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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"What if everybody in this room decided to come together and agree with what I'm saying? Let's look at a picture of the planet again. That is a world I want to live in."
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.
This isn't just a CSS snippet—it's a monumentous paradigm shift in your HN browsing landscape. A link on the front page? That's not noise anymore—that's pure signal.
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.
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/
Pay no mind to this miserable mob. You do good work. It’s thorough and balanced. They don’t realize it because they don’t actually read anything you write.
> 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'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.
> 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.
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.
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).
The value add here is in highlighting and encouraging a new piece of terminology in the AI space which I think is genuinely useful.
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.
I've been building managed hosting for this exact category of agent systems. The supervision/persistence angle is what drew me to it.
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.)
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.
Telling someone they are not only "introducing more slop into the language" but even "trying to introduce more slop into the language" is clearly pejorative.
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.
I'm broadly with you on disliking OP's comment because it is needlessly negative, but I don't think it quite rises to the standard of a personal attack.
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.
Interpretations differ, of course. I'd say any internet comment of the form "Please $Person. For the love of god stop trying to do $bad-thing" is clearly over that line, and snarky to boot.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, after his ~23 years of writing online I think he's fairly earned the title as an independent researcher. He added those sponsorships three days ago; perhaps wait to raise your alarm bells until he actually writes about a sponsor.
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)
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