Show HN: Remove “GPT” from your HN feed | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Remove “GPT” from your HN feed

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85 pointssurprisetalk50 comments

Ever since I've started using mastodon, where users can filter accounts, whole domains, and posts containing keywords, I wished every site with user-submitted content would allow you to do that.

I miss score files from the Usenet days. You could have a whole set of rules that would increase or decrease the score of posts, based on any combination of rules, and then you could filter on score.

To be honest, I don't use kill lists even when they are available. Usenet taught me that they cause me to miss things I wanted to see. It's much safer to just use the kill list in my mind and not read the things that don't interest me.

I use slrn for reading news. In my .slrn-scores file, I don't have any entries that assign a score other than -9999.

Reddit has been around for long enough that there isn't really a good reason as to why a user can't block out entire subreddits (vs "muting") from appearing in their feeds - there are ways to use the site that accomplish that, but it's not a very user-friendly design (imo)

For as long as I've been on Twitter it's always been super easy to block keywords, accounts, adjacently related topics, etc.

Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree with your underlying point that users should be allowed to curate their experience with a platform.

I wonder if GPT (sorry) could be used to generate filters that works on any web page.

> there isn't really a good reason as to why a user can't block out entire subreddits

You can-ish. At least on old reddit's /r/all page. There's a block list you can curate for yourself (when logged in) on the right hand sidebar. Sadly, it doesn't work for "popular". The filter list does carry over to the new interface, FWIW.

"Displaying content from /r/all, except the following subreddits:"

Oh wow, thank you! That's awesome to know.

Love this site - the breadth of knowledge and willingness to share it is so refreshing.

There are pros and cons to doing it either way. I think the way HN does it is in its DNA so we're unlikely to change it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Good. There hasn't been a page lately without mentioning GPT in the headline. It's becoming annoying.

Alternatively, you can immerse yourself in a wealth of AI news by adding GPT and AI-related keywords via Hacker News Alerts Bot: https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot (Made by me).

Super cool project!

I use a similar project to get HN keywords as an RSS feed.

[1] https://hnrss.github.io

Yeah I am tired of hearing about it. Can’t wait for the hype cycle to die down.

You might be in for a bad rest of your life

Similar things were said about cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Wishing both you and the original commentor a lovely "rest of your lives" either way.

The only time cryptos are mentioned here is when there are bad news, and BTC is doing well at the moment so you won't hear it about for a while, at least until the next bear run.

we're still on a bear, btc is doing well only because the global financial system is slowly imploding

That's the thing. "Well" implies a gain, but how about the utility? Not so well.

That's true now but was not always the case, which just proves hammyhavoc's point. Crypto has certainly gone through its own annoying, breathless hype cycle on HN as well. It wasn't that long ago when half the stories on the front page were "blockchain this" and "blockchain that". Everything built with blockchain was going to solve world hunger and all of our other woes, and if you weren't jumping on the blockchain train you were going to be left behind.

Oh, please.

Its not that we don’t wish to ever hear about the technology again.

We’re just sick of the current wave of breathless, manic speculation from nincompoops engaged in magical thinking.

Yesterday I asked my own computer how to crop a video that was recorded vertically and published in widescreen format and it spew out a ffmpeg command that worked perfectly.

To be fair, I would have called that magic a few months ago.

That's cool, but you could have probably figured out how to do that with a google search as well, albeit not as quickly. So your example speeds up something that was already possible, but doesn't necessarily introduce anything novel.

> So your example speeds up something that was already possible, but doesn't necessarily introduce anything novel.

yes that's true, but you could say the same thing about a spreadsheet.

with the correct tooling this thing will have a serious impact on the productivity of a lot of people.

It may be comparable to the invention of the search engine: instead of looking up stuff in dictionaries and encyclopedias people could find information online way faster. The accuracy of the information back then, however, was not as great as it is nowadays. For a long time teachers told kids not to trust anything they read on Wikipedia because “anyone can edit it” so it was best to verify information with another source. Probably still a good idea to do that.

IMO what makes GPT even cooler than a search engine or online forums is you don’t have to wait for a human to respond to your highly technical or niche questions, in some cases GPT can just generate an accurate response to your prompt on the fly. exciting stuff

Good use case!

We’re still decades from AGI in my opinion, and the Chicken Little types ought to pace themselves, is all I’m saying.

It's good, but if I looked at the man pages of ffmpeg I would have got the same result and learned something. My issue with ChatGPT is that you don't learn, you get a solution but you still depend on that if you need it later.

I don't mind when a solution is provided by an open-source framework, but I'm very cautious when this solution is given by a closed-source application from a random company.

