Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
news.ycombinator.com4215 points by usefulposter 5 days ago
4215 points by usefulposter 5 days ago
I am 100% behind this. I've been browsing hackernews since I started in tech, it is the only forum i regularly browse, and partake in. Simply because the quality of submissions and conversations are so high. There has been more AI related articles this part year, and it only seems ramping. I personally haven't found the AI part of the comments as big of a deal but dang and tom might be doing more than I realize on that front.
Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.
At this point there nearly should be a "tax" on category, as of this moment I count 8-10 related posts on the front page related to AI / LLMs. It is a hot field, but I come to hackernews, to partake in discussions about things that are interesting, and many of those just doesn't cut it, in my opinion.
The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.
It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely. And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)
But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.
> It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely.
alternative view. it is going way too quickly and premature rules can be reduced if the actual damage is less than theexpected model.
You can always make things easier, its much harder to rebuild a community that hass been destroyed.
> And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)
You saying that in a website with a UI straight out of the 90s is really fucking funny. Cause HN is a perfect example of resistance to change working out. Facebook chased every trend and failed (the social media, meta as an ad platform is doing ok), tech blogs chased trends and failed. This place said "nah this is good", and is still here.
> The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.
That's true, but it also means that Show HN has less value than it used to: the SNR is falling off a cliff :-(
I planned to post a Show HN for a new product I want to launch (all human written by myself, with only the GEO docs vibed currently), but not sure now that any decent/quality product will ever get air. All the oxygen is being sucked out by low-effort products.
That's what I mean about doing things to keep our heads above water. For example, we're restricting Show HNs for now.
If you (or anyone) have ideas about other pragmatic measures we could take, we're interested.
> If you (or anyone) have ideas about other pragmatic measures we could take, we're interested.
Suggestion: Make it clear and explicit in guidelines and FAQ that this forum is for human conversation and that writing/editing post or comment by LLM or automated posting is bannable offense.
Second and similarly, "vibe-coded" should have no place on Show HN and this could be made much more explicit.
Invisible text that will serve as a honey pot for LLMs is one thing to try. Imagine a comment where half of the words are marked as invisible by CSS, the other half has letters rearranged, but at the HTML level all the words look the same. LLMs will have to render pages which is a lot more expensive.
That won't help.
1.) Rendering pages is table stakes for an AI headless browser tool, and 2.) most of the LLM comments probably come from copy and pasting to ChatGPT, not from autonomous agents.
maybe you guys already do this, but what about having a line of text near the submission fields that says "If you are submitting a Show HN post, please do not post an AI generated version, it degrades the quality of submissions (or it makes it harder for others to submit high quality content, or something like that)
I know when I see those guidelines show up in reddit submission forms, i respect that because I see what the sub exactly wants..
> For example, we're restricting Show HNs for now.
This is promising; in what way is it restricted? Are there any extra hoops for me to jump through before (eventually) posting my ShowHN?
You'll be fine. I don't want to say much specifically because it'll just end up as extra steps on some "how to promote your project on HN" checklist somewhere.
> But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.
Is this page meant to be discoverable normally, or is it just there to host a message for those who encounter the restriction?
The latter. But I gave it its own URL because it might also be worth linking to in other contexts.
Will removing the incentive, which is the upvotes, help reduce this spam? You can disable public access to the points gained by a new account (or may be for every account).
Or if the ranking that's attractive to spammer, may be try experimenting with randomizing order of comments in a discussion.
What I hope not to see is the Reddit method of "Oh you made a new account? Cool. You can't post anywhere and you can't post until you've posted catch 22"
Isn’t that going to cause more spam, though, from people that start using AI to comment until their account is mature enough to post a Show HN?
I feel the same and find myself extending it beyond forums. I've started skipping over articles about AI more and more from authors I normally enjoy reading because so few of those articles end up being particularly interesting or insightful.
AI is obviously an important topic but it has been discussed to absolute death the past couple years and very few people have anything useful to add at this point. Things will of course evolve and change in the near term but someone speculating that maybe this will happen or that will happen isn't very useful.
Given the risks and unknowns I think we should collectively be treating it as a major risk to our economic and national security, and figuring out how to mitigate the downside risks without stifling the upside. But most of the people in power have zero interest in doing that so we're all going to YOLO this in real time.
I've been on HN for 15 years and most of the times 80% of the content is not interesting to me, but i come for the 20%
> Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.
Exactly. I feel like HN has never been this boring. Enough of the slop, let’s talk about interesting stuff again!
If you haven't yet checked it out, I'd recommend taking a look at Tildes for similarly high quality submissions/conversations as on HN. It really is such a breath of fresh air compared to most other platforms.
Just had a look, it is pretty interesting, just from the few times I've checked the frontpage there was some interesting articles to me. with a variety of topic. Great suggestion!
I personally joined HN because of various AI discussions.
Comparatively, other sites such as Reddit, Twitter and YouTube just shill content, applications or products. A ton of the posts on Reddit are just AI written ffmpeg wrappers which no one should care about but apparently people do...
Upvoting rings on Reddit are likely not policed like they are here. That is to say, I wouldn't assume there is real interest based on Reddit points.
Using AI to write content is seen so harshly because it violates the previously held social contract that it takes more effort to write messages than to read messages. If a person goes through the trouble of thinking out and writing an argument or message, then reading is a sufficient donation of time.
However, with the recent chat based AI models, this agreement has been turned around. It is now easier to get a written message than to read it. Reading it now takes more effort. If a person is not going to take the time to express messages based on their own thoughts, then they do not have sufficient respect for the reader, and their comments can be dismissed for that reason.
This is very well put, and captures my feelings on it. I take it as disrespect that someone would have any expectation for me to read something they can’t be bothered to write. LinkedIn is a great example - my entire professional network is just spamming at this point, which drowns out others that DO put in any effort.
If it takes longer to read, it's not an AI problem, but the author failing to catch that the comment is too drawn out. I don't see how it is a problem to have AI write a comment if you agree with the content. If it is bad content, it will eventually reflect badly on the author anyway.
I skim 100 comments here everyday. Good comments/bad comments, overly long comments, whatever, time to read is low. I assume all those authors have a strong opinion / expertise on the subject that urged them to take the time to write that comment, which makes skimming hacker news to keep a pulse on the world (imho) a valuable task. If, instead, most of those comments are composed by molt-bots, then I'm not getting a "real" view of the world, I don't care how good and concise the comments are, I'd be wasting my time reading about news that may not matter to anyone and opinions that may not exist.
When I have AI write things for me, I'm spending a good amount of time on it - certainly longer than it takes to read. I'm also usually editing it quite a bit. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I still don't think it's appropriate to make a blanket statement about using AI to write content violating this social contract you described.
Where does the line fall? I can use an LLM to help form new and novel thoughts into prose, right? To structure and present it in conventional language rather than stream of thought. Is that disrespectful? It doesn't feel so.
> I can use an LLM to help form new and novel thoughts into prose, right? To structure and present it in conventional language rather than stream of thought.
Better to post your stream of thought.
Using LLMs to turn stream of thoughts into prose is mostly just adding fluff and expanding the text to make it look more like thoughtful prose. What you get looks nice to the creator because they agree with what it's saying, but it wastes other reader's time as they have to dissect the extra LLM prose to get back to the author's stream of thought.
Just post what you're thinking, even if it's not elegant prose. Don't have an LLM wrap it in structures and cliches that disguise it as something else.
I strive to be understood, and my streams of thought are often weird and generally intractable. Nobody really wants to read that; nobody wants the deep threads required to explain it.
I value reading novel and interesting thoughts and ideas. I don't feel "tricked" when I read something of substance or thought provoking, even if LLM generated and decorated with the platitudes and common forms for dull readers.
Something I try very hard to impress on my PhD students is that the process of writing is part of the process of thinking. We often have cool things in our head that don't sound right when we write them down, and that's usually because the thing in our head was more amorphous than we realized. The time you put in getting the written expression of it to work is actually helping you crystallize what you're thinking in the first place.
I guarantee you that I would endlessly rather read your streams of thought about amateur boat building than read another AI-generated Hacker News comment ever again. Don't sell yourself short.
I get that feeling, and I’ll echo my sibling comment: I’d much rather read your stream of thought and get on that brain train with you than see some fluffed up and sterilized version.
I also think that having that authentic voice, while it does open us up to criticism and maybe being misunderstood, also gives us a way to receive actionable feedback to improve.
I think we all want to be understood, and for me part of that understanding is seeing the person. How you write is a part of who you are, and I hope you don’t feel like you need to suppress that.
Feel bad for the people who used to do that for you. Many people have difficulty expressing what they're thinking in words. Those people always feel happy when they see someone else say what they're thinking. If AI can do that now then you don't need them. No point in coming onto Hacker News and using AI to participate in playing that role when you can just talk to the AI. If too many people do this then Hacker News won't even be able to play a vestigial role.
Is it really that dire?
Is it more awful to expect every reader to decipher my rambling, disjoint thoughts? Yes, it is. And, it undervalues the substance of what I'm trying to say because the willing audience dwindles to triviality.
You're being self-deprecating. You might believe the way you think and formulate ideas isn't good enough but it's at least you. The more you filter your thoughts through AI the more that signal is lost. If I'm not talking to you then I might as well talk to the robot myself, and honestly, that's what I spend most of my time doing these days. So when I come to Hacker News hoping for human connection the last thing I want is to talk to the robot even more. You should also show more respect for your peers whose writing talents you envy. People who are good at writing prose are usually good at deciphering it too.
I sucked at writing myself. It's been my experience that over time practicing to becoming a better writer helped me structure my thoughts into something cohesive on the page. And I got better over time.
Sorry, but I prefer original human streams of thought. I now have a pretty darn good filter for ignoring AI gen text just like a filter for skipping over page ads.
> Where does the line fall?
For now I would argue when ai edits for you instead of helping you edit. Take a look at the examples that Dang posted if you have not yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616
The first 5 I looked at were pretty egregious and not subtle.
Yes, I have also done the search and found that the beta on "LLM!" objections is very high; often seeming wrong as right.
As of this comment which ones are you finding wrong? 5 of the first 7 are confessed ai users, the other 2 look like ai to me too.
When I said "I have also done the search" I meant this simple one: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu...
Dang's search is much more clear cut and I think that is going to be better guide to what the enforcement will look like.
Looking at your search though I think we have to exclude today or at least this thread to get a fair look how llm generated is thrown around or not https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1773187200&dateRange=custom&...
Most of the comments I saw on the first page are not an accusation but there are some there 2 of the 3 I looked at looked pretty clear cut, while the 3rd was poorly written hype which looks like llm output, but I have seen similar from humans before at least from what I read, in either case it was flagged appropriately.
> Is that disrespectful
It is, by way of being extremely dishonest in at least two ways:
- there's no way you would do this if you were required to disclose that you used an LLM to write your comment.
- therefore, if your primary goal isn't communication, then you must be doing it to look smart and "win" the conversation
Same reason people desperately post links to scientific papers they don't understand in a frantic attempt to stay on top of some imaginary debate.
I guess, in theory, this can eventually be countered by people using LLM browser integrations to tell them whether comments are worth reading (and maybe to summarize long comments). Is anyone currently working on that? It might be interesting to see.
First we would run into the spam-filter problem no different to email. Then we have to choose: do we concede to viewing the world through a lens of WhatEverAI, or train it locally on our own thoughts/views on the world, and hope that AI model is never compromised.
I don't believe that delegating reading comprehension to an LLM is really any better than delegating writing ability. In fact I'd argue it's worse to have an automation advising on what's worth reading or not.
There are a lot of people who have no time for something like Infinite Jest and even getting through the first few chapters is an effort. But at least they tried. An LLM excluding the possibility of reading this book because it is 1000 pages of postmodern absurdity effectively optimises away the fringes of human creativity and leaves only the average stuff behind.
AI slop detectors already exist and are no better than snake oil, because a person can have an LLM-smelling writing style without actually using AI. After all, LLMs were originally trained on human input.
Well just have an AI read it for you then!
That reminds me of the gmail LLM usage where AI can writes your emails for you and also summarize incoming ones. Maybe we lost the thread somewhere...
It's not just about the increase in volume, it's about the delta between the prompt and the generation.
If the generation merely restates the prompt (possibly in prettier, cleaner language), then usually it's the case that the prompt is shorter and more direct, though possibly less "correct" from a formal language perspective. I've seen friends send me LLM-generated stuff and when I asked to see the prompt, the prompts were honestly better. So why bother with the LLM?
But if you're using the LLM to generate information that goes beyond the prompt, then it's likely that you don't know what you're talking about. Because if you really did, you'd probably be comfortable with a brief note and instructions to go look the rest up on one's own. The desire to generate more comes from either laziness or else a desire to inflate one's own appearance. In either case, the LLM generation isn't terribly useful since anyone could get the same result from the prompt (again).
So I think LLMs contribute not just to a drowning out of human conversation but to semantic drift, because they encourage those of us who are less self-assured to lean into things without really understanding them. A danger in any time but certainly one that is more acute at the moment.
This reads as an AI comment to me. Anybody else?
AI has not been used to write any comment that I have ever posted on Hacker News. You can observe my previous comments over the years, even prior to the adoption of modern LLMs, which demonstrate how I communicate.
(While the patterns may be similar, I have a tendency to be more loquacious due to my larger token limit! %)
On 4chan, a long time ago, comments like these would invariably get the reply "not ur personal army"
Think about that for a minute. 4chan would make fun of the comment you just made.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832601>
Email mods instead: hn@ycombinator.com
We've all heard the phrase "the sum of all human knowledge".
I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Which has its place. But a future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It's the heat death of thought.
Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.
Dostoevsky said that if all human knowledge could ever be reduced to 2 + 2 = 4, man would stick out his tongue and insist that 2 + 2 = 5. That was a 19th century formulation—he was a contemporary of Boole. I wonder what the equivalent would be for the LLM era.
Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things.
That may or may not be true, but the expression of thought and creativity matters to transfer meaning. If you average that out, it loses momentum. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346935. Compare the posters first and second, LLM assisted, paragraph. The second one is just bleak. If I had to read several pages like that, my eyes would glaze over. It cannot hold attention.
> Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.
The why not is: human beings are valuable in and of themselves, not just because of what they can do. If you raise the bar too high, you kick people out. And our society just isn't setup for that, and is unlikely to ever be in our lifetimes.
And I'm talking about a radical shift in the concept of ownership, where shareholding is radically democratized. Basically every random Joe needs the option to live comfortably on passive income generated by things he owns.
But it's a weird kind of average... Not the 3 from 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 but rather like the bland tv-dinner which tastes non-upsetting for most people.
An intellectual Mode rather than a Mean or a Median?
I don't understand what you mean by "intellectual mode".
I mean that it's a kind of lowest common denominator average where it's more important to seem reasonable and to not upset anyone rather than be really good in some ways and bad in others.
> I don't understand what you mean by "intellectual mode".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)
If human knowledge were a pyramid, LLMs just make the pyramid flatter, i.e. shorter, wider at the bottom, and narrower at the tip. It makes Humans dumber.
Thank you!
The capital M had meaning that I didnt grasp since I hadn't heard of Mode in that way before.
Today's learning!
What a great resource, thank you <3
The comment by Joseph Greenpie[0] is just marvellous, what a gem!
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The comment is actually by https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/107126/vishal ... Joseph Greenpie made the last edit to it.
Perhaps closer to “the mean vector point such that all outbound vectors to different training tests are in sum the smallest”? I assume that’s a property of neural networks anyways, though I’m out of date on current math for them.
If you want a more accurate measure then you should subtract "the sum of all human ignorance" before taking the average.
> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.
No, it's far worse. It's the mode of all human knowledge. The amount of effort you have to put into an LLM to get it to choose an option that isn't the most salient example of anything that could fit as a response is monumental. They skip exact matches for most common matches; it's basically a continuity from when search engines stopped listening to your queries and just decided what query they wanted to respond to - and it suddenly became nearly impossible to search for people who had the same first name as anyone who was famous or in the news.
I've tried a dozen times to get LLMs to find authors for me, or papers, where I describe what I remember about them fairly exactly. They deliver me a bunch of bestsellers and popular things, over and over again, who don't even match at all large numbers of the criteria I've laid out.
It's why they're dumb and can't accomplish anything original. It's structural. They're inherently biased to deliver lowest common denominator work. If you're trying to deliver something original or unusual, what bubbles up is samplings of the slop that surrounds us every day. They're fed everything, meaning everything in proportion to its presence in the world. The vast majority of things are shit, or better said, repetitions of the same shit that isn't productive. The things that are most readily available are already tapped out. The things that are productive are obscure.
You can't even get LLMs to say some words by asking them to "say word X." They just will always find a word that will fill that slot "better." As I said, this is just google saying "did you mean Y?" But it's not asking anymore, it's telling.
edit: It's also why asking it to solve obscure math problems is a dumb test. If the math problem is obscure enough, and there's only one way to possibly solve it, and somebody did it once, somewhere, or referred to the possibility of solving it that way, once, somewhere, you're going to have a single salient example. It's not a greenfield, it's not a white sheet of paper: it's a green field with one yellow flower on it, or a piece of white paper with one black sentence on it, and you're asking it to find the flower or explain the sentence.
edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346901 - I'm late and long-winded.
I feel the same about Claude Code. It's a fast but average developer at just about everything and there are some things that average developers are just consistently bad at and therefore Claude is consistently bad at.
I'm not sure, I think you overestimate the average developer. But then, the average code doesn't end up in public repositories, it spends decades in enterprise codebases rotting.
At this point I'd rather review LLM generated code than a poor developer's.
> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.
It's literally what it is. Fairly sure that mathematically it's a fancier regression/prediction so it's a form of average.
> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.
Have you tried the paid versions of frontier models? They certainly do not feel like they spew the average of all human knowledge. It's not uncommon for them to find and interpret the cutting edge of papers in any of the domains that I've asked them questions about.
Yup. And they all sound like slop. Read the papers, comprehend the papers, don't make someone else's computer do it for you.
Every scientist I ever met (and myself included) has a backlog of papers to read that never seems to shrink. It really is not trivial to stay up to date on research, even in niche fields, considering the huge volume of research that is being produced.
It is not uncommon for me to read a recently published review and find 2-3 interesting papers in the lot. Plus the daily Google scholar alerts. It can definitely be beneficial to have a LLM summarize a paper. Of course, at this point, one should definitely decide "is this worth reading more carefully?" and actually read at least some parts if needed.
Anti-tech contrarian sentiment happens with every new technology. Someone older than you probably said the same thing about the internet.
Yep. Even windows, the most widely used OS on the planet has a fringe group of contrarians still today. Amazing.
I grew up using windows and was a fan of it, but now I am a contrarian because of how shitty it has become. The fact that it is widely used is not an argument that it is good. It is widely used because of existing market share and reluctance of change by people.
Even tobacco, the second most widely used drug, has a group of contrarians still today. Amazing.
What's sad is that there's so much of that at this site. This page in particular is a disaster, and what we're actually seeing a lot of at HN is claims that real humans are bots. And the people who make these accusations are certain of their validity.
Have you considered that this suspicion is because the number of obvious bots has exploded in the last half year or so, particularly after OpenClaw became the latest fad?
Start going to the profiles of every comment from a green account you see for a week and you’ll see how bad it is.
There will be friendly fire but unfortunately that’s to be expected when you click the top comment in a thread and realize an account has been posting 100% slop for months.
What I see is massive intellectual dishonesty, like this comment that doesn't engage with my actual points and instead attacks strawmen.
I won't comment further.
True, and they were right about it when they said that. They wouldn't be right anymore, because the Internet has evolved. The same might happen to LLMs, but currently one would be right to call LLM output "slop".
Depending on the criticism at the time, they were probably wrong at the time and are correct now. There were always trolls and bad people but at least there were no mega-corp playing with people's minds.
> Read the papers, comprehend the papers, don't make someone else's computer do it for you
Why not?
Personally, I don't have the specialized knowledge, nor the time needed, to read and understand papers outside my own 2-3 domains. LLMs do. And I appreciate what they can do for me. They do it better, faster, and more accurately than most 'popular science', provide better coverage and also provide the ability to interact with the material to any degree or depth that I care to, better than any article.
It would be silly to pass up this capability to make my life better simply because random folks on the Internet disparage the quality of the output (contrary to my own experience) and make hand-wavy points about 'someone else's computer) while offering no credible or useful alternative :)
How do you evaluate the quality of a summary of a paper you do not have the knowledge to read and understand?
> How do you evaluate the quality of a summary of a paper you do not have the knowledge to read and understand?
Tough question. I think the straightforward answer is that you can't.
That said, there is some confidence gained in an LLM's abilities based on its performance on papers in domains that I do understand. Yes, it's not going to be the same across all domains, but the frontier labs do publish capability scores across different domains, and that helps scrutinize the answers it provides, and how much salt to take with those.
I wonder if you have asked the same LLMs to explain or summarize a paper in one of your fields and see if it still makes sense.
It could be that the LLMs are good at stringing words together in a way that seems reasonable when you are not an expert yourself, much like people from other fields seem very knowledgeable until you compare many of them or hear/see them talk with each other.
> I wonder if you have asked the same LLMs to explain or summarize a paper in one of your fields and see if it still makes sense.
I have, and it does, hence my confidence in its ability to do the same in other domains. Depending on what you're using it for, it is advisable to maintain some level of quality control (spot checks, sampling, deep dives, more rigorous continuous review) as in any process control.
Nice, that's good to hear and from the Zeitgeist that I get kind of new if I understand it correctly.
pooling as it is called, is, well the same as averaging. has nothing to do with swimming really. it happens all the time in latent space. it is a tool, not a side effect.
I feel a little bit of irony in this post of a company/forum that is asking its users to not use AI while simultaneously trying to fund countless companies that are responsible for ruining the internet as we speak.
We aren't asking people to not use AI. (We use it ourselves.) What we're asking is not to post AI-generated comments to Hacker News. (We don't do that ourselves.)
By all means make good use of LLMs and other AI. What counts as good use? The world is figuring that out, it will take years, and HN is no exception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We just don't want it to interfere with the human conversation and connection that this site has always been for.
For example, it has always been a bad idea and against HN's rules when users post things that they didn't write themselves, or do bulk copy-pasting into the threads, or write bots to post things.
As I mentioned, the HN mods (who are also the HN devs) use AI extensively and will be doing so a lot more. The limits on that are not technical; they have to do with (1) how much work we still do manually—the classic "no time to do things that would make the things that take all our time take less of it"; and (2) the amount of psychic rewiring that's required—there's a limit to the RoA (rate of astonishment) that any human can absorb. (It's fascinating how technical people are suffering the most from that this time. Less technical people have longer experience being hit by disorienting changes, so for them the current moment is somewhat less skull-cracking.)
Getting this right doesn't mean replacing human-to-human interaction, it means we should have more time for that, and do a better job of supporting HN users generally, as well as YC founders who want to launch on HN, and so on. The goal is to enhance human relatedness, not diminish it.
I'm not quite sure what the correct term is for this scenario, in which LLMs are being forced upon people in many places that previously had human-to-human interaction, some of it coming from YC backed companies, while HN tries to insist that it's discussions should continue be human-to-human.
Having your cake and eating it too? NIMBYism?
If anything it reeks of privilege. It says that it's okay to spread slop on the world at large, just so long as it doesn't soil the precious orange website.
What's worse about all of this is dang is going to be in the middle of a religious war between the AI accusers and defenders on who is using AI to post. People that speak well because they sound like AI will be pissed. AI will just keep sounding more human. And the self-righteous that feel good when they call out a comment are going to be annoying as hell.
