hckrnws
Comments* moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096253, which has the original source.
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)
The actual content: https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2024987174077432126
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Why is this linking to a blog post of what someone said, instead of directly linking to what they said?
(Prefer the xcancel link [1] someone posted in this thread.)
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That's a bit overblown, but Im getting tired of seeing pelicans on bikes too.
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Because the author of the blog is paid to post daily about nothing but AI and needs to link farm for clicks and engagement on a daily basis.
Most of the time, users (or the author himself) submit this blog as the source, when in fact it is just content that ultimately just links to the original source for the goal of engagement. Unfortunately, this actually breaks two guidelines: "promotional spam" and "original sourcing".
From [0]
"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
and
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
The moderators won't do anything because they are allowing it [1] only for this blog.
Simon's work is always appreciated. He thinks through things well, and his writing is excellent.
Just because something is popular doesn't make it bad.
That's not Simon's work or even any work at all, it is a link to a xit
"Self promotion is allowed if your content is sufficiently good" is odd.
Self-promotion is allowed. Doesn't even have to be good.
The HN guidelines say don't use HN "primarily" for self promotion, which Simon does not do. He's an active member of the HN community.
He's an active member primarily self promoting
Simon's comment history indicates otherwise
He massively fell off, is now only in for the marketing hype and even has a sponsor now for his blog. Sad.
Yeah it's really quite annoying. Is there a way to just block his site source from showing up on here without using external tools?
I find is very easy to hit the hide button. It makes reading the site much faster but there is some feeling of fomo.
That's per-post though isn't? I can't ban a submission source can I?
Regardless thanks for the tip
What's wrong with external tools? Just ask Claude to vibe-code you a Simonblocker.
The author didn't submit this to HN. I read his blog but I'm not on X so I do like when he covers things there. He's submitted 10 times in last 62 days.
> He's submitted 10 times in last 62 days.
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...
I like being able to follow tangents and related topics outside the main comment thread so generally I appreciate when people do that via a link along with some context.
But this isn't my site and I don't get to pick the rules.
>anyone else
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.
> Perhaps not other thought leaders.
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.
So about 1 in 10? Doesn’t seem that terrible to me. Especially when many of them are in response to questions about his work, and he’s answering with a link to a different post.
I think 7 or 8 out of 10 would be a bad look.
It depends.
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.
he adds an insane amount of signal. some folks just can't look at the light and that's ok!
Hah i didn’t see who submitted it but as soon as I read your message i thought it was simonw, and behold, tada!
HN really needs a way to block or hide posts from some users.
firefox usercss or stylus addon, enjoy ;), no LLM needed
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
HN formatting isn't quite markdown: you want a 4-space prefix to identify/format text as code.
my tabs :(
does it look measurably different this way? to me it looks the same but now indented
Looks great now!
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 :-)
But I didn't submit this.
It wasn't about the submission itself, is just about every post/comment you do about AI. I don't downvote you or anything, but a bit tired. So if it can save me time to just skip over submissions/comments I will do.
(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.
Also write about rare New Zealand parrots and their excellent breeding season. Those posts don't tend to make HN though! https://simonwillison.net/tags/kakapo/
i very much appreciate your reporting on AI, please don't stop
For what it's worth I enjoy your writing and commentary.
I use a bookmarklet for this https://dan-lovelace.github.io/hn-blocklist/. Just added simonw's website to the blocklist as well.
I described an approach here – feel free to use this if it's fit for your use-case:
Ironically, you could probably generate a browser extension or user script to do that in one to three prompts.
If you can't one-shot that you've been declawed /s
I've been warned for calling this out, but I'm glad others are privy to the obvious
> Most of the time, users (or the author himself) submit this blog as the source, when in fact it is just content that ultimately just links to the original source for the goal of engagement.
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.
Honestly in the end, I hope you don’t change your behavior b/c you’re one of the most engaging and accessible writers in the loudest space on earth right now.
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).
> 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.
Language matters. If you have a term that's widely understood you can have much more productive conversations about that concept.
"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.
What is the firm example that provides meaning to “claw”? I guess we don’t have any concrete analytics, but I would be willing to bet that the fraction of people who actually used openclaw is abysmally small, vs the hype. “Agent”s have been used by a disproportionately larger number of people. “Assistant” is also a great existing term (understood by everyone), that encompasses what the blogs hyping openclaw discussed using it for as well.
Coining terms affects normies too, it hits all of our headlines and lexicons.
Completely agreed - and that media exposure is a result of clickbait journos piggybacking on the AI hype crowd. It's all a quite disappointing feedback loop.
So everyone has to waste their time to visit a link on a blog first instead of being able to go directly to the source?
and why would anyone down vote you for calling this out, like who wants to see more low effort traffic-grab posts like this?
Because he didn't submit it.
Thank you for calling this out. The individual in question is massively overhyped.
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> Because the author of the blog is paid to post daily about nothing but AI and needs to link farm for clicks and engagement on a daily basis.
Care to elaborate? Paid by whom?
It’s at the top of the page:
> Sponsored by: Teleport — Secure, Govern, and Operate AI at Engineering Scale. Learn more
Ah, thanks. Somehow missed that.
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Would you please not cross into personal attacks on HN? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We've already had to ask you this, and we end up banning accounts that keep breaking the site guidelines this way.
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.
Rubbish. Simon is a good independent voice in capturing the llm zeitgeist.
Simon Willison claims to be an "Independent AI researcher"[1]:
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 wrote a little note about that here - it even opens with "I value my credibility as an independent voice" https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/sponsorship/
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.
> I value my credibility as an independent voice
not enough to not take their money though?
insipid
I'm currently planning to avoid sponsorship from companies that I regularly write about for that reason.
> I'm currently planning to avoid sponsorship from companies that I regularly write about for that reason.
ah so if it's not "regular" (which is completely arbitrary), then it's fine to call yourself independent while directly taking money from people you're talking about?
glad we cleared up the ambiguity around your ethical framework
You're welcome to stop reading me if you think my ethics are irreversibly corrupted and you can no longer trust my writing.
Thankfully most of my readers are better at evaluating their information sources than you are.
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That's actually a cleaner editorial standard than most publications follow. The major risk in tech journalism isn't disclosed sponsorships — it's the undisclosed access journalism where coverage tone shifts to maintain relationships. Visible banners beat invisible influence every time.
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You know I helped popularize "slop"? I get credited by Wikipedia as an "early champion": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop
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Crafted by Rajat
Source Code