How much of HN is AI?
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Sure, Waymo’s model is AI and the scams in Apple News are often AI generated, but this isn't some sort of monoculture of LLM articles.
Ironically, this article could have been improved by using an LLM to categorize things and also publishing the prompt, so we could inspect what it means to “be AI”.
Based on my experience, this isn’t typically done for kind reasons.
But what do I know, I am but one dumb monkey pushing tokens through tubes to what claim to be other monkeys but might be nothing of the sort.
Fwiw I think Waymo's self-driving AI model blog post and the piece about people using AI to mass produce ads on Apple News are fairly categorized. And the "50% of HN is or is about AI" tagline feels accurate enough.
There is so much more to tech than artificial intelligence (for that matter, there's is so much more to AI than LLMs) but even when having discussions about those other matters it feels like AI is still discussed
Next time don’t frame it as close. A telltale sign of true intelligence is not making others feel dumb so that you can feel like the big kahuna. ;)
I do think your comment was creating an “us vs them” frame (“I’m with the author”) when my original commment was just trying to add color.
This aligns with my much less scientific research. Every now and again, when I remember to do it, I will skim the top 10 stories and count how many are AI-related. I find it is very consistently in the 4-6 bracket. Probably a majority of the time, 5 out of 10 articles are AI-related, and very rarely does it drop below 4 out of 10. It also rarely goes over 6 out of 10, but I can remember it happening a couple of times.
In fact, the proportion of AI representation in the top 10 is so consistent (in my, again, unscientific experience) that I wonder if it is being moderated one way or the other.
Personally I find it boring that one topic gets so much discussion but who am I to argue. I do my bit by making sure to upvote non-AI stories that I find interesting.
Over the next few years it flipped, most of the posts concern AI, and I scan for non-AI topics to engage with. I can't really blame HN for this, it's a massive upset in our industry and the world more broadly.
Actually, it (LLM models) has been advancing slower for a while. This is pretty much in the mainstream. And the current approach is facing all sorts of obstacles that are not exclusively technological. The compute needs are no longer sustainable. Financially, big labs are drowning in debt and backlash against data centres has grown so much that it has become an electoral topic in at least one major country.
FUCK THAT
Jesus Christ this has to be bait. Added to the favourites to laugh about it when the lunacy and hype has died down in 5 years and the trough of disillusionment has truly settled in.
Or to laugh about it when ASI actually has arrived and we're waiting in line to be turned into biofuel for the Greater Good.
Everybody is literally pinning their hopes that God itself comes out of machine to save them from the exponentially accelerating pile of tech debt, and they're not even half joking about it. This is not engineering, this is utter madness.
Making hyperbolic claims about new tech makes people billions, until that changes you will always see this crap.
This site is owned an operated by people building empires around that principle.
They had whole manifestos prepared about how crypto was going to reshape society as we know it.
Its the same exact people making the same exact claims, only difference is substitution of "blockchain" for "ai".
Given human nature I also think it'll be kind of undramatic. Like when jet aviation transformed things people moan about check-in queues and maybe with ASI people will probably moan their robot butler is only 200 IQ when their neighbours is 205.
Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.
World-changing doesn't happen overnight. The internet didn't, either.
This is like 1991 internet.
There was a lot of genuinely useful tech that blockchain could have facilitated and all we were left with in the end was a mountain of scams and bitcoin.
I'm seeing something similar with AI where the genuinely useful stuff is getting washed out by the hype simply because it's a gradual improvement and not "disruptive". Meanwhile the stuff sold as disruptive like vibe coding is mostly bullshit.
i remember my friends excitedly telling me how cross border container trade is still done with paperwork because nobody trusts each others' IT systems. I'm pretty sure it still is because they can't be convinced to trust blockchain systems either.
trustworthy voting is another application. ive yet to see a political party that runs an internal voting system that doesnt rely upon you trusting a central server run by a few people. this is crazy.
It seems to me that people don't want to run their own security upon which they have no recourse if they fail, and don't think that benefits of centralized systems are worth giving up for the dubious benefits of a decentralized trust. Imagine if the scams for the currencies occurred with voting systems, with no way to undo it.
The technologies just didn't do anything that more than a small number of people wanted.
Funniest part of all of it is it’s all the same actors. Same hardware even. Just the crypto shills now talk about agentic capabilities & we’re approaching a singularity man! Can’t you see!!?
LLMs went from a toy to highly capable (along many dimensions) in just a few years.
Which makes it very likely that in a few years more, we will be seeing crazy capabilities that leave us humans increasingly behind.
Cynics really say stuff like "but it's been 3 years and all they can claim is that it's changed text to speech, speech to text, photos to text, text to photos, programming, cybersecurity, research, mathematics, war...
"They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!"