You're painting this as some sort of hypocrisy but I don't think that's the case. AI has infinite legitimate uses outside of creating slop. Lots of tools are used in the creation and distribution of slop - do we criticize all those other tools too? Do you like slop? Do you want it on the platforms you visit? Personally, I would prefer for AI companies to take the attitude that YCombinator has here and do their best to remove slop from their platforms. It's not hypocrisy - it's ethical business practice.
Thanks for the context! I hope HN will stay a place for knowledge sharing and deep conversations
1. There’s nothing human about hacker news. Since the telegraph, we lost human to human communication. We’ve gained a lot. But it’s naive to claim that HN is any semblance of human-to-human communication. 2. YC helped unleash the war that you’re now losing. This pleading screams too little too late. 3. Just because something “should” happen doesn’t mean it will. HMW Go build that future. HMW Replace HN with human verification and trust signals over AI slop algorithms that AI can’t produce. Pleading for change about it is not building. It’s the lawyers defense, not the engineers. I have only the utmost respect in YC and HN—but have heard this same argument for LI or any social media change. The networks’ defenses are crumbling and AI accelerated it.
Might be time to increase the value of trust signals over content.
Having worked for 12 years to keep this place as human as possible, I can't really agree that there's "nothing human about hacker news".
The mods here have quite a bit of leeway in how they run the site, YC funds it but effectively Dan is lord & master here and I suspect if the mods were to call it quits YC would lose their funnel pretty quickly. There is some balance, fortunately.
But yes, there is some irony there.
Yes a bit ironic, but I am glad they can see that there are times to use AI, and times for human interaction.
No one will ever think that lying that AI output is your own unique creation is a good thing.
The rule has been around for years, but only in case law, i.e. moderation comments (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). What's new is that we promoted it to the guidelines.
Fortunately I found some things we could cut as well, so https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html actually got shorter.
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Edit: here are the bits I cut:
Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.
It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.
I hate cutting any of pg's original language, which to me is classic, but as an editor he himself is relentless, and all of those bits—while still rules—no longer reflect risks to the site. I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN.
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Edit 2: ok you guys, I hear you - I've cut a couple of the cuts and will put the text back when I get home later.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
I don't understand why you cut these, they seem important! (I can understand the others, which feel either implied or too specific.)
Of course they're important, but they're also implicitly encoded into the culture. Cutting something from the guidelines doesn't mean the rule is canceled. HN has countless rules that don't appear explicitly in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I think I'm going to put that one back, though, because it's not a hill I want to die on and I know what arguing with dozens of people simultaneously feels like when you only have 10 minutes.
> Cutting something from the guidelines doesn't mean the rule is canceled.
Understood, but I feel like I see people breaking these ones frequently, so removing the explicit guideline feels to me like a bad idea.
People break them whether they're in the list or not. But don't worry, we'll put that one back.
My experience with posted rules is that it's less about people following them preemptively than having an explicit reference to point to when they don't.
HN's long-standing policy has been to fewer explicit rules, and looser rather than stricter interpretation. This particular one comes up often enough though that it's helpful to retain IMO, thanks for restoring the cut.
I've long made a practice of linking to moderator comments regarding policies when calling out deviations, as I'm sure the mods are aware, others might find that helpful. I've found it generally reduces the personal-irritation element going both ways, helps avoid derailing threads, and serves as a refresher to me on what standards apply.
I seem to recall a rule about "don't downvote something because you disagree with it", but I can't find anything like that.
Not sure if that's really solvable with rules, though.
My experience with downvotes is that people mostly use it as a "I don't like this" button, which is proxy for "I couldn't think of a counterargument so I don't want to look at it."
(I noted recently that downvotes and counterarguments appear to be mutually exclusive, which I found somewhat amusing.)
Whereas I will often upvote things I personally disagree with, if they are interesting or well reasoned. (This seems objectively better to me, of course, but maybe it's personality thing.)
Oh that one is a classic case of people 'remembering' a rule that never existed - there's a name for this illusion but I forget what it is.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for history...
This was (maybe still is) part of "reddiquette." Like the guidelines and case law here, it often found its way into subreddit rules and comments from moderators.
To me it's just like how, growing up in Canada, we all assumed we had Miranda rights because we watched American TV.
> I don't think we have to worry about cute animal pictures taking over HN.
Challenge accepted.
The real challenge is to do it in a way that's intellectually stimulating. Mind you The Economist just had an article about the monkey called Punch so all things are possible...
The laws of unintended consequences and never posting overhastily. You think you know these things and then blam.
I'm curious, just noticed there's no rule requiring comments to be in English, although I've never actually seen any other languages used here. Since the new directive is to write as best you can rather than use AI either to translate or edit, does that imply that one should write either all in another language or in a mix of English and another language? (The latter is especially relevant as many may either only know a technical term in one language, or know the terms in English but not the grammar to connect them.)
edit to add -- I completely agree with you that when one's English is "good enough," it's much better to read the original rather than an LLMs guess at how to polish it. It's just hard to define what that line is, especially for the poster themselves who has no idea what a native speaker can figure out. Would some posts be removed because they are too difficult to make sense of? Or would they be allowed in their native language?
HN is an English-language site. That's one of the many things that's not in the explicit list but is a long-established rule: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
It's purely for pragmatic reasons. We love other languages and have great admiration for the many community members who participate here despite English not being their first language.
FWIW I think “Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.” is different from the others.
It’s an instruction for how to use the site. It’s helpful to have it in the guidelines for when the flag feature should be used. Without it, the flag link is much more ominous.
Maybe it could be consolidated with the flag-egregious-comments rule?
Edit to add: IMHO it is not at all obvious on this site that flagging stories is meant to be roughly the equivalent of downvoting comments (and that flagging comments doesn’t have a counterpart at the story level).
I’m really curious how this will go. I have a suspicion that we will see more and more accounts all over the internet being controlled by AI agents and no amount of moderation will be able to stop it.
Because they've long ago passed the Turing test. Moderation won't be able to stop it because humans increasingly can't detect it.
I see well written people being called "LLM" here all the time, em-dash or not.
Even prior to LLMs, a single comment was rarely enough to identify a bot. Even if nonsensical, there's too little information to separate machine from confused human (plenty of people posting drunk on their phones).
On reddit people sometimes go through the comment history and see that it seems to be a bot, but that's fairly high effort.
The key is to accuse everyone of being an LLM. Those who don't react are bots. Those that fight the charge no matter how much its levied are also bots, but with better programming. Those that complain at first but give up when too much effort is required are the real humans. Any bot able to feel frustration is cool.
Maybe a reasonable approach would be that people could flag posts with a "probably AI" button to eventually trigger a "bot test" for that account (currently, the "score 5 in this mini game" type seem pretty clanker proof). If they pass, their posts for the hour, week, whatever result in a "not AI" indicator when someone clicks the "probably AI" button.
I assume we’ll end up with proof-of-identity attestation as a part of public posting (e.g. Worldcoin) which doesn’t necessarily solve the issue but will at least identify patterns more likely to be LLMs (e.g. a firehose of posts at all hours of the day from one identity). Then we’ll enter the dystopia of mandated real identity on the internet
I agree. I think that ultimately it will be governments providing services to attest humanity.
They already do to a certain extent via passports. I built a little human verifier using those at https://onlyhumanhub.com
I am pretty sure that through daily exposition to LLM output, most people's writing style will evolve and will soon be indistinguishable from LLM output
I'd be a wee bit cautious with the "AI edited" part of it; since that might exclude a number of people with disabilities or for whom english is a second (or third, or later) language.
My reading is that the intent is to have a human voice behind the text.
Monitor and see how it goes I guess!
I need to say something about this but it might have to be later as I have to run out the door shortly...
The short version is that we included it to protect users who don't realize how much damage they're doing to their reception here when they think "I'll just run this through ChatGPT to fix my grammar and spelling". I've seen many cases of people getting flamed for this and I don't want more vulnerable users—e.g. people worried about their English—to get punished for trying to improve their contributions. Certainly that would apply to disabled users as well, though for different reasons.
Here are some past cases of these interactions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
Edit: uni_baconcat makes the point beautifully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346032.
