Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Here are the articles in this series that got significant HN discussion (in chronological order for a change):

ML promises to be profoundly weird* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 - April 2026 (602 comments)

The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528 - April 2026 (106 comments)

The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730981 - April 2026 (169 comments)

The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379 - April 2026 (180 comments)

The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766550 - April 2026 (217 comments)

The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778758 - April 2026 (178 comments)

* (That first title was different because of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695064 - as you can see, I gave up.)

p.s. Normally we downweight subsequent articles in a series because avoiding repetition of any kind is the main thing that keeps HN interesting. But we made an exception in this case. Please don't draw conclusions from that since we'll probably get less series-ey, not more, after this! Better to bundle into one longer article.

If you enjoyed reading these and would like more, very few folks read sections 2, 4, or 6. They might be up your alley:

2. Dynamics - https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

4. Information Ecology - https://aphyr.com/posts/414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

6. Psychological Hazards - https://aphyr.com/posts/416-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

This series is seriously the best thing I have read about AI. Thank you thank you thank you for doing so much hard thinking and taking the time to write it all up. It's a monumental work and extremely valuable.

The next time someone asks me where I think AI is going, I'll just point them at this series.

I have read every post in the series and really appreciated it.

I've had a tremendous amount of respect for you since I first encountered the Jepsen analyses, but your breakdown of the likely impacts of LLMs and ML may impress me more.

You've articulated very well several concerns of mine that I haven't seen anyone else mention, and highlighted other issues I had not previously recognized.

Thank you for publishing this now, when it could still have some influence, rather than polishing and researching and refining until it was thoroughly rigorous and too late to be relevant.

> Normally we downweight subsequent articles in a series because avoiding repetition of any kind is the main thing that keeps HN interesting

This is in jest right? Yesterday hn posted a paper from 1983... I regularly see 20 year old articles reposted, you've even got a section in your code of conduct arguing how you aren't Reddit despite the apparent nature of this site....

I think I see the misunderstanding here! By repetition I didn't mean "anything that has ever appeared before". I meant "the frontpage being too similar to other recent frontpages". We could call the former absolute repetition and the latter relative repetition.

For community happiness, what matters is avoiding relative repetition. Absolute repetition isn't a problem because, once enough time has gone by, everything old becomes new again. It's like the second-hand clothing store in my home town that used to be called "New to You". (Actually it was called "New 2 You", but I'm pot-committed to the wrong spelling: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....)

In this sense, historical material usually counts as non-repetitive because it doesn't appear much and when it does, the topic is usuually unlike anything else. It is, in fact, some of our most uncorrelated material, so we encourage it.

For example, today we have lunar dust, Trojan coins, and a lost folk singer. A few days ago we had APL source code, medieval pronouns, and lord knows what else.

In the case of classics—perennial submissions that most HN readers either know or would probably enjoy—we explicitly allow them to be reposted after a year or so, and often list the previous discussions because many readers enjoy scrolling back through those too. Here's a current example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811186.

Why would a series of articles imply repetition?

Let's presume there's a series on re-making the antikythera mechanism:

1. Metallurgy: finding, mining and smelting the ore

2. Building the tools (files, molds, etc)

3. Designing the mechanism

4. Making the parts (gears, bearings, etc)

Am I wrong or there's no repetition, except maybe the title and calling it a series? Why reject parts 2, 3, 4?

Guess: there is likely some repetition in articles in a series, but there is a ton in the discussion here, and that is what HN wants to avoid. Discussion on a link that bundles together the parts of a series helps avoid excessive rehashing in the comment sections.

The overall topic is the same, even in the hypothetical sequence you mention. Keep in mind that even if an article series is strictly partitioned into distinct parts, the discussion threads mostly won't be - all the different aspects will blend together, which means the threads will be more like "the same soup over and over" than "one about metallurgy, one about design, etc."

(Edit: I just noticed that strbean already made this point in the sibling comment!)

Also: usually the splitting into a series is somewhat artificial. In the worst cases, people try to make the segments be like TV episodes with cliffhangers, to push you to the next bit. That's a poor fit for HN. But even when they don't, to get the full "meal" you still have to go through all the parts. Few people do that, and the threads as a whole never do. This makes it less interesting and satisfying.

But there can be exceptions, and (ironically?) featuring an occasional exception mixes things up and so reduces repetitiveness! The trouble is that once people see one exception, they immediately expect/want others, pushing things back into a repetitive sequence and making the site less interesting again. It's a bit like telling the same joke twice in a row—the interest is all in the first telling.

fyi, the entire domain is unavailable in the UK “due to the online safety act.”

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