[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Every...
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Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything
else/other?"
I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a
place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have
come across. The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made
it much less appealing to me.
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 392 points
Date : 2025-07-15 14:51 UTC (8 hours ago)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Feature request: HN could support a tag or label for categorizing
| a post. This would allow for filtering trivially, and creating
| views based on participant interest.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I second that emotion.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Wouldn't be hard to train an LLM to do it!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Indeed! Previous:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44261825
|
| I suppose an extension is the answer, classifying and
| customizing the user's view accordingly with a pluggable LLM
| config.
| azath92 wrote:
| weve just explored a HN site-reskin as a quick way to
| validate this, and I now use it for my browsing every day.
| Its a pretty transparent "profile" that gets applied by an
| llm to rank your HN frontpage, but would be trivial to
| shift that to a filter.
|
| An extension could be a powerful way to apply it without
| having to leave HN, but I wonder if that (and our website
| prototype) is a short term solution. I can imaging having
| an extension per news/content site, or an "alt site" for
| each that takes into account your preferences, but it feels
| clunky.
|
| OTOH having a generic llm in browser that does this for all
| sites feels quite far off, so maybe the narrow solutions
| where you really care about it are the way to go?
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| Maybe you'll want to try Techne: https://techne.app.
| Hasnep wrote:
| I don't know if you're allowed to promote alternatives to HN,
| but Lobste.rs has tags which you can follow or completely
| block. Plus I've found the quality of the discussion is higher
| than HN, at the cost of much lower quantity.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > at the cost of much lower quantity.
|
| Which they could solve by having a less dumb invite system.
| They can very easily confirm I am not a bot nor a spammer
| based on any number of objective metrics I can provide to
| them. But instead the answer is "idle in IRC, hope for the
| best" and thus they end up with the audience who is willing
| to jump through those hoops
| jowea wrote:
| That is a perennial proposal as far as I remember.
| al_borland wrote:
| Keyword filters on the user side would avoid adding extra steps
| to submitting and moderation. Categories are an extra
| complication.
| esafak wrote:
| Someone has probably developed a personalized browser for HN.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news is perhaps
| relevant.
|
| If someone wants to add LLM pluggable support (API endpoint
| target) and it'll work on Firefox, I'm willing to kick in
| some fiat. "HN Copilot."
| aleksituk wrote:
| Not a browser but a reskin website:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44454305
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This post is turning up at least every other day. The last few
| times my reply was "AI is 4/30 or 5/30 of the front page, it's
| not such a big deal", but today it is 9/30.
|
| I am wondering what the ratio is for VC and angel dealflow in the
| valley right now.
|
| Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI
| articles is an effective method of resistance.
| delusional wrote:
| > The last few times my reply was "AI is 4/30 or 5/30 of the
| front page, it's not such a big deal", but today it is 9/30.
|
| A bigger impact for me has been the number of mentions of AI in
| the comments. It's not just that a large part of the front page
| is dominated by LLM hype posts, it's that every single post has
| a least one guy near the top somehow bringing AI into the
| discussion. I don't even care if it's "AI will fix this" or
| "haha, AI sucks at this too". I just don't want to hear
| anything about AI ever again.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I noted that too, to the point where I'm suspecting that
| "that guy" (obviously not just one user) is being paid to do
| so.
|
| I've started downvoting them, the same way I always downvote
| "I fed this to an LLM and here's what it spat out".
| delusional wrote:
| I have had that same thought when I see them as one of the
| first comments on a post. I can't do anything with that
| suspicion, how would I prove it, but it's definitely there.
| jader201 wrote:
| > _I just don 't want to hear anything about AI ever again._
|
| Genuinely curious: Why?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I upvoted this post, and would love to
| see AI separated out, or at least tagged (like a root comment
| suggests) so that I can filter them out if I want.
|
| But I can't say I'd never want to hear anything about AI ever
| again (though I'm headed in that direction).
|
| What field are you in, and what are your interests, such that
| you'd want to visit HN without ever seeing mentions of AI?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Not the OP, but I'm sick to death of hearing about AI
|
| The hype around it is ridiculous. I don't personally find
| it nearly as useful as people are saying, so everything
| feels like people are trying to gaslight me
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's cool tech. Amazing stuff. I just
| personally don't have much interest in it until it's much
| more reliable for the things I want to use it for
|
| And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how this
| is going to replace people like me any minute now
| ryandrake wrote:
| > And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how
| this is going to replace people like me any minute now
|
| I'm kind of exhausted in general (year after year) of
| frankly unimaginative engineers who should know better,
| latching on to whatever is the latest soup of the month,
| and touting it here as the greatest human achievement
| since fire.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I do wish that there was a good place to talk about
| interesting stuff with people online that was a bit more
| resistant to both the extreme hype and the extreme
| pessimism
|
| HN threads very often feel like whichever side posted
| first winds up dominating the thread, it's bizarre
|
| I see the comments on some articles that are massively
| pro AI all upvoted to the top, then the comments on
| another article and it's all the negative AI comments
| upvoted
|
| It's weirdly echo-chambery on a post by post basis
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah this has been the worst development in HN culture as
| HN has grown in my experience. To make things worse the
| extremity of the hype and pessimism just creates a huge
| flamewar where each side is dedicated to using the worst
| strawmen to undermine the other side.
|
| Personally I just started treating this site as a
| sophisticated shitposting place and started actually
| talking about tech in group chats with friends who work
| in the industry. Increasingly I see folks refer to the
| content here in the same breath as Reddit so I don't
| think I'm the only one.
|
| It's probably just a scale problem. When a website
| becomes big enough it becomes dominated by the folks with
| the most time to post and the most passionate opinions.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Not your parent, and not anti-AI, but I've seen similar
| things to this thread in smaller spaces I'm in.
|
| There are some people who are having genuine crises over
| this stuff, some of it existential, and some of it "wow I
| thought my friends had some basic agreements about the
| world that we actually don't," and seeing this stuff on the
| regular just fans these sorts of issues.
|
| Also, in a simpler sense, there are a limited number of
| homepage spots, and if you don't want to see a topic, it
| effectively shrinks your homepage. If HN only showed five
| stories to me it would be less useful than it is now.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Also, in a simpler sense, there are a limited number of
| homepage spots, and if you don't want to see a topic, it
| effectively shrinks your homepage. If HN only showed five
| stories to me it would be less useful than it is now.
|
| Yes, I feel like all these shallow "[Someone] vibe-coded
| [thing] with AI using [Claud whatever]" articles are
| hitting the front page and muscling out other, more
| interesting ones. Just like the "[Common unix utility]
| re-written in Rust!" articles of years past.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I wrote this
|
| https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/
|
| years ago but I don't stand by that article because I
| don't feel that way anymore. I do stand by the sequel
|
| https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticle
| s/
|
| because that's the operating principle of YOShInOn which
| is something a little more sophisticated applied to RSS
| feeds and productized.
| delusional wrote:
| That is a wonderful question, but it's very hard to answer
| without essentially knowing me, and that may be a little
| bit ambitious for a comment.
|
| I'm a software engineer. I consider this some of the most
| important work of our generation. The hardware we've made
| today has unlocked an until now impossible control over the
| world. We don't have to mechanically devise a way to make a
| clock that tracks the stars. We can just program it into a
| microchip, and it'll just do it. We don't have to manage an
| untold thousands of people to calculate our taxes. We can
| write it into a computer and it can just do it. Forever and
| perfectly. We're just not applying it.
|
| I've reached the point of despair. It's not a AI doom kind
| of despair, where I believe that AI is going rogue or
| whatever. It's a much more pedestrian of despair. We have
| tremendous problems ahead of us. Both when it comes to the
| climate, but also when it comes to just doing the things
| that society always has to do and AI doesn't offer anything
| to any of the actual problems of society.
|
| While people are dying of Ebola in Africa and Americans are
| dying because they can't pay for healthcare, we are talking
| about automating software development for ad-tech
| companies. It's embarrassing. This is my field, these are
| my people, and this is the best we have to offer.
|
| I try to abstain from that despair by just not engaging
| with it. Either AI will happen and we'll take it from
| there, or it wont and then we'll have wasted a lot of
| effort and will hopefully never had any credibility as an
| industry again. I can't make a difference in either of
| those outcomes, so I just want it to go away.
|
| Let me make it clear though. I too love the math behind
| recent AI. I even love the engineering behind how we do
| fast GEMM on GPU's. The challenges are really fun
| technically. That just can't be what decides our direction.
|
| I hope that somewhat answered it a little. It's a bit hard
| to get such a large topic rooted so deeply in me into a
| comment. Thinking about the future in relation to these
| billion dollar companies and what they make does actually
| make me emotional.
| saulpw wrote:
| Thank you, I feel similarly. We've become gods of
| computing through global-scale invention, production,
| supply-chains, and finance, and we're apparently going to
| use that power to "improve productivity" which in the
| best case means cheaper apps that make people more money.
| I've not heard a single actual use-case for the modern
| AI/LLM that helps us with our actual national and global
| problems.
