Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitloginAsk HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?463 points by Ekami 8 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 765 commentsGenuine question.Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.I say this as someone who has spent more than 20 years honing their craft as a software engineer.Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code. dang 8 days ago | next [–] It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant.You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI:Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174.Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to bring out one side or other.As for why the community is divided, there's always a temptation to come up with HN-specific explanations, but society as a whole is divided about AI. Surely that is the only explanation one needs. As I've been saying for years, HN can't be immune from macro trends: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...reply_0ffh 7 days ago | parent | next [–] Thoughtful comment, and I'd like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are "divided" on the question as well.I can speak from myself as an example (although n=1): I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes especially obvious once projects go much beyond "private toy" size. For me personally the consequence is that I try to make my projects even more modular, and the modules even more clearly delineated. With proper guidance, current LLMs work mostly fine when working on isolated modules. That doesn't mean they don't sometimes fail even there, but they also on rare occasions come up with surprisingly clever solutions when you let them loose on a code base, as long as the problem you want them to fix is mostly isolated in a couple of modules.So long story short, you can be all for LLMs and still be conscious of their shortcomings, and that just vibe coding applications you intend to let loose on unsuspecting customers is probably a bad idea, and possibly outright immoral. We have already seen more than enough examples of vibe coded applications dumping sensitive user data into the lap of anyone who is inclined to pick up a stick and prod them a little bit.replythierrydamiba 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] There’s also the uncomfortable reality that a lot of people spent a lot of time learning how to do things that anyone can prompt now…We tend to ignore that reality but it hangs above all these discussions like a dirty cloudreplyrootusrootus 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] That does not seem like it should be controversial. I have known for quite a long time that a motivated high school kid could learn to code well enough to be perfectly useful. Especially with popular languages like Python.This is just an object lesson for everyone who thought all that software guys did was write code that there is just a little bit more to the job than that. Actual developers should already have known.replysupertroop 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Hard disagree. That’s like saying just because you can type 200 words per minute you’re a better writer than Shakespeare.replyTanjreeve 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I took that as exactly his point. Learning the syntax of Python or C++ or whatever isn't particularly hard. If reading the manual or being the one guy in the company who knew how the yamls worked was your "moat" then your career was built on sand. The challenge has always been leveraging that use of the tool into actually doing something useful with it.replymajormajor 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Yep, I use it every day. IMO it's a bigger long-term productivity lever for someone who knows good code than it is for someone who doesn't look at the code (at least for systems that are expected to have lots of users).For those sorts of systems, comments like this just remind me of people pitching UML + codegen-or-outsourcing 20 years ago.> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.> I say this as someone who has spent more than 20 years honing their craft as a software engineer.I've worked with outsourced code, and I've worked with similarly-messy/not-forward-thinking first-iteration startup-MVP code that found success and now needs to do more and be more reliable while being cheaper to operate. It ain't pretty.Once you start modifying working code that people rely on you quickly start to see that the code itself matters. There aren't enough tests in the world to get around this from a quality POV. And piles of copypasta turn into either inconsistent behaviors (bad from a user satisfaction POV) or a continual drag on velocity (bad from a product goals/competitivness POV). And I've run the tools on those sorts of "found MVP, now need to iterate fast" codebases, both on the messy parts and the better parts.Sure, Claude can chew through the pain points of "let me find the ten copypasta versions of this and try to update them all" and chase down all the weird stupid bugs/janky things that that requires because each of them evolved separately much faster than a human can. But it's not gonna be as fast as it was at writing the first version, and it's gonna get more and more annoying. You hit the point where your agent is churning for hours and running more and more tests and inadvertently breaking more things trying to make the change in all those places, and making MORE code changes to fix those (and those are just the caught broken things the tests cover!).It's wayyyyy faster and less potentially painful to have it make updates to a well-factored module. "You don't have to read the code" is all well and good until you have a 10k+ line PR that's 10x larger than it needs to be because nobody read the code in the past, and you realize that most of the relevant test files also changed substantially and you don't have that much known-unchanged permutation coverage of the actual things users do... how comfortable are you pushing the "ship it" button then?replydaymanstep 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] > You hit the point where your agent is churning for hours and running more and more tests and inadvertently breaking more things trying to make the change in all those placesI've had this experience with vibe-coded applications written by Claude itself. For