Most rules in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html have a lot of grey area, and how we apply them always involves judgment calls. The ones we explicitly list there are mostly so we have a basis for explaining to people the intended use of the site. HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law place, and—contrary to the "technically correct is the best correct" mentality that many of us share—we consciously resist the temptation to make them precise.
In other words yes, that bit needs to be applied cautiously and with care, and in this way it's similar to the other rules. Trying to get that caution and care right is something we work at every day.
That makes this more ok, IMO. I'm otherwise against "AI-edited" being part of the rules — it's very hard to draw the line (does asking an AI for synonyms of a word count?). AI-editing is especially a valuable tool for non-native-English speakers or similar.
I’m going to guess you’ve probably already thought about this, but just in case: is it worth adding a guideline about the guidelines being fuzzy and/or not being a comprehensive list? Or would that create more problems than it solves?
At such a general level, I think it would mostly go in one ear and out the other.
It's a bit different when specific cases come up because then there's a chance to talk about it, add clarifying comments, etc.
I've thought about fine-tuning a model on the corpus of your HN posts and then offering a service that would allow the user to paste their message into a text box and the Dangified version of their comment would pop out in another box next to it.
I was thinking of calling this service "Dang It."
You say you want hear posts in other people's voices but I'm pretty sure that if I did this that the people who used it would find greater acceptance of their comments than if they just posted them as they originally wrote them.
I very much hope that's not true, and my guess (or desperate wish?) is that the community would pattern-match to it after a while.
One dynamic I don't think has yet been given its due: while AI is training on us, we're also all getting trained on it—that is, the hivemind's pattern-matching ability is also growing. We're heading up the escalation ladder in a paattern-matching race.
But that name is hilarious!
I was close to one such case, and I really appreciate the care and caution you and Tom applied.
> HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law place
How the hell does does this place exist right now with all that is going on. I dont know much about YC, but they don't seem that humane..
> Here are some past cases of these interactions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
For me that link says:
> Error: Forbidden
> Your client does not have permission to get URL / from this server.
Sorry, I think there was a typo - does it work now?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Uh... sometimes? First time I clicked it seemed to work, but a subsequent click gave me that 403 error.
Anything I post here is always in my own voice - even when I use an LLM. 95% of the times grammar/spelling is fixed, it's because my brain lapsed while typing, not because I don't know the grammar well and am using LLM to shape my voice.
I would wager that this use case is much more prevalent than ones where the LLM changed the comment significantly enough to change one's voice.
I never copy/paste from an LLM into HN. Everything is typed by myself (and I never "manually" copy LLM content). I don't have any automatic tools for inserting LLM content here.[1]
Always, always, always keep in mind that you don't notice these positive use cases, because they are not noticeable by design. So the problematic "clearly LLM" comments you see may well be a small minority of LLM-assisted comments. Don't punish the (majority) "good" folks to limit the few "bad" ones.
Lastly, I often wish we had a rule for not calling out others' comments as "AI slop" or the like.[2] It just leads to pointless debates on whether an LLM was used and distracts far more than the comment under question. I'm sure plenty of 100% human written comments have been labeled as LLM generated.
[1] The dictation one is a slight exception, and I use it only occasionally when health issues arise.
[2] Probably OK for submissions, but not comments.
As a not native speaker, for me using something like Google Translate is fine, it's literal enough to keep the author voice. [1]
Also writing a draft in Google Docs and accepting most [2] of the corrections is fine. The browser fix the orthography, but I 30% of the time forget to add the s to the verbs. For preposition, I roll a D20 and hope the best.
I'm not sure if these are expert systems, LLM, or pingeonware.
But I don't like when someone use a a LLM to rewrite the draft to make it more professional. It kills the personality of the author and may hallucinate details. It's also difficult to know how much of the post is written was the author and how much autocompleted by the AI:
[1] Remember to check that the technical terms are correctly translated. It used to be bad, but it's quite good now.
[2] most, not all. Sometimes the corrections are wrong.
> As a not native speaker, for me using something like Google Translate is fine, it's literal enough to keep the author voice
Strong disagree on author voice. Vomit blows.
I think better to let recipient use full-text translation if that is necessary.
OK, I have to agree. about author voice. Last year I wrote something in English and I used the autotranlation to make the Spanish version. Google translated it to es-es instead of es-ar. I had to go over it like 3 or 4 times to fix all the differences, and adjust the tone to a more informal one and select which technical words to keep unstranlated, and a few more details.
Anyway, the autotranlation saved a lot of time for the most common words and switching the noun-adjetive order.
>For preposition, I roll a D20 and hope the best.
This makes me think of something: are nonnative English speakers tempted to use LLMs to correct grammar because mistakes like this actually make the writing unintelligible in their native language? For example, if I swap out the "For" in this sentence for any (?) other preposition, it's still comprehensible. (At|Of|In|By|To|On|With) example, ...
> (At|Of|In|By|To|On|With) example, ...
All of them are comprehensible, but are wrong, nobody would use them. If a foreigner use them (the translated version) people will understand them, but it will sound odd. Depending on the context, people will correct it or just go on.
Perhaps "As" or "Like" are better, still not 100% accurate but almost.
Yeah, I didn't mean they weren't wrong or aren't odd, just that they'll be understood. My point was around the fact that I've been told before by people that certain errors in their native language that seem relatively small to me actually make it impossible to understand. So I wondered if the urge to use LLMs could be explained by a difference in expectation around the seriousness of errors.
I'm trying to think a good example in Spanish. Probably double negatives like:
"Hoy no comí nada." -> literally "Today [I] did not eat nothing." but should be "Today, I didn't eat anything."
May be confusing, but people may ask for clarifications.
---
Another problem is that some words have different meaning in each country, like
"I will pick an apple." -> to es-es "Voy a coger una manzana" but in es-ar it means "I will fuck an apple."
May be confusing too, but if you have a strong Spanish accent or American-that-Learned-Spanish-from-Spain accent, people will chuckle and go on.
Yes even I posted something recently which was voted down since I mentioned from get go that I used help from AI. But the idea was mine, I wrote the first draft, and then worked with AI in 2-3 loops to get it right.
But like dang said ... I do not have time to fight this battle when I have only 10 minutes :)
You say "used help from AI", then describe the process of having LLM write comment for you. To me that sounds like legitimate violation, regardless of how many minutes or tokens you have available.
I suppose I should put my comment here instead of at top level.
Exactly when was this point added? It seems somehow not new, but on the other hand it was missing from an archive.today snapshot I found from last July. (I cannot get archive.org to give me anything useful here.)
Edit:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Perhaps these points (and the thing about trivial annoyances, etc.) should be rolled up into a general "please don't post meta commentary outside of explicit site meta discussion"?
Do you mean when did we add "please don't post generated comments" to the guidelines? A couple days ago IIRC.
Does that mean that is now ok to e.g. comment that you did flag something?
That is one of those enjoyable questions that is best answered by first generalizing it.
Does the absence of a rule against X mean that it's ok to do X? Absolutely not.
It's impossible to list all the things that people shouldn't do. Fortunately we've never walked into that trap.
> Does the absence of a rule against X mean that it's ok to do X? Absolutely not.
Here it is "Does the lifting of a rule against X implies that it's ok to do X now?" A lot of times, the answer is yes, because that's a likely intention behind lifting a rule.
But I got that that was not your intention, because you wrote, that you removed it because they don't pose a risk anymore. That could still mean two things, that people are unlikely to do it or that people doing it now longer poses harm (relatively speaking).
Since in my experience people do like to point out to people why they were wrong posting something, this means you need them to know it is not expected to be done here. But I also don't see some other point in the guidelines about "meta-comments" in general, so that makes the second option more likely: it is okay to not forbid this now, because it does not pose that much harm. So either you expect newbies to somehow infer that rule (Why would you remove it then?) or you think it is now ok.
The difference between "a rule has been cut from the list" and "a rule is not on the list" only lasts a day or two. After that, no one will remember.
(I wouldn't say "lifted", though, since that implies quite a bit more.)