Tech leaders are awful, but it is just that we've built a society that enables the most awful among us to benefit the most. It has never been the case that tech leaders are particularly amazing, they are just amazing at exploitation.
FWIW:
The simultaneous "it's stupidly weak" and "it's dangerously strong" is a well known propaganda technique.
Instead of expanding the list, it would be better to widen your vision. Email was more transformative than AI is right now. Unix, then Linux was more transformative. If you have a magic wand and remove AI, I think barely anyone would be impacted, but removing something like windows would be like erasing computers. And removing Linux would wipe most of the internet services.
Unix in it's first five years reworked the way operating systems performed. I'd agree it's pretty important, but I don't see how it fundamentally changed the way we perform work in multiple disciplines (in its first 5 years). Same for Linux, but even less so.
We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse. Powerful technologies can have negative effects. Email has been negatively transformative in ways as well.
Part of the reason you can erase AI so effectively with so "little" effect is that it is new.
> We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse.
Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).
> Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).
We could survive without computers and the internet. We did it. I was there. We could go back. It's not essential. You've lived maybe 3 years with LLMs. No kidding they could disappear. As an old person, I have no idea why you think any other technology is any different. LLMs are new, that's the big difference as I said earlier.
> Forcefully.
So.... I hate mobile apps. I hate that TVs connect to the internet. I hate that we have cameras on every corner. I hate that we have cameras that watch us while driving.
Now, tell me about how this is different than all that.
As late as 2009, I was living without computers and internet. The most tech thingies in everyone home were the radio, the TV, the VCR (not everyone and half of them wasn't working properly) and a dumbphone.
I'm not saying that internet or any of the others is essential (in absolute). What I'm saying is that the supposedly "transformative" aspect of AI needs free offerings, dark patterns, and a mountain of hyping to just make it worthwhile to discuss in tech circles (removing the grifting on Linkedin). For everyone else, the most impact is the enormous amount of slop.
I paid for my computer. I'm paying for my internet connection and my electricity. I'm paying for my email service. Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.
The VCR? Hrm. What part of the world are you from? No computer and no internet? Hrm.
> Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.
It is currently being paid for by millions of companies in Microsoft products, and I can tell you that many companies are happy with it.
Microsoft honestly has done a tremendous job integrating it with some of their products, less so in others. (Excel is a disaster, Teams has been pretty good)
I would say, the transistor was probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop.
- The lighting of the match is mainly caused by the striking of the match, not by the presence of oxygen, even though both are necessary for lighting the match.
So a cause being necessary for an effect doesn't imply that its impact on the effect is very large.
When each of those things came in, there was definitely some stumbling but I remember things being less ambiguous about being good than LLMs.
and none of them changed society more than the smartphone (starting with the iphone).
He’s on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by the age of 10.
There’s nothing proving that this technology won’t be an S curve growth like every other before it.
This is some AI psychosis shit.
Explain how you think extrapolating off of 4-5 years of growth(I’m being generous here) means the development is asymptomatic instead of reaching a plateau like every other aspect of physics.
Are you one of those people who believes Anthropics claim that they will have the revenue of the entire United States yearly for their IPO?
The only one I saw upon review was
> Extrapolation of the extreme AI progress we have seen in the last few years.
I don’t think that’s a viable extrapolation hence my mockery about a 3 month old being trillions of pounds by the time they were 10 years old.
If there was another explanation please let me know so I can evaluate it.
You may claim it doesn't understand you, then I can say, fine... a machine that perfectly and indistinguishably imitates a response made by an intelligent being that understands such that a difference cannot be measurably detected.
There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something completely different.
And that's maybe what I miss. Nowadays Hacker News feels increasingly like another social media platform: mostly a lot of opinions, war stories, and self promotion. That feeling of serendipity that so characterized earlier ages of the Web is fading here, too.
There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction.
To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet. Some people are seeing massive improvements in how they work and it's understandable that they, like with blockchains or Kubernetes previously want to share their optimism. I just question if maybe these people are being to louder and have to much influence. There's a large silent majority for whom all the AI stuff is almost completely pointless.
It does need to take up more space on HN, compared to your normal media, because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. The hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, hence the ads. For now, it seems that AI is heavily pushed by industry and a group of fans, the amount of news and articles just doesn't line up with the actual daily use.
And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years.
ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
A personal assistant that will happily tell you that you’re the world’s largest supergenius who invented perpetual motion. I wouldn’t want that if they paid me $20/month to use it.
Instead, I asked ChatGPT what happened. It did a dive and figured out that I was being assessed a penalty rate because I had switched to a new payroll provider that does not file wage reports in my one quarter (seasonal business) where I have no wages. Without a wage report, you are considered delinquent.
You have to love the government, it is the only place where you can be delinquent on a payment you do not owe. ChatGPT filed the correct wage report, navigated to the Support site requested a retroactive rewrite, which was granted and saved me many thousands of dollars.
