Top all-time · #3079
Andrej Karpathy
Personal blog · karpathy.medium.comaiprogramming
Andrej Karpathy's personal blog at karpathy.medium.com covers ai and programming. Since 2021, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “Andrej Karpathy – Software 2.0”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Karpathy's Medium essay 'Software 2.0', which describes neural networks and learned models as a new way of writing software; it is cited across many threads on AI and programming.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Andrej Karpathy – Software 2.020 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2021-03-21
- Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-10-11
What Hacker News says?
It's using NNs or ML models which are given datasets and learn using those datasets. https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 If you read the talk you can find out this and more :)
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Andrej Karpathy's talk on the future of the industry”Submitted Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction (2016) as a story · 353 points
HN discussionNo – for more context you can check out Karpathy's original essay from 2017: https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Andrej Karpathy's talk on the future of the industry”Submitted Virtual Reality: still not quite there, again (2017) as a story · 49 points
HN discussionKarpathy talks about this in https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “OpenAI DevDay 2024 live blog”Submitted Andrej Karpathy – Software 2.0 as a story · 14 points
HN discussionAgreed - many tasks can be done with more accessible tools. It's why Excel is so popular. It's why modal editors suck for the majority of humanity. For most people and most applications, WYSIWYG is fine and allows people to use the computer to do their work. We'll still need the more sophisticated tooling for a long time, but even that becomes more niche once it gets really good. Most developers are not writing asse…
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Outgrowing Software”Submitted Software 2.0 as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is essentially the paradigm what Karpathy deemed to be "Software 2.0" in an article in 2017: https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless von Neumann Architecture”Submitted Software 2.0 (2017) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYes, but we've all heard about Dojo https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=8809 https://www.inverse.com/innovation/tesla-dojo-self-driving-v... , and Software 2.0 https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Tesla 2Q 2021 Quarterly Result”Submitted Software 2.0 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSome would call this Software 2.0 https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “What if we set GPT-4 free in Minecraft?”Submitted Software 2.0 (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think a lot of the hype has to do with the fact that since English has now become a programming language, everybody can theorize about what might be possible without any other programming or mathematical knowledge. This naturally results in a lot of noise, as random ideas by laymen and genuinely great, currently possible ideas now have the exact same form and even language. To outsiders, a good prompt might appear…
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Anyone else tired of the AI hype?”Submitted Yes, you should understand backprop (2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionVery worried. The BLS edited their stats, projecting the number of software engineers will decrease by 11% in the next ten years: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... This is a pretty drastic change from their earlier prediction (often cited all over the internet) that the number of software engineers will increase by more than 30% in the next 10 years. It's not the full replacement of sof…
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Ask HN: How worried are you about being replaced by an LLM”Submitted Yes You Should Understand Backprop (Andrej Karpathy, 2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhat concrete advantages does OP gain from solving a problem in Rust? If you're considering creating a language binding in Rust, you can't easily bypass C, the predominant language for operating systems, and may end up using “unsafe” anyway. While you can designate certain parts as safe and others as unsafe, the real question is: what tangible benefit does this bring to you? Is safety truly a crucial factor? Various…
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Should I learn C++ or Rust?”Submitted Software 2.0 (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI guess this raises the question of levels of explanation. What kind of explanation would you like to be able to get? It reminds me of something the physicist Tim Maudlin described on a recent podcast (I will give a poor summary): Suppose you have the spinning color wheel on your MacBook. You give it to a computer scientist who says that the program is in an infinite loop, and the wheel will never stop spinning. The…
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “The Computer Scientist Peering Inside AI’s Black Boxes”Andrej wrote an interesting post some years back titled Software 2.0 about the direction he saw software engineering going. It's more about changes in software than the changes in the job market, but I suspect you'd still find it interesting. https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out by Andrej Karpathy”According to Andrej Karpathy, programming 2.0 will be more oriented to dig in individual domain for your goal. https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Ask HN: Will AI era lead to rise of new programming languages?”> to read this as though it is very obvious and commonly accepted fact I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to by "this" but assuming you mean my comment, I think what I'm saying is very much up for debate and not an "obvious and commonly accepted fact". Karpathy has a very reasonably argument that directly disagrees with what I'm suggesting [0]. Of course he also agrees that in practice nobody will every use…
Comment linking /yes-you-should-understand-backprop-e2f06eab496b
on “Neural Network from Scratch (Interactive)”Agreed it's annoying, but on a certain level also not entirely wrong. In a software 2.0 [0] world the weights are functionally the code in that it is what gets you from input to output. Open weights or something similar would be better though [0] https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Comment linking /software-2-0-a64152b37c35
on “Llama and ChatGPT Are Not Open-Source”
