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.
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?
> 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 :)
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 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.
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 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
It's the biggest change in the tech and startup sector, the HN sector, for as long as HN/YC has been a thing. So I would expect nothing less than it to be the biggest topic.
The AI discourse has gotten worse since the time when it revolved more around new papers presenting new techniques. Now it's mostly integrations and recursions with various lipstick.
But I still think the discourse is important.
What would be better, albeit much harder work, than complaining or sticking your head in the sand would be attempting to find novel ideas, implementations, workflows etc.
Unfortunately, with the blanket negative attitude, when those new ideas do appear, it's much harder to recognize because often the reflex to down vote and gripe about yet another AI thing buries the potentially valuable posts.
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 hope it works out.
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.
TBH, I'm mostly here out of spite at this point. It's unhealthy but I can't seem to stop rage-reading.
Would love to hear more detail about the job losses you mentioned, if you are willing to share.
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?
> 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.
I've addressed the issues. It should be usable now. I apologize to everyone who encountered an error page. Have a good weekend, everyone!
I've been training to naturally ignore AI mentions that I thought this entry was about some HN ui font change (Sans).
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 :)
Was about to write the same
Interesting this keeps moving up the front page when the site is inaccessible because it's hosted on a baked potato.
Yep. My single core Proxmox machine sitting in my living room with horrible cache invalidation is struggling.
Sounds like a great use case for serving plain HTTP over cloudflare tunnel. Why terminate TLS when you don't have to?
You know what's funny? Most of this site is exactly that. The _one_ time I do something dynamic…
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.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315096490_Consumers...
edit: disclaimer, no hate on TFA. Just responding to the comment.
This submission should be studied by people holding clipboards. It needs a follow-up:
"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.
D1 hater right here.
73% of Reddit users vote prior to reading TFA:
> 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.
n=309 is better than n=1, but yeah...
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.
Reddit "users"
Huh, I didn't even remember to vote for posts, i just scroll down to read (and vote sometimes on comments)
Just goes to show how much demand there is.
HN really needs a containment board.
It should be accessible now.
I'm curious to find out if they're using a model to detect AI content. I'd be more amused than disappointed. But, alas, potato.
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 would argue that in a small way, this post _is_ about AI, so it wouldn't be a false positive.
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?
It's not an LLM.
Why use big program when regex do trick?
You can get the best of both worlds with a small embedding model
Show me an embedding model that runs as fast as an optimized regex engine and I'll buy you a beer.
Master of efficiency
For one sec, I got excited for a new font!
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
How often do you use it?
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.
I don't use it myself. I built it for a Hacker News thread where someone else was saying "I wish I could browse Hacker News without all the AI stuff".
interesting but i rarely use any HN reader
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.
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 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
The filter doesn't appear to be perfect, one of the top posts right now is "My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development"
I guess they could run the titles through a (flash) LLM to catch ones were keyword detection won't cut it.
Have to love the irony. :)
At least the blog post was proofread by an AI.
That should be fixed as soon as my server has a chance to catch up.
While you are at it can you filter out posts to subscription only sites eg economist NYT $&c. We're all here to escape click bait
Was hoping it was a new font.
Oh. A little bit of a let down. I was expecting "HN without comments and posts written by LLMs".
That would be cool. Although your username is a little suspicious…
Hopefully fixed the cache invalidation. I'm crossing my fingers.
Hug of death?
yep. standby
A lot of demand for ‘Sans AI’ :)
Probably by bots :)
Our AI overlords don't want an AI-free Hacker News
Welp, it was only a matter of time. Thank you
People love to hate AI
It's the biggest change in the tech and startup sector, the HN sector, for as long as HN/YC has been a thing. So I would expect nothing less than it to be the biggest topic.
The AI discourse has gotten worse since the time when it revolved more around new papers presenting new techniques. Now it's mostly integrations and recursions with various lipstick.
But I still think the discourse is important.
What would be better, albeit much harder work, than complaining or sticking your head in the sand would be attempting to find novel ideas, implementations, workflows etc.
Unfortunately, with the blanket negative attitude, when those new ideas do appear, it's much harder to recognize because often the reflex to down vote and gripe about yet another AI thing buries the potentially valuable posts.
^how about just be a devoted AI section at the top?
Are you using AI to figure out what's about what's AI and what's not?
A problem is it doesn't load as fast. Could it be helped?
Yes, it can. I am having a major cache invalidation problem. One of the major blights of programmers everywhere.
Maybe HN could have a filter button that hides ANY threads for keywords you choose to filter.
I would instantly hide anything about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
Yes, please. A general-purpose filter like the one on 4chan would also work.
I've been thinking the same. Couldn't this be done with a browser extension that hides elements that matches a regex?
Not quite. Lots of articles don't mention AI in the title, even if that is their core subject.
Okay, now filter out the VC stuff too...
Love this. Really nice to see a HN front page without AI, the fatigue is real.