Would I have done this myself eventually? Probably. But I work a lot in season. Something more important would have been neglected. It would have taken me an amount of hours that I would happily buy back for an entire year of ChatGPT business. It didn’t even hit my 5 hour usage limit to do it.
So maybe instead of asking it how it feels about you, ask it to do useful things. It’s my employee, not my girlfriend.
almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs.
> even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet
it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about.
>he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription,
again, it isnt 2023 anymore. none of this is true.
I assure you they do not, many truly do not care and don't want to. That's just what the hype and the article and the stories tell you. The HN bubble tells you that's true, but 90% of my co-workers don't even want to touch Claude, despite being given a license.
And again, if e.g. ChatGPT is providing so much value, why aren't people buying?
They have "more than 50 million consumer subscribers" and "More than 9 million paying business users" [0]. That's for example more subscribers than for Adobe Creative Cloud.
So, about 0.6% of the world’s population is willing to pay for something that’s supposed to be hugely useful for literally everyone (as opposed to Adobe products, which are only for digital artists)?
Also, these are just the numbers for OpenAI. A lot of others are ok with e.g. "paying" for it by going to Google's AI Mode, and getting some ads.
True, I’d rather spend my time to get useful skills whose usefulness cannot be destroyed by a single corporation deciding to pull the rug.
> A lot of others are ok with e.g. "paying" for it by going to Google's AI Mode, and getting some ads.
Since everyone who uses Google the search engine is forced to use Google AI, we can’t get meaningful statistics for those.
Meanwhile, here on HN, you have people who earnestly say things like "AI is the subtrate the future runs on"[1] (actual quote).
I am so fucking sick of this. No, you dumbshits -- ALL of us DO NOT use LLM's to write code. Just fucking STOP assuming every developer needs the same crutch that the rest of you can't seem to live without.
Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely look at it anymore—a popular local sport for 15 years or more—but to the extent anyone still reads the site, there must be some positive impact in having it running and rendering pages, even if you don't like what's on them!
Fixing the problems created by LLMs using LLMs seems like a bit like hiring a bully for security to prevent that same bully from beating you up.
But yes, there's plenty of positive things that are now possible. See as a combined net-positive vs net-negative, I'm still leaning towards the net-negative.
Now with LLMs it is just vibe-coded until it is fixed. Find the right prompt and hope the statistics is in your favor. If this is the case, there is nothing positive about it.
None of it was undoable otherwise, but we (where by "we" I mean "I") would never have gotten around to it otherwise. Lowering the bar from months to days, or weeks to hours, is significant.
Now, AI posting bots are much more difficult.
I hear what you're saying, but speaking for myself: can we *not*? I really have absolutely zero interest in having ChatGPT on my microwave or refrigerator. In fact, I'd rather have my appliances *not* be connected to the Internet, all things being equal.
It's getting harder and harder to find things that don't connect to the internet as time goes on. The moment a manufacture figures out how to sell your appliance data for more than it costs to add it, seemingly every model they produce gets it added with the only choice of going to some other manufacture if you don't want it... and even then finding one not internet connected gets nearly impossible.
In general most people don't care enough for people like us that don't want connected devices to move the dial.
I know it's been said countless of times before, but I think this community has truly changed within last year.
Almost. the iphone was launched 19 years ago. It was (and still is) much more relevant than the current LLM-based AI.
At the moment, half of this site on a given day is terrible ads with a swarm of the same people defending each other's attempts at either becoming or staying relevant - utilizing the latest gold rush topic to do so.
___
I'm not quite sure what could be done about this. The moderation does do a good job, so it's not that.
I also see that not everyone feels repulsed by the self-promotion. So maybe there is no problem and/or the problem is me. But I kinda doubt that too.
Maybe the time of voting systems for ... uh.. "social media" is somewhat over-ish? Though if I was truly signed up on that thought, I would not be commenting here but on I guess lobsters?
Most of the content is about using some data center based ML provider. My view is how so many ignore the environmental harm these constructs are doing; increasing ambient temperatures, inducing heavy metals into the water table, decreasing the access to water for human consumption in numerous drought areas, hostel ambient noise ... The wealth who are the majority finical backers do not care about these issues.
ML is a tool and hardly focused on it being able to operate as a local based solution. Frameworks are tie to expensive hardware. This creates a hyper pay-to-play scenario. While hand written coding can be done on a computer from 20 years ago. Local based solutions are the only means to decrease the wealth gap. Data center solutions increase the wealth gap.
I don't find value in ML summaries. I want to consume the answer and the ideas around them that lead to the answer. This creates more long-term value.
_Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.
That study was so bad that I can’t believe it’s becoming an actual concern that people use against data centers. They were barely able to register a temperature increase a couple hundred meters directly downwind.
> _Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.
Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related.
The top five most filtered-out tags¹, excluding meta², are (in order): vibecoding, dotnet, php, emacs, ai. Two of the five are AI-related. The top spot (vibecoding) has 60% more people filtering it than the second spot.
² In the sense of being about the website itself, not Facebook’s parent company.
Every time I open up the lobste.rs home page, there's an 80% chance the most commented on stories are related to AI in some way. Other stories are lucky to get 10 comments.
Reminds me of gamer-gate: Back then, NerdCubed graphed the top posts from both pro- and anti-gamer-gate subreddits, and most were meta posts about themselves and each other rather than their alleged topics. Gosh, that was such a dumb period.
Note the intersection between eyewitness accounts of noise, water, and light pollution from datacenters and those datacenter owners' noteworthy political activity. To be specific, the operators of these datacenters are notorious bad actors in many different public spheres.
Edit: the truth is obviously very painful and unpopular in this thread.
Lobste.rs seems to get along fine with them.
It just a basic filter based on keywords, but it helps.
This is an entirely different site from what it was just a few years ago, even if the orange tint remains the same.
Ask AI to save you from AI.
I'm sure some of the career chemists et al at IG Farben and BASF felt similarly in 1945.
There is no amoral middle ground where any of this is detached from its context. Context is everything.
a first look through the comments on some first page threads and they seem far more thoughtful and considered. it generally seems like a nicer commenting environment that might actually do me some good moving forward.
They've been driven underground or entirely out of software by the mundanes but pointing that out draws huffy accusations of "gatekeeping".
i miss seeing clever and thrifty solutions to weird problems. hell, i miss people just doing plain weird shit and posting that.
Heavy metals in the water table is a new one I haven't heard before, and I'm skeptical.
Most of this is motivated reasoning by people who don't like AI for other reasons and are just looking for justifications to shut it down.
Edit: Thank you kind stranger. I'm in.
AI has made me aware how opening a tab to HN is a compulsion I no longer truly enjoy. Especially after having made the conscious choice of leaving software engineering as a career, my time here is a mildly negative experience hoping for the random chance of finding a deeply technical post that is not about LLMs, or whose discussion does not devolve into discussion with Joe Rando on how much more productive he is lately.
Sure, it's a moral failing of mine, but by god I wish we had a little more diversity in topics.
I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes.
15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars.
10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce.
5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter.
Now it is a blurry view into the future through the black mirror of AI.
How could we jump back into the cozy past again?
I do not have a clear answer, but what seems to work for you are small groups of friends and friends of friends hanging out on WhatsApp or Discord, discussing geeky news together in the context of their backgrounds. But these are very curated and very closed groups, still operating on the social media platforms of behemoths.
Would now be the right time to restart self-hosted message boards or Mattermost/Campfire instances?
I think it is a problem of how we changed: shorter attention spans, and a much larger volume of information to process.
Short forms win, long forms vanish, which is a tragedy in itself as good writing requires good understanding, and understanding is impossible without attention.
I'm in my 40s. I remember lcamtuf from pl.comp.security when I was just getting started playing with FreeBSD and other fun stuff.
It's a community issue, not a technical one, but you have to intentionally create the community.
I think the visual weight of the first group has increased over time as their projects of making a bunch of money while offering nothing of value has been validated more and more by our capitalist economy.
Anyhow - I find tech stuff interesting to a degree, but fundamentally I’m an entrepreneur that sees it as a tool. A means to an end. And I would love to find a place that still has that vibe. But anywhere entrepreneur related is always a cesspool of grift so it’s hard to find.
As for the employee-vs-employer. I am for sure part of the problem there. When I joined I immediately saw the potential of this being a forum where tech workers can form an international solidarity and complain about our bosses and started using it as such. There is no way you can have that many workers in an industry together and we don‘t complain about our bosses, that is just not going to happen. Workers complaining about our bosses is a universal behavior.
I put my Bitcoin on ice, refused to sell it, my initial investment thesis was "what happens to the price when all Bitcoin is mined", given the supply is fixed, the price should surge, was my thought. I think they have or will find a way to alter the algo so that even more can be mined. But once I made that decision, it became difficult to see all the Bitcoin related news. I wanted to just not think about it. Daily reminder that I could sell today at a crazy high gain is tempting. I don't even know if that thesis makes sense given the projection of when that last coin will mine. Those projections didn't exist when I put this into place. So I hodl for no reason probably.
In terms of the posting and ethos, it was really all the non-Bitcoin crypto crap that came afterwards that I got super tired of. But I am older and know it was just the current hype cycle, just like AI today, something else will come tomorrow. Although AI is kind of a big one, it's both massively hyped and useful too. It's also moving faster than I can keep up with, so I just learn to dabble where I have interest. I'm not trying to be a creator of AI or start an AI startup, it's just tinkering and when it comes to tech as a means to an end, it allows me to move faster. But it's also given everyone my superpower. Kind of a net zero with extra steps. It feels like my beloved woodworking hobby has been changed to IKEA furniture assembly which is not fun at all.
