Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt3D | Hacker News Reader

This is a more extreme example of the general hacker news group think about AI.

Geohot is easily a 99.999 percentile developer, and yet he can’t seem to reconcile that the other 99.999 percent are doing something much more basic than he can ever comprehend.

It’s some kind of expert paradox, if everyone was as smart and capable as the experts, then they wouldn’t be experts.

I have come across many developers that behave like the AI. Can’t explain codebases they’ve built, can’t maintain consistency.

It’s like a aerospace engineer not believing that the person that designs the toys in an Kinder egg doesn’t know how fluid sims work.

View on HN

> the general hacker news group think about AI

I’m surprised to see this. From my perspective, reading comments and seeing which posts rise to the top, HN as a whole seems pretty bullish on the tech as whole…

I think there might also just be a vocal minority and/or some astroturfing hyping AI coding around hackernews. I personally keep trying all the latest shit and always stop using it, because it actively slows me down.

It’s changing over time. When copilot came out a few years ago, people were very against it due to it being trained oh GitHub codebase. Now there’s more support around it.

We don't want to admit it but HN has similar characteristics as many other platforms; echo chamber / group think. You see it over and over again.

HN participants (generally speaking) are against: AI, Crypto, HFT. I've worked in 2/3 of these industries so have first hand experience. My basic summary is that the average commenter here has a lot of misinformation on these topics (as a insider).

It also seems wildly inconsistent for someone who founded a self driving company. If models can't write code, which is a very constrained problem space, how are they supposed to drive?

I work in aerospace, trust me some of the aerospace engineers aren't any better.

But don't worry. The company puts them somewhere they can't do any damage. Most of them become managers.

I don’t know. He covers this pretty early in the post.

> The only reason it works for many common programming workflows is because they are common. The minute you try to do new things, you need to be as verbose as the underlying language.

>> Geohot is easily a 99.999 percentile developer

Really?

"The best model of a programming AI is a compiler... You give it a prompt, which is “the code”, and it outputs a compiled version of that code. Sometimes you’ll use it interactively, giving updates to the prompt after it has returned code, but you find that, like most IDEs, this doesn’t work all that well and you are often better off adjusting the original prompt and “recompiling”."

Really?

Programming languages, "the code", are languages specifically designed to concisely convey intent to a compiler.

If you do not understand his point, you need to read more about our field.

This.

I think his excellency in his own trade limited his vision for the 99% who just want to get by in the job. How many dev even deal with compiler directly these days? They write some code, fix some red underlines, then push, pray and wait for pipeline pass. LLMs will be gods in this process, and you can even beg another one if your current one does not work best.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com