| lazide wrote:
| That is because those problems aren't being fixed not
| because they are not technically fixable, but because as
| a society we would need to agree on what 'fixed' means.
|
| And that triggers the culture war, because Urban/Rural
| and other major factions have wildly different
| experiences, incentives, and goals on these fronts. And
| anyone trying to tackle those real problems who is
| noticed by one side or the other will inevitably get
| attacked.
|
| And rather than sit down and really consider what we (as
| a nation!) want overall, make compromises, and agree to
| work together, we'd rather sit in our comfortable air
| conditioned places and stab each other in the back over
| the internet - or just check out into a comfortable
| bubble.
|
| And unfortunately that means that the real problems are
| escalating.
| aleksituk wrote:
| I mean there are plenty of people using AI/LLMs to help
| with the actual problems, but it's about the same level
| of proportionality of people generally speaking working
| on those problems (vs. against or mostly just
| indifferent). So thus most of AI/LLM use is not in those
| areas, sadly.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI
| articles is an effective method of resistance._
|
| Fully agree, and I in fact am finding that I actually find more
| stories I'm interested in that way than looking at the front
| page. For whatever reason, I'm increasingly getting out of sync
| (interests-wise) with broader HN. So many stories I think are
| great HN material (and would have been a few years ago)
| languish with almost no activity.
|
| So there are two reasons IMHO to browse new: Surface better
| stories to front page for engagement, and find better stories
| authorfly wrote:
| As you age your interests and curiosity change, in ways you
| often don't see until later.
|
| Very common in computer science contexts. Young
| undergraduates always pick up the new tech and make something
| that seems alien and wrong first. It's not even the masters
| students.
|
| Possibly the same Kiro - Agentic IDE post would have been as
| interesting to you as the launch of Atom or something related
| to VS Code, etc.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >This post is turning up at least every other day.
|
| Res ipsa loquitur
| Jugurtha wrote:
| > _Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI
| articles is an effective method of resistance._
|
| I hang out in /ask and /asknew for my part.
|
| PS: Hey, Paul... When are you going to close my 2021 issue[0],
| you already merged the pull request[1] :D
|
| Come on, man!
|
| [0]: https://github.com/paulhoule/gastrodon/issues/10
|
| [1]: https://github.com/paulhoule/gastrodon/pull/11
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I will take a look at it.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Will "circle back" in a few years.
|
| Buy my AI/LLM RAG Agentic bot to handle pull-requests and
| follow-ups based on HN conversations.
| alganet wrote:
| Prevention of bots and other kinds of automation takes precedence
| over any thematic changes.
|
| If that is done first, we might not need to separate subjects.
|
| HN lacks even the most basic aspects of human verification.
| rasengan wrote:
| Unfortunately, this is simply a by product of the fact that this
| is both news and the state of the world.
|
| Like most it too will come to pass (as it is further adopted in
| the mainstream and becomes commonplace).
| optimlayer wrote:
| curious, couldn't AL/llm related content also have interesting
| new information? im not referring to ai generated sloppy
| articles. more so the deep tech behind it. personally im super
| interested in machine learning and love it when i come across
| such links here.
| dylan604 wrote:
| From time to time, you find something AI/LLM related that is
| interesting. Like the people trying to save money by speeding
| up their audio before submitting for transcription. Not only
| did it save money, but improved accuracy. It's those kinds of
| finds that are interesting in the hacker sense. Increasing the
| number of tokens at a certain point has a negative affect.
| Okay, someone is taking that hacker ethos to see what happens
| when the knobs are twisted. Showing me yet another image
| manipulation tool or new chat bot? Yawn. Next.
| gosub100 wrote:
| No, I have zero interest in LLM and ignoring the posts has worked
| fine for me. The political posts are causing more damage IMO.
| There is also a "hide" button if you keep seeing a lingering high
| activity post.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But finding out that LLMs are used to push the political posts
| in such obvious ways yet people are still falling for it is a
| somewhat interesting topic. Regardless whether that just pushes
| your bias towards LLMs == bad or tweaks you to spin up your own
| LLM to combat by searching/detecting/posting the slop. Burying
| your head in the sand and ignoring _all_ of it is not good
| either.
| zahlman wrote:
| > LLMs are used to push the political posts in such obvious
| ways
|
| Most of "the political posts" seem to happen because someone
| shares a news article and everyone else uses it as an excuse
| to discuss the general topic (or at least something that gets
| general agreement as being the topic). I'm not really clear
| on how LLMs get involved there.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I would absolutely click on an article about the detection of
| AI and how to get rid of fake accounts. Or how AI is being
| used to scam people. But I couldn't care less about
| turdF1nger.6i and it's 3.4b paramters.
| danbruc wrote:
| No, will go away just like all the crypto stuff - remember that
| time? - went away.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Very few problems were solved by crypto, so it naturally
| disappeared.
|
| On the contrary, LLMs based AIs create a lot of new problems.
| bestouff wrote:
| But but the Rust stuff is still there ! (To my pleasure I must
| confess)
| bombcar wrote:
| A new crypto LLM AI on the blockchain-l - in Rust!
| ryandrake wrote:
| You joke--but an article exactly like that has probably
| been posted here.
| waffletower wrote:
| Could we have a fork where people talk about Rust somewhere
| else ;)
| conception wrote:
| Unlike crypto though LLMs are actually useful.
| leptons wrote:
| "A broken clock is right twice a day". I guess that's useful
| too, in a similar kind of way.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| Reading this from a user named "leptons" made me chuckle.
| tornikeo wrote:
| No, it is not time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything
| else/other".
|
| I enjoy the website as-is, and simply use search when I want to
| get to the topics that interest me.
| slig wrote:
| Vibe code a browser extension that uses a cheap LLM to filter out
| content that you don't want to see.
| esperent wrote:
| Or just spend 60 seconds writing a ublock filter with the ten
| most common phrases you don't want>
| bnchrch wrote:
| No for three reasons.
|
| One, lets be honest, hn wont do it, part of their secret sauce is
| that they don't change, and they know that.
|
| Two, fragmenting the community would just reduce engagement and
| risk making both feel like a ghost town.
|
| Three, LLMs are (one of) the forefronts of our industry. State of
| the art is advancing fast. It has properties that no one knows
| the best practises for. And it has implications that are wide
| ranging. To try and bury this because it has a lot of new
| developments goes against why most of us are on this site.
|
| I believe in the meritocracy of the upvote button.
| thrill wrote:
| Maybe we could fork it into technical discussions and complaints
| about technical discussions.
| leonheld wrote:
| My experience with HackerNews would be significantly improved if
| I could exclude the LLM-related stuff... it's overwhelming.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| I havent been on here forever, but I vaguely remember other
| trends took over for certain periods. I could be misremembering,
| but crypto drove a lot of interaction for a while. I'm
| indifferent towards LLMs, probably because I'm not a developer in
| my day job, and I don't mind seeing LLM posts. It is annoying
| that every single LLM thread devolves into the same tired
| arguments between LLM zealots and detractors.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as
| a place where I 'd discover things that I never otherwise would
| have come across._
|
| I've had the exact same feeling a lot over the past couple years
| or so, and especially the last 6 months. I used to hit the front
| page and find 5 to 10 stories I was interested in. Exhausting
| those to read the second or third page wasn't common. Now I find
| maybe one story I want, and I routinely will scan through 4 or 5
| pages (down to 120 to 160) and only find a handful (4 or 5) that
| I want to read.
|
| I've long found myself wishing for mini-HNs on different broad
| topics that interest me. Sadly this was the whole point/idea
| behind reddit. For example, besides the actual and venerable and
| loved real HN, I'd love an HN for:
|
| 1. Politics: Where disagreements are encouraged and any claims
| are challenged, but only with factual arguments/counterarguments,
| and any emotional arguments are moderated (basically how we
| encourage HN comments to be). There have been some reddit
| communities over the years doing this, but IME they frequently
| devolve into echo chambers. It almost always comes down to bad
| moderators.
|
| 2. General News: Where stuff that is of broad interest (and not
| really tech-related) can be posted and commented on in thoughtful
| ways. Particularly local news would be fun
|
| 3. <placeholder>: Had an idea and forgot it as I was making the
| list. Will edit and insert when I remember!
|
| I've kind of accepted that my dream just can't work (at least,
| looking at Reddit as the great experimentation of that). People
| on the internet are just (generally speaking) incapable of
| consistently humanizing the user(s) on the other end, and proceed
| to treat others very poorly. Pride and inability to be wrong
| strongly exacerbate that tendency.
| waffletower wrote:
| I have a similar process, but usually scan down to 60 (as I did
| today). I found eight stories including this one and have
| tabbed them to read. I don't like rust-y koolaid myself, but
| would never complain that it is here, nor would I complain
| about seeing the word 'typescript' as it is really far from my
| interests. To my interest -- excellent AI related white papers,
| AI agent paradigms and code, model announcements etc. are
| regularly posted here. Of the eight I picked today, half are AI
| related. 4 out of 60 isn't bad if I was trying to be an
| artificial intelligence ostrich.