The moment that the greater public sees these high trust networks and tries to join them, all the bad actors and their armies of bots will follow and I mourn for the recreation time of any admin who has to suddenly deal with that.
Private walled gardens seem to be the only way forward for now. If you love something, do not share it here
You mean they had to import it from NPM and compile it from Typescript, right? I don't think anyone's copied and pasted JS since JQuery was a thing.
Democracies require conserved stake to function. How individuals initially get that stake is a degree of freedom, but if the stake can be printed freely, the system is unstable.
For working implementations of democracy, look at: invite trees, shareholder corporations, proof-of-stake distributed ledgers, etc.
Sync is barely working, "unable to decrypt" still exists, the encryption is flawed [0] and the whole thing is effectively just Element and everyone else follows their lead.
[0]: https://soatok.blog/2026/02/17/cryptographic-issues-in-matri...
Can't speak about the other issues, I haven't had those but I barely use it. Based on comments, it's clear they exist or have existed for quite some time.
[1] https://blog.erinshepherd.net/2026/02/non-contributory-keys-...
[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/analysis-of-reported-issues-...
I've edited the above linked post several times to make this clearer, but people still keep linking Matrix's flawed response as if it actually addressed the issue. It does not.
The issue is not as simple as "did the check exist? [y/n]". There are actually two issues:
1. Did the check exist? [y/n]
2. Did the group key agreement protocol fall to shit if the check was omitted? [y/n]
Matrix was (n, y) due to how Megolm manages keys in group contexts. Signal was (n, n) due to their protocol design.
Matrix tried to defend point 1 when the blog post was about both 1 and 2.
(Post-Quantum MLS, for comparison, would also have been impervious to this issue due to how KEMs work. Another point in favor of MLS adoption.)
> and whether the post was made in good faith (the check was added to libsignal on the same day that the author disclosed the vulnerability to Matrix, which can be a coincidence, but doesn't seem likely given that the code has been there for years).
Even if you assume the worst possible interpretation of this coincidence (which, sure, you're free to if you want-- you would be wrong if you did, of course): What does it even matter?
Like, what is the notion of "good faith" that's even necessary for someone to do independent security research and publish criticism of the cryptography used by a software project that's being propped up by EU sovereignty movements?
In my opinion, this is a stupid and vacuous framing.
Signal omitting the check didn't harm Signal's confidentiality. Matrix omitting the check demonstrably did.
---
Also, if you're going to decry my blog post for not enumerating unrelated security bugs (n.b., the blog post was about Matrix, not Signal, so why would I talk about Signal's code in that post???), be aware that I reported non-cryptographic bugs to Element (Matrix client) and Conversations (XMPP client) around the same time. Only XMPP actually credited me with any fixes.
Is that true?
(Im out of webdev for years)
But most new web apps will use a flavor of React.
Here is a protptype of how easy it is to setup a forum on onionv3 service. Just a few commands and your off.
"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
I'm seeing this nostalgic sentiment a lot on forums these days, but it's not just about bringing back ye old usenet groups: you also need to bring back the way people thought back then. It's hard.
If it were democratization, we'd all have access to the data that underlies this dataset. In reality, this will destroy the origins of the data, and it will become hidden for all of humanity.
It is a tragedy of the commons of the highest order.
They will talk about how they are trying to protect humanity all while putting it behind a paywall.
Delete 9/10th of the HN population. I could accept even AI discussion if there wasn't so much of it, and so many posts in general; /new is like trying to win the lottery.
It doesn't matter how interesting it is, you just have to be lucky. The corollary is that the front page isn't the most interesting stuff posted today, it's a list of who's got lucky posting the average topic for the average reader.
That is why many users here realized that there are protected accounts that can do that and everyone else cannot. Even in rare circumstances, the moderators sometimes unbeknownst to them, may also be indirectly allowing it.
It is far more complicated and one of the reasons why users here are fed up of the constant AI deluge on this orange site and nothing is changing other than there is more of it.
If quantum computing ever goes mainstream, I'm sure you'll see a lot of articles about that as well.
Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad? I remember those days I would read tech news and sites like Ars Technica and comments were sometimes snarky and indignant but generally people were enthusiastic about reading tech because it offered glimpses into more technically advanced futures.
I wasn't browsing HN back then but I imaging the same thing was true of HN in the late 2000's and early 2010's.
Now tech sites like Ars Technica consistently have comment sections filled with immense negativity cynicism indigation and just plain old boiling rage. I avoid those comment sections now because reading such things negatively affects my mood and certainly isn't fun.
