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Posted by __rito__ 2 days ago

Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight(karpathy.bearblog.dev)
Related from yesterday: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632
640 points | 262 commentspage 5
apparent 1 day ago|
> And then when you navigate over to the Hall of Fame, you can find the top commenters of Hacker News in December 2015, sorted by imdb-style score of their grade point average.

Now let's make a Chrome extension that subtly highlights these users' comments when browsing HN.

bbcisking 1 day ago||
Why not rank ESP for each HN user, with evidence?
bediger4000 2 days ago||
LLMs are watching (or humans using them might be). Best to be good.

Shades of Roko's Basilisk!

ambicapter 2 days ago|
More like a Panopticon. As the parenthesis notes, this is just as bad when humans are the final link in the eyeball chain.
Bjartr 2 days ago||
Neat, I got a shout-out. Always happy to share the random stuff I remember exists!
bgwalter 2 days ago||
"If LLMs are watching, humans will be on their best behavior". Karpathy, paraphrasing Larry Ellison.

The EU may give LLM surveillance an F at some point.

GaggiX 2 days ago||
I think the most fun thing is to go to: https://karpathy.ai/hncapsule/hall-of-fame.html

And scroll down to the bottom.

MBCook 2 days ago||
It’s interesting, if you go down near the bottom you see some people with both A’s and D’s.

According to the ratings for example, one person both had extremely racist ideas but also made a couple of accurate points about how some tech concepts would evolve.

brian_spiering 2 days ago||
That is interesting because of the Halo effect. There is a cognitive bias that if a person is right in one area, they will be right in another unrelated area.

I try to temper my tendency to believe the Halo effect with Warren Buffett's notion of the Circle of Competence; there is often a very narrow domain where any person can be significantly knowledgeable.

xpe 1 day ago||
Many people are impressed by this, and I can see why. Still, this much isn't surprising: the Karpathy + LLM combo can deliver quickly. But there are downsides of blazing speed.

If you dig in, there are substantial flaws in the project's analysis and framing, such as the definition of a prediction, assessing comments, data quality overall, and more. Go spelunking through the comments here and notice people asking about methodology and checking the results.

Social science research isn't easy; it requires training, effort, and patience. I would be very happy if Karpathy added a Big Flashing Red Sign to this effect. It would raise awareness and focus community attention on what I think are the hardest and most important aspects of this kind of project: methodology, rigor, criticism, feedback, and correction.

pnt12 1 day ago||
On the site itself:

it's great that this was produced in 1h with 60$. This is amazing to create small utilities, explore your curiosity, etc.

But the site is also quite confusing and messy. OK for a vibe coded experiment, sure, but wouldn't be for a final product. But I fear we're gonna see more and more of this. Big companies downsizing their tech departments and embracing vibe coded. Comparing to inflation, shrinkflation and skimpflation/ enshittification , will we soon adopt some word for this? AIflation? LLMflation?

And how will this comment score in a couple of years? :)

DonHopkins 1 day ago||
I'd love to see an "Annie Hall" analysis of hn posts, for incidents where somebody says something about some piece of software or whatever, and the person who created it replies, like Marshall McLuhan stepping out from behind a sign in Annie Hall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTSmbMm7MDg

lapcat 2 days ago|
Does anyone else think that HN engages in far too much navel-gazing? Nothing gets upvotes faster than a HN submission about HN.
dang 2 days ago||
It's true that meta is the crack of internet forums, so we, er, crack down on it quite a bit. That's a longstanding view: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Alternate metaphor: evil catnip - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

But yesterday's thread and this one are clearly exceptions—far above the median. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212180 was particularly incredible I think!

latexr 2 days ago|||
I love it when you share some insight about HN or internet communication for which you have relevant searches at the ready to explanations of the concept.

A personal favourite is “the contrarian dynamic”.

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

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

dang 2 days ago||
I just remember them. Or forget them!

The process is simply that moderation is super repetitive, so eventually certain pathways get engraved in one's memory. A lot of the time, though, I can't quite remember one of these patterns and I'm unable to dig up my past comments about it. That's annoying, in that particular way when your brain can feel something's there but is unable to retrieve it.

Terretta 1 day ago||
Well, you're #24 in this article's hall of fame, and the LLM thinks your moderation views stood the test of time. Perhaps it can already retrieve them for you.
dang 1 day ago||
There are so many interesting points and patterns that I've just lost track of over the years.

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

DonHopkins 1 day ago|||
Dang, posting links to searches for your own comments is so meta, no matter the topic, but even more meta when about meta crack. I love how the first hit of meta crack is this, your own message about meta crack.
dang 1 day ago||
I'm higher than my supplier!
yellow_lead 2 days ago|||
It's weird that HN viewers are interested in HN
CamperBob2 2 days ago|||
As moultano suggests, this is likely because most other websites make it completely impossible to navel-gaze. We can't possibly give the HN admins too much praise and credit for their commitment to open and stable availability of legacy data.
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