I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.
The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.
Readit NewsReadit NewsThe increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.
They always seem to take the form of "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy"
Invariably the person who proposes this wants to remain in group A and will not be a participant in group B.
To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats"
Anyone is free to make a website with whatever content they want, they can invite people to it and grow your own community. Directing a community to divide to remove an element you dislike is an attempt to appropriate the established community.
I do think it's worthwhile to occasionally have a discussion about what content we want to see, and if a particular topic is getting too much attention.
It's also totally reasonable for a group of people to not want their agenda hijacked.
So, IMO, let the discussion continue. Let's see what comes out of it.
Every day it was the same discussion over again, from someone who didn't bother to do a Google search or look at what was posted the day prior. After a week or so of seeing the same discussion over and over again, I stopped reading the news site.
Needless to say, it's important to occasionally have discussions like this. I also think we under-appreciate the amount of moderation that goes on here. Sometimes I look at the "new" feed and it is just loaded with lots and lots of nonsense, so I get that someone has to put their finger on the scale to keep the quality up.
Then the people wanting to filter "x" could just do it via simple grease monkey scripts or if HN natively supported it.
Sure, it wouldn't be perfect, but neither does it have to be.
Similar to nest usurpation with eusocial insects, this is by definition parasitism when the energy-redirection is unwanted or unavoidable.
In the specific case of AI it's way worse than the usual suspects where everyone is effected and so everyone has to have some opinion (looking at you politics). Because even some rant about how much you hate AI is directly feeding it at least 3 ways: first there's the raw data, then there's the free-QA aspect, then there's the free-advertisement aspect when others speak up to disagree with your rant. So yeah, even people who like some of the content sometimes quickly start to feel hijacked.
HN's power is its simplicity. We don't need any of those features.
This is one of those rare old internet places that still has no feature clutter, ads and other distracting and irritating UI elements.
Sometimes something works fine and it doesn't need to be changed.
It could just as easily be "I don't feel like there is a place here for me anymore and I wish I had another place to go"
People with that sentiment ask about what alternative places exist, some of them make their own places.
My post above mentioned something I notice on Reddit. I hardly ever visit Reddit these days. It doesn't really feel like the place for me now. I am not posting this comment on Reddit.
I don't disagree with this observation about Reddit. However, I feel HN readers are more topic-oriented. Folks really do come to HN to read the articles and then maybe get drawn into a discussion.
I grant there are some topics here that tend to be more engagement driven but on balance I think the above holds.
based on the number of comments i see that are oblivious to the actual content of the articles, i'm pretty sure the user flow is "Folks come to HN to read headlines and have a conversation, and then maybe get drawn into reading an article"
This is one of those things that is kind of hard to say without people getting triggered because of negative stereotypes but sometimes you have to stand up for principles and kick people out of social groups to keep a good thing going.
I am truly tired of AI being rammed down my throat, not just via the tech news, but in article content (slop), in un-asked-for tech product features, and at my own tech job. The solution is not to divide the community and make people unwelcome, but to provide at least some minimal set of filters and ways to opt out of the hype frenzy. I don't want people to feel unwelcome, but I do wish there was a way to turn the AI firehose off.
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I don't think the poster believes some kind of democracy could bring about this.
I do believe that by entertaining the idea, the subsequent discussion will be useful for moderators to get a feel of what their userbase thinks of the current state of things.
From my understanding, the soul of HN and what makes it what it is is the moderation - having discussions on issues is an efficient way to signal to them.
Some chess players benefited more from the tool than others. I always analyze my games carefully with an engine after the game. After less than 10 years I managed to get from zero to almost master level. I attribute that to extensive engine analysis I put on my games afterwards.
The user needs to know how to use the engine, LLM or chess engine, when it makes sense to use it, what are the shortcomings of the tool and so on.
LLMs are game changers, and AI's ability to distinguish the signal from noise is marvelous. Will it be a game changer like it is now for chess, a very narrow game compared to everything else, remains to be seen.
Literally 80% of the posts were about crypto and how we were going to experience some ground shattering revolution. There were so many posts about how all the topics are about crypto and how it is annoying.
Ultimately, all that noise and the billions of dollars poured into that turned into a meme if we're honest. Most people just buy/flip crypto or hold BTC that they'll sell when they double it after a year.
AI in LLM form is at least useful in many ways and in front of millions of people without any rugpulls and other shit, but due to their inherent limitations (doesn't matter how much python it writes and executes, half the time or more its wrong for any actual/meaningful work) I think the hype will settle in the next couple of years.
According to https://hn.algolia.com/:
- "show hn" "nft" – 151 results
- "show hn" "blockchain" – 479 results
- "show hn" "crypto" – 782 results
- "show hn" "llm" – 2,363 results
- "show hn" "ai" – 13,128 results
These numbers were originally posted by the very active user simonw just 9 days ago [0].
Since then, they've increased to:
- "show hn" "llm" – 2,417 (+54)
- "show hn" "ai" – 13,376 (+248)
- "show hn" "vibe coded" – 23 (past month)
That’s about 6 LLM-related and 27 AI-related posts per day, just in the "show hn" category.
When I first saw this thread earlier today, there were 12 AI-related posts on the front page. Even more oddly, threads unrelated to AI somehow still end up getting hijacked by AI-related comments.
I use AI and find it very useful, but I really don’t see the reason to bring it up all the time. Not everything needs to be framed around AI, and constantly forcing it into unrelated discussions just dilutes real conversations. It feels less like enthusiasm and more like obsession.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a non-negligible amount of astroturfing going on across HN.
[0] – [Data on AI-related Show HN posts - simonw's comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44484996)
I find I can do that with granular enough subreddits, or the (maybe old) feature in Twitter where you could group people you follow into lists and see multiple "homepages".
This for me has solved the issue of dividing community, which at the least from a practical level can be tricky.
Ive been exploring how to achieve this effect "on top" of HN lately, rather than by controlling followers, by popping a very simple AI filter on top that re-ranks it for me, and found it quite satisfying, but not sure what the ultimate value/usecase might be.
At the same time, I never saw HN do this with any other trend so why with AI?
HN has many VCs and startups and HN itself is backed by a VC firm, so I highly doubt AI news is going anywhere as it benefits many YC Startups currently levering this hype as well as VCs and other investors shoving cash into this.
Additionally, that there are also ton of vibe coders, OpenAI / Meta / Google folks here interested in this topic.
I'm afraid the only solution is for people to ride the cycle until it either fizzles out or morphs into something else.
This is very hard to do. But hey, I'll give it a try.
Starting now a new community for AI-assisted coding: https://kraa.io/vibecoding
> vibecoding
These should not be deemed equivalent.
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It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories filtered out.
You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in localStorage.
o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0...
Initial prompt was:
Then four follow-ups:https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/ccde4586a1d95ce9f5615...
Here’s an “anti-ai” timeline filter:
https://hcker.news/?filter=top30&exclude=llm%2C+vibe%2C+open...
I’m not using the Algolia API, I ingest the hn fire hose on my own server so the filtering is very fast.
OTOH, narrow solutions validate the broader solution, especially if there are a lot of them. Although in that case you invite a ton of "momentum" issues with ingrained user bases (and heated advocacy), hopelessly incompatible data models and/or UX models, and so on. It's an interesting world (in the Chinese curse sense) where such tools can be trivially created. It's not clear to me that fitness selection will work to clean up the landscape once it's made.
It's not hypocrisy or anything negative like that, but I do find it amusing for some reason.
Was it? I feel like it was clearly meant to be smug and inflammatory rather than useful in any meaningful way.
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Llm maths? ;)
"I built..." and "o3 knocked it out in a couple minutes...", not ironically, talking about a tool to keep us from having to be inundated with AI/LLM stuff.
One decision I had to make was whether the site should update in real time or be curated only. Eventually, I chose the latter because my personal goal is not to read every new link, but to read a few and understand them well.
I switched to using the older firebase API which can return up to 500 item IDs from the current (paginated) homepage - then I fetch and filter details of the first 200.
https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/ccde4586a1d95ce9f5615...
Love it. :D
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I don’t think it’s wrong, but I also don’t think we can really “AI generate” our way into better communities.
Let me stop folks early, don’t make comparisons to politics or any bullshit like that. We’re talking only about hacker news here.
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(The fact that I wrote it using AI doesn't really matter, but I personally found it amusing so I included the prompts.)
The prompt asks for "filters out specific search terms", not "intelligently filter out any AI-related keywords." So yes, a good example of the power of vibe coding: the LLM built a tool according to the prompt.
Wish it returned more unfiltered items tho.
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Even ones with detailed specs and the human agreed to them don't come back exactly as written.
That's at least 5 JIRA tickets.
I don't think I need a privacy policy since the app is designed so that nothing gets logged anywhere - it works by hitting the Algolia API directly from your browser, but the filtering happens locally and is stored in localStorage so nobody on earth has the ability to see what you filtered.