And over the past few years HN has gradually become more negative and nasty.
All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.
The negativity is rather well-earned at this point. I do still enjoy tech, but the ecosystem is no longer as infused (by ratio) with nerds doing cool things.
You're 16 years older now. You will have changed. HN has too, but looking back at how great it all was without also realising that your point of view is different means you're missing a big part of why it feels worse now. I've been here a long time too so I'm not going to claim I don't see the same thing, but I imagine someone who signed up 3 months ago won't have the same opinion as us old timers.
that's for sure but if I got to know HN 3 months ago I would not be an active user. The content and discussions here are still interesting but the demographics that enjoy it changed over time and I (and OP) might not be the kind of people that would get interested anymore.
There is no "hacker" in HN anymore, unless we count the hustlers trying to cheat their way to success. Talking about that, there are so much psyops going on in so many threads that we, the old hackers, are the ones getting hacked.
There were several golden ages of tech for most people who went through them: - the pre-internet run-up of personal computing (~1975-1995) - the early internet (~ 1990-1998) - the big post-dot com crash tech boom (~ 2003-2020, but more of a golden age for employees)
However, almost all golden ages (including non-tech ones) end for the same reason (the ranges above I'm excluding the last phase). Early adopters (tech enthusiasts), early implementations that focus on them, then mass market appeal that "dumbs it down", then the financialization as accountants and grifters start showing up. Same thing happened to Hollywood, the music industry, etc.
We're now squarely in the last phase of the post-dotcom boom.
(I'll also note that the timeframes are arguable - I'm not going to get into quibbles over minutiae)
Yes, and when I first saw LLMs and image generators I experienced a similar feeling of awe. We haven't had anything like this in decades.
It is unfortunate that many people are negative and nasty about it. Local politicians are getting shot at over datacenter projects. We have truly lost the plot.
I used to think that people had learned their lesson that automation was a force for good, and we had gotten past the Luddite days of smashing looms. But it seems that is not the case, people are just as short-sighted as ever.
Do you honestly believe that the ledger for automation has zero items in the "liabilities" column? Do you think that 100% of people whose job is displaced find another job in a reasonable amount of time and on the same order or pay / status?
Do you believe that neighbors of recently built data centers have nothing to complain about?
The truth is that "data center politics" is happening in the context of post-NAFTA offshoring of lots of jobs/industry, post-manufacturing migration to the South, post-hollowing of labor unions, and in the context of Trump's War on Immigration (where AI companies have likened their product to "infinite AI immigrants").
Even the White House's Ratepayer Protection Pledge (a laudable goal) event was undermined by POTUS's speech at the event. Instead of even pretending to listen to the people who are hesitant about first and second order effects of data center buildouts, he encouraged developers to push the projects through ASAP and ignore all of the naysayers. It's clear this entire project is to maximize commercial advancement, not benefit people or give voice to voters/constituents.
And in a moment where we are told we have to do this ASAP because "we are in a race with China" but nobody can explain the race. It's not for AGI because China doesn't expect it to yield AGI. Perhaps Zuckerberg does, but he was wrong about crypto, then Metaverse, then open weights models training (before he returned to open weights). The US seems to be using LLMs wrong as a glorified DEI detector (DOGE using LLMs to enforce their political homodoxy) and to identify schools in Iran to bomb + double tap.
China has reasonable regulations on LLMs to protect their society whereas our "regulations" seem to be the Amazon CEO texting David Sachs on a Friday evening to warn about cybersecurity in a misunderstanding between what Mythos (prerelease for select privileged users) and Fable (general release with lots of moderation controls) and the nature of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities found (they were able to be replicated with other non-Claude models).
We are being outwitted by ourselves. The problem isn't the people anxious about data centers or AI. It's the clueless leaders who don't bother to anticipate the obvious outcomes of their decisions and execute a plan to mitigate it. And you desire "feeling awe" so much that you don't want to recognize that politics means not everybody is going to succumb to the same feeling of awe, and that's okay.
Do you not realize that the only reason we are not impoverished dirt farmers right now is because of automation?
Automation is what creates wealth. None of these 'high pay/status' jobs would exist if it were not for automating the previous generation of jobs. Every time we automate, we invent new higher-paying jobs and increase average wages across the economy.
This has played out time and time again since the industrial revolution. Luddites like yourself try to block automation with 'what if there no jobs?? what if it only makes the rich richer and we all starve??' Then automation happens anyway, we create new jobs that pay more because the pie got bigger, and we all end up better off.
Revolutions also happen anyway. Not sure if automated security would be enough to prevent them.
Ignorance. I'm not a Luddite. I use LLMs and see their relative value.
I'm trying to get idiots who think "all gas, no breaks" is a reasonable strategy to recognize there are consequences to ignoring the voices/will of a massive chunk of society.