some reason, Claude doesn't seem to use any good practices unless I tell it to, and seems to require me to walk it through a decent design up front.replywlonkly 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I read an article not long ago which I cannot find for the life of me now, but the thing in it that stuck with me was the idea that people (in the context, career software developers) were not either AI-pilled or anti-AI, but rather that people are both excited and afraid at the same time.replyjosephg 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Yes, I’m in this camp. I’ve been pushing forward some personal projects lately using LLMs. At first, I was delighted at how productive I was, prompting. But over time a lot of cracks have started to show. Claude is good at programming “in the small”. It’s good at getting self contained, well scoped tasks done. But it’s bad at large scale system thinking. Over time, every project I’ve gotten Claude to write has become riddled with poor design choices layered on top of one another until even Claude struggles to make forward progress. And at that point, what do you do? You’ve gotta read all its code. Something I’ve learned I should just do from the start to save myself a lot of time later on.It’s also strangely bad at correctness. You can ask it to write unit tests for a project. Unless you’re careful with your prompting, it will only write the unit tests that it knows will pass.Generally, these models are amazing tools. But they cannot be trusted to make correct, maintainable software. At least not yet. Maybe in another year or two.replymajormajor 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] > Claude is good at programming “in the small”. It’s good at getting self contained, well scoped tasks done. But it’s bad at large scale system thinking. Over time, every project I’ve gotten Claude to write has become riddled with poor design choices layered on top of one another until even Claude struggles to make forward progress.What's really fun about these tools is that this is both true and false!If you ask these tools to reason about things in-the-large you often get very useful information back out of them.I've asked about refactors I was thinking about doing, and gotten accurate and useful information back, which as been AMAZINGLY helpful for avoiding "let me start doing this, and then realize 4 hours in that it's not gonna work as well as I hoped" traps.But it's a very attention-on-one-thing-at-a-time thing. IMO this is fairly inherent to the models, but people have been doing great work making the tooling around them smarter in terms of how to break up tasks ahead of time to compensate, so I'm not gonna say it won't get materially better.So if you prompt it to do a task in a certain way, especially in a "plan mode" type of usage, you can get a pretty solid recipe + execution of a properly-designed implementation of that task.But if you're not opinionated and checking in frequently, you're gonna get the sorta median-approach or random-luck-output-of-the-day decision. And so the human-in-the-loop point is unlikely to go away as long as the human has more context. Even if it's half-baked or not-fully-realized intuition about how the code is likely to evolve in the future that you don't put into every prompt.> It’s also strangely bad at correctness. You can ask it to write unit tests for a project. Unless you’re careful with your prompting, it will only write the unit tests that it knows will pass.My hunch is that this is the same fundamental problem. When it's attention is fully on "produce the next string of code" the parts of the context that relate to the broader system goals are NOT being considered as much for the output. So you get things like this, even with latest Opus still, when dealing with hard-to-isolate-in-a-single-test bugs (esp when it comes to multi-service call sequences or concurrent code):- "we need to fix this bug across eight methods in three files"- "I found the spot! we need to do [blah blah blah]"- "great, implement that plan"- "I've done it!"- "wait a sec... you moved some of the sequencing around, but didn't actually fix the fundamental issue"- "you're right! i moved [xyz] into [func b] instead of [func a] since it needed to be called later, but actually it needs to be after [func c] since it depends on the output of func b!"When asked about correctness it's good enough at "reasoning"-style output to spot these issues, but when generating code it's in such a pure "predict plausible code sequences" mode that this can get lost.replyjosephg 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Yeah I hear you with all of this.Its weird, working with LLMs. There are some things the LLMs are extremely good at doing autonomously. Like, reverse engineering, or reading documentation (and using that knowledge in other areas). There are things that they can do - but you need to explicitly prompt. Like, I've found Opus is quite good at optimising code. I've had a lot of success by asking it to write benchmarks (and do profiling), and use that data to improve the performance of some piece of code. Thats often enough to get quite large performance improvements. You can get even further by showing it similar code others have written which is well optimised. It's very good at copying optimisation ideas from one project to another.But then there are very simple things it really struggles to do. Some kinds of correctness testing. Invariants. System design.Is it bad at that stuff, or do I just need to figure out how to prompt the LLM? To return to the topic of this thread, I think we're seeing a lot of different opinions on LLM generated code for 3 reasons:1. Some people aren't looking at claude's output at all. Some people are looking at the code and it looks fine to them. And some people (with more experience writing software) are looking at the code and judging it poorly.2. We all prompt our LLMs very differently! It turns out that you get really different results based on how you prompt the machine. We're all figuring this out together. Some people have better instincts than others.3. We're working on different projects. Claude is comparatively much better at end-user facing software. Its great at making a standalone website. Its much less good at finding and fixing obscure bugs in large, established pieces of software. If you work in consulting, LLMs can already do a lot of your job. If you