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Comment by QuadmasterXLII | Hacker News Reader

Why are comments turned off on the blog posts itself? I was planning to make 200 thoughtful comments with the cheapest AI I could find to prove a point, but the lack of an option to comment shows you already know the point: something has to gate participation in the conversation. Human authorship is a fantastic gate, which keeps me from pulling my stunt here, where that gate is firmly in place. You could achieve almost the same goals by requiring blog comments to hash to a number ending in X 0s, but requiring human writing is a strict improvement on this. A true devotee of “human writing is not fundamentally better than ai” is signing themselves up to never read a block of text written with actual effort again without some proof of effort mechanism.

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I guarantee you that people are using AI to write posts here.

I do think that there is a gate against poorly written comments.

This is probably true in the sense that it's also probably true that people are, at the margins, successfully manipulating votes, but it's part of the premise of the site that the moderators are working to counter that. And, like vote rigging, it's a cat-and-mouse game, so you're never going to get a wholly satisfying explanation of how they've decisively resolved the problem. Like a lot of problems in security and antiabuse, the practical solutions are essentially economic in nature: defenders do enough work to make attacks too expensive to be worth it.

Totally.

It also brings into focus what is being moderated for. It does seem like the most effective solutions are just to make sure the commentors are human.

Idea for a captcha

Are there infinitely many primes p such that p − 1 is a perfect square? In other words: Are there infinitely many primes of the form n2 + 1?

Answer: [ ]

( ) I don't know

Yeah, in a small way I agree with the post, but agree with you as well. For me: human authorship is a pretty solid gate, because the vast majority of people are not doing the work described in the post’s hypothetical “argue through 6 drafts and iterations, wholesale rearrangement, critically considering the content, adjusting further”.

I don’t exactly care about whether or not the actual bits on my screen came directly from a human’s fingers on a keyboard or from an LLM, but I do care about whether or not the material is good, well-written, appropriately concise (which varies both on the content and the audience), fact-checked, and I’m sure a bunch more factors. Some humans fail at these criteria as well.

Human authorship is an imperfect proxy for quality, but saying it’s imperfect doesn’t mean that it’s worthless… quite the opposite, I’d argue. Even if there are flaws in the writing, it at least shows that the author tried, which I do personally put value on. Copy & pasting Claude output without even fact-checking… that’s inherently low effort and if that’s what I wanted to read, I’d just ask Claude myself.

I use LLMs in my workflow to varying degrees depending on the task, but their output never makes it into the wild without serious scrutiny. Sometimes their code is better than what I’d have written, which is great. Sometimes it completely misses the point and needs significant re-steering several times, to the point where it’s easier if I write it myself. For writing, I’ll happily have an LLM harness put together a document explaining a dataflow through a complex system; I ask it to include source filenames and line numbers and can do my own validation before accepting it as truth.

Effort is not a good signal for value. Never has been. Just because someone took 10 more hours to finish a task doesn't mean they did a better job or they care more about the result.

Effort is, however, an okay proxy for giving a shit.

You’re right that some folks can share more value in fifteen seconds than others might in fifteen hours (setting aside that the first set of folks might have got to that point by way of fifteen years of practice first). That’s hard to gate on. But keeping out shitposters and spammers by requiring a modicum of effort is at least somewhat effective.

But a lack of effort is a good signal for a lack of value.

Eleven times out of ten, your initial idea is garbage. If you write it up, or let AI do that for you, the result is garbage. But if you go through the effort of structuring the idea and thinking about how to express it and how to phrase the details, you may learn what's wrong with the idea and how to improve it.

That's...not proving a point, that's vandalism.

Right, just like every time someone posts an AI comment on HN.

Authors aren't obligated to let strangers publish content on their site, any more than you're obligated to let me exercise my free speech by spraypainting messages on your house. You're not being gatekept from the conversation. You can participate in the conversation by publishing on your own site, just like the author has.

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