(Btw, I'm going to put some of that language back into the guidelines since so many people protested its removal - so this point is about to get even more theoretical!)
...Hacker News could use some more cute animal pictures, though.
One problem with cute animal pictures is that they appeal to almost everyone, including people who are incapable, for whatever reason, of posting well-reasoned, interesting, respectful comments. The fact that HN is a little dry makes it less appealing to dumbasses.
At any rate, it's too late. The era of organic 'cute animal' content on the internet is dead. AI slop has killed it.
(I was replying to a now deleted response)
> Slop has an upside?
Not exactly. Rather its is that places where one does want to find pictures of people's cute cats and dogs is now having additional moderation / administration burdens to try to keep the AI generated content out of those places.
It's not a "cute pictures of cats overrunning some place" but rather "even in the places where it was appropriate to post pictures of one's pets in #mypets or /r/cuteCatPics because such pictures are appropriate there (so they don't overrun other places), now people are starting fights over AI generated content."
An example that I recently encountered was someone who did an AI replacement of a cat that was "loafing" of a loaf of bread that looked like a cat. The cat picture would have been fine (with a dozen "aww" and "cute" comments in reply)... the AI cat loaf picture required moderation actions and some comment defusing over the use of AI.
AI generated "cutest possible animal" (and "make it cuter") might be mildly interesting.
Interestingly, their CSP policies forbid even an extension from inserting an img tag.
Is there a distinction between AI generated and AI edited?
I wanted to share some context that might be helpful: I am autistic, and I have often received feedback that my communication is snarky, rude, or tone-deaf. At work, I've found it helpful to run some of my communications through an AI tool to make my messages more accessible to non-autistic colleagues, and this approach has been working well for me.
userbinator put it somewhat dramatically but has the point. We'd rather hear you in your own voice, even at a cost of misunderstanding your intent sometimes. If you're using HN in good faith—and you are, because otherwise you'd not be worrying about this—then over time it's possible to learn to lessen such misunderstanding, and not only possible but well worth doing.
>We'd rather hear you in your own voice
You can't hear my voice if I'm downvoted to oblivion.
>then over time it's possible to learn to lessen such misunderstanding
Is it possible, over time, for a person with a severed spinal cord to learn how to use stairs?
The answer to this last one may be technology! Same for autistic communication: I now have a technological assist. It's called AI. AI is my wheelchair. You might not get to hear my "voice", but you will get to hear my message.
You can interpret it as: We'd rather you be snarky, rude, and tone-deaf, than bland and unhuman. Your work may rather you act like a soulless corporate drone.
...except that "snarky, rude, and tone-deaf" generally gets the downvoting (flagging?) mob to come in and "phoosh".
That’s a life lesson worth learning, yes. Presentation matters, even if intent is genuinely positive, because patience is finite. Sometimes it will be awkward. If something gets flagged and it shouldn’t be, email the mods and ask if they would modify the flag so the comment remains visible. Learn, grow, try, fail, retry doesn’t work if you replace ‘try’ with ‘AI’.
This is what I’m talking about. “Why can’t you just communicate like a neurotypical person?” is like saying “why can’t you just take the stairs like a normal person” to someone wheelchair bound.
So thanks for confirming that, yes, I need to use AI because “life lesson”.
No, the lesson isn’t “do like the neurotypicals do”, the lesson is “neurotypicals have an instinctive response to things they perceive as rude, challenging, or atypical”.
It’s up to you what you do with that knowledge. Conforming is the most boring option. I studied human behavioral psych for two decades instead, and if I felt like it I could probably earn a degree in organizational therapy rather easily now. I don’t feel like it; can’t stand people enough! But at least I know how they tick, so I can plan for their nonsense and work around it. For example!
Linus Torvalds gets thrown around a lot as an example of this, but, like, he really is an excellent example of “subtract the harmful part about calling individuals bad people over bad work, and you still have an abrasive, decisive leader who calls ideas and work bad when he sees it”. You don’t have to curb who you are or how viciously you act if you don’t want to, but demonstrably you will be more welcome to be yourself in more places if you adopt that particular distinction of “hate the work, not the worker” when it’s the work you hate and the worker is just a nameless faceless irrelevance.
That doesn’t guarantee that neurotyps will comprehend, of course, since a lot of them — and us! — have an ego that’s wired to their work competence, but for example it helps managers defend you when you are consistent and clear about separating your criticism of the work and, if any, your criticism of the worker.
There’s a lot more things like that where you can voluntarily learn how those around you function and learn to push their buttons more skillfully in ways that benefit you both, rather than putting their typ as prime over your atyp or torturing them for your benefit alone. Sure, they probably won’t try as hard, and that really fucking sucks. But at the end of the day it’s your call how much energy you spend on protocol adapters to those around you, not theirs.
See, you're just making the same mistake, with this assumption "subtract the harmful part about calling individuals bad people over bad work, and you still have an abrasive, decisive leader who calls ideas and work bad when he sees it”.
I once sat in a promo meeting and the consensus was that a particular individual had a "bad attitude". Someone asked for evidence, and another pointed at a ticket, where the person had written:
"This should not have been a ticket".
Everyone agreed this was very much an example of a bad attitude. After several minutes of discussion around how to exit this person, I asked "Was he right?" and, upon review, everyone agreed that in fact this should not have been a ticket. He was not fired.
There's no "calling individuals bad people" here. You just assumed that when I said "often received feedback that my communication is snarky, rude, or tone-deaf" that I am being snarky, rude or tone-deaf, that I am "calling individuals bad people".
This would be hilarious if it wasn't every fucking conversation about the issue. And it's also the fallout of every time an autistic person is reported "Oh, Bob was so rude today", and then is interpreted as "Oh, did you hear, Bob called someone a cunt."
Bob said "This should not have been a ticket."
I’m the asshole I was thinking of when I wrote that, so of course I’m talking from the perspective of my experiences. Amused to be condescended to about the typ/atyp interfacing woes in business. I’m a middle-aged autistic prosociopath with decades of business experience, and it remains validating to this day to be so badly misread by other atyps. Hope you feel better soon :)
There should be a "flag as AI" link in addition to "flag" and then a setting for people to show flagged as AI. Once the flagged as AI reaches a certain threshold then it disappears unless you enable "Show AI".
Maybe once enough posts have been flagged like that then that corpus could be used to train an AI to automatically detect content generated by AI.
That would be cool.
Maybe the HN site wouldn't add this feature but if someone wrote a client then maybe it could be added there.
We're going to add that. I've resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so.
A nice side effect is that it will double as a confirmation step, solving the FFF (fat finger flagging) problem.
> We're going to add that. I've resisted adding reasons-for-flagging for years, but even I can change my mind every decade or so.
You need a reason that means "this person is talking about something helpful that an admin needs to fix." Flagging currently has a negative connotation (too many flags and the comment gets deleted), but sometimes you want to flag a comment that says something like "the link is broken and should be X" to just bring it to admin attention without the implied negative judgement.
Flag as AI would be incredible and is probably unique to software-focused forums. Saves everyone who wants it a lot of time. Still allows cool content to reach the front page with some visibility or escape some moderation queue.
Thanks for not standing still on this issue. The world is changing, fast, and glad HN responded quicker than some forums on a cogent stance.
> it will double as a confirmation step, solving the FFF (fat finger flagging) problem
Thank you!!!
Could it be also a toggle to skip/not show any AI-generated content? And all child branches?
That might take me another decade.
I'm joking, but we've always resisted partitioning HN. Here a bunch of past explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I do sort of like the idea (suggested by mthurman) that we let users prompt HN to be the kind of HN they want. That could be the ultimate dump of long-requested features (dark mode! tags! blocklists!)
Will there be a process or opportunity for mis-flagged comments' posters to prove their comment was human generated?
Or will they have to simply eat the karma hit and move on?
Do commenters even know whether their post was flagged as anything?
I mean my comments may have been flagged or I may even have been shadowbanned but I never look at old comments to check.
My radical opinion is there shouldn't be 2 flags, there should be N flags, user defined, so that we can flag humor/satire/factuality/insight/political and a bunch of other things. I fully realize that's not going to fly any time soon.