| zahlman wrote:
| > There have been some reddit communities over the years doing
| this, but IME they frequently devolve into echo chambers. It
| almost always comes down to bad moderators.
|
| In my experience:
|
| Most of them are basically designed to be echo chambers from
| the start -- opposition is only admitted in to the extent that
| it allows easy targets to knock down. Most people just aren't
| that good at explaining why they believe what they believe, let
| along making a convincing argument for it; so all you need to
| do is set up an environment where one side's position is the
| default.
|
| There have been a few attempts at explicitly avoiding that
| problem. They do eventually collapse. But I don't think it's
| due to bad moderation. It's more that certain factions simply
| refuse to engage civilly and unemotionally with each other.
| They will see statements as inherently provocative that the
| other side genuinely consider matter-of-fact.
|
| I was a moderator for a place like that once. It was remarkable
| to me how, on the "hot topics" that were polarizing and led to
| a lot of bans and suspensions, on one side people who were
| suspended would argue and whine and complain basically as long
| as we'd listen to them, maybe even the entire duration of the
| suspension, and they would never get it into their head what
| our standards were for respectful discourse; and they would
| even suggest that having such standards was inherently
| oppressive; and when they got back they would immediately go
| back to their old ways. And on the other side, people would
| basically say "LOL, see you on <suspension end date>" and
| disappear, and come back as promised, and behave themselves for
| a while.
|
| And while there were a very few people who simply couldn't kick
| the habit of using slurs or other disparaging terms to refer to
| identifiable groups of people, there were _far more_ -- almost
| all on the opposite side -- who simply couldn 't kick the habit
| of openly insulting the people they were directly responding
| to. Or at insinuating negative character traits and hidden
| motivations not in evidence, or other such "dark hinting" as we
| call it. Or even just of using obnoxious, brutal sarcasm all
| the time when we expected people to speak plainly.
| waldopat wrote:
| Honestly, I've always appreciated how much of 2007 Hacker News is
| still intact. It remains one of the few places on the internet
| where discovery still happens organically without trending
| algorithms or clickbait optimization. It's just manual
| submissions, one by one.
|
| There's only one other community I've encountered like it, run by
| a small liberal arts college.
|
| From a signals perspective, HN is incredibly valuable. You get to
| watch in real time what's capturing the minds of technically
| inclined readers. Sure, that means lots of lurkers and a few
| dominant topics (right now: AI). But that's also kind of the
| point. HN works as a reflection of where the collective attention
| is, whether we like it or not.
|
| Anyways...just two cents.
| Lerc wrote:
| I have seen this question asked on subreddits, Not about AI, but
| for other topics that some people dislike.
|
| They always seem to take the form of "Should we divide this group
| into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way
| everybody is happy"
|
| Invariably the person who proposes this wants to remain in group
| A and will not be a participant in group B.
|
| To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not
| welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have
| anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down
| our throats"
|
| Anyone is free to make a website with whatever content they want,
| they can invite people to it and grow your own community.
| Directing a community to divide to remove an element you dislike
| is an attempt to appropriate the established community.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not
| welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have
| anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down
| our throats"
|
| It could just as easily be "I don't feel like there is a place
| here for me anymore and I wish I had another place to go"
| Lerc wrote:
| In my experience that is not what people mean.
|
| People with that sentiment ask about what alternative places
| exist, some of them make their own places.
|
| My post above mentioned something I notice on Reddit. I
| hardly ever visit Reddit these days. It doesn't really feel
| like the place for me now. I am not posting this comment on
| Reddit.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > People with that sentiment ask about what alternative
| places exist, some of them make their own places
|
| I don't think that's overall very true
|
| Most of those people are just lonely and isolated, and
| that's a big part of why we are living in what people are
| calling a "loneliness epidemic"
|
| It's easier than ever to make a new niche area. It's more
| difficult than ever to get your niche area discovered by
| others, because you are drowned out by the noise
|
| It feels quite hopeless for many people in my experience
| pydry wrote:
| It's about a topic not the people.
| Lerc wrote:
| So say the people who say "Hate the sin not the sinner" when
| they talk about homosexuality.
| pydry wrote:
| So say the "bigots" who, for example, want sports news
| separated from regular news because they don't find
| football so interesting.
| sdf4j wrote:
| Yes, it's always about the people. Adding a "small
| inconvenience" to people with a different perspective is ok,
| right? just visit two sites if you want your AI news.
|
| How does this sound? It's about a religion not the people.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I have seen this question asked on subreddits, "Should we
| divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over
| there and that way everybody is happy" To me this seems like
| the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here"
|
| I don't disagree with this observation about Reddit. However, I
| feel HN readers are more topic-oriented. Folks really do come
| to HN to read the articles and then maybe get drawn into a
| discussion.
|
| I grant there are some topics here that tend to be more
| engagement driven but on balance I think the above holds.
| parpfish wrote:
| > Folks really do come to HN to read the articles and then
| maybe get drawn into a discussion.
|
| based on the number of comments i see that are oblivious to
| the actual content of the articles, i'm pretty sure the user
| flow is "Folks come to HN to read headlines and have a
| conversation, and then maybe get drawn into reading an
| article"
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Those comments can't reflect people who are drawn in by the
| article but don't engage. Upvotes hint it is a significant
| number.
|
| Past that, I don't see non-reading commenters being a
| dominant presence. Some topics draw a few more than normal
| but that's the worst of it.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Really? I feel like P(didn't read the article | wrote a
| comment) to be quite high personally. Any thread with >
| 100 comments seems to be full of these posters.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| To begin with, this would be a non issue if HN just introduced
| something like user provided tags and users can vote
| for/against (to circumvent abuse)
|
| Then the people wanting to filter "x" could just do it via
| simple grease monkey scripts or if HN natively supported it.
|
| Sure, it wouldn't be perfect, but neither does it have to be.
| photonthug wrote:
| Most platforms don't grow this feature because they can
| benefit from redirecting user energy into places that the
| platform is choosing. Or some vocal minority of the user base
| benefits from redirecting the platform to a place of their
| choosing.
|
| Similar to nest usurpation with eusocial insects, this is by
| definition parasitism when the energy-redirection is unwanted
| or unavoidable.
|
| In the specific case of AI it's way worse than the usual
| suspects where everyone is effected and so everyone _has_ to
| have some opinion (looking at you politics). Because even
| some rant about how much you hate AI is directly feeding it
| at least 3 ways: first there 's the raw data, then there's
| the free-QA aspect, then there's the free-advertisement
| aspect when others speak up to disagree with your rant. So
| yeah, even people who like some of the content sometimes
| quickly start to feel hijacked.
| Kiro wrote:
| No. HN is good as it is and I find it disrespectful when
| newcomers are demanding changes like this. There's a good
| reason the forum has stayed the same for almost 20 years.
| levmiseri wrote:
| > Anyone is free to make a website with whatever content they
| want, they can invite people to it and grow your own community.
|
| This is very hard to do. But hey, I'll give it a try.
|
| Starting now a new community for AI-assisted coding:
| https://kraa.io/vibecoding
| dolebirchwood wrote:
| > product building
|
| > vibecoding
|
| These should not be deemed equivalent.
| azath92 wrote:
| For myself, i often want to be able to just "shift views" on an
| existing community, rather than wholesale move to somewhere
| else that fits better.
|
| I find I can do that with granular enough subreddits, or the
| (maybe old) feature in Twitter where you could group people you
| follow into lists and see multiple "homepages".
|
| This for me has solved the issue of dividing community, which
| at the least from a practical level can be tricky.
|
| Ive been exploring how to achieve this effect "on top" of HN
| lately, rather than by controlling followers, by popping a very
| simple AI filter on top that re-ranks it for me, and found it
| quite satisfying, but not sure what the ultimate value/usecase
| might be.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not
| welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have
| anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down
| our throats"
|
| I am truly tired of AI being rammed down my throat, not just
| via the tech news, but in article content (slop), in un-asked-
| for tech product features, and at my own tech job. The solution
| is not to divide the community and make people unwelcome, but
| to provide at least some minimal set of filters and ways to opt
| out of the hype frenzy. I don't want people to feel unwelcome,
| but I do wish there was a way to turn the AI firehose off.
| op00to wrote:
| Who's forcing you to read the AI articles?
| dmbche wrote:
| Some people come to HN for interesting articles, many lists
| exists if you want to know what I mean.
|
| If, say, a third to two third of articles in any given
| frontpage, for multiple months to years, do not fit this
| description - can you see how one's ability to find what
| they are looking for gets hampered?
|
| Like yes, you can grow nice flowers on the beautiful
| fertile soil there, it just sucks we need to get rid of
| these protected grasslands harboring endangered species on
| top of it.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Hacker news, like everything in tech, is susceptible to hype.
| Today it's AI, a few years ago it was Bitcoin.
|
| I do think it's worthwhile to occasionally have a discussion
| about what content we want to see, and if a particular topic is
| getting too much attention.
|
| It's also totally reasonable for a group of people to not want
| their agenda hijacked.
|
| So, IMO, let the discussion continue. Let's see what comes out
| of it.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I should add: Many years ago I used to read a news site that
| was modeled after slashdot. One day the person running it
| decided to switch it to be community-moderated.
|
| Every day it was the same discussion over again, from someone
| who didn't bother to do a Google search or look at what was
| posted the day prior. After a week or so of seeing the same
| discussion over and over again, I stopped reading the news
| site.
|
| Needless to say, it's important to occasionally have
| discussions like this. I also think we under-appreciate the
| amount of moderation that goes on here. Sometimes I look at
| the "new" feed and it is just loaded with lots and lots of
| nonsense, so I get that someone has to put their finger on
| the scale to keep the quality up.
| dmbche wrote:
| I don't think the poster has the power to split HN in twain.
|
| I don't think the poster believes some kind of democracy could
| bring about this.
|
| I do believe that by entertaining the idea, the subsequent
| discussion will be useful for moderators to get a feel of what
| their userbase thinks of the current state of things.
|
| From my understanding, the soul of HN and what makes it what it
| is is the moderation - having discussions on issues is an
| efficient way to signal to them.
| korse wrote:
| It is also possible to appropriate an established community by
| bringing in new members over time with views opposing the
| founding principles. This is much easier if the leadership
| preaches tolerance.
|
| This is one of those things that is kind of hard to say without
| people getting triggered because of negative stereotypes but
| sometimes you have to stand up for principles and kick people
| out of social groups to keep a good thing going.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| This honestly reminds me of the crypto days from 2017-2021ish.
|
| Literally 80% of the posts were about crypto and how we were
| going to experience some ground shattering revolution. There
| were so many posts about how all the topics are about crypto
| and how it is annoying.
|
| Ultimately, all that noise and the billions of dollars poured
| into that turned into a meme if we're honest. Most people just
| buy/flip crypto or hold BTC that they'll sell when they double
| it after a year.
|
| AI in LLM form is at least useful in many ways and in front of
| millions of people without any rugpulls and other shit, but due
| to their inherent limitations (doesn't matter how much python
| it writes and executes, half the time or more its wrong for any
| actual/meaningful work) I think the hype will settle in the
| next couple of years.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Maybe someone could make an AI service to separate them out.
| simonw wrote:
| I built you this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-
| filtered
|
| It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories
| filtered out.
|
| You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in
| localStorage.
|
| o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0...
|
| Initial prompt was: Build a web tool that
| displays the Hacker News homepage (fetched from the Algolia
| API) but filters out specific search terms, default
| to "llm, ai" in a box at the top but the user can change
| that list, it is stored in localstorage. Don't use React.
|
| Then four follow-ups: Rename to "Hacker News,
| filtered" and add a clear label that shows that the terms
| will be excluded Turn the username into a link
| to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xxx - include
| the comment count, which is in the num_comments key
| The text "392 comments" should be the link, do not have a
| separate thread link Add a tooltip to "1 day ago" that
| shows the full value from created_at
| rottc0dd wrote:
| Top story: Kiro: new agentic IDE
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Just add "agent" to the search box. It's saved in local
| storage.
| simonw wrote:
| I just added "agent" to the default exclusion list.
| luke-stanley wrote:
| Still seeing `Kiro: A new agentic IDE` BTW.
| simonw wrote:
| If the filters UI at the top shows "llm, ai" instead of
| "llm, ai, agent" then you probably have that previous
| search saved in localStorage.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| Huge respect for all your articles and work on llms, but
| this example should have been using AI to create a tool
| that uses AI to intelligently filter hacker news :)
| lossolo wrote:
| "Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a "Windows" user-
| agent"
|
| "Agents raid home of fired Florida data scientist who built
| Covid-19 dashboard"
|
| "Confessions of an ex-TSA agent"
|
| "Terrible real estate agent photographs"
|
| etc etc
| simonw wrote:
| See comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44571740#44572312
| lossolo wrote:
| I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see there. From my
| point of view, this is a low-effort, vibe coded app that
| doesn't solve the problem the OP had but it's solving a
| different one. You'd need to at least train a small
| classifier based on something like BERT to actually
| address the issue.
| pxc wrote:
| This is neat, but with the given filters you autoselected (just
| the phrases "llm" and "ai"), of the 14 stories I see when I
| visit the page, 4 of them (more than 25%!) are still stories
| about AI. (At least one of them can't be identified by this
| kind of filtering because it doesn't use any AI-related words
| in its headline, arguably maybe two.)
| azath92 wrote:
| people have said it elsewhere, but I think you might have to
| fight fire with fire if you want semantic filtering.
| IanCal wrote:
| > of the 14 stories I see when I visit the page, 4 of them
| (more than 25%!)
|
| Llm maths? ;)
| juped wrote:
| 25% of 14 is 3.5. 4 is more than 3.5. Ask grock if you
| still don't get it.
| CL_ergo wrote:
| There's a special kind of irony to use AI to help out the
| people who hate AI.
|
| It's not hypocrisy or anything negative like that, but I do
| find it amusing for some reason.
| owebmaster wrote:
| There is an even more special kind of irony to see it failing
| as the top ranked story now is "Kiro: A new agentic IDE"
| simonw wrote:
| Already fixed https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/f95b30
| 6be7b584f388256...
| owebmaster wrote:
| I know but the irony stands. We will get used to people
| getting embarrassed by AI results.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This seems like exactly the type of problem human-written
| filtering systems fall into as well.
| owebmaster wrote:
| human-written filtering systems don't brag about having a
| solution for a problem in 2 minutes and fail.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This sounds more like a complaint about the human author,
| than the system itself.
| owebmaster wrote:
| Not at all, simonw's work is fantastic. But it was a
| funny #fail.
| tuveson wrote:
| > to help out the people who hate AI.
|
| Was it? I feel like it was clearly meant to be smug and
| inflammatory rather than useful in any meaningful way.
| simonw wrote:
| I was gong for smug, inflammatory _and_ useful at the same
| time.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Great example of the power of vibe coding. The first item is
| literally "Kiro: A new agentic IDE".
| raincole wrote:
| There is literally an input box to put terms you want to
| exclude...
|
| The prompt asks for "filters out specific search terms", not
| "intelligently filter out any AI-related keywords." So yes, a
| good example of the power of vibe coding: the LLM built a
| tool according to the prompt.
| FroshKiller wrote:
| So I have to stay up to date on AI stories just to know
| what buzzwords I should filter so I don't see AI stories?
| ChromaticPanic wrote:
| That's how any filtering service works
| simonw wrote:
| Sounds to me like you want a deeper version of this that
| uses AI instead of keywords to help filter out AI
| stories.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| At a certain point it's ironic
| tolerance wrote:
| I think we're well past that stage. Using AI to escape
| AI. Does that count?
| voisin wrote:
| I think there's another step here: Using AI to build
| tools that use AI to escape AI.
|
| Eventually: using AI to build tools that use AI to escape
| AI using tools that use AI.
| tolerance wrote:
| > using AI to build tools that use AI to escape AI using
| tools that use AI
|
| Few illustrations are so absurd yet feasible enough to
| depict as horrendous a reality as this.
| jwillp wrote:
| Clearly the US needs a constitutional amendment to
| preserve the right to keep and bear AI tools. Then we can
| arm the victims of AI tools with their own AI tools, for
| self-defense. If we're lucky, AI will send its AI
| thoughts and AI prayers in carefully calculated
| quantities.
| tolerance wrote:
| Better yet, such expressions would be categorized as
| _tokens of condolence_ at no expense to the public.
| Subsidized by the arms manufacturers.
| aleksituk wrote:
| Lol, yup. See azath92 comment -
| https://www.hackernews.coffee/
| raincole wrote:
| ...Yes? This is how this tool is coded. Machines do what
| one codes them to do, not what one wants them to do. If
| you're interested in making a more intelligent tool you
| can do it. This tool does exactly what @simonw says it
| does.
| arcfour wrote:
| A tool was offered that can accomplish what you want,
| with a very small amount of added effort on your part.
|
| No, you do not have to "stay up to date on AI stories"--
| if you see one, add the keyword to the list and move on.
| There are not as many buzzwords as you seem to be
| implying, anyways.
|
| If you are dissatisfied, you are welcome to build your
| own intelligent version (but I am not sure this will be
| straightforward without the use of AI).
| Reubachi wrote:
| Our brain decodes info based on context and extrapolation
|
| This submission we're commenting on could be about
| filtering out any data, not just AI stuff. Politics,
| crypto, AI etc. Or more minute like "Trump" "fracking"
| "bitcoin" etc.
|
| In any of these scenarios, with a tool designed to filter
| _out_ content based on limited context, when would you
| ever be perfectly satisfied?
|
| would you like AI to help you build the perfect context-
| filter model?
| bee_rider wrote:
| And certainly in our anti-politics filter we'd want to
| include the filtering of stories that promote the extreme
| political position that tech is somehow detached from
| politics! (Especially Silicon Valley startup tech that
| owes so much to the local politics and economy of
| California).
|
| Which is to say, filtering politics out is absurd, one
| person's extreme politics is another's default view of
| the universe.
| lazide wrote:
| In a similar vein, I've had people assert (in all
| seriousness), their English had no discernible accent
| because they were American.
|
| It's a similar kind of mindset.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Add the buzzword when you see a story you don't like. Or
| settle with it filtering 90% of the AI content and just
| don't click on whatever remains, I doubt you expect the
| top story to be interesting to you 100% of the time.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| sounds like you need an AI to sort out and predict what
| you won't want to see ;)
| throwanem wrote:
| Isn't it enough to bury yourself under the rock? - you
| want the fact of your having done so concealed from you
| also? But what about the fact of wanting _that?_
| barbazoo wrote:
| How about a version with LLM integration that detects
| "AI" related stories in a more clever way? /s
| throwaway290 wrote:
| The prompt was to exclude llm and ai by default though
| marcellus23 wrote:
| the prompt was "default to "llm, ai"", which is exactly
| what it did. Nothing in the prompt about defaulting to
| other related terms
| Tostino wrote:
| And that title didn't contain either of those
| words...what is the complaint again?
| ackfoobar wrote:
| if all you want is word filtering in the title, you can
| simply write an adblock rule.
| dawnerd wrote:
| But how are you supposed to hype AI by using old tech
| like that?
| nbex0080 wrote:
| Have AI write the rule and an article about having AI
| write the rule.
| nice_byte wrote:
| because the point is literally to filter based on vibes
| not precise keywords
| Tostino wrote:
| That is not what the prompt I saw above asked for. It
| took him a few min. Write your own with a semantic based
| filter instead of a keyword based filter if that's what
| you want.
| johnb231 wrote:
| Just write "there is an input box ...".
|
| Stop saying "literally".
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| But there literally is an input box.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| If you're unable to discern that the word serves a
| purpose(emphasis) in that sentence, I _literally_ don 't
| know what to say to you.
| hluska wrote:
| Superfluous words serve no purpose, though your use of
| one here emphasizes your lack of maturity. If that's your
| goal, good writing.
| johnb231 wrote:
| Of course I can discern that. I think it sounds stupid
| and childish, and makes someone appear less intelligent.
| Overused and misused word. But this is now derailing the
| thread.
| hluska wrote:
| I'm with you here - it's a completely superfluous word
| that the young have adopted as some form of belonging
| ritual. It has no purpose, adds no emphasis and is just
| poor English masquerading as a statement.
| lazide wrote:
| It used to be that literally had a meaningful definition
| - quite literally. Now it doesn't (see #2)
| [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally]
|
| Not everyone has caught up.
| pc86 wrote:
| It's bad enough to expect other people to change the way
| they communicate to make you feel better.
|
| It's another thing entirely when the way they're
| communicating _is accurate and correct_.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > The prompt asks for "filters out specific search terms"
|
| So if I want a front page free of LLM "agents" but also
| want to view stories about secret agents it will do that,
| right?
| simonw wrote:
| See comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44571740#44572312
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I like this because things can stay permanently filtered.
| Just not across devices. But that wasn't one of the original
| requirements.
| aorloff wrote:
| Also a great example of how software can be perfectly to spec
| and also completely broken.
| savolai wrote:
| llm, ai, cuda, agent, gpt.
|
| Wish it returned more unfiltered items tho.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Isn't knocking out CUDA going to take out a significant
| chunk of GPGPU stuff with it? I can see wanting to avoid AI
| stuff, for sure, but I can't imagine not wanting to hear
| anything about the high-bandwidth half of your computer...
| jtbaker wrote:
| feature request for OP: sort by "LLM Agentic AI" embedding
| cosine distance desc
| simpaticoder wrote:
| An interesting example of both LLMs' strengths and weaknesses.
| It is strong because you wrote a useful tool in a few minutes.
| It is weak because this tool is strongly coupled to the
| problem: filtering HN. It's an example of the more general
| problem of people wanting to control what they see. This has
| existed at least since the classic usenet "killfiles", but is
| an area that, I believe, has been ripe for a comprehensive
| local solution for some time.
|
| OTOH, narrow solutions validate the broader solution,
| especially if there are a lot of them. Although in that case
| you invite a ton of "momentum" issues with ingrained user bases
| (and heated advocacy), hopelessly incompatible data models
| and/or UX models, and so on. It's an interesting world (in the
| Chinese curse sense) where such tools can be trivially created.
| It's not clear to me that fitness selection will work to clean
| up the landscape once it's made.
| azath92 wrote:
| Not sure what a local solution would look like when what you
| see is on websites, maybe a browser extension? we just made a
| similar reskin as a website, and it works great, but is
| ultimately another site you have to go to. Its another narrow
| solution with some variation (we do use AI to do the ranking
| rather than keyword filtering), but im interested in the form
| factors that might give maximal control to a user.
| aorloff wrote:
| It is strong because you believed it created something of
| value. Did it work ? Maybe. But regardless of whether it
| worked, you still believed in the value, and that is the
| "power" of AIs right now, that humans believe that they
| create value.
| butlike wrote:
| It only shows 13 stories? And no pagination.
| NotPractical wrote:
| Probably would work better as a userscript, so you don't have
| to rely on a random personal website never going down just to
| use HN. I don't have a ChatGPT account but I am curious as to
| if it could do that automatically too.
| aleksituk wrote:
| Interesting idea, we could consider that as an alternative
| implementation to https://www.hackernews.coffee/. While we
| are planning on making it open-source, a userscript would be
| even more robust as a solution, although would need a
| personal API key to one of the services.
| pton_xd wrote:
| [flagged]
| gamerDude wrote:
| Now that's impressive. I've worked with and managed many
| humans and almost never do I get want I want back in one
| prompt.
|
| Even ones with detailed specs and the human agreed to them
| don't come back exactly as written.
| paulddraper wrote:
| tf humans do you work with?
|
| That's at least 5 JIRA tickets.
| lazide wrote:
| Also a lot of cursing that I've been told to cut down on by
| HR. (/s, kinda)
| aleksituk wrote:
| I think it's a bifurcation between 0-1 prompts (self-driven)
| and a 1,000 prompts :)
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Perhaps you should add a privacy policy or just release the
| source rather than assume people will trust your site. Why do
| you do these demos if you aren't upfront about all the things
| the LLMs didn't do?
| simonw wrote:
| I released the source:
| https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/hacker-news-
| filter... (Apache 2 licensed) and a commit history listing
| the prompts I used.
| https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/hacker-news-
| fil... - also displayed on the site here:
| https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon#hacker-news-
| filtere...
|
| I don't think I need a privacy policy since the app is
| designed so that _nothing_ gets logged anywhere - it works by
| hitting the Algolia API directly from your browser, but the
| filtering happens locally and is stored in localStorage so
| nobody on earth has the ability to see what you filtered.
|
| The API it uses is
| https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=front_page - which
| is presumably logged somewhere (covered by Algolia's privacy
| policy) but doesn't serve any cookies.
|
| > Why do you do these demos if you aren't upfront about all
| the things the LLMs didn't do?
|
| What do you mean by that?
| johnb231 wrote:
| The site does not request any personal information, therefore
| no privacy policy is required.
| bodash wrote:
| I also built https://lessnews.dev (HN filtered by webdev links)
|
| One decision I had to make was whether the site should update
| in real time or be curated only. Eventually, I chose the latter
| because my personal goal is not to read every new link, but to
| read a few and understand them well.
| duncangh wrote:
| simon how do you get so much done? It's incredible. Would love
| to see the day in the life TikTok :P
| mvdtnz wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack.
| rjh29 wrote:
| [flagged]
| simonw wrote:
| In a thread devoted to filtering out AI, I gave them a way of
| filtering out AI.
|
| (The fact that I wrote it using AI doesn't really matter, but
| I personally found it amusing so I included the prompts.)
| dttze wrote:
| > The fact that I wrote it using AI doesn't really matter
|
| Given that it is a poorly implemented solution that doesn't
| really do what the OP asked, yes it is.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack.
| simonw wrote:
| I updated it to fetch 200 stories instead of 30, so even after
| filtering you still get hopefully 140+ things to read.
|
| https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/ccde4586a1d95ce9f5615...
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| You can even make it live with SSE/EventSource.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I think there is a fundamental disconnect in this response.
| What the user is asking for is for a procedural and cultural
| change. What you've come up with is a technical solution that
| kind of mimics a cultural change.
|
| I don't think it's wrong, but I also don't think we can really
| "AI generate" our way into better communities.
| schmookeeg wrote:
| AI solving the too-much-AI complaint is heart-warming. We're at
| the point where we will start demanding organic and free-range
| software, not this sweatshop LLM one-shot vibery.
|
| Love it. :D
| matt_heimer wrote:
| AI/LLM has become of core part of IT. If you don't want AI then
| it seems like you want a retro-computing news aggregator or just
| HN minus personal annoyances. I get it, sometimes I want the
| simpler days but as long as the AI/LLM posts are not dumbed down
| mainstream content I'm interested it them and most visitors
| probably are also. I wouldn't have discovered most of the
| articles from other places. The posts match the site's on-topic
| criteria, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That
| includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it
| to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
| intellectual curiosity.
|
| Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or
| celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new
| phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal
| pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
| zahlman wrote:
| > as long as the AI/LLM posts are not dumbed down mainstream
| content
|
| The problem is, most of it really is (as it boils down to "I am
| / $COMPANY is using an LLM to do something; here's how you can
| do it too, and / or some pundit's opinion of the implications
| for the industry"). And the stuff that wouldn't be (like how
| they work, or statistics and benchmarks), often requires
| relatively specific domain knowledge to really appreciate.
| pxc wrote:
| I've gradually come around to reading and engaging more with AI-
| related topics, but I'd still appreciate this. The balance of the
| content is way off.
| jmyeet wrote:
| No.
|
| There's always a flavor of the month. Go back 3-5 years and every
| third post was crypto or NFT related. AI/LLM too will pass.
|
| I've never really understood this desire of people to effectively
| hide content that doesn't interest them. Just... ignore it. Like
| there are enough people on HN who really care about academia and
| research. I don't. But that's fine. Let them be.
|
| But here's the interesting part: so many on HN rail against the
| newsfeed concept . You will hear a significant number of HNers
| say they just want everything in chronological order. Well,
| except for the subjects that don't interest them.
|
| If HN submissions were tagged and a recommendation algorithm
| decided what to show you, you'd get exactly what you want: fewer
| AI/LLM posts if that doesn't interest you. But somehow newsfeeds
| are still bad?
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| The desire is relateively simply explained. Some people used to
| find HN interesting, but the modern set of things being upvoted
| isn't matching their interests anymore. They already ignore the
| content they don't like, the problem is the content they do
| like isn't there anymore. The assumption, I expect, is that if
| there was less LLM content the site would have more of the
| "older style" content they used to enjoy. I don't necessarily
| think that will happen, but that's my interpretation of the
| sentiment.
| zahlman wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| It's not _supposed to be_ zero-sum -- posting volume isn 't
| limited, or at least I assume we're nowhere near what the
| servers can technically handle -- but attention span is
| limited. Seeing a front page full of things you aren't
| interested in makes it harder to find the things you are
| interested in, and feels discouraging if you want to post one
| of those things (an unfortunate feedback loop).
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| you're seeing more that content because it is relevant. HN should
| show relevant topics in tech. the AI/LLM domination of tech as a
| whole is what you're seeing on HN. There is lobste.rs which might
| be what you're looking for.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I mean, just don't click on an AI story.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| If you think HN AI/LLM content is bad, try LinkedIn or X!
|
| HN is probably the best source of informed, critical takes on
| AI/LLM content and that is super valuable to me. I don't think it
| should fork; I want the same audience to keep doing its work and
| having the debates :P.
| 6510 wrote:
| Install firefox
|
| then install violentmonkey
|
| then install https://salamisushi.go-here.nl
|
| browse around as usual and it will collect all discoverable
| feeds.
|
| then export the feeds as opml
|
| then install a robust RSS aggregator
|
| then load the opml into the aggregator
|
| then sort the news items by pubDate
|
| then remove the obnoxious subscriptions
|
| this is the way
| paulddraper wrote:
| That's like saying HN but without the web stuff.
|
| AI is the largest technology advancement of the last 2
| decades...it's going to show up.
| bombcar wrote:
| Containerization (either the docker stuff or the literal 40 foot
| steel boxes) was a huge revolution in their respective
| industries.
|
| There was a ton of work and howling and news about them for
| years, decades.
|
| Now they're so boring and standard that they're just table
| stakes. Nobody cares about them enough to get into long
| discussions about them.
|
| The same in a best case will happen with LLMs - the things they
| can do will become boring and assumed, and people will eventually
| stop trying to make them do things they can't.
| qmmmur wrote:
| It is reducing my desire to read this site. I don't have anything
| against the subject matter necessarily, and sometimes it can be
| interesting, but in large parts it is attracting very low quality
| discussions and content about vibe coding X product.
| op00to wrote:
| Luckily there are many other places you can spend your time.
| conductr wrote:
| I feel it's to generic in application to be interesting to a
| broad audience like HN. Some things I like because I have
| interest in the problem space and am interested in how they
| applied AI to it. But most things I'm not even interested in
| the problem space and so could care less how they applied AI to
| it.
| dang wrote:
| Can you link to some specific examples of low-quality
| discussions?
|
| As with any Major Ongoing Topic on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?
| dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), the goal is to
| reserve frontpage space for the higher-quality stories and try
| to downweight the follow-ups and low-quality ones. We can't do
| this perfectly, of course, but we try.
| merelysounds wrote:
| Not sure if this would be practical - AI seems to be part of the
| startup ecosystem now.
|
| I guess people still use HN to discover things that they never
| otherwise would have come across, just that it now also includes
| AI, for better or worse.
| mikewarot wrote:
| In an ideal world, you'd be able to tag a post (or a comment)
| with arbitrary tags, with an optional real number to turn it into
| a vector. This would make it possible to rank your suspected
| level of AI generatedness of a comment, for example, without
| having to disturb other things.
|
| The UI for said system, on the other hand, is something I can't
| even imagine.
| tolerance wrote:
| Maybe try lurking into "Past".
|
| Think about it. You can go into whichever pre-AI booming period
| you desire.
|
| Today I think I'm gonna check out what was hot in May 2009.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-14
|
| " _Obama proposes no capital gains tax on qualified small
| business stock_ "
|
| Sounds steamy.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=608202
|
| See you there!
| jonas21 wrote:
| Nobody is stopping you from creating your own HN clone with
| whatever rules and guidelines you want. I'd say go for it, and
| good luck! I'll stay here though.
| viraptor wrote:
| You don't even have to create it. https://lobste.rs exists and
| is opensource https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters It even has
| tags built-in.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| In the last ycombinator batch, how many companies do not use AI
| in the core of their business?
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| It's a hype cycle that will eventually die down. People here are
| usually pretty excited for new hype cycles they think they can
| make equity windfalls from. It's looking less likely that
| individuals will be making windfalls even as of this week with
| the new style of top-talent-acquihire acquisitions that seem to
| be increasing in number, so there's hope that HN goes back to
| generally technical :)
| lazide wrote:
| Difficulty - AI makes it a lot easier to generate mountains of
| hype articles and drown out other content, self-reinforcing the
| hype.
|
| Different than prior hype cycles.
|
| Frankly, this one seems to be dying out more from everyone just
| flat out refusing to pay attention to online stuff or things on
| their phone long enough to starve the beast. If that is even
| possible.
| ksec wrote:
| People who are a little late to the site may not know there was a
| time on HN where Erlang has even more frontage submission than
| the best of AI / LLM.
|
| Ruby Rails, Postgres, SQLite, Rust, etc. They all have their
| moments and I dont think LLM right now is as overwhelming as any
| other hyped moments. Certainly not Erlang.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Microservices had a micro moment not much longer than xml.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| If it follows the name, it's gonna be terrible since we're
| dealing with large language models
| antonymoose wrote:
| It all depends if you care about the tech side of HN or the
| startup side of HN. I love the tech articles above all else and
| could easily do without the general trend fluff.
|
| With that said, I don't find the AI posts nearly as bad as the
| Blockchain era.
| devmor wrote:
| As annoyed as I am with the constant deluge of uninteresting
| AI/LLM articles, I would much rather see a split between tech
| and startup news. I think that's a lasting and useful
| distinction.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Isn't topical subcommunities just Reddit?
| aydyn wrote:
| The userbase overlap is probably > 50%. To many people HN
| is just another subreddit.
| sshine wrote:
| Lobste.rs provides that distinction.
| 201984 wrote:
| And it's invite-only, so it's hardly an alternative.
| MarceColl wrote:
| well, it takes around 20 minutes to get an invite, so
| hardly a problem if you prefer only tech articles
| iib wrote:
| How exactly does it take 20 minutes to get an invite? I
| have not tried it, but I can't see how that would be
| easy.
| earnestinger wrote:
| No idea. Read only is good enough.
| MarceColl wrote:
| I got mine in about that time, joined their IRC and asked
| for an invite, someone DM'd me, asked me a couple of
| questions and sent me the invite. This was about 7 years
| ago when there as a lot less people, so I imagine it
| should be easier now.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| A socially awkward speakeasy with deranged moderation?
|
| Where do I sign up?
|
| A forum that is exclusionary-by-design has already
| failed.
| zahlman wrote:
| Personally, I'm more interested in the think-pieces than
| the actual news.
|
| (And I could very much do without the content that revolves
| around US politics. Even if it draws me in sometimes.)
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I don't remember blockchain ever being as big as AI here.
| More annoying? Yes.
| thm wrote:
| Yes, but unlike AI & Crypto, Erlang came with little grift,
| slop and Show HN spam.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The atmosphere on the site was _very_ different then. There
| was plenty of Erlang vaporware and lots of "how to grow your
| startup" growth spam which wasn't called growth spam yet. The
| community was a lot less cynical then (though obviously the
| middlebrow dismissal [1] tendency of the site is quite old.)
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248
| ghc wrote:
| I miss the days of daily Haskell posts.
| piperswe wrote:
| I can imagine you would, with that username :)
| tsoukase wrote:
| I would definitely follow a HN fork with posts of such
| amusing spirit.
| GZGavinZhao wrote:
| "tell me you like Haskell without telling me you like
| Haskell" moment
| dude187 wrote:
| I mean, he basically said directly that he likes Haskell
| lol
| cmdrk wrote:
| I wouldn't mind the Erlang-dominated front page coming back :)
| Bluestein wrote:
| Seconded :)
| amalcon wrote:
| Erlang is kind of a special case, since there was that period
| when the community's preferred response to "too much politics"
| was to spam submissions about Erlang. Agreed though, it doesn't
| seem to have taken over more than (say) Bitcoin or Rust have at
| times.
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| That was very different. Somehow the entire front page was
| Erlang, but it was only for a day or 2. AI is different from
| that. It's like a good 40-50% of the posts for at least a year
| or more, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. It's also
| different from web3/etc. as those were at most 10% of the posts
| and most of us can see it's just hype.
|
| I'm not fighting for a split/fork, just stating the fact that
| it's nothing compared to Erlang.
| endtime wrote:
| IIRC that was a deliberate campaign to make the site
| unattractive to a spate of non-technical folks who had
| apparently all simultaneously discovered it.
| waterhouse wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145
|
| "We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k
| daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned
| on more mainstream sites [...] You can help the spike
| subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple
| days it would be better to have posts about the innards of
| Erlang [...]"
|
| "Ok, ok, enough Erlang submissions. You guys are like the
| crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome
| overliteral genies. I meant more that it would be better
| not to submit and upvote the fluffier type of link. Without
| those we'll be fine."
|
| Also some fun comments here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178
| ModernMech wrote:
| lol ask a community of autists for more posts about the
| innards of Erlang, don't be surprised when you get posts
| about the innards of Erlang.
| flakiness wrote:
| This is a great little anthropology work of you. Thanks
| for taking time to find this out!
| dang wrote:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| thefourthchime wrote:
| One might argue that those technologies are sunsetting now
| faizshah wrote:
| The best one was the 2048 era: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=2048
| conductr wrote:
| I've been here a while and this is certainly more, prolonged,
| and has no end in sight compared to most other hype cycles
| we've experienced.
|
| It's also exceedingly generic such that AI isn't really a
| topic, it's an entire classification or maybe domain to steal
| from the animal kingdom hierarchy.
| seydor wrote:
| to be fair, AI is replacing all computers so talking e.g.
| about languages is believed to be soon obsolete.
|
| I would like to see more nuanced and interesting articles
| about AI though. Right now it's all about VCs measuring the
| size of their investments and the politics of alleged
| superstar programmers.
| seydor wrote:
| Oh my god, the years of the JS frameworks. Millions traumatized
| for life
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I hope I'm not the only one here who never heard of Erlang
| until I read your comment (I arrived in 2016).
| gojomo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void
| vmsp wrote:
| No. This is a trend. HN is a tech and startups website so it will
| show trends. At one point it was VR, eventually it was Web 3.0.
| Right now it's LLMs but this too will pass and something else
| will come along.
| azath92 wrote:
| We just built https://www.hackernews.coffee/ to rerank your
| frontpage based on a quick survey of your preference, all local
| storage based.
|
| In general we're thinking about how you can have a transparent
| profile that stands in place of an opaque algo, or in this case a
| dominance of a community by something you're not so into. It
| allows you to still engage with HN, but through the lense of a
| profile you have control over.
|
| Ironically it is built with AI, but its pretty straightforward no
| magic stuff. Keen to hear if it is useful, or could be, we're
| really early stages exploring where to go with it.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| The first fork should be one for socialists and one for
| capitalists... but the latter, Bookface, already exists.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| You mean, blockchain and everything else?
|
| Oh, sorry, wrong hype cycle.
|
| Currently, for me on the front page, there is 10/30 AI/LLM
| related. It means you have 20/30 that is not about AI/LLM. 1 of
| them is blockchain btw.
|
| Typical HN, 1/3 hype, 1/3 less hype tech, 1/3 other. AI is the
| current hype.
| jasonmarks_ wrote:
| Yeah, definitely an adverse amount of guerilla advertising. How
| many veiled pro _insert some code assistant_ posts can one r &d
| budget write?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| The fact is, the vast majority of people on HN have drunk the AI
| kool-aid and have no desire to be critical of it or avoid it.
| gojomo wrote:
| ~simonw's demo of a quickie customized HN front-end is great.
|
| But ultimately, your browser should have a local, open-source,
| user-loyal LLM that's able to accept human-language descriptions
| of how you'd like your view of some or all sites to change, and
| just like old Greasemonkey scripts or special-purpose extensions,
| it'd just do it, in the DOM.
|
| Then instead of needing to raise this issue via an "Ask HN",
| you'd just tell your browser: "when I visit HN, hide all the
| AI/LLM posts".
| azath92 wrote:
| Its pretty easy to do the user-loyal bit, with a bit of
| prompting to give an llm your preferences/profile. Not
| ideologically loyal, but i mean acting in accordance with your
| interests.
|
| The tricky part is having that act across all sites in a light
| and seamless way. Ive been working on a HN reskin, and it only
| is fast/transparent/cheap enough because HN has an api (no
| scraping needed), and the titles are descriptive enough that
| you can filter based on them, as simonws demo does. But its
| still HN specific.
|
| I dont know if llms are fast enough at the moment to do this on
| the fly for arbitrary sites, but steps in that direction are
| interesting!
| gojomo wrote:
| I'd expect a noticeable delay with current local LLMs -
| especially visiting a site for the 1st time. But then they
| could potentially memoize their heuristics for certain
| designs, including recognzing when some "deeper thought"
| newly required by server-side redesigns.
|
| But of course local GPU processing power, & optimizations for
| LLM-like tools, all adancing rapidly. And these local agents
| could potentially even outsource tough decisions to
| heavierweight remote services. Essentially, they'd
| maintain/reauthor your "custom extension", themselves using
| other models, as necessary.
|
| And forward-thinking sites might try to make that process
| easier, with special APIs/docs/recipe-interchanges for all
| users' agents to share their progress on popular needs.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Now _that_ is a browser I 'd pay for. A genuine user agent,
| rather than just a browser.
|
| It would also need to be able to "Recognize tasteless, ad-
| ridden, or other difficult-to-read pages, silently dismiss
| cookie popups and signup solicitations, undo any attempts to
| reinvent scrolling, remove all ads except for those on topics
| X, Y, and Z, and present the page using something like
| Firefox's reader mode."
|
| Other requirements would include "Fill in these fields that are
| marked as autocomplete=off," "Use this financial site to
| display exactly the charts and tables that I want, in this
| order," "Clean up broken, irrelevant and repetitive search
| listings on Amazon and eBay," and so on.
|
| For extra credit: "Maintain this persona on Facebook, this one
| on Bluesky, this one on Slashdot, and this one on HN.
| Synthesize documents needed to establish proof of age and other
| aspects of personal identity."
| rhodey wrote:
| I dont think its the right idea long-term
|
| If it went thru that this changed I would not be opposed tho I
| would read both
| sgc wrote:
| ublock origin filter example, removes post, post actions/stats,
| and spacer:
|
| news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission:has( _:has-text(
| /LLM|agentic/)) + tr + tr
|
| news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission:has(_:has-
| text(/LLM|agentic/)) + tr
|
| news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission:has(*:has-
| text(/LLM|agentic/))
| scoofy wrote:
| I say this about Reddit all the time. If you're on Reddit (or HN)
| to just consume, then you're doing it wrong.
|
| Threads that are "my feed isn't what I want" are exhausting.
| Sure, cool, but unless someone is breaking some rule, you're
| looking for an algorithm to feed you content, which is all well
| and good, but it's a different type of site.
|
| Reddit (and HN) are designed exactly so that _you can share
| something interesting you found_.
| 65 wrote:
| One liner you can use in a GreaseMonkey/TamperMonkey script:
|
| [...document.querySelectorAll('.titleline > a')].filter(link =>
| link.innerText.split(' ').find(word => ['llm',
| 'ai'].includes(word.toLowerCase()))).forEach(el => {const sub =
| el.closest('.submission'); sub.nextElementSibling.remove();
| sub.remove() })
|
| I wrote this in 2 minutes so I'm sure someone is going to reply
| with something better.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| This is one thing lobste.rs does really well. Every submission
| needs a tag and you can exclude tags that you are not interested
| in.
| throwanem wrote:
| 'Domination' in what sense? I could see a couple ways you might
| mean this, and as qe are HNers of similar "tenure" but as far as
| I recall more or less otherwise strangers to one another, I could
| see some interest perhaps in comparing our views of what's
| changed and how. (Hence being vague here to try to avoid putting
| too strong a stamp on initial conditions...)
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| No. HN is like this. It skews heavy towards startups and right
| now if you have one of those and you aren't putting AI in your
| investor propaganda, you're not going to get many investors.
|
| Besides, it's already starting to slow as people realize AI isn't
| as great as the influencers want you to believe.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I haven't noticed any slowing, if anything it's accelerating as
| people try vibe coding and realize they can build an mvp and
| get some suckers to sponsor on GitHub. Just look how many end
| up with donate links. I suspect a large portion of people
| releasing open source vibe coded projects don't care about the
| project but see it as a low effort way to make a few bucks.
| 3acctforcom wrote:
| Fuck no. AI/LLM is a tool like any other and we need to keep on
| top of it.
|
| If anything it needs less politics, I have other sites for that
| bs.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| > I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as
| a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would
| have come across.
|
| So what does this mean exactly? Nothing LLM/AI related on hacker
| news is new to you, or you would easily have come across it
| without HN? Really? Where exactly are you finding your AI/LLM
| news?
| gessha wrote:
| A cynical take is if Joe learned a bit about LLMs, they could
| build an extension that filters AI stuff into a separate tab or
| something along the lines of what simonw coded up.
|
| This too shall pass, Joe.
| aleksituk wrote:
| HN is just a reflection of the community using it. And there's
| always some area that's hot and trending, common challenge on any
| platform with a popularity-based curation.
|
| -> But still better than a highly-personalised algo that you
| don't get to control?
| zipy124 wrote:
| This is why https://lobste.rs/ and reddit have tags/subreddits in
| a nutshell. They get too big and people want seperation.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| If you like intelligent, tech-focused discussion as seen on HN
| but have less of an appetite for other aspects of the HN
| community, you might find you really like lobste.rs
| zahlman wrote:
| I'm seeing quite a few plugs for lobste.rs ITT. My recollection
| of my impression from many years ago is that they had different
| politics from HN (I did read it every now and then, even if I
| only actually joined months ago) of the time, but that many
| posters were still very much engaged in ideological battle, and
| furthermore flagging and downvoting was used more to suppress
| one side of the argument than it was to keep the site tech-
| focused.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I can't speak to that aspect specifically, but I have flip-
| flopped in the last five years or so. I don't go there
| anymore hardly and conversely I find myself using HN a lot
| more. My decline in usage coincided with some policy changes
| they made years ago. I still think there are people who will
| really enjoy lobste.rs over HN. It's not for everyone (and as
| of late, not for me).
| egorfine wrote:
| As much as I love LLMs and crypto, I'm really tired of subpar
| LLM/AI news populating the vast majority of the feed.
|
| But I have no idea how to separate topics on HN. Is it even
| possible to do so while keeping the community intact.
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| Weird that people are floating the idea of kicking out of a tech
| forum the most important tech development of the last 10 years.
|
| Not sure what that means about the community, but must mean
| something.
| zahlman wrote:
| The problem is the quality, not the topic. Understanding
| serious papers about AI development requires fairly specialist
| knowledge; there are plenty of people around (like myself) who
| have been programming for decades and can write really nice
| code in a bunch of different programming languages, but have
| very little if any mental model of "transformers" or whatever.
|
| So in practice, "AI" content ends up revolving around people
| bandying about opinions about whether or not we're all doomed,
| or whether or not we're all on the edge of a utopia, or how
| much productivity programmers (and which ones) have lost or
| gained, or what kinds of tasks the LLMs are or are not
| currently or still good at, or whether anyone still cares about
| the fact that the term "AI" is supposed to mean something
| broader than LLMs + tool use.
|
| The emergence of the "vibe coding" concept has made things
| worse because people will just share their blog posts about
| personal experiences with trying to write code that way, or
| flood the Show HN section with things that are basically just
| "I personally found this specific thing to be 'the boring
| stuff' that's actually relevant to me, so now I'm automating
| it" with a few dozen lines of AI-generated code that perhaps
| invokes some API to ask another AI to do something useful.
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| Interesting take.
|
| To me it feels like golden age of hackers in the 60s-80s
| (which was before my time but I heard stories about) where
| everybody is doing their own home grown research to the best
| of their abilities and sharing insights of varying quality.
|
| But somehow these days if it's not all polished, HN "hackers"
| aren't interested.
| zahlman wrote:
| > But somehow these days if it's not all polished, HN
| "hackers" aren't interested.
|
| The fun part is that these days, typically the READMEs
| (especially) and licensing and documentation and maybe even
| the packaging setup are "polished"; the actual code (and
| perhaps the tests), not so much. It's quite backwards from
| what you expect from humans writing new code based on
| personal intrinsic motivation.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think both things can be true:
|
| 1. This is a great time to get your hands dirty with LLM
| tech and explore workflows and tooling that bring you joy.
|
| 2. The writing around this exploration is often low quality
| insights or low quality engagement bait that leads to
| flamewars. Engagement bait that often takes one of two
| forms. One being a novella on how surely this time the
| human race is doomed due to singularity/capture by the
| rich/fascism/etc. The other being how we're one cm away
| from utopia because automation/flourishing of
| creativity/etc.
|
| I am enjoying playing around with the tech a lot but the
| presence of 2 is just annoying. I do think that's an HN
| problem and not a problem with tech writing as a whole.
| There's subreddits that, while they have their own
| problems, are a lot less flamey when discussing these
| topics.
| op00to wrote:
| It means there are grumpy curmudgeons in every community.
| conductr wrote:
| Why kick it out, in the past when similar annoyances of
| dominating the front page occurred they created the Show link
| and the Ask link. For people interested in those they still
| exist, just away from the front page
| op00to wrote:
| No. Ignore the threads you do not like. Conversely start your own
| message board if you desire and have your own rules.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If that happens, I would like the "non AI" side to also not allow
| AI-generated content. (But how would that be enforced? I don't
| know.)
|
| More generally: You could think about creating "sub HNs" for AI,
| politics, functional programming, startups, and several other
| categories. You could think about having something in your
| settings which specified which sub-HNs would put stories on your
| front page, with the default being "all".
| elpocko wrote:
| I'm interested in news about current and emergent technologies. I
| wouldn't mind if those who are not interested made their own site
| and left the curious people alone. Please do.
| wslh wrote:
| You can perform a poor guy filter via
| <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...>
| ei23 wrote:
| vibecode yourself a filter ;-)
| archagon wrote:
| More generally, I wish the site had tagging support. It would
| help solve a number of other problems, too.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| HN is the way I keep up with what's going on. AI is very much the
| topic of the moment. I'm fine with it the way it is.
| jmull wrote:
| From my perspective HN has always had certain themes I find
| overly repetitive and boring.
|
| I just whack "hide" on those and never think of them again.
| unixhero wrote:
| No it isn't.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It's not just Hacker News. It's everywhere else too. I want some
| sort of web extension that allows me to just block list items
| from various social media websites when the topic at hand is in
| my blocklist.
| thomascountz wrote:
| We had it the way we had,
|
| Because of the way it was.
|
| And, because of the way it is,
|
| We have it the way we have.
|
| And so it is.
| tyleo wrote:
| I for one am happy with this site's own little fads. Who knows,
| either AI stays with us and I'll be glad to have got my helping
| here via osmosis. Or it goes away and I can reflect on this fun
| little quirk our community once had.
| michaelteter wrote:
| Nope. While the blockchain craze was less meaningful and slightly
| less annoying, it died down. This will too (even though there's
| more actual value hiding in corners).
|
| There are certainly periods where one concept is "viral" and
| appears quite often; that's normal.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| This happened with X/Twitter. What it resulted in was a
| sycophantic hug-box on Bluesky and amplified social-darwinist
| amoral techno-capitalism on the former site. I believe splitting
| the rare congregations of diversely oriented smart people leads
| to worse outcomes for everyone, as better ideas/conversations
| emerge from opposing sides rubbing up against each other.
| Bifurcating HN would probably lead to a hype-driven, noisy AI
| side and a myopic, increasingly anachronistic non-AI side.
| tim333 wrote:
| As someone who quite likes AI, couldn't the AI dislikers just
| ignore the ~15% of stories that are about AI? Or does their mere
| presence offend?
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| The mere presence does seem to a offend. HN has what seems to
| be on average a more negative appraisal of AI than the industry
| average (based on where new software jobs/funding are going),
| but some of the comments I read seem to imply that this page is
| swamped by endless AI hype posts devoid of substance.
|
| My first instinct reading these comments is "are we on the same
| website?", but I realize their perspective is possibly skewed
| by a strong visceral dislike of AI as an affront to many
| fundamental things they like about software and tech. It's
| become a tribal conflict, based on the ethos of "whose side are
| you on" rather than a sober appraisal of the facts, benefits,
| and legitimate hazards.
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