work on Chrome or Unreal or the windows kernel, maybe not so much.replymajormajor 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] > Is it bad at that stuff, or do I just need to figure out how to prompt the LLM? To return to the topic of this thread, I think we're seeing a lot of different opinions on LLM generated code for 3 reasons:I think there's definitely a bit of both. Some things are easier to prompt "adequately." Some domains or types of requests are tougher.The billion dollar question (well, trillion dollar, looking at the valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic) is will that change enough to actually replace the highly-paid people who currently are needed to make sure shit doesn't go sideways? They're betting that they can solve the "turn a bad prompt into a good-enough series of prompts" problem generically for everyone.And where exactly that lands could have a lot of knock-on effects. The easy targets are things like SaaS that is only valuable because of economies of scale but the problems are "simple" if you don't have that scale.But even there, there's a lot of echoes of the past, where things like ad-hoc Access apps or spreadsheets powered (or still power!) a bunch of business processes in lieu of SaaS products. How much appetite is there long-term for large businesses to really go back to owning all that in-house?Also a fun irony in that the trillion-dollar-valuation world is basically "the biggest SaaS of them all" and those companies have a huge target on them and at that point practically everyone else in the world would be gunning for them. If they do find that "good enough" point, they also have to hope that nobody can replicate it for less anytime soon... (but they'll also have given those folks aiming at doing just that a great tool for helping build those systems).replywild_egg 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I'm a divided individual.I've spent an obscene number of hours learning how to get reliably good quality code out of these things. I'm actually very happy with where the tech is right now and can't imagine ever going back to typing code by hand.But I absolutely hate how companies and society at large are acting because of this stuff. It feels like all rationality has flown out the window. So I'm just staying in my sandbox with my little toys and hoping the mass psychosis blows over at some point.replydang 8 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] As an aside, the variety of examples in that other thread is impressive. Here are some that I noticed:Fixing my furnace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845New software for a retro keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158Customizing my camper van: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379Porting my astronomy app from an old Nokia phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242Fixing my kid’s science fair project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419364Unborking the family printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419480Learning to draw anatomy (!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418716Lowering my electrical bill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417949Making classic guitar pedals programmable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418006Avocado armchair guy victory lap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417658 ( There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, ...I think some of this pro/anti AI discussion is really a proxy for something else though. There is another unstated, societal disagreement about personal responsibility and the behaviors of the AI tool users.It isn't entirely new, as people have always been blaming abstractions which lack agency (society, bureaucracy, "the machine", "the process", "the game", etc.) to conduct themselves in an ethically or logically flawed manner and then shirk responsibility. But, I think it is accelerating dramatically with the way AI agent usage is being adopted. I don't see how this can possibly continue to be normalized without leading to a catastrophic outcome.Right now, AI tool usage is being applied in ways that would have been considered misconduct, negligence, or fraud if the actors were doing the same thing via traditional outsourcing. People who have a contractual and ethical responsibility to apply analysis, judgement, and oversight are rapidly turning into dumb pipes who just relay content. They essentially phone it in, trying to take credit for apparently moving KPIs "up and to the right". They pretend to themselves and others that they are reviewers and still in control, but when things go wrong they expect forgiveness and for others to lean in and clean up their rapidly spreading mess.In software circles, many of us are appalled by this slop that is poisoning the well for our existing organizations. It seems like a massive, toxic externality. To us, people aiming their AI agents into our existing collaborations are pretty much flipping a switch to "roll coal", or worse.replytrumpdong 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I don't know if that's specific to AI. It seems accountability levels are in hell right now. Consider anything the president has done and how that would have gone if any other president ever did it. Or anything AI companies do. Or anything Tesla does. Or X.replyhunterpayne 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Don't bring politics into it. We can literally see the software being produced getting worse very quickly since the introduction of LLMs for coding. I expect a wave of data breaches to come soon when the hackers realize how many new holes have been created lately and adjust their tactics.replytrumpdong 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] But it's not just software and it's not just LLMs. Everything was starting to turn to slop before LLMs hit the scene.replyTheOtherHobbes 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Yes, it's a cultural problem. A failure of responsibility, a lapse into collective delusion that fails to take the limits of truth and physical reality seriously, in favour of a dream world made of status and money.AI in theory could be a transformative technology. In practice it's the final product of a self-destructive system that has lost contact with the real world.replyskirmish 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] In