This is the problem with programming by SO or search engine. I think it's a terrible habit, and developers who do it are cheating their future selves.

I truly understand the urge that "I just need an answer, right now!", but in chasing the quick fix, you aren't bettering yourself as a developer. And we all know that in our industry, if you aren't constantly improving, you're becoming worse.

I agree with you and I also started using ChatGPT a lot since the GPT4 release.

I think there are different problems that needs different solutions. Sometimes I'm hacking around in a language I don't know and I don't want to know, I just have to fix/implement something in that language because program/library X happens to use that language. I don't really care about learning, I just want the damn problem solved.

But then most of the times I spend in a language I expect myself to continue to use for a long time, then it makes sense to spend time coming up with a solution by myself through reading long manuals, other reference documentation or even purchasing books and working through them.

But, it doesn't make sense to do that for everything.

Or another way to look at it is: it's not worth learning if you're just doing it once or twice. By the 10th time you've asked ChatGPT I presume some learning/remembering will take place.

Except, if you don't learn how to invest time into learning how things work, even for one-off uses, you don't learn, period.

Perhaps in some cases but when you are curious about something you'll just drill down on it via repeating questions. Depends who you ask.

You will remember the prompt you typed not the solution you copy/pasted

Cold Fusion, 3d printing, haskel, lisp and anti php articles to the rescue.

Good day, could you point to how to use this script? Is it meant for a plugin?

That's cool for filtering. Thank you!

I personally use the Tampermonkey extension, but I think others have criticized it for being closed-source and using Google Analytics.

Apparently Violentmonkey is a suitable replacement.

Once you install the extension, just load my userscript in and it'll take effect whenever you visit any HN page.

[1] https://www.tampermonkey.net

[2] https://violentmonkey.github.io

Perfect! Thank you a lot!

uBlock origin filter:

    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has-text(GPT)

I understand the purpose behind this, but you would be much better off leaving HN for 1-2 weeks when the next cool thing comes along.

I get the point of this in a way, though it's easy enough to just ignore stuff you consider 'noise', surely.

I'd really urge you to dive deeper into this one though. Ignore the noise maybe, but this really is something different IMHO, and I've seem a lot of hype, from '4GL computer languages' to 'fifth generation computers' to ...

The noise is very hard to avoid, though. The extreme hype levels legitimately gets in the way of understanding. I'm sure I'll dig deeper into the topic eventually, but after the hype dies down to at least a dull roar so I can hear over it.

I keep seeing scripts to block a particular word or phrase, like another for "Kardashian," rather than just any old word. I get that it's more of an editorial act than an attempt at an optimal architecture. But it's like writing an auction site that just sells Pez dispensers.

No, it's more like changing Ebay on the client side to be an auction site that only sells Pez dispensers. Others can continue to use Ebay as they did before.

And that's kinda awesome.

Add -gpt -chatgpt to search box.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Totally agree with this no-code solution.

Moreover, I use https://hn.algolia.com search engine to filter stories by type ("Show HN") and sort by date.

Query example: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...

Another useful link to "Advanced search syntax": https://hn.algolia.com/help

Edit: It appears that Algolia search engine has several hours delay in indexing. But it is acceptable to me.

Thank you! The code is understandable to a non-dev, and can be updated to include new over-used terms as they appear!

My biggest gripe with the current hype is the lack of genuine curiosity.

Maybe it’s the circles I'm in, maybe it’s only HackerNews, but I feel that the biggest question for many people isn’t "How does it work, and how can we make it work better?", but rather:

"How to get rich quick?"

Or "This will make you obsolete"

My personal favorite.

Its a discussion forum tied to a tech industry startup accelerator, so, if it relates to tech and a possible connection to new profit opportunities can be drawn, you’ll get that.

Even so, there's plenty of “how does it work and how technically can we do more with it” stuff here, HN’s been one of the densest places for that with generative AI despite the make-money focus thay often creeps in. Sometimes, the two even overlap.

"AI" isn't really smart at all right now. It is en route to achieving feature parity with the manual tagging efforts taken for it. There is no guarantee that it will ever transcend it. The recent "plugins" announcement and other tools for the same (langchain) just enable removing friction from current UIs, nothing more. It is indeed big for people that could never use the UIs, but it does nothing for the long tail, where data for training just does not exist.

Wake me up when "AI" parses Nietzsche, Hegel or even Lewis' apologia without any philosophical data to train on.

We simply never did figure out the "algorithm". Instead the big orgs (aka to governments) decided to throw all the surveillance data into a large model and called it a day. It's insanely expensive to run, and it doesn't scale. But boy does it give results right now, nevermind the future.

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