The API it uses is https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=front_page - which is presumably logged somewhere (covered by Algolia's privacy policy) but doesn't serve any cookies.
> Why do you do these demos if you aren't upfront about all the things the LLMs didn't do?
What do you mean by that?
I am wondering what the ratio is for VC and angel dealflow in the valley right now.
Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI articles is an effective method of resistance.
Fully agree, and I in fact am finding that I actually find more stories I'm interested in that way than looking at the front page. For whatever reason, I'm increasingly getting out of sync (interests-wise) with broader HN. So many stories I think are great HN material (and would have been a few years ago) languish with almost no activity.
So there are two reasons IMHO to browse new: Surface better stories to front page for engagement, and find better stories
Very common in computer science contexts. Young undergraduates always pick up the new tech and make something that seems alien and wrong first. It's not even the masters students.
Possibly the same Kiro - Agentic IDE post would have been as interesting to you as the launch of Atom or something related to VS Code, etc.
Res ipsa loquitur
I hang out in /ask and /asknew for my part.
PS: Hey, Paul... When are you going to close my 2021 issue[0], you already merged the pull request[1] :D
Come on, man!
[0]: https://github.com/paulhoule/gastrodon/issues/10
[1]: https://github.com/paulhoule/gastrodon/pull/11
A bigger impact for me has been the number of mentions of AI in the comments. It's not just that a large part of the front page is dominated by LLM hype posts, it's that every single post has a least one guy near the top somehow bringing AI into the discussion. I don't even care if it's "AI will fix this" or "haha, AI sucks at this too". I just don't want to hear anything about AI ever again.
Genuinely curious: Why?
Don’t get me wrong, I upvoted this post, and would love to see AI separated out, or at least tagged (like a root comment suggests) so that I can filter them out if I want.
But I can’t say I’d never want to hear anything about AI ever again (though I’m headed in that direction).
What field are you in, and what are your interests, such that you’d want to visit HN without ever seeing mentions of AI?
I've started downvoting them, the same way I always downvote "I fed this to an LLM and here's what it spat out".
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If we were to look for only blockchain stories, doing an explicit feature is one way. Searching through by free text is other. And we could just bookmark the link.
Ruby Rails, Postgres, SQLite, Rust, etc. They all have their moments and I dont think LLM right now is as overwhelming as any other hyped moments. Certainly not Erlang.
I'm not fighting for a split/fork, just stating the fact that it's nothing compared to Erlang.
With that said, I don’t find the AI posts nearly as bad as the Blockchain era.
It's also exceedingly generic such that AI isn't really a topic, it's an entire classification or maybe domain to steal from the animal kingdom hierarchy.
I would like to see more nuanced and interesting articles about AI though. Right now it's all about VCs measuring the size of their investments and the politics of alleged superstar programmers.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248
As with any Major Ongoing Topic on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), the goal is to reserve frontpage space for the higher-quality stories and try to downweight the follow-ups and low-quality ones. We can't do this perfectly, of course, but we try.
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There’s only one other community I’ve encountered like it, run by a small liberal arts college.
From a signals perspective, HN is incredibly valuable. You get to watch in real time what’s capturing the minds of technically inclined readers. Sure, that means lots of lurkers and a few dominant topics (right now: AI). But that’s also kind of the point. HN works as a reflection of where the collective attention is, whether we like it or not.
Anyways...just two cents.
Not sure what that means about the community, but must mean something.
So in practice, "AI" content ends up revolving around people bandying about opinions about whether or not we're all doomed, or whether or not we're all on the edge of a utopia, or how much productivity programmers (and which ones) have lost or gained, or what kinds of tasks the LLMs are or are not currently or still good at, or whether anyone still cares about the fact that the term "AI" is supposed to mean something broader than LLMs + tool use.
The emergence of the "vibe coding" concept has made things worse because people will just share their blog posts about personal experiences with trying to write code that way, or flood the Show HN section with things that are basically just "I personally found this specific thing to be 'the boring stuff' that's actually relevant to me, so now I'm automating it" with a few dozen lines of AI-generated code that perhaps invokes some API to ask another AI to do something useful.
To me it feels like golden age of hackers in the 60s-80s (which was before my time but I heard stories about) where everybody is doing their own home grown research to the best of their abilities and sharing insights of varying quality.
But somehow these days if it's not all polished, HN "hackers" aren't interested.
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