other words, engineers are becoming (bad) middle management: happy to take credit on wins and quick to blame underlings (LLMs in this case) for any mishaps. As long as managers are allowed to play politics in workplace, of course engineers will try to do the same!replyFr0styMatt88 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] We aren’t even being given a choice nor being consulted for our judgement.Higher-ups are literally saying “This company WILL use AI, you are required to use AI, now go use it whether you want to or not”.I wonder if this will change now with the model cost explosions that are happening.replypixl97 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] And this is why I'm glad we don't have full continuous learning AGI at this point. Humanity is not ready. We neither have the legal system nor the responsibility of handling something that would be capable of agency when turned on.replywarumdarum 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] There are also madman who get tools and capabilities via AI sane society would never hand anyone. Thos is a liberation for the untamed fringe.replyjimmygrapes 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!replyTylerE 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Lemme give another. I was formerly quite anti-AI but bought a cheap Claude plan just to play around with it a bit. First thing I built with it was this - https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano, in about an hour and maybe 10 prompt cycles. It replaced, for my specific use case, the 10% of the functionality of an increasingly-unreliable commercial app. That's including building the website, setting up actions for mac and windows builds...My next project was a 2d game with random terrain, physics, sound, music, multiple levels, a day/night cycle with transitions high score tracking... (not uploaded anywhere, but it works, and I refined it a good bit.). That was more like 8 hours and maybe a 100 prompts.Here are a few screenshots:https://imgur.com/a/vhUXBu3One thing that I have found to make a pretty big difference is using both the latest models and higher thinking levels. Opus 4.8 with thinking on Extra or even Max is genuinely mind blowing. The thing I hadn't really appreciated, having a sort of naive impression formed mainly from using free early versions of stuff like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion was sort of that "Type a big ass prompt and it craps out a result" experience. But Claude is really great at refining from feedback, and it's way more flexible and responsive than I would have ever expected. I can do something like take a screenshot of a small portion of the running app or website or whatever and just say "This button needs to be bigger" or "make this red" or something like that, or even sometimes just "fix this", and Claude both correctly identifies what I'm talking about, and actually does the thing.here I've found it really, incredibly game changing is my health. I have a pretty, to put it mildly, complex medical profile at this point. I haven't worked in over a year and pretty much every sign is pointing towards permanent disability at this point. Tons of symptoms, long med list, and I live in a smaller town with not great access to care. I'm also autistic and have not the greatest verbal communication, especially under stress or time pressure. I dumped all my info at it, in bits and bobs over several days (Side note... it's memory is pretty limited, but it will quite happily right out everything it knows from a session into a markdown file it can later re-read. I've found it very good for things like screening for drug interactions, or talking through and logging symptoms (and it can log those into human readable markdown files too). Biggest win (other than having unlimited time and interactions) is that it thinks across specilaties, versus the "real world" where the gastro only wants to deal with gastro stuff, neurology only wants to do neuro.I certainly don't (and wouldn't) use it as a replacement for a doctor, but as an adjunct it's phenomenal. For instance, it flagged a possible drug interaction with a symptom I was having, and then offered to draft a portal message to my GP about it. I have poor executive function so lowering the friction from "type up a message and send it" to "copy and paste" is actually a pretty big deal. Turns something (I probably won't do) later into something I will do now.It wouldn't surprise me if my very direct, literal, autistic communication style is particularly well suited to interacting with AI. I actually find talking to it rather refreshing as, while of course it's not perfect, it tends to actually respond to what I say rather than the all the assumed subtext NTs tend to expect/react to.replymichaelhoney 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I am very optimistic about people using LLMs to explore their medical issues. Human bodies are complex and doctors are time- and intelligence- limited. An LLM can be a really useful partner.replyhunterpayne 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Dear god no. ML is useful for medicine and has been for some time. LLMs in medicine are 100% malpractice and should be treated as such. LLMs Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023And the parent said,>I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency crazeAnd 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".replypeteforde 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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!replyjohnfn 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] I'm with GP here, there is nothing to respond in what you actually said because you misunderstood the comment you replied to.replyoverfeed 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] > It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious griftWas 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.replythunky 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] > Was it universally obvious?Yes. Crypto was never productive.But nice that your buddy financed a house with other people's dumb money.replytrumpdong 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.replypeteforde 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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".replytrumpdong 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replyFabHK 