Comments moved thither. Thanks!
3,691 karma · joined October 30, 2007
---
Please send HN questions to hn@ycombinator.com.
It's common for people to not recognize that their commenting seems more escalatory when read by others than it does when it's being formulated in their mind, which is why we need to keep reminding people and asking people to make a conscious effort.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I was incredibly lucky to have had a father who worked that out for himself then impressed it on me. The people I feel sad for are those who don’t have people around to make them feel it’s ok to try things that seem impossibly advanced for your age or social status.
We – of course – care about manipulation on HN; the only reason this is a site people come to for discussing so many different important topics is that so much effort has gone into ensuring integrity in the content that can be read here. It's just not that easy to engage in astroturfing, shilling, brigading, etc without setting off alarms either in the software or in the many HN users who have finely honed bullshit detectors, because organized, manipulative participation looks and feels so clearly different from earnest participation.
As to the substance of your comment, there's nothing stopping a 17-year-old from writing poetry, learning guitar, and also learning about how LLMs work, if they're so inspired. Indeed I'm sure pg would encourage it, and that he did the equivalent of all those things himself when he was young. There's plenty of evidence of that in his essays: he wrote short stories, published a scandalous school newspaper, played soccer, and studied fine art and philosophy. See:
Please don't post like this here. We're accustomed to better from you than this.
Also, please don't try to reframe what is plainly egregiously abusive commenting as reasoned argumentation. That’s obviously game-playing, not honest dialogue. This site is only a place where people like to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down. Please only comment here if you intend to participate earnestly.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: FYI we've also banned all the associated accounts and domains. It's really not hard to write software to detect this kind of thing, and keen-eyed community members notice coordinated posting and point it out to us. Please don't waste your time or reputation doing this.