All: quite a few comments in this thread (and another one we merged hither - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099160) have contained personal attacks. Hopefully most of them are [flagged] and/or [dead] now.
On HN, please don't cross into personal attack no matter how strongly you feel about someone or disagree with them. It's destructive of what the site is for, and we moderate and/or ban accounts that do it.
The personal attacks I saw were against different people, not just one. In a lot of cases it's just routine internet cynicism, which is always amplified against unusually successful or prominent people.
There's also a lot of fear and anger about the AI tsunami these days, among certain user cohorts, and that's an amplifier as well.
On HN, personal attacks aren't allowed regardless of who's being attacked, and comments are asked to make their substantive points thoughtfully and not be cynical or snarky. Here's one guideline:
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
I can understand the sentiment against Simon it's just to much of the same content over and over again but I handled it with just blacklisting him no need for personal attacks.
Saw that, too, but at some point one cannot just stand like sheep in the slaughterhouse, the reaction was to be expected (even though it could have happened in a more civilized way, not via personal-ish attacks, I agree with that).
More generally, there are now literally trillions of dollars being invested in this madness/tsunami/whatever-one-wants-to-call-it, which means that it has now become impossible to follow said money so as to follow the conflicts of interests (it’s easy to assume a conflict of interest for a guy like Karpathy given his past and recent employment history, but I do think that Simon is more on the genuine side), so this is why that counter-reaction is now manifesting itself so chaotically, hitting left and right with not necessarily any logic behind it, which means that there are going to be collateral “casualties” during it all (such as Simon in this case).
Being rude isn't helpful. It's not their fault, it's the unavoidable reality of treating complex social signalling as one-dimensional. At minimum Hacker News would need to separate approval/disapproval signals from assessments of whether a comment is constructive. That’s not a simple change given the obvious abuse vectors. It would require reliably distinguishing good-faith participants from bad actors. It can be done, but it's not easy.
The main reason sites avoid this approach is institutional rather than technical. Adding algorithmic mediation invites accusations of algorithmic bias whenever results are unpopular.[0] Simple manual interventions are often sufficient to nudge community behaviour so that majority outcomes broadly align with the moderators’ priors, without the visibility or accountability costs of a more complex system.
[0] Case in point being X. People routinely accuse the new management of "juicing" the algorithm to favour their politics, when outcomes are adequately explained by the exodus of contributors on the other side. Isolating innate community bias from algorithms is a philosophically impossible problem.
The reason I left there was the down vote brigade that really killed most genuine criticism that disagrees with the sites pre formed opinions on certain topics. So I'm not sure it's a solved problem. Unless it's gotten better since 2011?
I think the specific community and some of the ways it does moderation and voting are seperable and I would love to see the latter tested on an open source discussion platform
When I review the link posted by @dang it says talking about downvotes is boring. Maybe that's why your comment is grey. (This comment should turn grey as well)
It's not 'downvote abuse' if it's working exactly as intended. The community decides what's 'perfectly fine and neutral.' If your comments follow the guidelines, at least they won't get deleted.
This is pretty obviously false? I get downvoted quite frequently on HN for posting comments that go against what people typically think. For instance, I find it quite difficult to discuss the productivity gains of AI because any comment I make saying that AI makes me more productive immediately gets downvotes. I am not making inflammatory comments - my comments with a similar tone about other things that boost my productivity, like Rust or whatever, never get downvoted.
It's genuinely pathetic to care about downvotes. People downvote me all the time and you don't hear me crying about it. People disagreeing with you is simply the price you pay when you decide to have hot takes, and don't say you didn't understand this up front.
I'm here to have interesting conversations. Downvotes naturally inhibit that by pushing my comment out of sight. There is nothing "pathetic" about that.
You'd have to be f'n dumb to think anybody cares about votes, if it was just votes. No it fucking hides the comment and prevents you from replying for a while.
And it's so one sided: If just the first 3-5 people who see your comment downvote it, it can prevent hundreds or thousands from seeing it. Way too easy to bury the truth and sometimes used that way.
And look: I downvoted you but you can't downvote me, because I replied to your comment. How dumb did they want this system to be?
