Comment by tomhow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomhow | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't act like a jerk.

People throughout the tech industry have been variously wrong or right in their predictions. Nobody has been consistently precise. Some of the industry's top luminaries have had to admit to being wildly wrong in their predictions (others haven't but I still notice how bad their predictions were and how little damage it's done to their position of authority).

Plenty of people have consistently made solid assessments here. Some of the best writing about AI anywhere has been by writers who are among HN’s leading figures. And, sure, plenty of people have said things that turned out to be wrong. That says nothing about HN as an entity and says only unsurprising things about large groups of people and the difficulty of anyone to make accurate predictions in a rapidly changing climate. It's easy for anyone to feel superior in hindsight and insist others were stupid, but unless you can point to records of specific predictions you made 5+ years ago for everyone to evaluate, a comment like this is just an asshole move.

The guidelines specifically state: Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please observe the guidelines if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The use of the word dumb was too much. But there is an argument to be made on majority and overall sentiment on HN and that is the angle I am coming from. Pointing out the existence of anecdotal evidence that counters the overall sentiment is just pointing out outliers.

HN has records of every comment going over a decade back. The entire sentiment of HN on AI specifically has been wrong repeatedly. Not even just wrong once but wrong as a majority opinion and consistently as well.

> Pointing out the existence of anecdotal evidence

Isn't that what you are doing? If you have evidence, why not share it? If not, measure it and share it?

Because it’s too much effort to share. Compiling statistical data on sentiment would cost too many tokens.

So I have to go off of vibes. The most interesting topics talked about are usually interesting mainly because they cannot be scientifically validated. In fact not only are they more interesting, they are the majority of topics that can be talked about. To expect compiled statistical evidence is usually impossible. We wouldn’t be able to talk about most things in the universe if that was your criterion for debate and discussion.

I would treat this topic as one “those” topics even though technically speaking the records are there to be compiled empirical y. It’s just too much effort. Instead I present the evidence so you can go and collect vibes. Pick a random AI topic and genuinely see what the sentiment and predictions are.

The caveat here is this methodology may never convince anyone on the surface. There will always a remain a counter argument and in any heated discussion any counter argument will likely be used as a counter to both “win” and to satisfy a persons own biases.

I can only hope that internally you’re convinced.

Now that I can see your other comments in this subthread and the discussion in the main thread, your argument is more flawed and false than it first appeared.

You assert that there’s a decade of HN history to support your claim, but you don’t share any analysis of that history or point to anyone else’s. When pressed by someone else you “defend” yourself by saying that it’s a vibes argument [1]. It’s a basic principle of debating that an unfalsifiable claim is a worthless claim.

Your apparent central claim – that HN’s consensus position about AI has been pessimistic and oppositional because the audience is made up of software engineers who fear for their jobs – does not bear much scrutiny. HN users were the earliest adopters of AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex. HN is where the biggest discussions happen about every new AI model and software dev tool. HN is where the developers and vendors of these models and tools come to see how their products are being received and utilized by the best software developers from all around the world.

Sure, there’s still negativity and criticism about AI here, and often for good reason. Plenty of the most bullish predictions about AI have not come to fruition, for reasons that are unsurprising to people who understand the technology.

The discussion in this thread just consists of people casting doubt on the claims in the article based on their understanding of technology. If they’re wrong, point out how they’re wrong, based on your understanding of the technology.

But please avoid acting like a jerk here, for your own sake as much as anyone else’s. Yes, it’s against the guidelines because it drags the place down, which should be reason enough, especially when your very complaint is about this place being too negative. But aside from that, sneering at others is bad for the soul and in my experience is not what highly successful people do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50088893

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