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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
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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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.
"Self promotion is allowed if your content is sufficiently good" is odd.
That's not Simon's work or even any work at all, it is a link to a xit
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...
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
But I didn't submit this.
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.
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.
What's wrong with external tools? Just ask Claude to vibe-code you a Simonblocker.
I've been warned for calling this out, but I'm glad others are privy to the obvious
Thank you for calling this out. The individual in question is massively overhyped.
> 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.
> 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.
Linking a tweet by Karpathy is a value add??
Karpathy calling OpenClaw a claw is an act of genius level naming?
Jesus wept.
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).
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.
> 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
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.)
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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.
I think my comment was a dissenting opinion, not a personal attack. Its troubling that such a comment would be considered crossing a line
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 sorry, how was that a personal attack?
I answered that in the sibling (cousin?) comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114810.
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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.
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.
You know I helped popularize "slop"? I get credited by Wikipedia as an "early champion": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop