the world that this place exists. It just can't expect to be perceived as such [5]. End of this season's lament.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] I don't mean "you" personally, of course—everyone does this. It's a double whammy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion, sometimes described in this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect.

[3] Lots of past explanation here if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[5] I wrote a thing about this a few years ago, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[7] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[johnfn]

Thank you for the very long and thoughtful comment. It's an fun and interesting idea to think about, and I certainly don't mind reading long tangents :) But I want to push back on it a tad: I think it misses my point a little bit. I completely am fine with HN being a negative place - I wouldn't have been here so long if this bothered me! But I don't think all divisiveness is made equal. And in particular, I think the divisiveness on HN about AI feels different than previous divisiveness. I think your argument hinges on how if you are pro-A you are much more likely to notice anti-A sentiment. This is true, but I think the quality of anti-A sentiment differs in this case from the past.

When TypeScript came out and for the first couple of years, I was the biggest TypeScript zealot on the planet. I loved it! There was a point when I typed T that the autosuggestions on iPhone would suggest "Typescript" :-) This all to say: when anti-Typescript sentiment popped up, I definitely noticed it, and it definitely annoyed me. (I still think back on jashkenas saying that he didn't see any point in TS because any good engineer wouldn't make the errors it catches and I just want to throttle him! But I digress...) And there definitely was a lot of it.

But there was a difference in quality between the anti-TS sentiment and the anti-AI sentiment. No one ever attacked my abilities as an engineer for saying I liked TS; no one ever said the things I built with TS were embarrassing or intern-quality like they have with AI. It never devolved into personal attacks the way that anti-AI commentariat pull out when they run out of other arguments.

I'd make a humble suggestion. I would like to suggest that when comments get that derisive, that those comments are removed faster and those users are banned faster. I genuinely think it brings down the quality of discourse site-wide. (FWIW, I think the same about pro-AI incendiary content - very low-quality comments about how people are going to lose their jobs / become obsolete without AI should equally well be flagged, removed and banned.)

I know the HN moderator team is incredibly busy and I am very thankful for all you do!

[dang]

Yes, not all divisive topics are equally divisive. It depends on how people feel. More people feel more intensely about AI than about Typescript, and certain other topics exceed even AI in intensity. The dynamic I was describing is powered by feelings so it makes sense it would show up more where those are more intense. I think that accounts for the differences you've experienced, no?

> I completely am fine with HN being a negative place

That can't be true, or else the personal attacks, derisive and incendiary content you're describing wouldn't bother you!

Also, it isn't possible to treat comment quality and negativity as separate issues because the two are related. Negativity reduces comment quality, for many reasons. One is what when people are angry or frightened they become repetitive and uncreative. Another is that such comments evoke more, and worse, from others.

> I would like to suggest that when comments get that derisive, that those comments are removed faster and those users are banned faster.

No argument there, but this is what we're already doing, or at least trying to do, regardless of the topic. If we knew a more effective way to do it, we'd be there!

[johnfn]

> That can't be true, or else the personal attacks, derisive and incendiary content you're describing wouldn't bother you!

FWIW, I think we agree on almost everything, but just a clarification on this point. I am perfectly fine (in fact I delight in reading) if HN is negative in the flavor of "You are completely wrong, here are sources 1 2 and 3 that show you exactly why you are wrong". I have read plenty of anti-AI writing on HN of that form and enjoyed it. OK, I don't love it when it's directed at me, but everyone needs to be told they are wrong sometimes. But I very strongly dislike "Only an inexperienced person could hold a view like that", i.e. personal attacks.

> No argument there, but this is what we're already doing, or at least trying to do, regardless of the topic. If we knew a more effective way to do it, we'd be there!

Godspeed :)

[rpcope1]

There's probably a lot to say about it's merits or problems, but given the demographics (or my perception of them) is largely "software people" can you really be that surprised or angry given that this could snuff out a _lot_ of people's livelihoods like nothing we've probably seen in our lifetimes?

[claytongulick]

At least in my case, I don't think that's where the anger is coming from.