Adding AI in addition to the standard up/downvote and flag seems a reasonable thing.
That sounds like /.'s moderation system. Not that I disagree, theme based filtering could be fun but also encourages things like meme threads that you'd see on reddit under the guise of "Just filter funny out and let us have fun".
The issue with N-flagging is that every flag needs to be universally-defined and equally applied.
If one person's humor is another person's satire is another person's political, then splitting it into N options muddles the signal.
Downvotes are bad enough between "I disagree with this" and "This isn't an appropriate comment for HN."
i think you're thinking of flair like on reddit, flag is more of a 'report spam' type feature
I think the up/downvote system is good enough for that - good posts go up, bad posts go down, really bad posts that nobody should see and whose poster should get banned get flagged.
Flags are a signal to the moderation system. What does it mean to "flag" something as "factuality" or "satire"?
‘Flag’ is an algorithmic flag only, and there are no humans in the flag algorithm’s processing loop. They may monitor and react to the ‘queue’ of flagged articles, and they can do special mod things with flagged posts. But if you want to report a guidelines violation for AI-assisted writing to the mods, just email the mods (contact link in the footer) subject “AI-assisted writing flag” or similar with a link to the post/comment. It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.
> It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.
It's a ton of friction compared to ordinary use of a forum; and while I've emailed several times myself, it comes with a sense of guilt (and a feeling that my "several" is probably approximately "several" above average).
Valid. It’s a big drawback of HN. I find it helps to report a perceived guidelines violation in “seems like” language rather than “is”, without demanding a specific mod outcome, in cases where I’m uncertain. That is noticeably distinct from “this is completely unacceptable” which I’ve said in a couple of instances, though I still tend to let the mods pick the outcome since that’s their job and I make a specific effort not to participate in sentencing decisions if at all possible.
ps. I acknowledge as well that I’m exempt from feeling guilt for brain reasons, and so if it sounds like I’m not honoring what I would describe as a ‘completely normal’ human response, apologies; I’m trying my best given the lack of familiarity and intend no disrespect towards that reaction.
Never occurred to me to try that, because I assumed I would get banned for doing it, until today.
Nah, as long as you aren’t demanding and rude, you’ll either get a reply or not, and if you get a reply, it’ll either be “we’ll look into it”, “we looked into it and acted in some way”, or “we looked into it and decided it isn’t actionable”; often with some supporting explanation.
(I suppose if you open with e.g. “wtf is wrong with you mods” they might well ask you to reconsider your approach or else clock a ban — I’ve never tried that!)
I’ve actually been thinking about this exact idea for https://hcker.news/. Stay tuned, I’ve already started rolling out some comment filtering.
Oh I didnt know about this. Very cool. Is hcker.news only on web? Or is there a mobile app as well?
For quite a while, I like use LLM to refine and fix my grammar issue, but my colleagues and professors reminds me that it was way too obvious. They said they can tolerate some mistakes in my words, but no tolerance for AI generated content.
Thanks for putting this so nicely! We'd much rather hear you in your own voice, and the cost of a few mistakes is far less than the cost of losing that.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Voice is everything. Don't relinquish the best part of yourself.
It's worse than relinquishing: you get a new voice, that of the person needs an LLM to talk.
I have similar reservations about code formatters: maybe I just haven't worked with a code base with enough terrible formatting, but I'm sad when programmers loose the little voice they have. Linters: cool; style guidelines: fine. I'm cool with both, but the idea that we need to strip every character of junk DNA from a codebase seems excessive.
On code-formatters, I don't think it's so clear-cut, but rather an "it depends".
For code that is meant to be an expression of programmers, meant to be art, then yes code formatters should be an optional tool in the artist's quiver.
For code that is meant to be functional, one of the business goals is uniformity such that the programmers working on the code can be replaced like cogs, such that there is no individuality or voice. In that regard, yes, code-formatters are good and voice is bad.
Similarly, an artist painting art should be free. An "artist" painting the "BUS" lines on a road should not take liberties, they should make it have the exact proportions and color of all the other "BUS" markings.
You can easily see this in the choices of languages. Haskell and lisp were made to express thought and beauty, and so they allow abstractions and give formatting freedom by default.
Go was made to try and make Googlers as cog-like and replaceable as possible, to minimize programmer voice and crush creativity and soul wherever possible, so formatting is deeply embedded in the language tooling and you're discouraged from building any truly beautiful abstractions.
The biggest problem I ran into without a code formatter is that team wasted a LOT of time arguing about style. Every single MR would have nitpicking about how many spaces to indent here and there, where to put the braces, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I don't particularly like the style we are enforcing but I love how much more efficient our review process is.
Personally I think a lot of programmers care way too much about consistency. It just doesn't matter that much if two files use indentation / braces slightly differently. In many cases, it just doesn't matter that much.
Problem is, development doesn't operate on the level of "files". The incremental currency of developers is changes, not files -- and those changes can be both smaller and larger than files. Would you rather see different indentation/braces in different files so that the changeset you're reviewing is consistent, or rather see different indentation/braces in the changeset so that the files being changed remain internally consistent? And what about refactorings where parts of code are moved between files? Should the copied lines be altered so they match the style of the target file?
Point being, "different indentation in different files" is never a realistic way of talking about code style. One way or another, it's always about different styles in the same code unit.
Indeed, it doesn’t matter too much, as long as it is consistent.
People running their own formatting or changes re-adding spaces, sorting attributes in xml tags, etc. All leading to churn. By codifying the formatting rules the formatting will always be the same and diffs will contain only the essence.
> > programmers care way too much about consistency.
> Indeed, it doesn’t matter too much, as long as it is consistent.
Um, I think you may have missed my point. Why does it always need to be consistent?
The problems you're talking about only show up when someone runs a formatter over the entire file. One answer is, just don't do that.
Also your eyes are good at seeing patterns. If the formatting is all consistent the patterns they see will be higher level, long functions unintuitive names, missing check for return success; make bad good look bad is the idea. Carefully reading every line is good but getting hints of things to check more deeply because it looks wrong to the eyes is extremely useful.
I now really want my city to employ local artists to redraw all the street markings.
Chaos, sure, but beautiful chaos.
I really like the street sign analogy.
But in my case it was the other way around. I work in a Kowloon Walled City of code: dozens of intersecting communities with thousands of informally organized but largely content contributors. It looks like chaos, but it works ok.
Code formatting really did feel like a new neighbor declaring "you know what this place needs, better-marked bus lanes!" as though that would help them see the sky from the bottom of an ally or fix the underlying sanitation issues. As you might imagine, the efforts didn't get far and mostly annoyed people.
But as the GP said, it all depends on the culture. If you pick up and move to Singapore you'd damn well better keep your car washed and your code style black.
The major reason auto-formatting became so dominant is source control. You haven't been through hell till you hit whitespace conflicts in a couple of hundred source files during a merge...
First time I saw this hell was when a junior colleague convinced a rather senior one to use black. Of course senior went bumbling around black-ing every file he touched, including some random thousand-line files in long-lived forks of an established code base. Those files became essentially unmergable from then on.
It was a confluence of a lot of bad design features and blunders and I can't blame the formatter for the mess it caused. So I understand your point but, I'd amend it a bit: version control is the reason many projects require a specific formatting style.
In projects without an explicit style, the number one formatting rule is don't reformat code you didn't touch.
Code formatting is a bit different though, at least if you're working in a team - it's not your code, it's shared, which changes some parameters.
One factor is "churn", that is, a code change that includes pure style changes in addition to other changes; it's distracting and noisy.
The other is consistency, if you're reading 10 files with 10 different code styles it's more difficult to read it.
But by all means, for your own projects, use your own code style.
I worked on a project where having code formatting used was massively useful. The project had 10k source files, many of them having several thousand lines, everything was C++ and good chunks of code were written brilliantly and the rest was at least easy to understand.
I mean, not sure if this makes sense? The creativity you put into code is about what it does (+ documentation, comments), not about how it’s formatted. I could care less how a programmer formatted their website’s code unless it’s, like, an ioccc submission.
