I can deal with a launch problem. I am looking forward to being able to check it out. I stopped coming to HN as often as I used to because there has been too much AI talk. It's like a dang AI subreddit. I don't want anything to do with AI. I have lost 2 jobs to AI budgets and stupid executive decisions. It's no longer part of my personal and professional life.
I agree with you, but haven't really left yet since there's still a good amount of discourse outside AI related topics. Seems a significant amount of contributors here are all to eager to fall over themselves putting themselves, their juniors, children, and colleagues out of work, long term.
My personal stance is that the genie is out of the bottle, and there's likely no putting it back. Kind of like nuclear weapons: I wish they didn't exist, but since they do I'd rather be on the side that has them.
Honestly it's an incredible technology the likes of which I never thought I would see in my lifetime. It's definitely not perfect, but it is improving at a frightening pace. Some days I am optimistic for how it might shape the future, and other days I am scared.
If goverments wanted to make a credible effort to limit how they are used, I would support that. But I'm not terribly optimistic that can or will happen.
It’s interesting how, as someone more pro-AI, I feel the exact opposite way - every comment thread just devolves into people saying AI is stupid (OK, perhaps modulo new model releases from frontier labs, those tend to be fairly positive). Like we had a thread about what your AI workflow is and people were coming in and saying they didn’t have one because AI is bad. Really? Do these people enter threads about what your favorite Rust library is and say they don’t have any and Rust is a bad language?
Sure, but not to the same extent. Because the industry isn't experiencing a trend where it tells everyone that if they don't use Rust, they are obsolete. And because nobody is saying "Rust is going to take all our jobs" to all the other programmers. And because most of the threads on HN aren't about Rust on a daily basis.
Sure overly enthusiastic Rust fans exist and they are annoying. But it's nowhere even close to the AI mania gripping the industry.
Just because some people are contributing to bad discourse doesn't mean that you also get permission to contribute to bad discourse. If you don't like it when people say you're going to be obsolete -- tell them! Don't hop into random spaces where no one is saying that and act negative! This just lowers the discourse quality everywhere. Very few people on HN are saying you are going to be obsolete if you don't use AI (I basically haven't seen a single person say this who hasn't been massively downvoted).
> Do these people enter threads about what your favorite Rust library is and say they don’t have any and Rust is a bad language?
Yes. And Rust people enter threads about other languages and projects not written in Rust and say they're bad because they aren't Rust. Welcome to Hacker News.
The style is a bit off for the usual HN fare: 'sans' should be lowercase here, or otherwise it's easy to confuse for a font. It's still pretty swell :)
The only way to fully detect and remove AI posts from HN is using human curation by a human-selected few. Everything automated will have a higher review rate (postsReviewed / postsTotal) and also an higher error rate (incorrectReview / postsReviewed) in return for not being subject to puny human weaknesses like sleep, sickness, and (until curator selection is itself automated), spam/troll malice. To misquote my favorite blooper reel ever, “That’s not something that code can fix, that’s gonna be a little harder to fix”.
I built (well, vibe-coded) a version of this a while back that runs against the Hacker News API, it's static HTML on GitHub Pages so I don't have to run a server for it: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered
Immediately I started thinking how nice it would be to use natural language to have LLMs generate a deterministic filter for stories matching content I DO care about, filtered from New. Instead of filtering it out.
73% of users vote prior to reading TFA, according to this research. (I am sometimes guilty of this myself)
We live in a world being dimished by confirmation bias, but this isn't a new thing. Those who wrote/approved the headlines always had more power than those who wrote the articles.
> In the present work, we introduce and make available a new dataset containing the activity logs that recorded all activity for 309 Reddit users for one year.
However, tracking over a year might make the subject forget about the whole thing, and act naturally. As far as HN vs Reddit, not much difference really. I mean that as more props to reddit users than anything against HNers.
I got a partial load and what it looks like it does is just search each submission for a list of key words and discards any that hits, so it would discard this submission.
I was not suggesting that it would be a false positive, I was suggesting that this will filter out many submissions that would be of interest to those that want less AI on HN. This would flag a blog that has nothing to do with AI if some random person mentioned AI in the comments of that blog post, right?
I have an app that does Hacker News with AI; it analyses all the stories and comments for a number of criteria, and tags them so you can skip stuff you don't want to see. I should get around to actually publishing it but I've been lazy.
One of the fun things I noticed is the psychological impact of framing. A comment that might've made you feel the need to reply before has less emotional weight if it's highlighted in red and a diminished font. Same thing for stories; if you would normally disagree with a story and it would make you want to comment, you feel less like commenting if the story is rated as 'lacking evidence', 'unsupported by research', 'personal anecdotes only', etc. It drives down the feeling of needing to engage. Which is horrible for site engagement, but good for mental health (I think).
I've found a workable approach, browsing HN with my feed reader (FreshRSS, in this case). I have bookmarks for various things, one of which is what I've labeled "AI nonsense". It's not HN-specific, but selects for unread articles that match a variety of AI-adjacent terms. One or two might look interesting enough to read, all the rest get the "mark as read" treatment, and so much clutter just goes away.
I've been thinking of making something like this for myself for quite a while now, glad I'm not the only one who had the idea and someone actually did it before I got to it
I have my own version of this as a browser extension paired with a backend that runs all new submissions through a small LLM to classify them, which catches more than a simple word match. Fight fire with fire, as they say.