If LLMs were truly able to replace me, I'd be disappointed, sure - I've spent 30 years developing mastery of a craft, it's sad to see it go. But I'd resign myself and move on.

But that's not what makes me mad.

I get angry because I simply don't believe it is true. I have a reasonable math and tech background to where I grok how this stuff works at a fundamental level, and I'm utterly unconvinced that it is performing any sort of reasoning.

Call it a stochastic parrot, a token extrusion machine, whatever, but these things are not thinking or reasoning.

That doesn't mean they aren't useful- they clearly are very useful for many tasks.

My anger comes from the global attempt to replace things that require human reasoning with LLMs.

There's this push to use this stuff way past the point of "helpful accelerator" to "why do we need programmers/doctors/lawyers/etc..."

I think it's incredibly dangerous.

So while the tool is useful, I don't think we've figured out how to use it appropriately. For all the short term appearance of productivity boost it provides (whether this is real in a total-cost sense is still an active question), I think the risks to skill development and quality outweigh those benefits in many cases, and are being overlooked.

[arjie]

It is just a few people. Any time people are unpleasant to others or post in an uninteresting way I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. Rapidly the site becomes more usable. The negativity is from a few highly polarized individuals.

I know others also do this - though often they are kind enough to auto-fold.

[SyneRyder]

> ... I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments.

I think this would be a very useful feature to add to HN itself. I nearly emailed dang a few weeks ago to suggest it myself rather than roll my own browser extension to do it, though maybe it's my own responsibility to roll my own software too.

The Gearspace forums (vBulletin based?) have an "Ignore User" feature that helps make that forum vastly more tolerable.

[happytoexplain]

I think it's probably not palatable because it reduces the friction too much on removing large amounts of content for yourself - it's too easy to "delete" a person forever based on one or two things they said, or just based on not liking their opinion, and thereby reducing your exposure to differing thoughts, which is one of the tenants of HN.

[mook]

I think there's definitely groups on both sides, and I feel like it's similar to cryptocurrency a few years back. There's people really into it, and in response there's people really against it. On a smaller scale, see for example rust. In contrast there isn't as much vitriol against, say, world hunger because there isn't people very obviously pro-that to push against.

[YZF]

Same experience. But that's simply because you think you're experienced but the OP knows that you're just deluding yourself. Just kidding.

More seriously, I think this is a true reflection of a cultural phenomena. All discussions have become more polarized. There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance.

To complicate this even further there is a real diversity of experiences depending on many factors.

I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil. When we had tabs vs. spaces flamewars (or whatever the fun topic of the day was) everyone knew they were in a flame war (and often acknowledged that). Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic/biased.

I see the anti-AI sentiments in my work place. I think people are genuinely worried/concerned and don't know how this is going to change our world or even where we are exactly. This is also spilling into adjacent areas where people have strong emotional responses to (the rich, the economy, job market, politics, environment etc.).

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance.

The youth are facing an enormous employment crisis. Many have found themselves completely unemployable through no fault of their own.

And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in.

There's no loss of nuance, the situation has just escalated a lot.

[senordevnyc]

And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in.

This is a good example of anti-AI bias.

This didn’t happen. Out of thousands of commencement speeches across the country, a handful of speakers, none of whom are “AI leaders”, mentioned AI in passing and students booed.

So yeah, I’d say there’s a loss of nuance.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

"This didn't happen, except for that few times where it did happen and massively blew up in the media"

That you fail to understand why those students took such great offense to what was said at those speeches doesn't make it "anti-AI bias".

Those students reacted like that, and I used it as an example, because it's very emblematic of how tech companies and leading figures act.

[senordevnyc]

I'm specifically saying that AI leaders didn't go around making pro-AI commencement speeches. At all.

The absolute closest example is Schmidt, who was last CEO of Google more than a decade before ChatGPT launched, and is now CEO of an aerospace company. No other "AI leaders" gave commencement speeches where they were booed.