Also, timing matters: Sometimes if I post a ""hOt TaKe"" and it gets downvoted immediately, if I delete it and repost the same shit, right away or at a later time, sometimes it gets upvoted on the 2nd or 3rd time try: Proving that only the first few votes really matter. Even a 2020 AI could game this crap.
Working as intended my ass
And I'm not just talking about my own comments and didn't have a part in this post's conversation, I see this shit happening to others all the time and point it out to dang whenever he talks like HN is some posh upscale establishment above the shenanigans of the rest of the net.
Going gray gets more eyeballs on your comment than if you were to stay at 1, people will actually stop and read whatever it was that's so controversial. You really are caring far too much.
How does that make it “obviously false”? The community doesn’t want to hear about how AI isn’t working for people on every AI article. That’s the current balance of votes in the community.
Don’t read AI articles. The vote balances are a reflection of the current majority opinions. That’s how these voting based social site work, by design.
> Weirdly, he doesn’t care about the toxicity problems on Twitter/X either,
> Yet he has the nerve to call HN toxic.
That's not weird or paradoxical. They don't have to delineate every online platform they disagree with in order to criticize HN; "orange site bad" is a pretty common sentiment in my experience.
I hear about X being hateful but nobody wants to talk about how toxic BlueSky actually is. I had to stop going on there permanently. I dont think I have ever quit a social media platform as quickly and permanently as BlueSky.
The chutzpah of complaining about the level here when most tech threads on X are primitive billionaire marketing. Why don't they complain about Musk's X?
It isn't enough that Karpathy is rich---we also need to admire him. That dynamic was satirized in the Silicon Valley show with Gavin Belson.
Managers will be starting to ask for claws in the development flow, claws for automation, etc. Another flashy trend everyone will have to endure because an influencer is hyping the tech. It happened in 2024/2025. Every manager demanding use of "vibe coding", because they bought the lie that is what everyone is doing and is the best thing since sliced bread and whatnot. Karpathy comes up with a new shit to hype, and everyone will jump on the bandwagon. It's exhausting. It's like when there was a new frontend framework every single month and everyone just following the trend. Backbone is good enough. Then Vue. Then react. Then angular. Then svelte. Then SolidJs. Then Astro. Probably now everyone and their mothers will try to come with another abstraction layer on top of llms, then on top of agents, then on top of claws. Like I said, it's exhausting and the ROI of jumping every single fucking trend is becoming really hard to see.
Stop taking work so seriously. You're getting paid to deal with other people's nonsense, and if you're in tech you're getting paid better than most to deal with less than most. The next time you're about to have a cry session about your meanie boss asking you to use AI, try to remember that you're allowed to walk straight out the door, without so much as two weeks notice if the request is really so offensive to you. You can get a job flipping burgers instead, lots of people make ends meet with jobs like that. And instead of your boss asking you to use a claw or some other silly AI thing, maybe he'll ask you to clean up the diarrhea some degenerate sprayed on the bathroom walls. A little perspective for you. If you want to learn what the word "exhausting" really means, quit tech.
> You're getting paid to deal with other people's nonsense, and if you're in tech you're getting paid better than most to deal with less than most.
The problem is that you are paid for two things that are often contradictory to each other
1. writing good code
2. dealing with other people's nonsense
Many good coders really care about 1, so of course they are complaining.
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Concerning the argument that tech pays so well: this is very US-specific; in many other countries working in tech is rather some job that may pay the bills, but not more. So people who work there often do it because they are insanely passionate about programming.
This again, as I already outlined above, means that they really care about good code, and if "other people's nonsense" means sacrificing this, it will make the respective employees really furious.
This framing sucks. "I'm unhappy with the job I put years into honing my skills for, but since I make decent money I should shut up even when even things are happening that I don't like." And as if "flipping burgers" is the only alternative.
On HN, please don't cross into personal attack no matter how strongly you feel about someone or disagree with them. It's destructive of what the site is for, and we moderate and/or ban accounts that do it.
If you haven't recently, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure that you're using the site as intended when posting here.