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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".replytrumpdong 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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"replyFabHK 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.replyhunterpayne 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replyFabHK 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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 The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.You don't say.replypeteforde 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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!?replydang 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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 ( I completely am fine with HN being a negative placeThat 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!replyjohnfn 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–] > 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 :)replyrpcope1 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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?replyclaytongulick 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.replyarjie 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replySyneRyder 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] > ... 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.replyhappytoexplain 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.replymook 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replyYZF 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.).replySlinkyOnStairs 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] > 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.replysenordevnyc 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.replySlinkyOnStairs 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] "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.replysenordevnyc 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.replycard_zero 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.replysenordevnyc 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Exactly.replyceejayoz 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replyhunterpayne 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Pretending he has any real insight into AI is also a bit goofy. Listen to him speak. Even his own stories about his time at Google don't show himself in a good light like he thinks they do. There are multiple, multi-billion dollar products that Google made where they had to trick and lie to him to get them released. And he still tells those stories as if he was right to try to kill those products. He's an executive and has no real expertise or insight into LLMs or AI.replysenordevnyc 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] Quite recently? It ended in 2021, again, before ChatGPT and this latest boom. I doubt anyone today would hear “AI leaders” and think about Eric Schmidt, no disrespect to the man intended.replyJblx2 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] >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?replynumpad0 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replytactlesscamel 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replyjohnfn 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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!replyfoxes 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replyvjvjvjvjghv 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.replyhappytoexplain 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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).replyfoxes 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.replyvjvjvjvjghv 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replyscarab92 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.replyfoxes 8 days ago | root | parent | next [–] 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?replytrumpdong 7 days ago | root | parent | next [–] Everyone's replaceable in capitalismreplydatsci_est_2015 8 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] It’s not even a dichotomy, A vs B, especially when you consider “AI” is incredibly poorly defined. There are many new technologies available, and I have nuanced opinions about all of them.I’m happy that my friend who works in plastics manufacturing can move his monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet to something more predictable and maintainable. I’m deeply annoyed by my coworker who’s trying to put a chatbot in our UI.replybartread 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] I think the community is divided. But I think it’s less A/B and more a spectrum. There are plenty of more balanced comments rolling in from people who’ve been using it for a while and have experienced both the advantages and disadvantages.E.g., agentic development is great for solo projects and prototyping, but can become overwhelming alarmingly quickly when you’ve got multiple devs involved, especially if they’re not all super-disciplined and consistent about how they use their agents. And we’re all learning how to deal with that.replysanderjd 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] Yep. It has a lot to do with which comment threads you click on. I often read one and think "wow, I can't believe the people here are so negative" and then on another on the same front page at the same time and think "wow, I can't believe the hype here". It's just different people participating on different articles.replythrow10920 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–] I think that the "group attribution error"[1]/"goomba fallacy"[2] are what's going on - someone will sample ~10 comments out of a thread of 500 on a site with tens of thousands of users and assume that those 10 comments are representative of the thread or all of HN.(and a different person will do a similar sampling technique but come away with the opposite conclusion, that HN is super pro-AI)This is why neglecting statistics in favor of vibes is a bad idea.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035600[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035860replyjonas21 8 days ago | parent | prev | next [3 more] Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7.And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page?HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremel