It cannot be a long-term solution, though. Most people don't use them and if HN continues to be AI-foremost, many will simply stop coming here to post other interesting, non-AI stuff. A vicious circle.
I'm curious where people would go to as an alternative. I like looking at lobste.rs for non-AI stuff, but to post there you need to be invited by an existing member so it's not a perfect alternative.
Unless you're one of those people who only ever use HN and make it a part of your identity, sure. You can just leave for greener pastures. Or learn to care less.
Thank you for that recommendation. I find the website hard to read¹, but the submissions themselves are as a whole much more interesting² than any HN homepage in the past year.
¹ But I can do something about that, as opposed to the submissions as a whole.
² Even if one of them is about someone’s son pooping in the toilet.
The NN revolution which started 15 years ago cannot be understated - if anything, some areas are not progressing as fast as they should and some of us are nervously waiting.
Have you actually multiplied the weight of submissions in your mental model by how consequential each one is?
Because we are still submitting even more idle "intellectual curiosities" - but these are in no way "times of static peace and ordinary administration".
Well it is the best way to do a 'fuzzy' filter like that. Rather than trying frantically to chase keywords.
I don't think anyone considers AI to be something useless. It sure has its uses, I use it a lot to help with research. But it is sometimes shoehorned into things it doesn't belong, or its capabilities overblown for marketing. I think that's what people object to.
This is where I’m at. I find AI to be useful but there’s a tendency for it to suck the oxygen out of the room. Other things still matter.
Edit: I'll also note that while its nice to see real novel AI news I find a lot of it is extremely marginal value. I mentally associate most discussion with debating what color of marker to use when marking the edge of your CDs to improve the sound.
Yeah I didn't word that well at all, at least you know it wasn't an LLM.
I meant I don't really care, I keep half an eye on what they are up to (have to live in the same world as them) but I'm not really interested in it at all beyond playing with some local models, the constant onslaught of it has just become tiresome, then I got to YT to watch my usual history content which mentions something I didn't know about so I do a search to see if there is a video on that and that is wall to wall AI slop and that annoys me so I go to do something else, do a search and the results are slop if the AI doesn't try and answer it for me first.
It just feels like if you want to do anything on-line you get force fed slop whether you want it or not and it's damn hard to filter it, can't even block channels on YT without an extension.
In the old days we had this thing called a redaction. It was like a dungeon master vs playing the same hardcoded level again and again. Had one suggested automating it back then even the greatest optimist wouldn't see how you replace [say] Stephen King with a calculator but here we are - true believers.
I guess "hype cycle" is an accurate description, but it feels overly negative, in the sense that we now have a revolutionary technology that's still quite young and moving fast, and folks everywhere are trying to figure out how to leverage it, both to do new things, and to deal with the problems it causes. So it just feels like a high-energy time where we're going to have a billion ideas, most of them will suck, and we'll eventually find out where the real winners are.
Given that context, having a hacker site cover what's happening with that revolution makes sense. All that said, I agree with OP that it does drown out other cool things happening, but that's just how mass psychology works.
Almost everything in top/new/best is an interesting read. Either I don't know anything about the topic ("...the spanning tree protocol") or am seriously interested in the topic ("Remembering Hong Kong", "Automattic's board forces CEO..."). None of these made to frontpage over the last two days AFAIK.
Its important to use these filtered front pages though, so that eventually theres a sizable Referrer traffic chunk coming not from HN's frontpage itself that will signal to the admins that something is up
No disrespect intended at all, I like HN and have used it for what feels like a long time and the moderation team that keeps it one of the more reasonable places to have a conversation on the internet (for the most part).
That out of the way, The admin/moderators can hardly be unware given they work for a startup accelerator that is heavily in on the AI stuff, it is the way it is because that is the way they want it to be.
HN is great but it's bias has always skewed to what is hot in the VC market or that they are heavily in on at the time (as someone who was around when it seemed like every other post was blockchain/crypto it's not even "new").
oh absolutely, but if they lose half their audience due to the sloppification of their front page, then they lose both legitimacy as an interesting and impartial platform to promote said AI tech
The mods have said that they consider the cynicism and "curmudgeonliness" in the community to be a problem and they want newer people coming in. The most direct way to accomplish that would be to drive the old grumps out and replace them with a younger pro-AI userbase. After all, every startup YC will fund in the forseeable future will be first and foremost an AI startup. There just isn't going to be a place here for people who actually enjoy programming as an art, or the human element in any creative activity, nor any benefit to YC in maintaining that culture.
You can't serve humanity and the machine, you have to choose a master. YC has no choice but to choose the machine because that's where the money is, so HN has no choice but to follow suit. Hacker News is an AI forum.
I'm not suggesting there is some kind of conspiracy afoot but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to just give in let nature take its course.
Make sure to generate a wordy blog post on it and the ramifications of generating empty parody versions of social media pages or people won't know that you did it.
It would be cool if one could visualise (graph wise) the number of posts around different hypes (eg. crypto, not sure what else was prominent like AI) throughout the history of HN.
It's more complicated than that. This place has changed.
The biggest tell is reposting something interesting from a year or two ago that received hundreds of upvotes. Now it will get 2 or three upvotes whilst "lulz Trump" /r/politics style culture war BS will be immediately hurled up and onto the front page.
Those posts get buried really quickly by the anti flamewar algorithms. I really don’t think anything changed regarding political stuff over the past 2y on this site (other than the fact the US has a new administration doing pretty insane things, resulting in way more important political topics, such as everything related to Iran)
At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore :)
These things tend to improve/get worse by themselves over time, if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on. Right now, seems we're still "discovering" new things around AI, so the submissions will surely continue, and interested parties will continue to upvote.
But AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely, where eventually you hardly see any frontpage submissions about it ever.
He's not wrong. It would still be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang, than the daily press releases or manufactured Twitter drama by OpenAI and Anthropic to generate hype for their IPO. We will just have to close an eye for the weekly point release of major AI models get 10 posts + associated reactions by thought leaders
He's annoying right with the "You guys are like the crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome overliteral genies" part too, which accurately represents LLMs as well... Wait, are LLMs training on us perhaps? (It's a joke, of course they are)
Yeah, Haskell, Erlang and also the whole functional programming wave was fun and is missed dearly. Also Clojure used to be featured on the frontpage a lot more, would be a fun exercise to write some small script to see what specific day had to most Clojure-stories at the same time, I remember one day we had two of them at least!
The difference between ruby, rust or react or whatever hyped technology was ruling the frontpage in the past, none of them transformed programming the way AI did and still does.
Whether I programmed in this or that framework did not matter so much, as I was still typing.
Now I (allmost) don't code anymore. That is a pretty big change and I still try to cope with it and I suspect many who hate AI, just don't want to face this new reality.
But it really is not just another technology where the hype will fade out and it becomes forgotten. It becomes part of the standard and we are still figuring out how. So more diverse submission on the front page would be nice, but AI just is what keeps most programmer busy these days, whether they like it or not. So naturally there is interest. It became existential.
That's a hot take. AI has fundamentally shifted things. Start-ups can start up 10x faster, and HN is start-up flavored.
If people quit talking about AI, it'll be because it's become foundational infrastructure, so it's not the primary focus of the articles, but just the atmosphere they all exist within, like the computer, or the internet.
But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.
Don't get me wrong, I leverage these AI tools as well to be more productive, I'm not against using it or anything else. But I'm also old enough to know that eventually AI will be "old news" when the next hot topic comes around.
> But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.
I really don't understand anyone who can say something like this with a straight face. Comparing AI to Bootstrap? I...
Only if you're actively inside of the hype-machine and don't see it from the outside with the experience of previously having been inside of the hype-machine.
The logic was/is "other topics been popular on the HN frontpage in the past and their advocates have made bunch of claims about their topics, and eventually it'll die down too, like the others did", that's hardly under attack here as you're on some wild tangent right now.
I'm pretty confident that, presently, with AI, I get more done than I could with 5x hours, but less than I could with 20x hours, and 10's a nice round number.
Nah. I've committed over a million LOC in the past 4 months, discounting personal projects. LOC is a fuzzy measure that doesn't tell much, but, it's easier to mention that than to describe the details of my work.
HN has a lot of Ruby posts because it was, and still is, a really good language and ecosystem for making web applications, and most of the companies at the time were web startups. It's a solid language, still one of the better ones for making real, practical web apps.
If you don't want to see Ruby posts and AI posts, why are you here? Do you realize that you have control over what media you consume? A lot of HN readers like Ruby and we like AI and we would like to have one place to do that without all the negativity, hatred, and low quality comments coming from people that don't care about the things we care about.
> If you don't want to see ruby posts and AI posts, why are you even here?
I don't know what feeling you got of me from my comment, but it's wrong. I don't mind either Ruby posts or AI posts, and I'd personally probably put Ruby somewhere along 1-3 top programming languages I like to work with professionally, so not sure why you feel like you have to defend something here.
> HN has a lot of Ruby posts because it was, and still is, a really good language
Agreed, but I was talking about specifically frontpage submissions, it used to be filled with them, almost every day, and now there is hardly any anymore. I think most of us long-term users can clearly see the trends over time, or at least feel them.
They have no interest in that, they came from god knows where and want to mangle HN and turn it into some kind of weird neo-luddite doomer forum.
HN is a forum made by angel investors for entrepreneurs, startups and hackers. We like technology, we like Ruby and we like AI because it's useful for what we want to do, and we would like to continue talking about it like we've talked about every other emergent technology before it (including other "controversial" things like Bitcoin).
Instead of trying to torture HN into something it was never designed for, why not go to lobste.rs and unselect the AI button and you won't see AI? Or make your own version of HN that bans AI discussion? You can even be really ironic and use Claude Code to make the forum for you so you can do even less work on that then you do on posting about how much you hate AI here in a forum designed for and by people that understand it and want to discuss it. I ask, once again, why are you here?
> They have no interest in that, they came from god knows where and want to mangle HN and turn it into some kind of weird neo-luddite doomer forum.
What on earth are you talking about?
> I ask, once again, why are you here?
Who are you asking? The person you're responding to, or "they" who I assume to be me, who you think somehow want to get rid of RoR/Ruby/AI submissions?
I'm sorry, but did the reading comprehension just fall off a cliff today among HN users, or what's going on?
I mean I come here to read AI stuff myself, so its kind of a reverse preaching to the choir to me.
For the most part the worst AI garbage gets filtered out in new, so ya downvotes are needed to keep out the crap, but it's up to the community to decide what is crap. The person who made this post wants to tip their finger on the scale to get their way.
With this said fanboyism does suck and we end up seeing the following pattern quite often.
AI haters repeat every anti-ai dumb thing they see regardless of how dumb it is because they hate AI.
AI lovers repeat every pro-ai dumb thing they see regardless of if how dumb it is.
Team sports and team politics are annoying and that's what a huge amount of the conversations fall into.
Completely agree with you. It's stopped being a calm discussion of the pros, cons, neither, and implications of emerging technology, and started being "us vs them" football team fans shouting at each other, but it really feels like the anti AI people are the home team right now, and every other position is the away team.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because I seem like the AI booster in these conversations but in reality I'm fairly middle of the road, and have plenty of concerns about the technology. But we can't even get to that discussion until we can move the overton window from "AI is bad, how can we ban it from HN", and "AI is cigarettes, it will kill half of its users".
The proverbial AI piss is in the pool, it's not going away, I don't know what to tell anybody that doesn't believe that or doesn't want that. It's time to start integrating this into your psyche as something that will be a part of the rest of our lives in a big way.
> if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on
True, but I think the point I am trying to make is that amybe YC could start curating this content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump.
They already do this. It's called the "second chance" pile. You will get an email saying that your submission didn't get the love they felt it should, and will add it to a list of submissions that get submitted to the front page, to see if the community agrees.
Not in my experience. Multiple submissions (non Show HN) of mine have been second chanced. I can't be certain, but I don't think any of my Shows have been... I guess that says more about the content I create than the content I share.
Nope. If you email hn@ycombinator.com with the subject "second chance pool" and it is not your submission, there is a very high chance one of the lovely mods will take the submission and second-chance it.
Often enough, they even email the original authors and submissions about it if it is a really good submission!
Thank you for posting this <3. I've been thinking it daily for about a year and feel a little bit less alone.
I understand this is a significant topic in the industry but the ratio is really high. Every time someone at OpenAI or Anthropic farts, there's top 10 post.
It makes me feel as if a lot of hackers had given up on actual hacking to just be followers of the latest commercial stuff thrown on the market.
It's likely a projection of my own fears, but I have not been able to shake it off and it's gotten worse and worse.
A lot of tech folks turn out to enjoy management roles more than engineering roles, but until now human subordinates were the only option available. Now that subordinates without feelings, whimsy, and labor rights have been introduced as an option, a lot more flexibility of choice exists for outcomes in tech. This forces Hacker News into a crisis of identity:
Are managers hackers? Are management topics of interest to Hacker News?
Both of those examples wouldn't have gotten traction in the pre-AI HN in my opinion.
The Lenovo laptop jet is experimental and the details suggests that it uses 7.5w to cool 30w. That's not very efficient. You might as well have a small fan and let it spin at a low RPM to reduce noise. There doesn't seem to be a breakthrough here.
The Brax industries one is just an ad from the company's official Youtube channel. I don't think the product is interesting at all.
Looking into it more, it seems like the actual consumption is close to 1W per module, for an approximately 1:7.5 ratio. Regular fans are still likely more efficient, but the other advantages of the "AirJet" make it interesting.
I thought so, too! There aren't too many in this field that do this and I think they deserve some recognition only because of that. They're also not entirely new, their previous product has been around for a while.
I miss all the programming articles. It feels like everyone has given up with the very idea of ever writing code now and the entire practice of making software has been handed over to AI.
Same. I miss the excitement around programming. New languages, new tricks, weird hacks, odd projects.
I have little to no interest in AI coding - I try it every couple months but always regret it, git reset, and go back to coding by hand.
It feels quite lonely these days. The general energy and enthusiasm from hn was a big source of motivation, or maybe community. Now using hn feels quite isolating.
I do see the occasional post about going back to hand coding though, and their frequency seems to be on the rise, so hopefully that correction continues
(I don’t need to see no AI, to each their own, just would be nice to see an equal amount of hand coding content one day)
Reddit's /r/programming is very well moderated, and they specifically don't allow articles about AI, unless it's programming AI. You should check it out.
There are already too many articles about programming and new things are constantly being invented even with AI. For example, I created a programming language called ACPUL by hand designed for humans and there are still articles about it that have yet to be written.
Programming will become like esports. Maybe out of the 30 million programmers who can program without AI, only 5 million will remain, but that is still a large number.
I also experience this as a great loss, but honestly yes, I can't get excited about perfecting the craft of writing computer code now that there are AI systems that have done so. I'll always be sad about this! But the flip side is that I'm way more excited about what I can do with software, now that it's so much easier to write.
I experience quite the opposite. I'm quite excited about the value my skills are gaining in relative terms. An entire generation of potential competition is getting addicted to the subsidized corporate tooling. Voluntarily!
What I fear is the future career path for manual programming is fixing AI generated systems. I suspect it will pay very well because you will be finding and fixing things the AI driven work can't. It is going to be soul destroying as reading AI code is deeply unpleasant in the same way reading the articles is.
I never go by pay. I won't fix bad systems whatever their provenance because trying to understand poorly coded software is very unpleasant.
I go by interesting problems and I like being able to chose from more options due to lessened expertise competition. Why people voluntarily renounce expertise is beyond me, but they are and I welcome the increase in choices of engagement I have been experiencing.
I would never engage in uninteresting work at any rate of pay, and working with LLM output directly or mediated is quite uninteresting to me.
AI is a very useful tool for finding problems in codebases.
I'm very far from an "AI is going to take everyone's job" doomer, but I really do think "there will be programming jobs that don't involve using LLM based tooling" seems pretty unlikely.
The future is open models running on your device. No subsidized corporate tooling required. There will never be a reckoning for the people who are letting their coding skills atrophy.
Maybe! But probably not, IMO. There have been a number of generations now that have been "addicted" to using digital spreadsheets rather than doing bookkeeping by hand.
Maybe all this time we were just in a ZIRP bubble and the people who claimed to be "interested in programming" were just grifting to the top all along.
I've always been interested in "building". Programming was always just the means to do so.
I got into it at a very young age, but the syntax and the languages were just the means to an end of building and creating. I'm academically interested in algorithms and data structures and distributed systems architectures, but I have no desire to actually code those things by hand.
You're probably not hand-writing your software in assembler.
Next to nobody will be writing code in 2050. It was always just a stepping stone.
Long time user, recently scrambled my password and gave up on HN entirely.
It's not just the AI thing - though that hasn't helped - there's been a real turn in the community. The most generous take I can offer is that a lot of people flooded into tech for the money in the last ten years, and now that the money is tighter all these people are panicking and trying to cling to anything that looks like a winning lottery ticket.
Unfortunately that means that for those of us who actually like cool tech, the space is inundated with get rich quick trash and wishcasting. So so much of it on HN right now.
I also think there's been a subtle change in the quality of the moderation. Before, stories were clearly gently spiked or promoted to encourage interesting and novel things to drift to the top every once in a while, and now that basically never seems to happen. A story about a cool new lisp would somehow appear in front of a story about a new version of React, even though it's kind of obvious it couldn't match the level of upvotes for the latter. Now it's all the latter. It's like a very smart thumb has been lifted off the scales and the community is poorer for it.
As I say, I eventually just left. HN currently detracts from my enjoyment of my day more than it adds. I hope it finds its way back over time.
I noticed it as well but I don’t see a problem with it.
I have spot-checked it at times and saw 5 to 8 of the top 10 posts about AI or directly adjacent.
We are in an emergent, dynamic periodt. AI is revolutionary and will continue to get better. The world will change drastically because of it. This seems so obvious yet many will call it purely hype, no real value, etc. We are still in the incubation period, just like the internet in the early 2000s.
A few years ago, it was all web3 and block chains. I was just last week reflecting on how long ago it was I'd seen anything in that category make it to the HN front page. I think a lot of it has to do with where the investment money is going. Interesting how times change and topics that people are passionate about reflect that.
A simple truth with HN is that you don't have to click on every link. And if you go into the comment threads, you don't have to react at everything. This whole "somebody is wrong on the internet" cliche starts with people's own behavior. In my case, AI agents are giving me a lot of quality procrastination time. I'm waiting for two things to finish right now. Anyway, that's just me looking into the mirror.
AI definitely is a hot topic on HN. IMHO a lot of the material being upvoted is a bit low quality. I wouldn't mind a bit more aggressive pruning for that. I know the HN editors put their fingers on the scale when things get out of hand sometimes.
I just have that in my Ublock Origin rules - it cuts the noise dramatically and if something gets through I just update the has(), it's a brute force approach.
Ironically the only reason I saw this post is because I was on my ipad :).
Here's an extension I wrote to do the same idea, except it clicks the Hide link for each AI submission instead of just nuking the DOM node. This means when you load the front page again, HN will fill it in with articles from the 2nd page. Works pretty well. https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
Oh it absolutely will have issues (for example it'd hit Maintenance in a title because of AI), it was something I did in a fit of pique because I opened HN one day and ~2/3 of the stories where about AI/LLM's - great if that is what you want, annoying as hell if you like the other stuff much more.
There are about a million ways to do it better but I can accept the odd false positive :).
Its 13:15 UTC and 21 of the 30 submissions on the HN home page are not AI related. I'm not saying there isn't a problem with AI-related submissions, but I'm not sure its a flood.
If it is on the homepage then is it not algorithmically what the community wants? Have you tried the https://news.ycombinator.com/newest link? I find that I prefer it over the homepage and have does so for years.
Why limit? This is a news website where users judge if something is newsworthy by upvoting it. If the community decides it’s newsworthy it’s newsworthy. Maybe not for you but at least enough people to make it visible in front page. Unless you have strong arguments, like topics creating death threats or people doxing, there is no reason whatsoever to censure any news because you personally doesn’t care or don’t like it and prevent others from accessing it.
HN is curated by moderators and votes are just one input. All sorts of topics get downweighted all the time. Given the longevity of the AI news cycle it's not a crazy ask to suggest it get downweighted too.
And it's "censor", not "censure". To censure AI news would be for Dan and Tom to lodge a formal complaint about it.
While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment, the ongoing automation of intelligence is, for better or worse, one of the most consequential things that can/will happen to "hackers" (as well as white-collar workers in general), and it is very difficult for us to look away from that asteroid in the sky.
"Hackers" because the term in the context of "Hacker News" is broad and hard to define. Intelligence is, too, but I'm not in the business of pretending that the AI systems aren't some form of intelligent.
The front page is a reflection of what folks want to see. AI is certainly mentioned a lot but it’s also top of mind for every industry atm. I still see a lot of diversity in posts though. After all this is a VC forum for startups.
Life is always changing. HN has gotten more popular over the years and at least it feels materially different in comment quality. Bots are always a problem but that’s not why you see different things on the front page, that might be your nostalgia taking over.
Was it? Iirc there was always something interesting on the front page besides the blockchain. Now there are days when there's nothing besides the "AI" created "AI" spam.
Every AI post on the front page is there because it was upvoted a lot by HN readers. So you are effectively asking these readers to not vote on a topic because you are not interested in it but they are. Why would any of them alter their behavior because of that?
But HN simply ranks posts by upvotes. I know you don't intend it this way, but you're effectively suggesting that HN should not pay attention to what its userbase are upvoting, but instead curate posts by your personal opinion instead. That's ... probably not going to be a workable solution for anyone other than you, I'm sorry.
There are always a lot of HN top stories that I'm not interested in, but I just scroll past them. If I really cared, I'd use a community site that provides a filter, an app that provides a filter, or just vibecode one for myself.
Exactly. HN hasn't really changed, the industry has.
The community does a pretty good job of following the guidelines and that's helped to suppress the echo chamber effect that any personalization would add to.
AI is novel and exciting and terrifying (my how we live in interesting times!) and all of that will fade with time.
But, like you said, if somebody really wants to change their view of HN, the tools are out there.
And to prove this point: this post went from page 1 to page 4 in a matter of hour, despite significant voteship. Posts are not ordered per count only, there's an algorithm and manually applied weighs involved.
The way you're responding to the comments in this thread just makes me dislike your idea even more. You want the site to be curated with things you like instead of what the community upvotes. That's it.
Reddit has been thoroughly contaminated by AI slop as well. In the tech and sysadmin subs, even in the maker subs in general, there is sooooooo much stuff at least made with AI.
HN is often dominated by a Thing that is happening, during periods when there is some dominant Thing going on. In my time here, that has been many different Things over the years; social media, SaaS, Ruby on Rails, javascript frameworks, Rust, VR, self driving, crypto, and now AI (and this list is certainly missing a few). And during all those periods, lots of people have complained that the Thing of the moment is getting too much attention. But IMO, this kind of eye of sauron effect on a main Thing of a given time is mostly good. We're all here working out what we think of things, and it is useful to focus a lot of discussion on the new Thing that is developing and moving quickly.
I think there's still plenty of good stuff here, but agree that is beneficial to be kept up for to date on model evolution. We gotta get through this together.
I'm glad HN isn't a curated feed, it would end up like all the the others.
> I am trying to make is that maybe YC could start curating the content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump?
This kind of defeats the purpose of a link aggregator compared to a human curated newsletter or blog. Maybe something like https://hackernewsletter.com acts as a good filter for you?
There's already the "second chance pool" which is a human bump for interesting posts that didn't get the attention they should (Bad timing, other big news overshadowing, bad title etc.).
Your suggestion would break my use case: i.e I check out HN every day to see what the latest models that have been released are, and opinions from erudite people who have taken them for a spin.
Keeping abreast of fast moving AI developments with informed opinions/comments for various new models/agents etc. is primarily what I'm here for.
Right, but my point was about what they said about the use-case. They couldn't have been coming here for AI news since 2017. So did they finally find their use-case for HN some 2 years ago?
If they were indeed coming here before AI revolution, it was a different type of medium.
I have always used HN for consuming tech news. I was trying to say that these days, I really love following the developments in AI and among the most erudite audience for that can be found here, which is great.
You extrapolated that to assuming that AI news was my only use case.
Am saying that a lot of us like HN the way it is, and the way it has evolved organically into a firehose of AI news.
Tbh if you are long enough on hn, quite a lot of stuff gets repeated over and over.
AI gets 'that much' tracktion because it is right now the fastest changing technology we have and with the biggest impact day-to-day for a lot of people on hn.
The CVEs from the last few month? Normal topic for hn, it became an AI toopic because AI found them.
Limiting the flood wouldn't mean necessarily omitting stories like "new model released" (within reason); it'd mean omitting "check out my new vibecoded slop" or "check out this article that's obviously LLM-written and provides very little value" (what we once would have called "blogspam", or dismissed as SEO-bait).
There's no way to reliably filter that "vibecoded slop" or "low value LLM-written article" (BTW what about low value human-written articles?) without users actually interacting with them. And it's actually the votes/flags of said users that determines visibility, so I'd say that's an indication of where the interests of HN's most active users lie.
In that regard AI fits the bill well. Because many of the AI related posts are about tools one can immediately tinker with.
While a new type of laptop cooling might become interesting once the laptops come out, the news is not as interesting to me as a new LLM or agent that I can experiment with right away.
On the brax thing - the "article" is a youtube video. There's a pretty reasonable amount of pushback here against video-only content where folks can't rip through quickly to figure out how relevant it is to them or if it's just a vapid ad.
HN due to its design is easy to read, interact with and modify according to personal preference. How many other sites on the www are like that
A few projects that demonstrate this are mentioned in this thread
These are projects hosted by third parties
One of them uses "AI"
Another asks users to enable Javascript
Another only applies to the /front page
There is also DIY
For example
Transform HN HTML into SQL to create SQL database. This makes it faster and easier to search for interesting information and present it in whatever format the user prefers, all from the command line, no browser needed
Modify the web pages before they reach the browser/client using a local forward proxy. This makes it easy to filter out comments that discuss "AI" and make other cosmetic and substantive changes, for example, using Lua (no "AI" needed)
Use custom command line programs to make submissions and/or replies, instead of using a web browser
These are all DIY projects of mine, written in C (Flex as code generator), Lua and Almquist shell script (no Bash). I use older, underpowered, low spec computers, no "AI"
The discussions of AI hype in HN threads seem to follow a pattern. It goes something like
HN comment: "I dislike AI hype"
HN reply: "I think AI is useful. It saved me time." (sometimes including a personal anecdote)
But "I find AI useful. I like it because [reason(s)] I used it for [project(s)]" does not address the _hype_ issue
It could address a _"usefulness"_ issue but that's not the issue being raised
They mention rules and automatic triggers etc. but I think it’s just broken.
Auto-moderation is broken and the human mods are preferential, inconsistent, often harsh, especially to new people or hobbyists, which is pretty discouraging.
Both of your links are basically ads, or at least the titles make them sound like it.
> Lenovo showed a model that incorporates solid-state air cooling. That technology has been around for a while but it looks like it matured and is production-ready. This allows for super-light and slim designs, which, in turn, should allow for bigger batteries installed and I think it's some sort of breakthrough
See now this sounds like something I'd click on. (The linked article doesn't really discuss any of the technology or engineering though)
I think tagging on HN is an idea whose time has come. We already had informal tags for "Show HN" and "Ask HN" for some time. A few fixed tags chosen at submission time might suffice, for example:
- Global news, AI, Software, Hardware, Explainer, Tech Opinion, Personal project, Misc.
There could even be fake tags like Politics that trigger a message about appropriate topics.
It does increase moderation burden for mislabelling, and introduces another nitpicking point for comments to latch on, so it's not all upsides.
I'd be ok leaving filtering and other UI concerns to extensions.
I understand where you’re coming from, but would argue that the reality is that our industry is predominantly almost exclusively AI-related at this point.
A tagging feature would be nice, but HN is historically very reluctant to introduce new features. I argue that’s a good thing, given its age and the fact that it remains the gold standard for tech community news.
Adding tagging strikes me as a tall order, almost like asking Craigslist to make a major UI change - feature additions threaten the spirit of a beloved platform.
As I type this comment, 18 out of 30 links on the front page appear to be about things other than AI. I would not call this "almost exclusively AI talk."
I wonder if all the slots that used to be filled with the things OP and I found interesting are now filled with LLM stuff (not saying AI because I'm interested in all the cool machine learning things, for example medical and game applications, just not the 'yet another text autocomplete' links), since a lot of coding is now... gone I guess? Not being done, or seen as worthwhile and thus not upvoted as much as before? So those "mostly not LLM talk" links may all be things we'd not have found interesting before either, and now there is almost nothing left of the old HN 'for us' (OP, me, and whoever else feels this way)
It's also way too harsh to just remove any mention of LLMs, as some people are suggesting shoehorning adblock filters for for example. I'm interested if GPT9 solved world hunger by presenting logic to world leaders and workers and creating a great collaboration that gets food to everyone. It would be a bit silly to hide that link. But all the tiiiiny incremental steps and projects that are outdated by (often quite literally) next week.... guys, please :/
I've been hearing a lot of "Amdahl's law" regarding AI - the rule that says the slowest part of a system sets the speed of what you can accomplish. On one hand, this means that AI has sped up software (so there is more software news because you can make a 20-page blog post in one prompt now), but it doesn't speed up, say, shipping hardware products that much. I guess we need to re-weight the news to include how hard it is, not just how many tokens it makes.
I maintain a simple browser extension to auto-hide AI news stories: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ It just scans for keywords and clicks the Hide button. Doesn't catch everything, but cuts out a ton of the noise. You can go hit the Hidden page in your profile sometimes and scan for highly-upvoted stories to see the couple that are maybe actually worth looking at.
Thinking: The user focuses on unimportant issues and does not appear bright or creative. I have to remain polite but firm. Let us use phrases he will recognize.
Answer: Fair. I'll give an honest assessment of the situation. There are a multitude of possible reasons for a user to forget their password. [cut 100 lines of lecture]. Would you like me to introduce you to a secure password manager?
I've been using HackerSmacker for a while to tag AI-related and non-AI-related submissions.
I find, depending on the time of day, 30-50% of submissions are about AI. Also, Users who submit AI-related content tend to also submit non-AI-related content - those I tag for non-AI-related content almost never submit AI-related content.
I can't help but feel that every 1% improvement over a benchmark from new releases of flagship LLMs isn't really that impressive anymore. To some extent it feels like LLM improvements is slowing down significantly despite increasing resources being spent on them.
The people promising AGI just 6 months ago are now more and more quiet about the possibility and rightfully so. LLMs alone are most likely not the path to AGI.
The Opus moment in November felt very different but despite that, a handful things did not woork well with Opus in November and I tried them last week and they now just work.
In parallel GPT-6 and Fable 5.1 show significant skill improvements in 3D modeling and Astra shows significant progress in computer use.
Do we live in a parallel universe? I mean it, this week was crazy from a progress point of view.
> Do we live in a parallel universe? I mean it, this week was crazy from a progress point of view.
This is how I feel too, wandering into some of these threads. Sure the damn things aren't perfect yet, but people act as if they are incapable of doing anything, or no more worth the hype than Bootstrap?? (the latter comes from this very thread!)
When Anthropic gave out some usage, I was able to do a lot more and it felt differently than when you always have to think about limits.
I now spend $90 this month and do even more now (privat). It might really be a big bias of these people either not spending any time on it or just doing very small experiments and immediadly being put of by some random issue.
Reading threads like this always confuses me a little...
Since Corona this platform has become basically reddid as it was 10-15 yrs ago.
> Meanwhile the legitimately, broadly-hacker stuff gets left out for the most part
Those were pretty much always niche content here. This was- at least until Corona, a forum where you got usually pretty highly intelligent and critical input on various topics, strongly centered around products as a direct consequence of this being the (I think) most successful VC forum.
Pretty much every comment section had me think about something that I hadn't fully understood before.
Nowadays? It's extremely rare to see anything remotely insightful.
It's mostly just reactionary/knee jerk response, from people that clearly never actually thought about what they're actually talking about/just parroting political points.
I do miss the older content, and I've found myself getting more and more toxic as a consequence of seeing ever less insightful if not downright stupid comments here. Which - if I'm honest - objectively contributes to the problem and I should stop henceforth.
AI is on the front page because those articles are upvoted. There have always been hot topics that dominated the feed in the past: Apple product releases, Steve Jobs's passing, cryptocurrency, US-only news, San Francisco-only news, coding bootcamps, NPM drama of the week, etc.
1. Popularity != Merit and this site is not different. A lot of worthy posts get ignored.
2. Even though I find most of the AI posts interesting, I agree that tags and the ability to filter by tags would be really great. But it's probably a ton of work and additional system load.
People post and interact with what interests - or triggers - them. Yesterday it was one thing, today it's AI, and tomorrow it'll be another thing. Just have to ack the flow, and find another way to filter for your non-today's-thing interests.
This happened when crypto was big. Hacker News rides the bandwagon hard. Everything in tech trying to align to AI makes it more pronounced. It'll calm down, hopefully.
I highly agree. I am very interested in the AI news but the distribution isn't right at the moment. It doesn't really feel like the same website to me.
AI-related news are very much relevant nowadays, so limiting them would be excessive. But introducing tags to make it possible to filter out specific topics seems like a good idea.
FWIW, one article is very short on details, it’s a slightly expanded press release, and the other is a video. I’m not sure either is what’s needed more on HN.
I wish but honestly that's unrealistic because a lot, if not most, people related to HN are currently their livelihood linked to AI, in one way or another.
Most companies, in software or not, are imposing minimum (after backtracking to suggest to maximized, until their started to pay bills) AI usage. A lot of people in HN also have stocks a lot of popular stocks is linked to AI success, whatever that might mean. A lot of AI entrepreneurs also are directly to sell AI, as it's simply where most of the VC money is currently going.
So... when it's this intertwined I think it will be difficult. If you know of other places I'd be curious.
Totally agree. An analogy would be a physics journal getting flooded with articles about psychology because "ultimately the human brain runs on atoms".
Instead, AI deserves its own field, outside (and, in my taste, far away from) CS.
I mean, it's not surprising. I think that most people on here are software developers.
AI is fundamentally transformative to the software development industry and threatens to put large numbers of software developers out of a job. Fable regularly does things in 20 minutes that would have taken me 2 weeks before. AI is probably the biggest revolution in software development since the development of operating systems and high-level languages. It's also potentially a fundamental turning point in the entirety of human history.
So it's no wonder that AI gets a lot of attention.
"Whats new" is, I hate to break it to you, 99% AI-related. Its a pretty unique point in time here and likely will continue to be for at least 12-24 months. This is likely to go down as being as reality-altering as the internet but with the added wrinkle of things are able to progress/iterate _much_ faster. Not only are the models progressing at breakneck speed, but our understanding of how to use them effectively is as well. So theres legitimate "discoveries" happening every week.
I've largely moved over to lobste.rs for actual technical news. They even have a "vibecoding" tag to let you filter out anything related to coding with LLMs.
Given that LLMs are currently the frontier of innovation in our industry, it does make sense to me that most stuff that happens and gets talked about would be somehow connected to it.
There's a lot of focus on in. People are trying it out in their workflows and learning new things.
So, potentially, this could just be organic.
Of course, in reality, it is not. There's a ton of "thought leader" LinkedIn slop, just advertising their own personal brand with at best mid takes. But grifters come with every paradigm shift. Unfortunately.
It has been like this for more than a year, a lot longer than just the past couple of months.
HackerNews, just like all other platforms, is heavily astroturfed and the big AI labs have bots commenting and voting, so it'll never end.
The only solution is a platform that only allows humans, with a proof of humanity before posting anything, but not too sure what that can be, and it would ultimately be unsuccessful.
But we have to see the positive, at least less posts about SQLite make it to the frontpage.
All I ever see are the Anti's and the crazies? Like the guy (who is in this very post) who keeps opening accounts to complain about Claude related posts and saying various slurs. Almost feels like the old days when Terry Davis would post technical rants with slurs applied liberally.
To be honest I have showdead on and while I see the things you see, I also see a lot of blatant AI slop getting killed off too. I'm sure most people on here are at least somewhat attuned to Claude's 'voice' by now.
If a LLM-voice comment has [dead] next to it, either the account was already banned in its entirety or HN's LLM text detector marked the comment auto-dead due to suspected LLM writing. If the comment has [flagged] [dead] next to it, the comment was killed by human flagging. You can see both kinds of comment if you browse https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
If you have enough karma to flag comments you can also flag them directly from the noobcomments feed, which is useful to help manage the abusive users who keep re-registering new accounts.
Point taken, I probably file a lot of that away under "generic HN spam" (or maybe I've gotten so good at skimming Claude output that my eyes glaze over automatically now in response :P)
Nah not on this thread but in general, you'll always find at least one person prompting "summarize this article" and regurgitating the slop into the comment section.
It's HackerNews themselves selling fake praise as an ad product.
The sticks are so far up the asses of the mods here and the top karma folks that no random AI company would be able to get upvoted here. The moment something like that happens outside the in-group, they would get flagged to death.
Instead HN sells propaganda as a product. So we get to hear about Claude, Kagi, and AT Proto every hour of every day :D
Time for a category at the top? Next to new, jobs, ...? Something like "sans AI".
I like adjacent articles though. Today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656496 was a delight. It would be sad if such articles were filtered out or automatically downvoted or similar.
The amount of useless griping and sniping on HN has made it a less interesting and resourceful community. Moreso than the flood of AI news.
Tagging may not help though. Even the latest Apple product announcement threads were just.. bad. Everyone wants to be grumpy and dismissive.
If I had to keep one and lose one, I’d keep X and lose HN. And while I hate Elon, HN is losing on vibes, utility, information, network, links, and tips.
Once we start dividing, filtering, or moderating content, HN will just become Reddit. The current level of moderation is good enough, if not the best. It works because the community naturally filters itself—like-minded people find a home here, while those outside the bubble quickly get bored and move on.
Yeah there really needs to be better moderation and filtering here.
Yesterday there were multitudes of blatant AI slop and AI-slop-fueled misinformation/contrarianism all over the front page. It's not getting caught and flagged fast enough.
The best communities are ones that do not allow to be taken over by inorganic behavior. I think we can reasonably assume that not all AI front-page stuff is as interesting as other, non-AI stuff, yet here we are.
Thanks for sharing. I'm going to give it a spin for a while. The downside is you cannot comment or vote on the external site so you are always juggling the two sites for that.
If the AI haters would avoid AI articles and stop adding useless, unrelated "slop!" and "just text prediction!" comments, HN would be a much better place IMHO.
In the last month, excluding this post, three of your five submissions were AI focused, and one was part-AI. For the past two months, it's five of 11. Certainly not "explicitly AI" but it's about half, which in the context of this overall discussion is towards "too much", IYAM. Half of HN being AI is still a poor signal-to-noise ratio.
I don't know what to tell you. I hate Meta and social media but still use Instagram and Facebook, because that's the society we live in. Does this make me a hypocrite? Can I not wish for a different reality? Can I singlehandedly change Meta if I stop using their tools, just like you think I could change HN reality if I post more non-AI content?
Variants of your Ask are a regular thing around here. Lots of stuff still floats to the top that's non-AI but traction is as ever a challenge somewhat. Stuff moves fast around here.
Some recents:
Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?
The Brax industries stuff you mentioned looked really sleek and fun until I noticed it's pretty much vaporvare as for today. I'm a great fan of the former submission you mentioned: a technology that seemed innovative but not in production but is available now. Stuff that will be available next year or never is simply less interesting.
My linkedin is just pages and pages of AI posts and layoffs.
Are lawyers, doctors, and people in non-tech fields getting the same thing? Is Doctor linkedin all about how AI is going to improve surgery while half your connections posts are about being unemployed?
I’ve been a hacker since I was 10, so about 30 years now.
A couple of years ago, I felt the same way you did. And then I started properly/seriously using Claude Code. When Opus 4.5 came out, it was sincerely life-changing. I can prototype working projects in possibly 1/30th the time, and I can do them simultaneously.
This post has made me realize that the flood of AI news isn’t annoying or boring to me anymore because I think my profession is the only one that’s actually being replaced by it, for better or worse. For coders, there’s nothing even close to the level of importance as AI (which doesn’t mean it’s interesting).
Honestly I’d like to see more news about AI, but actually about the way it’s devastated the labor side of our industry and will kill the middle classes of countries like India.
Without question, nothing short of the web has been more impactful to our industry specifically than AI has been and will be.
I have the same "1/30th ... simultaneous" experience with coding agents, and I am having fun. Directing teams of agents to solve many problems (or create many useful things) for me has its own fun challenges/puzzles-to-solve.
Some of the fun is redirecting coding agents when they get stuck, by showing them code or design they could not work out on their own. Some of the fun is designing tools to rein-in AI coding agents, keep them on track, and verify their outputs. Some of the fun is exploring new areas for me: compilers, game dev, language design, emulators, embedded, etc.
So I am having fun at the CTO/PM/Engineering Manager level but also at the lowest coding level.
I've been coding since the early 70s. This brings back the joy I had discovering microprocessors and electronics.
Sure, if that is what you like. I for one did not get into this field because I wanted to hire people (artificial or natural) to write the programs for me. Programming as an activity / art is what I enjoyed the most. Managing people / agents is a total turn off.
I absolutely do, in fact I do post on the subject as well. I just think the amount of AI news is overbearing and I do not feel like HN is a good enough source for IT news anymore. Sure, I can use another medium, but that's not the point, I hope we can discuss this and hopefully see YC come up with some good solution.
The Brax example you posted was a YouTube link, which is an instant skip for me. Personally, no phone with dated tech is going to interest me. Their WallUp looks interesting but there’s no product just a waitlist and an animation. I already have TRMNL displays around my home, so I’m in their market.
For Lenovo, their Yoga was interesting ~15 years ago but Aeroblade is just a proof of concept, and thinner laptops in general are irrelevant to me. I use a powerful laptop and a tablet, not a compromise between them.
I don't think they are, and given amount of votes on each — seems like so does the community.
Regarding Lenovo: it's the first laptop with AirJet, sure, but it's not the first computer in general. Zotac released a mini PC with the very same AirJet in 2023. It looks dope, but it's just not that interesting or new.
Regarding Brax: Braxman is a well-known scammer. The world would be a better place if nobody paid any attention to this person.
Lenovo is just vaporware currently as was their laptop with translucent display. YMMV but I no longer waste my time with things that are not available (and may never be). The Lenovo page that is linked from the page you posted is super light on details and just fluffy marketing.
Doing some research on "AirJet solid-state cooling" turns up products that have been announced at CES 2023. More info may be found at the Frore Systems homepage. Funy enough Airjets seems to be used in some NVidia systems such as Jetson Orin.
I don't want to shill Apple but my Macbook Air with M4 performs great and never runs the fan (does it have one, I don't know), so the Airjet thing (for me) is pretty much a solution in search of a problem.
> never runs the fan (does it have one, I don't know)
> so the Airjet thing (for me) is pretty much a solution in search of a problem.
That's it? Fan is about noise and nothing else? The much lower volume/dissipation and weight/dissipation ratios, which made this Lenovo latop 830g, which easily allows for some 200-300g of extra battery is a solution in search of a problem?
Sorry, if you don't see this then we have nothing to discuss.
Ironically "Project AeroBlade and Project Swan proof-of-concepts explore the future of AI-powered business computing" but anyway I just read this when I re-visited the Lenovo site to learn more about that prototype with respect to the CPU it is using. I could not find anything, though.
My point is that maybe it's better to develop CPUs with less power consumption than to invent new cooling techniques (hence "solution in search of a problem"). This is what Apple silicon does.
We get it, your interests aren't the same as others. The problem here is you want your vote to count more than others because your interests are super important and everything, but that's not how upvote based sites on general tech topics work.
There's loads of slop and slop enthusiasm on lobste.rs; the only difference is that they have a moderation policy which forbids the most egregious forms of advertising and astroturfing.
I have found that the https://lobste.rs/ submission policy means that there is a lot less slop (and discussion of slop) over there. They focus more heavily on technical discussions, which I find more rewarding.
Seems to me that most people still have to get up in the morning to go to a bullshit job just to stay alive and consoom things they don't need. I don't see the big change.
I'd also SERIOUSLY ask for an "LLM generated" flag in addition to normal flags - on both comments and submissions, that is.
Obvious slop comments thankfully already get flagged or downvoted in the hell they belong, but the submissions, oh dear god I do not wish to engage with shit written by AI any more. It's questionable enough if you let LLMs do your coding work for you, but if you can't even be arsed to write a proper README.md on your own, why the fuck should I be forced to waste my time reading it?
Unfortunately most of what gets posted to HN or could conceivably be posted here is already LLM generated to some degree. Because content of interest to HN tends to be written by the same people who increasingly prefer to use an LLM for everything they do, machine-generated submissions are only going to increase over time. Tagging submissions as LLM generated is ultimately futile, as one might as well tag water as wet.
Also HN's design ethos of not having "silos" precludes having tags or filters or blocklists, since they want everyone to see the same content at the same time. This is the kind of thing you're going to have to use with a browser plugin or third party service if you want it at all.
Well, Lenovo's new air cooling and Brax's new open source devices would both be made pretty moot if everyone on earth dies in the coming months. Sooooooo
Top stories (critical and otherwise) were upvoted hundreds of times 4-5 years ago and had hundreds of comments. Sort by the past year, and no story has more than 9 points. NFTS have effectively disappeared from HN's front page.
AI is a different beast ... the tech and concepts have true value. But we may see the term "AI" start to fade as new terminology and companies and concepts rise to the fore ... the Sons/Daughters of AI.
HN is a reflection of the industry and we're at peak hype-cycle at the moment. I use this when I need a break https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai.
There's also https://unslop.news, which removes just the posts about AI, rather than all posts that mention it at all
OK, this is cool, actually! Thanks!
It cannot be a long-term solution, though. Most people don't use them and if HN continues to be AI-foremost, many will simply stop coming here to post other interesting, non-AI stuff. A vicious circle.
theres also
https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai
which additionally lets you add and modify custom filters
I am inclusive in that sense and enjoy both AI and non-AI content, and will post both.
I'm curious where people would go to as an alternative. I like looking at lobste.rs for non-AI stuff, but to post there you need to be invited by an existing member so it's not a perfect alternative.
The fediverse. Mastodon or Lemmy are viable alternatives if you curate well enough.
So nothing to worry about then.
Unless you're one of those people who only ever use HN and make it a part of your identity, sure. You can just leave for greener pastures. Or learn to care less.
tildes.net is also great, though it's not just for tech stuff
Thanks for the recommendation, I had actually never heard of this but it looks promising
Thank you for that recommendation. I find the website hard to read¹, but the submissions themselves are as a whole much more interesting² than any HN homepage in the past year.
¹ But I can do something about that, as opposed to the submissions as a whole.
² Even if one of them is about someone’s son pooping in the toilet.
> if HN continues
The NN revolution which started 15 years ago cannot be understated - if anything, some areas are not progressing as fast as they should and some of us are nervously waiting.
Have you actually multiplied the weight of submissions in your mental model by how consequential each one is?
Because we are still submitting even more idle "intellectual curiosities" - but these are in no way "times of static peace and ordinary administration".
What does the "NN" in "NN revolution" mean?
Neural networks.
Frigging snipers.
"92 of 179 articles survived the filter". So about half of the posts are about AI now, more than I expected.
I made the website, and I wish I had tracked the stats from day one. I've seen it hit closer 75% on some days, though
Potentially more. Example, the data center articles don't match the AI filter, but they are certainly AI driven.
Thank you for plugging my site :)
Thank you from the bottom of our organic hearts!
Thanks for making it! Saw it on FMHY and have been using it since then
"Ironically, this project was built with AI coding and uses AI to filter out articles about AI. Go figure."
Well it is the best way to do a 'fuzzy' filter like that. Rather than trying frantically to chase keywords.
I don't think anyone considers AI to be something useless. It sure has its uses, I use it a lot to help with research. But it is sometimes shoehorned into things it doesn't belong, or its capabilities overblown for marketing. I think that's what people object to.
This is where I’m at. I find AI to be useful but there’s a tendency for it to suck the oxygen out of the room. Other things still matter.
Edit: I'll also note that while its nice to see real novel AI news I find a lot of it is extremely marginal value. I mentally associate most discussion with debating what color of marker to use when marking the edge of your CDs to improve the sound.
That and the sheer volume drowns out everything else.
The S/N ratio entirely depends on whether you care about AI and I don't not really.
Man, that last sentence is ambiguous as hell. I'm not sure if you do or do not care.
Yeah I didn't word that well at all, at least you know it wasn't an LLM.
I meant I don't really care, I keep half an eye on what they are up to (have to live in the same world as them) but I'm not really interested in it at all beyond playing with some local models, the constant onslaught of it has just become tiresome, then I got to YT to watch my usual history content which mentions something I didn't know about so I do a search to see if there is a video on that and that is wall to wall AI slop and that annoys me so I go to do something else, do a search and the results are slop if the AI doesn't try and answer it for me first.
It just feels like if you want to do anything on-line you get force fed slop whether you want it or not and it's damn hard to filter it, can't even block channels on YT without an extension.
In the old days we had this thing called a redaction. It was like a dungeon master vs playing the same hardcoded level again and again. Had one suggested automating it back then even the greatest optimist wouldn't see how you replace [say] Stephen King with a calculator but here we are - true believers.
An AI slop to filter out AI slops -- the pinnacle of AI.
Sadly this would not end just as a joke. We'll be doing this forever from now on.
Humans becoming the adversarial network to the AI is indeed a Black Mirror episode worthy outcome.
I guess "hype cycle" is an accurate description, but it feels overly negative, in the sense that we now have a revolutionary technology that's still quite young and moving fast, and folks everywhere are trying to figure out how to leverage it, both to do new things, and to deal with the problems it causes. So it just feels like a high-energy time where we're going to have a billion ideas, most of them will suck, and we'll eventually find out where the real winners are.
Given that context, having a hacker site cover what's happening with that revolution makes sense. All that said, I agree with OP that it does drown out other cool things happening, but that's just how mass psychology works.
This is so refreshing.
Almost everything in top/new/best is an interesting read. Either I don't know anything about the topic ("...the spanning tree protocol") or am seriously interested in the topic ("Remembering Hong Kong", "Automattic's board forces CEO..."). None of these made to frontpage over the last two days AFAIK.
They're all on the front page, just buried between all the AI stuff
Which kind of makes my point: these pages filter AI stuff, but do not make room for non-AI stuff.
Its important to use these filtered front pages though, so that eventually theres a sizable Referrer traffic chunk coming not from HN's frontpage itself that will signal to the admins that something is up
No disrespect intended at all, I like HN and have used it for what feels like a long time and the moderation team that keeps it one of the more reasonable places to have a conversation on the internet (for the most part).
That out of the way, The admin/moderators can hardly be unware given they work for a startup accelerator that is heavily in on the AI stuff, it is the way it is because that is the way they want it to be.
HN is great but it's bias has always skewed to what is hot in the VC market or that they are heavily in on at the time (as someone who was around when it seemed like every other post was blockchain/crypto it's not even "new").
oh absolutely, but if they lose half their audience due to the sloppification of their front page, then they lose both legitimacy as an interesting and impartial platform to promote said AI tech
The mods have said that they consider the cynicism and "curmudgeonliness" in the community to be a problem and they want newer people coming in. The most direct way to accomplish that would be to drive the old grumps out and replace them with a younger pro-AI userbase. After all, every startup YC will fund in the forseeable future will be first and foremost an AI startup. There just isn't going to be a place here for people who actually enjoy programming as an art, or the human element in any creative activity, nor any benefit to YC in maintaining that culture.
You can't serve humanity and the machine, you have to choose a master. YC has no choice but to choose the machine because that's where the money is, so HN has no choice but to follow suit. Hacker News is an AI forum.
I'm not suggesting there is some kind of conspiracy afoot but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to just give in let nature take its course.
They will lose half their audience and gain it back from all the Twitter AI bros.
(The Automattic story did make it to the front page.)
This is just asking for a parody-site that displays literally an empty page though.
As inspired by this tumblr which did not age well:
https://www.tumblr.com/picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes
Good idea, I'll ask Claude to spin that up
Make sure to generate a wordy blog post on it and the ramifications of generating empty parody versions of social media pages or people won't know that you did it.
It's unlikely that right now is peak anything AI.
Yeah, that's like someone in 1998 saying we're at peak internet hype
It would be cool if one could visualise (graph wise) the number of posts around different hypes (eg. crypto, not sure what else was prominent like AI) throughout the history of HN.
Fascinating.
It would seem OP is spot on. I just used this and it reduced the front page of 30 posts to 14.
People have been saying we've been "at peak hype-cycle" for years
Peak so far.
Maybe there’s a hype singularity where the hype is so strong that nothing can escape.
Ironically this thread became Yet Another AI Discussion. Really its just the agi takes that are the most useless and annoying.
Thank you so much for sharing this
thanks, rebinded my Tridactyl shortcut for HN to this.
Hero
It's more complicated than that. This place has changed.
The biggest tell is reposting something interesting from a year or two ago that received hundreds of upvotes. Now it will get 2 or three upvotes whilst "lulz Trump" /r/politics style culture war BS will be immediately hurled up and onto the front page.
Those posts get buried really quickly by the anti flamewar algorithms. I really don’t think anything changed regarding political stuff over the past 2y on this site (other than the fact the US has a new administration doing pretty insane things, resulting in way more important political topics, such as everything related to Iran)
Thank you, could you make the UI match exactly?
To be clear: I'm not the author. I just use the service.
Calling AI "hype" is like calling the internet hype.
This is great! I hope it was vibe coded
At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore :)
These things tend to improve/get worse by themselves over time, if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on. Right now, seems we're still "discovering" new things around AI, so the submissions will surely continue, and interested parties will continue to upvote.
But AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely, where eventually you hardly see any frontpage submissions about it ever.
The Erlang front page was nice, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11
For reference, the glut of Erlang posts was due to pg posting "Why HN is slow lately": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145
> it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter
He's not wrong. It would still be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang, than the daily press releases or manufactured Twitter drama by OpenAI and Anthropic to generate hype for their IPO. We will just have to close an eye for the weekly point release of major AI models get 10 posts + associated reactions by thought leaders
He's annoying right with the "You guys are like the crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome overliteral genies" part too, which accurately represents LLMs as well... Wait, are LLMs training on us perhaps? (It's a joke, of course they are)
Yeah, Haskell, Erlang and also the whole functional programming wave was fun and is missed dearly. Also Clojure used to be featured on the frontpage a lot more, would be a fun exercise to write some small script to see what specific day had to most Clojure-stories at the same time, I remember one day we had two of them at least!
The difference between ruby, rust or react or whatever hyped technology was ruling the frontpage in the past, none of them transformed programming the way AI did and still does.
Whether I programmed in this or that framework did not matter so much, as I was still typing.
Now I (allmost) don't code anymore. That is a pretty big change and I still try to cope with it and I suspect many who hate AI, just don't want to face this new reality. But it really is not just another technology where the hype will fade out and it becomes forgotten. It becomes part of the standard and we are still figuring out how. So more diverse submission on the front page would be nice, but AI just is what keeps most programmer busy these days, whether they like it or not. So naturally there is interest. It became existential.
This is like when cryptocurrency was in full hype cycle, but even more severe as it touches every inch of the industry.
I thought the last round was the (JS) framework wars
I remember those days! And Elixir/Phoenix had to be hyped in every 5th post.
I miss these times!
(Django won.)
Yep, HN loves/loved Ruby :)
>> At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore
Thank god.
That's a hot take. AI has fundamentally shifted things. Start-ups can start up 10x faster, and HN is start-up flavored.
If people quit talking about AI, it'll be because it's become foundational infrastructure, so it's not the primary focus of the articles, but just the atmosphere they all exist within, like the computer, or the internet.
But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.
Don't get me wrong, I leverage these AI tools as well to be more productive, I'm not against using it or anything else. But I'm also old enough to know that eventually AI will be "old news" when the next hot topic comes around.
> But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.
I really don't understand anyone who can say something like this with a straight face. Comparing AI to Bootstrap? I...
Both have sped up front end development at the cost of making half of the internet look the same.
I don't think it's fair to blame AI just because people aren't prompting unique design elements into their vibe-coding.
It must be some sort of denial playing into this
That seems like comparing the internet to jQuery.
Only if you're actively inside of the hype-machine and don't see it from the outside with the experience of previously having been inside of the hype-machine.
No. RoR lets you build a certain class of web apps faster. AI lets you build almost anything faster.
Again, I'm not bashing AI and I'm much more productive with AI myself too, no need to try to defend something I'm not attacking...
I'm not defending AI, I'm attacking your logic.
The logic was/is "other topics been popular on the HN frontpage in the past and their advocates have made bunch of claims about their topics, and eventually it'll die down too, like the others did", that's hardly under attack here as you're on some wild tangent right now.
> because it's become foundational infrastructure
Which will happen in due time, like electricity and the general computer.
Why 10x? If you’re making up numbers why not 100x or 1000x?
I'm pretty confident that, presently, with AI, I get more done than I could with 5x hours, but less than I could with 20x hours, and 10's a nice round number.
And like AI, I imagine you're confidently wrong here.
Nah. I've committed over a million LOC in the past 4 months, discounting personal projects. LOC is a fuzzy measure that doesn't tell much, but, it's easier to mention that than to describe the details of my work.
HN has a lot of Ruby posts because it was, and still is, a really good language and ecosystem for making web applications, and most of the companies at the time were web startups. It's a solid language, still one of the better ones for making real, practical web apps.
If you don't want to see Ruby posts and AI posts, why are you here? Do you realize that you have control over what media you consume? A lot of HN readers like Ruby and we like AI and we would like to have one place to do that without all the negativity, hatred, and low quality comments coming from people that don't care about the things we care about.
> If you don't want to see ruby posts and AI posts, why are you even here?
I don't know what feeling you got of me from my comment, but it's wrong. I don't mind either Ruby posts or AI posts, and I'd personally probably put Ruby somewhere along 1-3 top programming languages I like to work with professionally, so not sure why you feel like you have to defend something here.
> HN has a lot of Ruby posts because it was, and still is, a really good language
Agreed, but I was talking about specifically frontpage submissions, it used to be filled with them, almost every day, and now there is hardly any anymore. I think most of us long-term users can clearly see the trends over time, or at least feel them.
Go to new, click down vote on every AI post.
That is how we have less AI stuff on the front page.
But if other people are interested in it and there are more of them than you then you might not get your way.
> Go to new, click down vote on every AI post.
I'm sorry, why would I? Is most of my comment not coherent English or what's going on?
> you might not get your way.
Please do tell me, what is "my way" I'm advocating for here, or implied advocating for?
They have no interest in that, they came from god knows where and want to mangle HN and turn it into some kind of weird neo-luddite doomer forum.
HN is a forum made by angel investors for entrepreneurs, startups and hackers. We like technology, we like Ruby and we like AI because it's useful for what we want to do, and we would like to continue talking about it like we've talked about every other emergent technology before it (including other "controversial" things like Bitcoin).
Instead of trying to torture HN into something it was never designed for, why not go to lobste.rs and unselect the AI button and you won't see AI? Or make your own version of HN that bans AI discussion? You can even be really ironic and use Claude Code to make the forum for you so you can do even less work on that then you do on posting about how much you hate AI here in a forum designed for and by people that understand it and want to discuss it. I ask, once again, why are you here?
> They have no interest in that, they came from god knows where and want to mangle HN and turn it into some kind of weird neo-luddite doomer forum.
What on earth are you talking about?
> I ask, once again, why are you here?
Who are you asking? The person you're responding to, or "they" who I assume to be me, who you think somehow want to get rid of RoR/Ruby/AI submissions?
I'm sorry, but did the reading comprehension just fall off a cliff today among HN users, or what's going on?
I mean I come here to read AI stuff myself, so its kind of a reverse preaching to the choir to me.
For the most part the worst AI garbage gets filtered out in new, so ya downvotes are needed to keep out the crap, but it's up to the community to decide what is crap. The person who made this post wants to tip their finger on the scale to get their way.
With this said fanboyism does suck and we end up seeing the following pattern quite often.
AI haters repeat every anti-ai dumb thing they see regardless of how dumb it is because they hate AI.
AI lovers repeat every pro-ai dumb thing they see regardless of if how dumb it is.
Team sports and team politics are annoying and that's what a huge amount of the conversations fall into.
Completely agree with you. It's stopped being a calm discussion of the pros, cons, neither, and implications of emerging technology, and started being "us vs them" football team fans shouting at each other, but it really feels like the anti AI people are the home team right now, and every other position is the away team.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because I seem like the AI booster in these conversations but in reality I'm fairly middle of the road, and have plenty of concerns about the technology. But we can't even get to that discussion until we can move the overton window from "AI is bad, how can we ban it from HN", and "AI is cigarettes, it will kill half of its users".
The proverbial AI piss is in the pool, it's not going away, I don't know what to tell anybody that doesn't believe that or doesn't want that. It's time to start integrating this into your psyche as something that will be a part of the rest of our lives in a big way.
You'll just get banned.
> if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on
True, but I think the point I am trying to make is that amybe YC could start curating this content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump.
They already do this. It's called the "second chance" pile. You will get an email saying that your submission didn't get the love they felt it should, and will add it to a list of submissions that get submitted to the front page, to see if the community agrees.
Fair, but I think that's only for "Show HN" stuff?
Not in my experience. Multiple submissions (non Show HN) of mine have been second chanced. I can't be certain, but I don't think any of my Shows have been... I guess that says more about the content I create than the content I share.
Fair, didn't know that. But that proves some editing is in place, it could be a bit more active, perhaps.
Nope. If you email hn@ycombinator.com with the subject "second chance pool" and it is not your submission, there is a very high chance one of the lovely mods will take the submission and second-chance it.
Often enough, they even email the original authors and submissions about it if it is a really good submission!
Fair, didn't know that. But that proves some editing is in place, it could be a bit more active, perhaps.
Thank you for posting this <3. I've been thinking it daily for about a year and feel a little bit less alone.
I understand this is a significant topic in the industry but the ratio is really high. Every time someone at OpenAI or Anthropic farts, there's top 10 post.
It makes me feel as if a lot of hackers had given up on actual hacking to just be followers of the latest commercial stuff thrown on the market. It's likely a projection of my own fears, but I have not been able to shake it off and it's gotten worse and worse.
A lot of tech folks turn out to enjoy management roles more than engineering roles, but until now human subordinates were the only option available. Now that subordinates without feelings, whimsy, and labor rights have been introduced as an option, a lot more flexibility of choice exists for outcomes in tech. This forces Hacker News into a crisis of identity:
Are managers hackers? Are management topics of interest to Hacker News?
I think the problem is the ease that you can create believable low effort articles and even software.
It's harder to filter for the good stuff when compared to previous hypes, like Blockchain and JavaScript frameworks.
All github trending projects are AI related
Both of those examples wouldn't have gotten traction in the pre-AI HN in my opinion.
The Lenovo laptop jet is experimental and the details suggests that it uses 7.5w to cool 30w. That's not very efficient. You might as well have a small fan and let it spin at a low RPM to reduce noise. There doesn't seem to be a breakthrough here.
The Brax industries one is just an ad from the company's official Youtube channel. I don't think the product is interesting at all.
> and the details suggests that it uses 7.5w to cool 30w.
"Secondly, AeroBlade reportedly uses four AirJet Mini modules rated at roughly 7.5W each, theoretically amounting to 30W of cooling."
How about some less skimming of the text before you jump the contrarian gun?
> I don't think the product is interesting at all.
Which one?
> How about some less skimming of the text before you jump the contrarian gun?
That would be against the rules
>> How about some less skimming of the text before you jump the contrarian gun?
Evergreen comment TBH
Looking into it more, it seems like the actual consumption is close to 1W per module, for an approximately 1:7.5 ratio. Regular fans are still likely more efficient, but the other advantages of the "AirJet" make it interesting.
This article (German, sorry) claims that it tops out at 20W TDP
https://www.computerbase.de/news/notebooks/lenovo-x-airjet-i...
I don’t think thinner laptops with larger batteries are intellectually interesting either.
Even though I might favor one if I was shopping for a new Thinkpad and was willing to spend more money on a laptop than I am likely to spend.
The Brax products and the company values look very interesting to me, thanks OP for pointing them out.
I thought so, too! There aren't too many in this field that do this and I think they deserve some recognition only because of that. They're also not entirely new, their previous product has been around for a while.
BTW. Their tablet is also interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyEYum3cIQQ
I miss all the programming articles. It feels like everyone has given up with the very idea of ever writing code now and the entire practice of making software has been handed over to AI.
Same. I miss the excitement around programming. New languages, new tricks, weird hacks, odd projects.
I have little to no interest in AI coding - I try it every couple months but always regret it, git reset, and go back to coding by hand.
It feels quite lonely these days. The general energy and enthusiasm from hn was a big source of motivation, or maybe community. Now using hn feels quite isolating.
I do see the occasional post about going back to hand coding though, and their frequency seems to be on the rise, so hopefully that correction continues
(I don’t need to see no AI, to each their own, just would be nice to see an equal amount of hand coding content one day)
Reddit's /r/programming is very well moderated, and they specifically don't allow articles about AI, unless it's programming AI. You should check it out.
Sounds like their head is in the sand
There are already too many articles about programming and new things are constantly being invented even with AI. For example, I created a programming language called ACPUL by hand designed for humans and there are still articles about it that have yet to be written.
Programming will become like esports. Maybe out of the 30 million programmers who can program without AI, only 5 million will remain, but that is still a large number.
I also experience this as a great loss, but honestly yes, I can't get excited about perfecting the craft of writing computer code now that there are AI systems that have done so. I'll always be sad about this! But the flip side is that I'm way more excited about what I can do with software, now that it's so much easier to write.
I experience quite the opposite. I'm quite excited about the value my skills are gaining in relative terms. An entire generation of potential competition is getting addicted to the subsidized corporate tooling. Voluntarily!
What I fear is the future career path for manual programming is fixing AI generated systems. I suspect it will pay very well because you will be finding and fixing things the AI driven work can't. It is going to be soul destroying as reading AI code is deeply unpleasant in the same way reading the articles is.
I never go by pay. I won't fix bad systems whatever their provenance because trying to understand poorly coded software is very unpleasant.
I go by interesting problems and I like being able to chose from more options due to lessened expertise competition. Why people voluntarily renounce expertise is beyond me, but they are and I welcome the increase in choices of engagement I have been experiencing.
I would never engage in uninteresting work at any rate of pay, and working with LLM output directly or mediated is quite uninteresting to me.
It's the domains, the problems being solved, that are interesting, not the lines of code. I want to have expertise in the former, not the latter.
AI is a very useful tool for finding problems in codebases.
I'm very far from an "AI is going to take everyone's job" doomer, but I really do think "there will be programming jobs that don't involve using LLM based tooling" seems pretty unlikely.
The future is open models running on your device. No subsidized corporate tooling required. There will never be a reckoning for the people who are letting their coding skills atrophy.
I don't like it either, but that's the way it is.
I don't wish anyone any reckoning. But I can see and feel less competition for my niche knowledge and I welcome it.
What niche knowledge? It seems to me that applying general knowledge to new niches has never been easier.
Maybe! But probably not, IMO. There have been a number of generations now that have been "addicted" to using digital spreadsheets rather than doing bookkeeping by hand.
Maybe all this time we were just in a ZIRP bubble and the people who claimed to be "interested in programming" were just grifting to the top all along.
I've always been interested in "building". Programming was always just the means to do so.
I got into it at a very young age, but the syntax and the languages were just the means to an end of building and creating. I'm academically interested in algorithms and data structures and distributed systems architectures, but I have no desire to actually code those things by hand.
You're probably not hand-writing your software in assembler.
Next to nobody will be writing code in 2050. It was always just a stepping stone.
AI is not an abstraction and it cannot be the foundation for the next layer up, like assembly can. I think you are categorically wrong.
Maybe there is no next layer. This is it, and it'll just be iterated on for decades.
Long time user, recently scrambled my password and gave up on HN entirely.
It's not just the AI thing - though that hasn't helped - there's been a real turn in the community. The most generous take I can offer is that a lot of people flooded into tech for the money in the last ten years, and now that the money is tighter all these people are panicking and trying to cling to anything that looks like a winning lottery ticket.
Unfortunately that means that for those of us who actually like cool tech, the space is inundated with get rich quick trash and wishcasting. So so much of it on HN right now.
I also think there's been a subtle change in the quality of the moderation. Before, stories were clearly gently spiked or promoted to encourage interesting and novel things to drift to the top every once in a while, and now that basically never seems to happen. A story about a cool new lisp would somehow appear in front of a story about a new version of React, even though it's kind of obvious it couldn't match the level of upvotes for the latter. Now it's all the latter. It's like a very smart thumb has been lifted off the scales and the community is poorer for it.
As I say, I eventually just left. HN currently detracts from my enjoyment of my day more than it adds. I hope it finds its way back over time.
I noticed it as well but I don’t see a problem with it.
I have spot-checked it at times and saw 5 to 8 of the top 10 posts about AI or directly adjacent.
We are in an emergent, dynamic periodt. AI is revolutionary and will continue to get better. The world will change drastically because of it. This seems so obvious yet many will call it purely hype, no real value, etc. We are still in the incubation period, just like the internet in the early 2000s.
A few years ago, it was all web3 and block chains. I was just last week reflecting on how long ago it was I'd seen anything in that category make it to the HN front page. I think a lot of it has to do with where the investment money is going. Interesting how times change and topics that people are passionate about reflect that.
A simple truth with HN is that you don't have to click on every link. And if you go into the comment threads, you don't have to react at everything. This whole "somebody is wrong on the internet" cliche starts with people's own behavior. In my case, AI agents are giving me a lot of quality procrastination time. I'm waiting for two things to finish right now. Anyway, that's just me looking into the mirror.
AI definitely is a hot topic on HN. IMHO a lot of the material being upvoted is a bit low quality. I wouldn't mind a bit more aggressive pruning for that. I know the HN editors put their fingers on the scale when things get out of hand sometimes.
Do you genuinely think the current AI developments are only on the same tier as blockchain?
> I noticed it as well but I don’t see a problem with it.
Again, I don't have a problem with AI news, I have a problem with missing out on other news that simply don't surface the news from the "New" abyss.
Thankfully due to AI, it is an extremely simple matter to set up your own HN feed and filter it absolutely however you want
If people here barely see any non-AI content, then that non-AI content doesn't get interacted with, have interesting comments, etc.
Filtering HN for yourself does not have the same effect as surfacing more non-AI content to every one.
Ironically the only reason I saw this post is because I was on my ipad :).
Here's an extension I wrote to do the same idea, except it clicks the Hide link for each AI submission instead of just nuking the DOM node. This means when you load the front page again, HN will fill it in with articles from the 2nd page. Works pretty well. https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
I think you should replace vibecode with vibecod so that you can catch vibecoding too.
Also add "vibe cod" with a space.
And add token, Gemini, OpenAI, llama
Oh it absolutely will have issues (for example it'd hit Maintenance in a title because of AI), it was something I did in a fit of pique because I opened HN one day and ~2/3 of the stories where about AI/LLM's - great if that is what you want, annoying as hell if you like the other stuff much more.
There are about a million ways to do it better but I can accept the odd false positive :).
Yea, it will also block words like email, daily, main, domain, train etc as the term AI is case insensitive without word boundaries.
I used gemini to update it to:
Note that blocking token, prompt, agent, and harness will also block things like auth tokens, SSH agents.Here's how mine looks using my method:
https://imgur.com/a/P1qMIok
9 out of 30 posts have been removed.
Any improvements to above filter are welcome.
Its 13:15 UTC and 21 of the 30 submissions on the HN home page are not AI related. I'm not saying there isn't a problem with AI-related submissions, but I'm not sure its a flood.
If it is on the homepage then is it not algorithmically what the community wants? Have you tried the https://news.ycombinator.com/newest link? I find that I prefer it over the homepage and have does so for years.
at 13:31 there are 11 "AI" related submissions from just the titles. Bet a good half of the others are "AI" slop.
Why limit? This is a news website where users judge if something is newsworthy by upvoting it. If the community decides it’s newsworthy it’s newsworthy. Maybe not for you but at least enough people to make it visible in front page. Unless you have strong arguments, like topics creating death threats or people doxing, there is no reason whatsoever to censure any news because you personally doesn’t care or don’t like it and prevent others from accessing it.
HN is curated by moderators and votes are just one input. All sorts of topics get downweighted all the time. Given the longevity of the AI news cycle it's not a crazy ask to suggest it get downweighted too.
And it's "censor", not "censure". To censure AI news would be for Dan and Tom to lodge a formal complaint about it.
I mean, it's cute that you think that users are driving anything on the internet anymore.
While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment, the ongoing automation of intelligence is, for better or worse, one of the most consequential things that can/will happen to "hackers" (as well as white-collar workers in general), and it is very difficult for us to look away from that asteroid in the sky.
Surprised you put "hackers" in quotes but not intelligence.
"Hackers" because the term in the context of "Hacker News" is broad and hard to define. Intelligence is, too, but I'm not in the business of pretending that the AI systems aren't some form of intelligent.
The front page is a reflection of what folks want to see. AI is certainly mentioned a lot but it’s also top of mind for every industry atm. I still see a lot of diversity in posts though. After all this is a VC forum for startups.
This was true before the Internet was overrun with bots.
"Folks" doesn't mean what it did mean years ago.
Life is always changing. HN has gotten more popular over the years and at least it feels materially different in comment quality. Bots are always a problem but that’s not why you see different things on the front page, that might be your nostalgia taking over.
I think this is just how it goes. Were you here in 2017-2018 when it was all blockchain all the time?
Was it? Iirc there was always something interesting on the front page besides the blockchain. Now there are days when there's nothing besides the "AI" created "AI" spam.
IMO the crypto / blockchain dominated periods were worse than the AI dominance of the moment. But YMMV I suppose!
I think it goes past 2018, but yes. It's a similar proportion of activity.
There's no way you think this is comparable to blockchain?
I think this is another level because AI affects the actual job of programming regardless of domain which is not the case with blockchain
Even if you don't use AI you may still have to review co-workers using it
Whereas blockchain was just a specific domain
Every AI post on the front page is there because it was upvoted a lot by HN readers. So you are effectively asking these readers to not vote on a topic because you are not interested in it but they are. Why would any of them alter their behavior because of that?
> a lot by HN readers
You're assuming there are human eyes behind all of these accounts. With the rise of AI has also come a precipitous rise in astroturfed views.
I think you are looking for a different product. Reddit or another app that shows you a feed of things you are interested in is more in this vein
I am not, HN was this product, it just changed. Hence the invitation to discussion on the subject.
But HN simply ranks posts by upvotes. I know you don't intend it this way, but you're effectively suggesting that HN should not pay attention to what its userbase are upvoting, but instead curate posts by your personal opinion instead. That's ... probably not going to be a workable solution for anyone other than you, I'm sorry.
There are always a lot of HN top stories that I'm not interested in, but I just scroll past them. If I really cared, I'd use a community site that provides a filter, an app that provides a filter, or just vibecode one for myself.
Exactly. HN hasn't really changed, the industry has.
The community does a pretty good job of following the guidelines and that's helped to suppress the echo chamber effect that any personalization would add to.
AI is novel and exciting and terrifying (my how we live in interesting times!) and all of that will fade with time.
But, like you said, if somebody really wants to change their view of HN, the tools are out there.
> But HN simply ranks posts by upvotes.
As others pointed out:
a) HN absolutely does apply weighs to some topics
b) bots
And to prove this point: this post went from page 1 to page 4 in a matter of hour, despite significant voteship. Posts are not ordered per count only, there's an algorithm and manually applied weighs involved.
No, HN was never this product. You were just more on board with previous trends and for some reason you're not on board with AI
Or the main topics just changed to something you are not that interested in, there was always a temporary bias to some bigger topics.
If I would not like to hear about funding rounds when money was cheap, being here 5 years ago wouldn't have been fun.
If I don't like to hear about Go being here 10 years ago would not be fun.
My timelines may be off, but the general industry trends showing up on HN were always there (and it would be weird if they wouldn't).
> Or the main topics just changed to something you are not that interested in,
I never said I AM NOT interested in AI. Can you re-read my post with an open mind?
> If I would not like to hear about funding rounds when money was cheap,
> If I don't like to hear about Go being here 10 years ago would not be fun.
I didn't say I don't like hearing about AI. I just don't like NOT HEARING about other stuff!
The way you're responding to the comments in this thread just makes me dislike your idea even more. You want the site to be curated with things you like instead of what the community upvotes. That's it.
> You want
No, bud. That's what your projection says. I said clearly I suggest HN curate more or give tools to self-curate.
> The way you're responding
How am I responding?
> makes me dislike your idea even more.
OK.
You are taking comments in this thread as personal attacks, when the they are not.
> > You want
> No, bud. That's what your projection says. I said clearly I suggest HN curate more or give tools to self-curate.
Those are literally the same thing
No? It's still about tech, same as always
Reddit has been thoroughly contaminated by AI slop as well. In the tech and sysadmin subs, even in the maker subs in general, there is sooooooo much stuff at least made with AI.
HN is often dominated by a Thing that is happening, during periods when there is some dominant Thing going on. In my time here, that has been many different Things over the years; social media, SaaS, Ruby on Rails, javascript frameworks, Rust, VR, self driving, crypto, and now AI (and this list is certainly missing a few). And during all those periods, lots of people have complained that the Thing of the moment is getting too much attention. But IMO, this kind of eye of sauron effect on a main Thing of a given time is mostly good. We're all here working out what we think of things, and it is useful to focus a lot of discussion on the new Thing that is developing and moving quickly.
I think there's still plenty of good stuff here, but agree that is beneficial to be kept up for to date on model evolution. We gotta get through this together.
I'm glad HN isn't a curated feed, it would end up like all the the others.
> I am trying to make is that maybe YC could start curating the content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump?
This kind of defeats the purpose of a link aggregator compared to a human curated newsletter or blog. Maybe something like https://hackernewsletter.com acts as a good filter for you?
There's already the "second chance pool" which is a human bump for interesting posts that didn't get the attention they should (Bad timing, other big news overshadowing, bad title etc.).
I do miss the fun, small side projects that used to be in the front page. Artisanal coding they call it now.
Why do side projects only count if you take 20x as long to do them by not using modern tools?
I like HN precisely because it tends to tell me what's happening.
GitHub or AWS down? New LLM model? Some Apple event? Some famous tech person passed away? Some language achieved 1.0?
I think removing what's currently hot opens a bad precedent.
I suggest using personal filters (or even AI) to curate what you see in HN and the internet itself.
It's a very limited view of what's happening that happens to coincide with your bubble.
Those were just examples. I never said it was the only thing happening.
And asking to filter out the bubble you don't happen to like doesn't look like a solution.
Your suggestion would break my use case: i.e I check out HN every day to see what the latest models that have been released are, and opinions from erudite people who have taken them for a spin.
Keeping abreast of fast moving AI developments with informed opinions/comments for various new models/agents etc. is primarily what I'm here for.
> Your suggestion would break my use case: i.e I check out HN every day to see what the latest models that have been released are
But you can get that from some AI-specific sources, it doesn't have to be HN. That's the point, this medium used to be much more universal.
It also means you're new here, because that's not what HN was until quite recently, so your use-case wouldn't work.
> you're new here
Their account is 2 years older than yours. Doesn't say much since you could've been using another or sans account long before then, but still.
Right, but my point was about what they said about the use-case. They couldn't have been coming here for AI news since 2017. So did they finally find their use-case for HN some 2 years ago?
If they were indeed coming here before AI revolution, it was a different type of medium.
I have always used HN for consuming tech news. I was trying to say that these days, I really love following the developments in AI and among the most erudite audience for that can be found here, which is great.
You extrapolated that to assuming that AI news was my only use case.
Am saying that a lot of us like HN the way it is, and the way it has evolved organically into a firehose of AI news.
Tbh if you are long enough on hn, quite a lot of stuff gets repeated over and over.
AI gets 'that much' tracktion because it is right now the fastest changing technology we have and with the biggest impact day-to-day for a lot of people on hn.
The CVEs from the last few month? Normal topic for hn, it became an AI toopic because AI found them.
I think he's meme-ing
https://xkcd.com/1172/
You lost me at erudite
Limiting the flood wouldn't mean necessarily omitting stories like "new model released" (within reason); it'd mean omitting "check out my new vibecoded slop" or "check out this article that's obviously LLM-written and provides very little value" (what we once would have called "blogspam", or dismissed as SEO-bait).
There's no way to reliably filter that "vibecoded slop" or "low value LLM-written article" (BTW what about low value human-written articles?) without users actually interacting with them. And it's actually the votes/flags of said users that determines visibility, so I'd say that's an indication of where the interests of HN's most active users lie.
Anyone with any karma can limit the flood by upvoting/down voting. And based on the number of dead submissions they do.
I think part of the problem is people that like AI really like it and those that hate it really hate it. Hard to reconcile that.
For me, the appeal of HN is the DIY attitude.
In that regard AI fits the bill well. Because many of the AI related posts are about tools one can immediately tinker with.
While a new type of laptop cooling might become interesting once the laptops come out, the news is not as interesting to me as a new LLM or agent that I can experiment with right away.
Are posts like that really DIY? They're more like increasingly elaborate and convoluted ways of getting something else to do it for you
In the same sense that using a 3D printer is DIY. Moreso than buying a thing off the interwebs; less so than carving or casting your own thing.
On the brax thing - the "article" is a youtube video. There's a pretty reasonable amount of pushback here against video-only content where folks can't rip through quickly to figure out how relevant it is to them or if it's just a vapid ad.
Brute force being the antithesis of hacking spirit, I too wish brute force would end up in Lamer News instead.
Implying llms are brute force?
1769379778 | Brax open_slate Android/Linux tablet | https://community.braxtech.net/t/introducing-open-slate-our-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46759121 | 0 comments
HN due to its design is easy to read, interact with and modify according to personal preference. How many other sites on the www are like that
A few projects that demonstrate this are mentioned in this thread
These are projects hosted by third parties
One of them uses "AI"
Another asks users to enable Javascript
Another only applies to the /front page
There is also DIY
For example
Transform HN HTML into SQL to create SQL database. This makes it faster and easier to search for interesting information and present it in whatever format the user prefers, all from the command line, no browser needed
Modify the web pages before they reach the browser/client using a local forward proxy. This makes it easy to filter out comments that discuss "AI" and make other cosmetic and substantive changes, for example, using Lua (no "AI" needed)
Use custom command line programs to make submissions and/or replies, instead of using a web browser
These are all DIY projects of mine, written in C (Flex as code generator), Lua and Almquist shell script (no Bash). I use older, underpowered, low spec computers, no "AI"
The discussions of AI hype in HN threads seem to follow a pattern. It goes something like
HN comment: "I dislike AI hype"
HN reply: "I think AI is useful. It saved me time." (sometimes including a personal anecdote)
But "I find AI useful. I like it because [reason(s)] I used it for [project(s)]" does not address the _hype_ issue
It could address a _"usefulness"_ issue but that's not the issue being raised
All the stuff I post that I find interesting gets instantly flagged now. Not sure why.
They mention rules and automatic triggers etc. but I think it’s just broken.
Auto-moderation is broken and the human mods are preferential, inconsistent, often harsh, especially to new people or hobbyists, which is pretty discouraging.
They look dead to me, not flagged. Most seem to be about tor or onion.
I guess that's what I meant. Dead, but most times I just end up deleting if posts show dead cause what's the point.
Both of your links are basically ads, or at least the titles make them sound like it.
> Lenovo showed a model that incorporates solid-state air cooling. That technology has been around for a while but it looks like it matured and is production-ready. This allows for super-light and slim designs, which, in turn, should allow for bigger batteries installed and I think it's some sort of breakthrough
See now this sounds like something I'd click on. (The linked article doesn't really discuss any of the technology or engineering though)
I think tagging on HN is an idea whose time has come. We already had informal tags for "Show HN" and "Ask HN" for some time. A few fixed tags chosen at submission time might suffice, for example:
- Global news, AI, Software, Hardware, Explainer, Tech Opinion, Personal project, Misc.
There could even be fake tags like Politics that trigger a message about appropriate topics.
It does increase moderation burden for mislabelling, and introduces another nitpicking point for comments to latch on, so it's not all upsides.
I'd be ok leaving filtering and other UI concerns to extensions.
I understand where you’re coming from, but would argue that the reality is that our industry is predominantly almost exclusively AI-related at this point.
A tagging feature would be nice, but HN is historically very reluctant to introduce new features. I argue that’s a good thing, given its age and the fact that it remains the gold standard for tech community news.
Adding tagging strikes me as a tall order, almost like asking Craigslist to make a major UI change - feature additions threaten the spirit of a beloved platform.
As I type this comment, 18 out of 30 links on the front page appear to be about things other than AI. I would not call this "almost exclusively AI talk."
I wonder if all the slots that used to be filled with the things OP and I found interesting are now filled with LLM stuff (not saying AI because I'm interested in all the cool machine learning things, for example medical and game applications, just not the 'yet another text autocomplete' links), since a lot of coding is now... gone I guess? Not being done, or seen as worthwhile and thus not upvoted as much as before? So those "mostly not LLM talk" links may all be things we'd not have found interesting before either, and now there is almost nothing left of the old HN 'for us' (OP, me, and whoever else feels this way)
It's also way too harsh to just remove any mention of LLMs, as some people are suggesting shoehorning adblock filters for for example. I'm interested if GPT9 solved world hunger by presenting logic to world leaders and workers and creating a great collaboration that gets food to everyone. It would be a bit silly to hide that link. But all the tiiiiny incremental steps and projects that are outdated by (often quite literally) next week.... guys, please :/
I've been hearing a lot of "Amdahl's law" regarding AI - the rule that says the slowest part of a system sets the speed of what you can accomplish. On one hand, this means that AI has sped up software (so there is more software news because you can make a 20-page blog post in one prompt now), but it doesn't speed up, say, shipping hardware products that much. I guess we need to re-weight the news to include how hard it is, not just how many tokens it makes.
I maintain a simple browser extension to auto-hide AI news stories: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ It just scans for keywords and clicks the Hide button. Doesn't catch everything, but cuts out a ton of the noise. You can go hit the Hidden page in your profile sometimes and scan for highly-upvoted stories to see the couple that are maybe actually worth looking at.
That solves it for the individual, but still leaves gullible people exposed to the shock and awe indoctrination and ads run by the AI astroturfers.
If every sane person used this extension, there would be no pushback.
I can't solve all of the world's problems, but I can solve the problem in front of me and share my solutions with others who have the same problem.
Says the green account astroturfer!
Yes, the quadrillion dollar anti-AI industry really pays exorbitant salaries to influencers!!!11!!
Can the AI people do anything else than modify the arguments of their opponents? I guess not, their brains have been quantized.
Did you forget to log into the right account to reply to me?
Magic 8-Ball says:
SIGNS POINT TO YES
Thinking: The user focuses on unimportant issues and does not appear bright or creative. I have to remain polite but firm. Let us use phrases he will recognize.
Answer: Fair. I'll give an honest assessment of the situation. There are a multitude of possible reasons for a user to forget their password. [cut 100 lines of lecture]. Would you like me to introduce you to a secure password manager?
I've been using HackerSmacker for a while to tag AI-related and non-AI-related submissions.
I find, depending on the time of day, 30-50% of submissions are about AI. Also, Users who submit AI-related content tend to also submit non-AI-related content - those I tag for non-AI-related content almost never submit AI-related content.
I can't help but feel that every 1% improvement over a benchmark from new releases of flagship LLMs isn't really that impressive anymore. To some extent it feels like LLM improvements is slowing down significantly despite increasing resources being spent on them.
The people promising AGI just 6 months ago are now more and more quiet about the possibility and rightfully so. LLMs alone are most likely not the path to AGI.
My personal experience diaagrees.
The Opus moment in November felt very different but despite that, a handful things did not woork well with Opus in November and I tried them last week and they now just work.
In parallel GPT-6 and Fable 5.1 show significant skill improvements in 3D modeling and Astra shows significant progress in computer use.
Do we live in a parallel universe? I mean it, this week was crazy from a progress point of view.
> Do we live in a parallel universe? I mean it, this week was crazy from a progress point of view.
This is how I feel too, wandering into some of these threads. Sure the damn things aren't perfect yet, but people act as if they are incapable of doing anything, or no more worth the hype than Bootstrap?? (the latter comes from this very thread!)
When Anthropic gave out some usage, I was able to do a lot more and it felt differently than when you always have to think about limits.
I now spend $90 this month and do even more now (privat). It might really be a big bias of these people either not spending any time on it or just doing very small experiments and immediadly being put of by some random issue.
Oh I've been maxing out my twin Pro/Max $200 accounts for the past 12 months or so :P
No, the people promising AGI 6 months ago are now saying it's here. (and I agree)
Is the AGI in the room with us?
HN/YC should be called "News Venture Capital Cares About". VC cares about AI, so AI is what you're gonna get
I submitted an article today, then withdrew it when I noticed it was AI generated. I think it's a matter of self-policing.
https://studyfinds.com/telling-kids-theyre-smart-nearly-doub...
We absolutely must discuss SVGs of animals riding vehicles, that is the only compelling topic these days.
Reading threads like this always confuses me a little...
Since Corona this platform has become basically reddid as it was 10-15 yrs ago.
> Meanwhile the legitimately, broadly-hacker stuff gets left out for the most part
Those were pretty much always niche content here. This was- at least until Corona, a forum where you got usually pretty highly intelligent and critical input on various topics, strongly centered around products as a direct consequence of this being the (I think) most successful VC forum.
Pretty much every comment section had me think about something that I hadn't fully understood before. Nowadays? It's extremely rare to see anything remotely insightful. It's mostly just reactionary/knee jerk response, from people that clearly never actually thought about what they're actually talking about/just parroting political points.
I do miss the older content, and I've found myself getting more and more toxic as a consequence of seeing ever less insightful if not downright stupid comments here. Which - if I'm honest - objectively contributes to the problem and I should stop henceforth.
AI is on the front page because those articles are upvoted. There have always been hot topics that dominated the feed in the past: Apple product releases, Steve Jobs's passing, cryptocurrency, US-only news, San Francisco-only news, coding bootcamps, NPM drama of the week, etc.
1. Popularity != Merit and this site is not different. A lot of worthy posts get ignored.
2. Even though I find most of the AI posts interesting, I agree that tags and the ability to filter by tags would be really great. But it's probably a ton of work and additional system load.
I don't have a
https://sprinklz.io/demo/hackerNews
running live w/ability to set custom tags if you're interested
People post and interact with what interests - or triggers - them. Yesterday it was one thing, today it's AI, and tomorrow it'll be another thing. Just have to ack the flow, and find another way to filter for your non-today's-thing interests.
This happened when crypto was big. Hacker News rides the bandwagon hard. Everything in tech trying to align to AI makes it more pronounced. It'll calm down, hopefully.
Here is a link to an HN feed with reduced priority for AI content
https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai
this is what I use to keep the garbage out
I would like more news on native dev (C++/assembly/Nim/D/...)
or Theoretical CS and algorithms.
youd love lobste.rs
I highly agree. I am very interested in the AI news but the distribution isn't right at the moment. It doesn't really feel like the same website to me.
AI-related news are very much relevant nowadays, so limiting them would be excessive. But introducing tags to make it possible to filter out specific topics seems like a good idea.
Yes, believe they can down weight certain topics by keywords, let’s hope they do. This doesn’t stop the posts but just flushes them more quickly.
Oh but the world is ending due to skynet anyway. So why bother with batteries? They'll turn us into ones after we pollute the sky
FWIW, one article is very short on details, it’s a slightly expanded press release, and the other is a video. I’m not sure either is what’s needed more on HN.
If intergalactic aliens landed on Earth tomorrow, HN would be flooded with alien news too ;-)
Every platform captures the Zeitgeist somewhat, the AI related post are just a reflection of that.
While I also somewhat dislike it. I don’t think limiting them resolves the issue.
Been here a long time and wouldn't upvote any of those things. Sounds like you're looking for a different site.
There are almost as many posts like this as there are about AI.
Keep both. AI and banning AI are both high-interest topics.
I'm sorry, who said anything about banning AI?
It's the biggest 'thing' in the industry.
Previously this site was swamped with Blockchain news...
You think that would have been some kind of lesson, but no!
This. Simple tagging and/or a dedicated AI news section would be very welcome.
I wish but honestly that's unrealistic because a lot, if not most, people related to HN are currently their livelihood linked to AI, in one way or another.
Most companies, in software or not, are imposing minimum (after backtracking to suggest to maximized, until their started to pay bills) AI usage. A lot of people in HN also have stocks a lot of popular stocks is linked to AI success, whatever that might mean. A lot of AI entrepreneurs also are directly to sell AI, as it's simply where most of the VC money is currently going.
So... when it's this intertwined I think it will be difficult. If you know of other places I'd be curious.
https://hcker.news/ > settings > quick filters > AI
There's also an extension and rss feeds.
Totally agree. An analogy would be a physics journal getting flooded with articles about psychology because "ultimately the human brain runs on atoms".
Instead, AI deserves its own field, outside (and, in my taste, far away from) CS.
So instead of the most craziest technology advantage in our lifetime, you want to see more products?
Like a lenovo laptop with a technology which is available for a bit and another product which you can pre-order?
Yes.
I'm on hn for 15 years, tbh as someone else said that to you already: thats not what hn is. At least I wouldn't even expect your two examples on hn.
I would expect them on reddit, kickstarter or hackaday.
Apple always gets quite a lot of tracktion on hn (i don't like it but happens evertime). But lenovo? Framework for sure.
I had the same feeling yesterday, when the front page was filled with all apple stuff.
I have been lurking in lobste even though i dont have account, which currently has this post which is right up my ally.
https://lobste.rs/s/twkkac/fastly_speedtest_test
same thing on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650630
I already miss rust and erlang articles
I mean, it's not surprising. I think that most people on here are software developers.
AI is fundamentally transformative to the software development industry and threatens to put large numbers of software developers out of a job. Fable regularly does things in 20 minutes that would have taken me 2 weeks before. AI is probably the biggest revolution in software development since the development of operating systems and high-level languages. It's also potentially a fundamental turning point in the entirety of human history.
So it's no wonder that AI gets a lot of attention.
"Whats new" is, I hate to break it to you, 99% AI-related. Its a pretty unique point in time here and likely will continue to be for at least 12-24 months. This is likely to go down as being as reality-altering as the internet but with the added wrinkle of things are able to progress/iterate _much_ faster. Not only are the models progressing at breakneck speed, but our understanding of how to use them effectively is as well. So theres legitimate "discoveries" happening every week.
I've largely moved over to lobste.rs for actual technical news. They even have a "vibecoding" tag to let you filter out anything related to coding with LLMs.
Given that LLMs are currently the frontier of innovation in our industry, it does make sense to me that most stuff that happens and gets talked about would be somehow connected to it.
There's a lot of focus on in. People are trying it out in their workflows and learning new things.
So, potentially, this could just be organic.
Of course, in reality, it is not. There's a ton of "thought leader" LinkedIn slop, just advertising their own personal brand with at best mid takes. But grifters come with every paradigm shift. Unfortunately.
It would be nice to at least have a day in the week without AI news. Some kind of "No AI Friday," for example.
But this post is about AI news!
Get mad at me if you want, but whenever I see a new program/project posted, my first thought is "that's cool, please don't be AI slop."
There is an ebb and flow.
But with Hugging Face hack, and Navier–Stokes. You're going to be flooded with news for at least a few more weeks.
Well...at the rate things are going, probably not tapering off after a few weeks :P
It has been like this for more than a year, a lot longer than just the past couple of months.
HackerNews, just like all other platforms, is heavily astroturfed and the big AI labs have bots commenting and voting, so it'll never end.
The only solution is a platform that only allows humans, with a proof of humanity before posting anything, but not too sure what that can be, and it would ultimately be unsuccessful.
But we have to see the positive, at least less posts about SQLite make it to the frontpage.
> big AI labs have bots commenting and voting
I'd love to see some proof of this.
Turn on showdead and watch the AI bros yell into the void.
All I ever see are the Anti's and the crazies? Like the guy (who is in this very post) who keeps opening accounts to complain about Claude related posts and saying various slurs. Almost feels like the old days when Terry Davis would post technical rants with slurs applied liberally.
To be honest I have showdead on and while I see the things you see, I also see a lot of blatant AI slop getting killed off too. I'm sure most people on here are at least somewhat attuned to Claude's 'voice' by now.
If a LLM-voice comment has [dead] next to it, either the account was already banned in its entirety or HN's LLM text detector marked the comment auto-dead due to suspected LLM writing. If the comment has [flagged] [dead] next to it, the comment was killed by human flagging. You can see both kinds of comment if you browse https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
If you have enough karma to flag comments you can also flag them directly from the noobcomments feed, which is useful to help manage the abusive users who keep re-registering new accounts.
Point taken, I probably file a lot of that away under "generic HN spam" (or maybe I've gotten so good at skimming Claude output that my eyes glaze over automatically now in response :P)
This comment is very clearly a bot for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49657869
Nah not on this thread but in general, you'll always find at least one person prompting "summarize this article" and regurgitating the slop into the comment section.
> proof of humanity
I'm just wondering how you'd do that. Only thing I can see working is a web of trust.
It's HackerNews themselves selling fake praise as an ad product.
The sticks are so far up the asses of the mods here and the top karma folks that no random AI company would be able to get upvoted here. The moment something like that happens outside the in-group, they would get flagged to death.
Instead HN sells propaganda as a product. So we get to hear about Claude, Kagi, and AT Proto every hour of every day :D
Time for a category at the top? Next to new, jobs, ...? Something like "sans AI".
I like adjacent articles though. Today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656496 was a delight. It would be sad if such articles were filtered out or automatically downvoted or similar.
> Something like "sans AI"
Sounds like something that'll shrink to an insignificant niche over time, rendering it meaningless as a category.
The amount of useless griping and sniping on HN has made it a less interesting and resourceful community. Moreso than the flood of AI news.
Tagging may not help though. Even the latest Apple product announcement threads were just.. bad. Everyone wants to be grumpy and dismissive.
If I had to keep one and lose one, I’d keep X and lose HN. And while I hate Elon, HN is losing on vibes, utility, information, network, links, and tips.
Once we start dividing, filtering, or moderating content, HN will just become Reddit. The current level of moderation is good enough, if not the best. It works because the community naturally filters itself—like-minded people find a home here, while those outside the bubble quickly get bored and move on.
Yeah there really needs to be better moderation and filtering here.
Yesterday there were multitudes of blatant AI slop and AI-slop-fueled misinformation/contrarianism all over the front page. It's not getting caught and flagged fast enough.
HN already has an upvote/downvote system to surface what's interesting to people here.
> people here
The best communities are ones that do not allow to be taken over by inorganic behavior. I think we can reasonably assume that not all AI front-page stuff is as interesting as other, non-AI stuff, yet here we are.
You cannot downvote posts, which is an issue IMO.
You can flag posts though. Enough flags kills.
Its a unlocked feature once you have enough points
How many points?
Here's a decent write up
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
For posterity, you can only downvote comments, you can't downvote posts.
It doesn't say anywhere in that document that you can downvote posts.
For comments only, not posts. Downvoting comments will achieve nothing when it comes to reducing the prevalence of AI spam posts.
This is a solved problem. Hacker News without AI: https://hcker.news/?view=frontpage&ai=exclude
> This is a solved problem.
It is not. If people here barely see any non-AI content, then that non-AI content doesn't get interacted with, have interesting comments, etc.
Filtering for yourself does not have the same effect as surfacing more non-AI content to everyone.
Thanks for sharing. I'm going to give it a spin for a while. The downside is you cannot comment or vote on the external site so you are always juggling the two sites for that.
I have a browser extension that allows you to comment and vote as if it's HN.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hckernews-helper/gm...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hcker-news/ https://hcker.news/notes/browser-extension
(Safari ext coming soon)
The extension itself follows the principle of least privilege. It doesn't even have access to the HN site cookie.
If the AI haters would avoid AI articles and stop adding useless, unrelated "slop!" and "just text prediction!" comments, HN would be a much better place IMHO.
Perhaps you could lead the change you wish to see?
Well, I do, don't I, by trying and posting some other stuff than explicitly AI?
In the last month, excluding this post, three of your five submissions were AI focused, and one was part-AI. For the past two months, it's five of 11. Certainly not "explicitly AI" but it's about half, which in the context of this overall discussion is towards "too much", IYAM. Half of HN being AI is still a poor signal-to-noise ratio.
I don't know what to tell you. I hate Meta and social media but still use Instagram and Facebook, because that's the society we live in. Does this make me a hypocrite? Can I not wish for a different reality? Can I singlehandedly change Meta if I stop using their tools, just like you think I could change HN reality if I post more non-AI content?
Of course HN isn't going to stop advertising the very thing it's probably sunk a ton of money into.
If you want actual technical discussion of other subjects, maybe slashdot is still around.
Don't look up...
This is eternal September my friend
The AI is only going to increase on all forums from here. There's no stopping it, because on most forums people will start preferring AI in many areas
Variants of your Ask are a regular thing around here. Lots of stuff still floats to the top that's non-AI but traction is as ever a challenge somewhat. Stuff moves fast around here.
Some recents:
Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834961
Show HN: Hacker News with AI stories filtered out
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159018
Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886741
Just a few weeks ago:
How much of HN is AI?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435728
Also surfacing non-AI projects:
Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700460
Ask HN: What are you working on (non-AI)?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122103
The Brax industries stuff you mentioned looked really sleek and fun until I noticed it's pretty much vaporvare as for today. I'm a great fan of the former submission you mentioned: a technology that seemed innovative but not in production but is available now. Stuff that will be available next year or never is simply less interesting.
My linkedin is just pages and pages of AI posts and layoffs.
Are lawyers, doctors, and people in non-tech fields getting the same thing? Is Doctor linkedin all about how AI is going to improve surgery while half your connections posts are about being unemployed?
No they are more about VC buying all the clinics and working them 24 hours a day and trying to extract as much money from the customer as possible.
Solidarity in Shit
I say embrace the eras, hackernews has always be fixated on some shiny topic for a while before jumping to the next.
Someday you will look back and see this as the good old days.
I’ve been a hacker since I was 10, so about 30 years now.
A couple of years ago, I felt the same way you did. And then I started properly/seriously using Claude Code. When Opus 4.5 came out, it was sincerely life-changing. I can prototype working projects in possibly 1/30th the time, and I can do them simultaneously.
This post has made me realize that the flood of AI news isn’t annoying or boring to me anymore because I think my profession is the only one that’s actually being replaced by it, for better or worse. For coders, there’s nothing even close to the level of importance as AI (which doesn’t mean it’s interesting).
Honestly I’d like to see more news about AI, but actually about the way it’s devastated the labor side of our industry and will kill the middle classes of countries like India.
Without question, nothing short of the web has been more impactful to our industry specifically than AI has been and will be.
> I can prototype working projects in possibly 1/30th the time, and I can do them simultaneously.
This takes all the fun out of programming for me.
I have the same "1/30th ... simultaneous" experience with coding agents, and I am having fun. Directing teams of agents to solve many problems (or create many useful things) for me has its own fun challenges/puzzles-to-solve.
Some of the fun is redirecting coding agents when they get stuck, by showing them code or design they could not work out on their own. Some of the fun is designing tools to rein-in AI coding agents, keep them on track, and verify their outputs. Some of the fun is exploring new areas for me: compilers, game dev, language design, emulators, embedded, etc.
So I am having fun at the CTO/PM/Engineering Manager level but also at the lowest coding level.
I've been coding since the early 70s. This brings back the joy I had discovering microprocessors and electronics.
Sure, if that is what you like. I for one did not get into this field because I wanted to hire people (artificial or natural) to write the programs for me. Programming as an activity / art is what I enjoyed the most. Managing people / agents is a total turn off.
But I am creating programs to manage the coding agents for me. Of course I am using coding agents to do that. It's turtles all the way down :-)
Nobody's stopping you from writing code, whether as a hobby or you find/start a company where that's valued.
I do NOT have a problem with AI.
Again, the problem is with the flooding that drowns-out other news. I intentionally say "limit the AI news" in this post's title.
I wasn’t suggesting you do. But how relevant is AI to your everyday life? Do you use it heavily yourself?
I was irritated by AI news until it became one of my main tools.
I absolutely do, in fact I do post on the subject as well. I just think the amount of AI news is overbearing and I do not feel like HN is a good enough source for IT news anymore. Sure, I can use another medium, but that's not the point, I hope we can discuss this and hopefully see YC come up with some good solution.
I like it.
It’s relevant and current technology.
Are the Lenovo and Braxx examples I provided not relevant nor current?
The Brax example you posted was a YouTube link, which is an instant skip for me. Personally, no phone with dated tech is going to interest me. Their WallUp looks interesting but there’s no product just a waitlist and an animation. I already have TRMNL displays around my home, so I’m in their market.
For Lenovo, their Yoga was interesting ~15 years ago but Aeroblade is just a proof of concept, and thinner laptops in general are irrelevant to me. I use a powerful laptop and a tablet, not a compromise between them.
I don't think they are, and given amount of votes on each — seems like so does the community.
Regarding Lenovo: it's the first laptop with AirJet, sure, but it's not the first computer in general. Zotac released a mini PC with the very same AirJet in 2023. It looks dope, but it's just not that interesting or new.
Regarding Brax: Braxman is a well-known scammer. The world would be a better place if nobody paid any attention to this person.
> not that interesting or new.
Its parameters are! That's the whole point! 830g with regular 30W TDP Lunar Lake is impressive.
> Braxman is a well-known scammer
Which is interesting as I didn't know that and seems like you're right. Still warrants some discussion around those products and even some ad-hominem?
Lenovo is just vaporware currently as was their laptop with translucent display. YMMV but I no longer waste my time with things that are not available (and may never be). The Lenovo page that is linked from the page you posted is super light on details and just fluffy marketing.
Doing some research on "AirJet solid-state cooling" turns up products that have been announced at CES 2023. More info may be found at the Frore Systems homepage. Funy enough Airjets seems to be used in some NVidia systems such as Jetson Orin.
I don't want to shill Apple but my Macbook Air with M4 performs great and never runs the fan (does it have one, I don't know), so the Airjet thing (for me) is pretty much a solution in search of a problem.
> never runs the fan (does it have one, I don't know)
> so the Airjet thing (for me) is pretty much a solution in search of a problem.
That's it? Fan is about noise and nothing else? The much lower volume/dissipation and weight/dissipation ratios, which made this Lenovo latop 830g, which easily allows for some 200-300g of extra battery is a solution in search of a problem?
Sorry, if you don't see this then we have nothing to discuss.
Ironically "Project AeroBlade and Project Swan proof-of-concepts explore the future of AI-powered business computing" but anyway I just read this when I re-visited the Lenovo site to learn more about that prototype with respect to the CPU it is using. I could not find anything, though.
My point is that maybe it's better to develop CPUs with less power consumption than to invent new cooling techniques (hence "solution in search of a problem"). This is what Apple silicon does.
> My point is that maybe it's better to develop CPUs with less power consumption than to invent new cooling techniques
And why not both? Because that's exactly what's happening. Vapor chambers? Heatsinks before that?
We get it, your interests aren't the same as others. The problem here is you want your vote to count more than others because your interests are super important and everything, but that's not how upvote based sites on general tech topics work.
> The problem here is you want your vote to count more
That's just your projection.
I see a recurring pattern here.
does hn quickly down rank other subjects?
if i’m not mistaken they might with political subjects, if so, there’s already precedent and so the tech pieces are in place.
i would be against entirely removing it, but limiting it to like 10-20% of the front page would honestly be kind of nice.
it feels like it’s been an ai sausage fest for months and months.
Unfortunately, no. People talk about the times. I was sick and tired of covid posts a few years ago. Or nodejs before that.
Hn is the propaganda arm of yc. Yc is heavily invested in ai. Follow the money.
HN frontpage in 2000: Can we please limit the Internet news flood?
> Please stop discussing one of the most pivotal moments in history
That's why lobste.rs is a good plance, almost no AI.
There's loads of slop and slop enthusiasm on lobste.rs; the only difference is that they have a moderation policy which forbids the most egregious forms of advertising and astroturfing.
I have found that the https://lobste.rs/ submission policy means that there is a lot less slop (and discussion of slop) over there. They focus more heavily on technical discussions, which I find more rewarding.
Reminder that this is primarily a Silicon Valley / VC related and owned technology news aggregator.
Fringe topics will stay fringe until they're hip (again?); currently non fringe from my intermittent read:
- anything "AI"
- retro computing (honest interest x mourning/cope in the non-deterministic agentic takeoff)
- random topics that hit the zeitgeist
Check out lobste.rs as well as SIG across forums, IRC, fediverse, discord, etc, etc – and or create your own like in the olden days :)
https://sive.rs/dance-lessons
FWIW I prefer to come here and post, read up and comment on "AI" over having to wade through proxied shitter content (it truly stinks over there).
Go to lobste.rs and hide the 'vibecoding' tag.
"One of the largest changes in human history has started, why is everyone talking about it?"
Seems to me that most people still have to get up in the morning to go to a bullshit job just to stay alive and consoom things they don't need. I don't see the big change.
"what i post here gets no traction"
I'd also SERIOUSLY ask for an "LLM generated" flag in addition to normal flags - on both comments and submissions, that is.
Obvious slop comments thankfully already get flagged or downvoted in the hell they belong, but the submissions, oh dear god I do not wish to engage with shit written by AI any more. It's questionable enough if you let LLMs do your coding work for you, but if you can't even be arsed to write a proper README.md on your own, why the fuck should I be forced to waste my time reading it?
That should be somewhat feasible to be done objectively, now that we have LLM text fingerprinting regulations in place.
Unfortunately most of what gets posted to HN or could conceivably be posted here is already LLM generated to some degree. Because content of interest to HN tends to be written by the same people who increasingly prefer to use an LLM for everything they do, machine-generated submissions are only going to increase over time. Tagging submissions as LLM generated is ultimately futile, as one might as well tag water as wet.
Also HN's design ethos of not having "silos" precludes having tags or filters or blocklists, since they want everyone to see the same content at the same time. This is the kind of thing you're going to have to use with a browser plugin or third party service if you want it at all.
Or they could...just use Reddit or Lobsters, it's so weird that they want to fight the whole purpose of this site.
The whole purpose of this site is to "satisfy intellectual curiosity," not to post LLM generated content.
What is stopping "LLM generated content" from "satisfy[ing] intellectual curiosity"?
The AI posts are better than the reddit tier politics slop
No. You will have your slop and you'll like it, too.
Well, Lenovo's new air cooling and Brax's new open source devices would both be made pretty moot if everyone on earth dies in the coming months. Sooooooo
To see how fast hype cycles can die, check out the NFT archive on HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=NFT
Top stories (critical and otherwise) were upvoted hundreds of times 4-5 years ago and had hundreds of comments. Sort by the past year, and no story has more than 9 points. NFTS have effectively disappeared from HN's front page.
AI is a different beast ... the tech and concepts have true value. But we may see the term "AI" start to fade as new terminology and companies and concepts rise to the fore ... the Sons/Daughters of AI.