Andrej Karpathy talks about "Claws"
simonwillison.net
simonwillison.net
We will add the current link to the toptext there as well.
(* except for the ones that only make sense in current context - that's the intention at least)
Just because something is popular doesn't make it bad.
Now check how many times he links to his blog in comments.
Actually, here, I'll do it for you: He has made 13209 comments in total, and 1422 of those contain a link to his blog[0]. An objectively ridiculous number, and anyone else would've likely been banned or at least told off for self-promotion long before reaching that number.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But this isn't my site and I don't get to pick the rules.
Perhaps not other thought leaders.
I would be curious to know:
How many clicks out from HN, and much time on page on average (on his site), and much subsequent pro-social discussion on HN, did those links generate versus the average linkout here? Wouldn’t change the rules but I do suspect[0] it would repaint self-promotion as something more genuine.
Nice way of saying grifters.
You're bringing up essentially the same non-argument that dang himself used when he recently personally told off someone else for pointing out the same rule breaking behavior. It boils down to "People upvote it and comment on it so it must be good content regardless of which rules it breaks" which is a harmful way of thinking, the social media version of "laws are only for the poor".
If getting enough upvotes and replies elevates one above the rules, it should be clearly stated in said rules, but I have a feeling it never will be because it's obviously not a good look.
A classic skit on 'Thought Leadership': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZBKX-6Gz6A
I think 7 or 8 out of 10 would be a bad look.
How many of the comments without links were in a thread that started from the links? I'd guess at least some 2 or 3 out of 10.
What about just last year? We are probably close to 7 out of 10.
It's annoying.
HN really needs a way to block or hide posts from some users.
tr.submission:has(a[href="from?site=<...>"])
{
display: none;
& + tr
{
display: none;
}
}
.comtr:has(.hnuser[href="user?id=<...>"])
{
display: none;
}
time to take a shower after writing that
does it look measurably different this way? to me it looks the same but now indented
And thanks for an example with nested CSS, I hadn't seen that outside SASS before, hadn't realised that had made its way into W3C standards :-)
(for the rest, I was able to hide in Safari using manarth comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341604
If anyone has one that will also work for user comments I would appreciate it.
Regardless thanks for the tip
I encourage you to look at submissions from my domain before you accuse me like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net - the ones I submitted list "simonw" as the author.
I'm selective about what I submit to Hacker News. I usually only submit my long-form pieces.
In addition to long form writing I operate a link blog, which this Claw piece came from. I have no control over which of my link blog pieces are submitted by other people.
I still try to add value in each of my link posts, which I expect is why they get submitted so often: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - in this case the value add was highlighting that this is Andrej helping coin yet another new term, something he's very good at.
Ignoring all the other stuff, isn't this just a phenomenon of Andrej being worshipped by the AI hype crowd? This entire space is becoming a deification spree, and AGI will be the final boss I guess.
"Agent" is a bad term because it's so vaguely defined that you can have a conversation with someone about agents and later realize you were both talking about entirely different things.
I'm hoping "Claw" does better on that basis because it ties to a more firm existing example and it's also not something people can "guess" the meaning of.
Karpathy calling OpenClaw a claw is an act of genius level naming?
Jesus wept.
I think it's a good idea to define a name for the category of personal digital assistant agents that fit the general shape pioneered by OpenClaw. And "Claw" fits the bill.
It is self-evident the spirit of no rule would intend to prohibit anything I’ve ever seen you do (across dozens and dozens of comments).
and why would anyone down vote you for calling this out, like who wants to see more low effort traffic-grab posts like this?
Care to elaborate? Paid by whom?
> Sponsored by: Teleport — Secure, Govern, and Operate AI at Engineering Scale. Learn more
My stack is Elixir on Fly.io — OTP supervision trees are basically purpose-built for long-running processes that need to stay alive. If something crashes, the supervisor restarts it. No systemd, no cron, just the runtime doing what it was designed for.
The self-hosting path is great for tinkering — and Karpathy's point about NanoClaw's ~4000 lines being auditable is a solid trust argument. But once you want 24/7 uptime across multiple agents, you end up rebuilding production infrastructure from scratch.
I run 5 Elixir apps on Fly for under €50/month, so the economics of multi-tenant hosting work well here.
(Founder of OpenClawCloud — clawdcloud.net — happy to talk architecture if anyone's exploring this space.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46715512 (Jan 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45022369 (Aug 2025)
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.
Also, "for the love of God" is an internet snark trope which both signals and amplifies negativity. You can think of it as a minus sign, or perhaps a triple minus sign.
I would not classify this putdown as a "dissenting opinion" because if you take away the pejoratives and the signals of negative sentiment, there is little if any information left.
Accusing the author of introducing slop into the language by coining (or using) a new term is a criticism of the author's work, not the author himself.
It's akin to saying, "Your work has a negative side effect which I don't like." Which clearly would've been the nicer way to say it.
I know "personal attack" sounds pretty strong, but the closer one is to being the target of such an attack, the more it feels like that—and there's absolutely no need to make a point that way.
but then at the top of this article:
> Sponsored by: Teleport — Secure, Govern, and Operate AI at Engineering Scale. Learn more
not exactly a coherent narrative, is it?
I get (incorrectly) accused of writing undisclosed sponsored content pretty often, so I'm actually hoping that the visible sponsor banner will help people resist that temptation because they can see that the sponsorship is visible, not hidden.
not enough to not take their money though?
insipid