Many people interested in technical stories have mostly stopped reading computing related news. I know people that used to host talks about .NET software development quit because they hated all .NET developments pushed by Microsoft were related to Azure or A.I. These are developers that want to build software, not scream to/plead with an LLM to do it for them. It simply takes the fun out of being a software developer. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that in a couple of years many people will leave the sector because it's no fun anymore. Management is forcing you to use your (supposed) future replacement.
We might even see a "codepocalypse" where the companies using A.I. to write their code realize that the code is unmaintainable, developers that cannot maintain it are sacked and they desperately look for developers who never stopped writing code and maintained their proficiency.
AI tools are incredibly powerful, new and rapidly evolving, you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.
Eternal September. Just like the usenet groups
And CB radio before that.
That’s not the argument.
> I can't tell the difference so what does it matter?
It matters because you’re not the only human on HN and others have difference preferences. “I don’t care about this particular issue” is not the same thing as “this particular issue isn’t important”.
> you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.
Not the argument either. No one is “surprised” this happens, people (obviously not all, but a significant number) are annoyed by it.
It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop, loving a colour, painting your house, then your neighbour informing you that a person of colour or an algorithm created it, then you hating it.
We were something different before we were primates, and we'll be something different after. Evolution has always been in a flux.
We're all just entities processing information and in my opinion, humanity should collectively get off the high horse.
Serious question, could you ever have a meaningful relationship with a teddy bear and/or an algorithm?
Not “people”, you. Some can tell the difference, others can’t. Just because you cannot tell and don’t mind that the waiter pissed in your soup, it doesn’t mean other people can’t tell and shouldn’t be bothered by it.
> It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop (…)
No, no it is not. That analogy makes no sense. Colour is part of the light spectrum, it’s not “created”. Paint is, and that’s a physical process.
> We were something different before we were primates (…)
That’s not how evolution works. We don’t just evolve into different things over time. Mutations occur and the most adapted survive while the others die and are eventually replaced. We are short circuiting that process for ourselves and other species via selective breeding.
> (…) humanity should collectively get off the high horse.
I agree, and that has nothing to do with the conversation. Humanity’s “high horse” starts way before the conversation ever reaches computers”, let alone LLMs.
> Serious question (…)
In don’t think it is. You have to define what you mean by “meaningful relationship” (no two people will have the same definition) and “you” (are you being specific or general)?
It's not been my experience that people can reliably tell the difference.
I, personally, would not equate pissing in somebody's soup with having a chat with an LLM but if we must, you need to appreciate that it's the piss itself, that makes the soup delicious, if the soup was not pissed in, it would be middling at best. Only in that context can you then ask yourself, "Am I bothered by this delicious soup?"
I think the analogy works in the context in which it was intended. I was illustrating the absurdity of contempt for something based on its provenance, after praising it. If you really don't like the paint analogy image this, you read a book, loved it, then later found out the author was black, or an LLM, then you hated the book.
I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from regarding evolution. Sexual reproduction is a comparatively recent evolution in the scheme of things. That which came before us defined us, are our ancestors and is our history. What comes tomorrow, engineered or otherwise I would consider our children and should be loved, cherished and allowed to thrive in the same way our ancestors ushered us all into this universe.
I wasn't being facetious when I asked if you could have a meaningful relationship with an algorithm, I asked about the teddy bear to draw a parallel to which a lot of people are familiar. If a child can have an enriched life and what I would call meaningful, intimate relationship with an stuffed toy, why shouldn't they also be able to have the same with an algorithm that talks back to them? I'm being both general and specific if I think about it.
If I could image your brain perfectly and put it into a perfect physics simulation running on silicon or whatever substrate, then have this same conversation with you, I would call that meaningful. Whether or not you would at that point label yourself as living, conscious, sentient, human, whatever. It would be a meaningful relationship to me.
I think people are scared of change, and that's alright.
https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
(That's the first one I found, maybe there were others)
So...are you complainers all using it? If not, why not?
Spoiler -- because when someone says "I'm tired of reading about {X}", they're really saying "I want everyone else to stop talking about {X}". This has happened repeatedly over HN's life, and it just betrays how emotional people get when they feel that they can't control the narrative.
If HN doesn't work for you, stop coming to it?
Eventually it will stop being novel, at which point people will stop calling it “AI”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
That said it would be interesting to have a AI flagging so you can just filter the just AI topics. Its very different from people harping on crypto or VC focus. I dislike reading the AI output when someone says they have an opinion the original source material the AI ripped content from to me is more valuable flaws in all than a normalized AI output
Unfortunately AI-based articles are on topic (AI generated comments are not) and if people flag them they'll just lose their flagging rights. I'm also reasonably certain "flagging campaigns" are categorically against the rules, even though there is such a campaign implicitly against "politics."