I've been editing my comments (not in English) with specialized spell-checking services, and I don't think they change my voice in any meaningful way. I suspect when people say they are using LLMs to fix their grammar, it's actually some more than just grammar.
There is quite a difference between fixing grammar and the fuller rewording that is often used especially by LLM based writing tools. The distinction is much more of a grey area when you not talking about a language you are fluent in, because you don't know the difference between idiomatic equivalences and full-on rewording that will change your perceived tone⁰ - the tool being used could be doing more than you think and not in a good way.
And if you are using the tool, “AI” or not to translate it is even worse and you often only have to do on cycle of [your primary language] -> [something else] -> [your primary language] to see what a mess that can make.
I'm attempting to learn Spanish¹ and when I'm writing something, or practising something that I might say, I'll write it entirely away from tech (I have even a proper chunky paper dictionary and grammar guide to help with that!) other than the text editor I'm typing in, and then I'll sometimes give a tool it to look over. If that tool suggests what looks like more than just “that's the wrong tense, you should have an accent there, etc.” I'll research the change rather than accepting it as-is.
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[0] or even, potentially, perceived meaning
[1] I like the place and want to spend more time down there when I can, I even like the idea of living there fairly permanently when I no longer have certain responsibilities tying me to the UK², and I'd hate to be ThatGuy™ who rocks up and expects everyone else to speak his language.
[2] and the shithole it has the potential to become over the next decade - to the Reform supporters and their ilk who say, without any hint of irony, “if you don't like it why don't you go somewhere else” I reply “I'm working on that”.
> Voice is everything. Don't relinquish the best part of yourself.
One observation I ran across on the use of the em-dash ("—") was that if AI was given training data from writers that were considered good/great, and those writers tended to use em-dashes, then it would be unsurprising that AI 'learned' to use the character.
So the observer said humans should, if they already did so in the past, continue to use the em-dash now and going forward if it was already part of their 'personal style' in writing.
I've written multiple books, the most recent in 2019. I used to love the em-dash, and considered it the superior form of ellipsis (over the parenthesis, comma or semicolon).
I'm not planning on writing new books now, but if I did, I would completely get rid of em-dashes, because of their second-order effect of making the copy AI-written (and therefore less valuable).
It's also interesting that using a Skill that discouraged the use of em-dashes, I noticed that Claude's "thinking" internal dialogue actually disagreed with the Skill spec itself ("no, actually, em-dashes are perfectly normal and not a sign of AI writing") and therefore kept the dashes, against the Skill instructions.
For hackers, wouldn't the best part of ourselves be our technical excellence?
If that's true, it would be very sad indeed. Techical excellence is a very low bar to clear. It's so easy even AI can do that part.
When I was young, and learning my technical skills, then naturally I was focused on improving those skills. At that age I defined myself by what I did, and so my self worth was related to my skills. And while the skills are not hard to acquire, not many did, and they were well paid. All of which made me value them even more.
As I've grown older though I discovered my best parts had nothing to do with tech skills. My best parts (work wise) was in translating those skills into a viable business, hiring the right people, focusing my attention where it's needed (and getting out the way where it's not.) My best parts at work are my human relationships with colleagues, customers, prospects and so on.
Outside of work my technical skills mean nothing. My family and friends couldn't care less. They barely know I have drills at all, and no idea if I'm any good or not. In that space compassion, loyalty, reliability, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, positivity, contentment and so on are far (far) more important.
I hope at my funeral people remember those things. Whether I could set up email or drive an AI will (hopefully) not even be in the top 10.
I really love your post, but I do think (and I come from an artistic background) that some skills have their own beauty, like work of art. Some love for creativity and what we create has a meaning of its own. Certainly worthy of an epitaph.
It’s why overuse of AI is a bad call imo. You skip a part of the journey. Like Guy Kawasaki says “make something meaningful”. If we are all AIs talking to eachother, everything becomes meaningless, we will become a simulation of surrogates.
That said, human compassion, relating to others and everything you mentioned trumps everything else.
Sure thing, but at the same time, there's creativity and then there's work; I could creatively write things in C or assembly for the art of it, but that isn't what my employer pays me to do. I could do my job in notepad or `ed` and type every character myself, but that's inefficient.
Same goes for art (which is often what it's compared to), some part of art is creative, but the vast majority of art that people get paid salaries for is "just work"; designing a website, doing graphics work for a video game or TV production, that kinda thing.
tl;dr, AI won't replace artisans but it's a tool that can help increase productivity / reduce costs. Emphasis on can, because it's a lot more complex than "same output in less time".
This is quite an interesting question, because I believe there's two facets to the surface of the question.
Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them. You can pique their interest, they may praise you, but if they are informed enough, anything looking like magic can be dissected easily. So technical excellence is meaningless.
Given you're interacting with a competent hacker again, everything technical will be subjective. Creating is deciding trade-offs all the way down and beyond. Their preferences will probably lay at a difference balance of trade-offs. Even though you catch "objective" perfection, even this perfection has nuances (see USB audio interfaces. They all have flat response curves, but they all sound different, for example), hence, technical excellence is not only meaningless, it's subjective.
On a deeper level, a genuine person who knows its cookies well, even though with gaps is a much more interesting and nicer person to interact with. They'll be genuinely interested in talking with you, and learn something from you, or show what they know gently, so both parties can grow together. They might not be knowledgeable in most intricate details, but they are genuinely human and open to improvement and into the conversation itself, not to prove themselves and win a meaningless battle to stroke their own ego.
An LLM generated response is similar. It's lazy, it's impersonated, it's like low quality canned food. A new user recently has written an LLM generated rebuttal to one of my comments. It's white-labeled gibberish, insincere word-skirmish. It's so off-putting that I don't see the point to reply them. They'll just paste it to a non-descript box and will add "write a rebuttal reply, press this point". This is not a discussion, this is a meaningless fight for internet points.
I prefer genuine opinions, imperfect replies, vulnerable humans at the other end of the wire. Not a box of numbers spitting out grammatically correct yet empty sentences.
> Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them.
I disagree with this and would instead consider that a technical expert (in any field) being impressed with your work can be the most satisfying reward of craft.
Laypeople can be awed, but the expert can bestow an entirely different quality of respect to your work.
I agree with you that some people find this very rewarding, but this is not a given.
I for one, don't care whether anyone is impressed by my work. That's a nice bonus, but not a requirement. Instead, when I improve my work w.r.t. my previous one, the satisfaction I get is way bigger than an external validation. I seek my satisfaction inside myself.
That's completely true that I love discussing what I did with a competent technical expert, yet it's not why I'm doing this.
> I seek my satisfaction inside myself.
> That's completely true that I love discussing what I did with a competent technical expert, yet it's not why I'm doing this.
I agree with this sentiment completely. I do consider "the reason for craft" (which is a joy in itself) to be separate from the "bonus reward" of being able to discuss it with other craftsmen.
... and the latter often ends up surfacing even more challenging/interesting ideas to work on for both sides, which is a huge win.
Have you tried that line in a bar?
More to the point, Hacker News is much more interesting for encouraging idiosyncratic (i.e. original, diverse, nuanced views of specific) human viewpoints, not just being raw technical information.
Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension.
> Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension
Great. Isn't that part of being anonymous if one so desires? This would have decent potential to avoid stylometry deanonymization, no?
Great? If you're worried that somebody's actively trying to identify your HN comments against some other source of your writing perhaps. But using a LLM to "avoid deanonymization" is about as sensible for some everyday Joe, as wearing a tinfoil hat in public to avoid 5G radiation is.
Yeah it's great if that's what you want to do. Whether it makes sense for any rando to do that is another question.
Whether it makes sense for anybody to do it is the real question. The threat model where this is a useful thing to do doesn't really exist in my opinion, at least not for obfuscating random comments. Perhaps if you're doing some anonymous journalism that's uncomfortable for your country's regime, and you've previously written other stuff using your real name, it might make sense to run your writing through a LLM, maybe. In addition to a bunch of other Snowden-esque countermeasures.