Though I haven't used it much lately, because seeing half of the front page disappear when I enable it is a bit disheartening.
Great idea. But the first thread I opened (Nordstjernen 1.0) is according to the comments about a project built with Claude. So it doesn't remove all the AI stuff.
What would be the worse non-semantic alternative? Regex?
LLMs are the holy grail for getting beyond string matches. I would hope one was used to solve such a problem, otherwise that would be a poor product, right?
I did not investigate the product, but my point here is irony. The correct solution to implement the TFA product is to use an LLM.
Yes, keyword-based matching is more than good enough for the use case. It doesn't justify bringing in trillion dollar companies to subsidize the costs.
Even if you wanted to go beyond simple keyword matching, there are ways to determine relevance before jumping to the shiny new overkill solution.
Also for everyone's sanity, please don't turn a troll's false accusations into a cynical argument for more LLMs. That's what drives to people to reach for solutions like the one in the article in the first place.
I built a filter for AI (inclusive and exclusive) for hcker.news a while back and continue to maintain it. It’s quite robust, and does more than just keyword filtering.
Never thought to check codebases for AI commits. That's very interesting. Since your comment I have added an option to filter out github submissions that contain commits from an AI assistant. I've implemented it by pulling the last 50 commits from the repo and checking for signatures of the commonly known coding assistants.
Regarding your second one, I have a pretty extensive static list that missed out on "GenAI" as a keyword but I've now created an automation to check search for exceptions daily.
I hope it works out.
Honestly it's an incredible technology the likes of which I never thought I would see in my lifetime. It's definitely not perfect, but it is improving at a frightening pace. Some days I am optimistic for how it might shape the future, and other days I am scared.
If goverments wanted to make a credible effort to limit how they are used, I would support that. But I'm not terribly optimistic that can or will happen.
True, but you're not being bombarded 24/7 with irrelevant -- and most likely false -- information about nuclear weapons.
Sure overly enthusiastic Rust fans exist and they are annoying. But it's nowhere even close to the AI mania gripping the industry.
Yes. And Rust people enter threads about other languages and projects not written in Rust and say they're bad because they aren't Rust. Welcome to Hacker News.
A much better option, in my opinion: https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
- Nordstjernen 1.0 (built with Claude)
- Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
"GenAI" is not filtered indeed. Maybe it's not working perfectly, but it does work for most/many AI stories. Good enough!
PS. You can just add the word "GenAI" to your manual filters, in settings...
Would be nice to have "include" option... for those of use who may want to ONLY read posts about AI or whatever else niche interest.
there's just something about this UI and its consistency
I also don't mind all the AI related news
If anything I just wish they had a mute/block button. its not fun when somebody is stalking you replying to every comment you make.
Immediately I started thinking how nice it would be to use natural language to have LLMs generate a deterministic filter for stories matching content I DO care about, filtered from New. Instead of filtering it out.
We live in a world being dimished by confirmation bias, but this isn't a new thing. Those who wrote/approved the headlines always had more power than those who wrote the articles.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315096490_Consumers...
edit: disclaimer, no hate on TFA. Just responding to the comment.
> In the present work, we introduce and make available a new dataset containing the activity logs that recorded all activity for 309 Reddit users for one year.
However, tracking over a year might make the subject forget about the whole thing, and act naturally. As far as HN vs Reddit, not much difference really. I mean that as more props to reddit users than anything against HNers.
"How I made it to the top of HN with zero content beyond a catchy title"
It further proves the key to getting your stuff on HN is not to post interesting content, it's to post something that sounds interesting.
Why use big program when regex do trick?
HN really needs a containment board.
One of the fun things I noticed is the psychological impact of framing. A comment that might've made you feel the need to reply before has less emotional weight if it's highlighted in red and a diminished font. Same thing for stories; if you would normally disagree with a story and it would make you want to comment, you feel less like commenting if the story is rated as 'lacking evidence', 'unsupported by research', 'personal anecdotes only', etc. It drives down the feeling of needing to engage. Which is horrible for site engagement, but good for mental health (I think).
> Does this use an LLM to categorize "AI-related" vs "not-AI related" articles? Would be ironic. Lol
Have to love the irony. :)
Though I haven't used it much lately, because seeing half of the front page disappear when I enable it is a bit disheartening.
https://github.com/elijah-potter/blog/blob/master/pages/hnsa...
LLMs are the holy grail for getting beyond string matches. I would hope one was used to solve such a problem, otherwise that would be a poor product, right?
I did not investigate the product, but my point here is irony. The correct solution to implement the TFA product is to use an LLM.
Even if you wanted to go beyond simple keyword matching, there are ways to determine relevance before jumping to the shiny new overkill solution.
Also for everyone's sanity, please don't turn a troll's false accusations into a cynical argument for more LLMs. That's what drives to people to reach for solutions like the one in the article in the first place.
https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
Yeah, that doesn't work either. E.g. it has the following stories:
- Nordstjernen 1.0 (built with Claude)
- Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
Regarding your second one, I have a pretty extensive static list that missed out on "GenAI" as a keyword but I've now created an automation to check search for exceptions daily.
I'm now wondering, what the default filter of https://hckrnews.com/ is exactly. I can't seem to get the same result on https://hcker.news/ ....
:/
I would instantly hide anything about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
Right now, number 3 is an AI slop tutorial released by Microsoft.
I guess there is no real escape