So you're blatantly lying and spreading misinformation to feed a negative narrative about the companies and executives in the AI space, then doubling down when called out. Reminds of Vance saying that he's willing to "create stories" in order to draw media attention to his cause-du-jour.

[card_zero]

For the record, besides Schmidt being booed, there was Gloria Caulfield (property development), and Scott Borchetta (music production). Then Jeremy Scott (fashion) tore up his AI-written speech and got cheered for that, and Ronny Chieng (The Daily Show) got cheered for saying "fuck AI" several times.

[ceejayoz]

Quite recently, he was the chair of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Commission_o...

Pretending he's some AI nobody is a bit goofy.

[Jblx2]

>I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil.

I think this is probably a combination of nostalgia and/or USENET prior to 1990 or so?

[numpad0]

IMO it's because AI outputs don't pass "is this corpses" test and trigger uncanny valley response. There's something in AI that instantly cause unsuspecting viewers to become alert and hostile.

At the same time, cut raw steaks don't alert people in the same way as corpses do, and that is a double standard, in a way, I guess.

[tactlesscamel]

Did You build it? Or did you manage the build of it? Could you have done it without AI? If not, you didn't do it.

A drill is just a tool. You can screw a screw without one. AI is just a tool, you can do things without it, too.

But AI applied in a manner you could not otherwise complete on your own is not a tool. It's a slave. None of the ideas or creations presented in that instance are your own. You just cheated someone out of a paycheck they may have otherwise earned.

[johnfn]

Your comment is a perfect example of the low-quality reflexivity negativity AI I am talking about. Yes, of course I built it! Why do I have to defend myself? What does it even mean that I "cheated someone out of a paycheck" -- it's my own hobby project!

[foxes]

Its divided because its the first time the previously more class unaware techbros have been critically challenged by the consequences of their actions - oh shit we might lose our jobs.

10 years ago "Disrupting X" was seen as a good thing. Now its come for them its a different story.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

100% this. Disrupting and killing the jobs of others is good. Now that we are killing our own jobs, disruption is not so good anymore.

[happytoexplain]

100%? So everybody who has any negative opinion of or experience with AI is now a "tech bro" who believes killing jobs is good? That's hideous. Why even have an HN account if you harbor this kind of black-and-white hate against people in software? You shouldn't want HN to look like the rest of the internet (flame wars, petty back-and-forth rhetoric, immaturity, etc).

[foxes]

Ive seen HN been filled with plenty of vitrol and hatred. Dang etc does clean it up mostly, but its still often here behind a veneer. Ive also seen really good opinions and ideas. It isnt black and white.

And no I dont think that generally, but it just seems like so many tech people here have been kinda mid/upper class/well off. I think a core issue around AI, around a new technology, is the class/capitalism issue, because that is the system we are stuck in.

But maybe some also havent quite connected the dots, and are starting to wake up to the reality of the situation.

It probably also gets astroturfed.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

I don't have a hate against people in software. I am one of them. I just find it hypocritical to throw a fit now that AI has the potential to kill a lot of our own jobs. But we happily created tools that cost a lot of other people's jobs.

In the end the real problem isn't AI but the way our economic system is set up. For a while it was accepted and worked to some degree that society should be structured to allow capitalists gain maximum profit and then use that money to hire people. AI and robotics will probably break this and we will either have a permanent underclass or we will have to think about a society where all citizens gain from technological progress.

You can't hold up technological progress. If once country doesn't do it, another will.

[scarab92]

I suspect there is a lot of selection bias going on as well.

Forums like this, reddit, X, readers of news sites etc tend to be filled with people that don’t have much going on in their lives, have a lot of free time to comment, are less likely to exploit the benefits of AI, and more likely to have simpler skills sets that are replaceable with AI.

Talking to people in real world, I would say the overwhelming majority are excited by AI and interesting in using it more rather than less.

[foxes]

Probably not the best way to reduce complicated feelings.

Do those people not deserve to be able to live and survive or are they all just replaceable?

[trumpdong]

Everyone's replaceable in capitalism