There's nothing anyone can do about it except complain (which will eventually get them filtered because such complaints are also against the rules), be quiet and tolerate it (which is the only option that follows the guidelines), or else leave to greener pastures.
I.e a long winded way of saying I don't think a campaign to flag stuff actually could be abuse if its done in good faith. I think politics flagging is sometimes in good faith sometimes not. There was an article yesterday that talked about the USDA finding uninspected food which I thought was off topic but only in so much that they shared a headline article and not the actually USDA report. Not bad faith but just the wrong way of sharing. The headline wasn't edifying but the USDA report was concise factual reporting and was mildly interesting. The community is the source of what is on-topic which strong veto powers against things that become non-edifying they way that AI is becoming
But AI-generated content is harder, both stories and comments. HN does moderately (heh) well at filtering them out, but I would like better.
The author is most subtle or diplomatic than me and thus call them "AI vendor press releases" or "AI vendor marketing" but we know.
The "could" isn't required here, since Pangram calls many of the evals "collaborations", and some received direct support. Results that don't favor Pangram as being among the least-worst of a questionable product category* surely wouldn't be featured.
* https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...
That's an odd thing to conflate with " written by AI".
I've posted several stories "about AI".
We have gotten to the point where it is virtually guaranteed that some commenter to almost any given article will have an oversensitive AI detector and accuse the author of it being AI. I swear there's people whose AI detectors are just
def is_content_ai(content):
return True
I don't know what to do about it. Discussion about AI provenance of a given work is often a valid topic. When YouTube shovels an AI channel at me and it briefly penetrates my defenses, it's heartening to see the commentors trying to warn people about it, shortly before I block the channel.
(It's annoying that so many legit channels, which I know are legit because they predate AI and the same person is on camera as before, have switched to heavily-AI thumbnails. That's the hole that the other channels sometimes get me with, because just having an AI thumbnail doesn't prove it's not a legit channel now.)
On the other hand, the chorus of very annoyed people who are very annoyed because they see AI everywhere who see AI everywhere because they literally see AI everywhere are becoming a bit of a nuisance themselves.
Well... when the utter majority of articles written about topics surrounding AI are written with AI and a ton of newcomers to the reverse-engineering and even hardware hacking communities now have AI do their work for them, even the last remnants of areas that used to be "for humans only" are now contaminated with AI.
Of course people end up being very sensitive. I come to HN to read words written by humans, not fluff hallucinated by an LLM.
AI has rapidly destroyed, completely destroyed, the remaining authenticity on the internet. The majority of articles are AI generated. And yeah at this point its futile to keep pointing it out. Human prose has been eliminated.
def is_content_ai(_content):
return TrueIf that were truly a problem, why wouldn't a human-only social media platform take off like wildfire?
If it’s pro-AI in stance, chances are it is.
The shape of the current Hacker News experience certainly implies an abundance of AI generated content.
A quiet approach to testing this insight is to ask the HN community itself, then assess the resulting replies for the load-bearing surface features.
But at the end of the day, aren't we all waiting to unpack our throughlines?
Bites your expanding pants
While raging toward eclipse
I find the posts/comments bemoaning the pervasiveness of LLMs on HN to be more tiring than even some of the more annoying LLM posts.
If HN didn't feature LLM-related content there would be people, rightful so, complaining that we are ignoring a huge thing happening in the industry.
How can you be surprised it's up-ending a geek forum first?
As well as many people in these comments.
I interpreted that as surprise. I apologize if you disagree.
It has some unfortunate side effects, though. Namely on a thread where people are discussing a text-heavy post that is LLM-authored, quoting a large enough block of that content appears to trigger it sometimes. Makes sense that it does, but..
As much as I am one of the "In Betweeners" of AI (not hyper loving, nor hyper hating it) I do wish HN wasn't flooded with it, but its just the nature of LLMs currently, they are the new thing that has taken over our society in a drastic way, those who pretend otherwise will be surprised to know that the rest of society has moved forward with it.
See also: jwz's referral redirect.
Bro, NFTs and crypto nolonger being front page is proof of a decline since 2018?
This story appears to be written by a human, and is watered down human-slop.
The Magnasanti that we call "Tech" is a little swimming pool that we first leapt into as kids, trying to splash the befuddled saps standing outside the pool. As we splashed and dunked and sprayed each other, a thrilling, unceasing mania began to build within us, and so we splashed all the harder, forcing enormous waves that slapped against the world, shocking it into noticing us. As more jumped in (or were pushed) we demanded and they forced upon us more and more and more water, until we no longer had to entice or push, the waves swept through the whole world, eating at the foundations of entire societies, once solid land crumbling into ravenous waters and spilling their hapless citizens into the vortex, spinning them head over heels, forcing them to cling to the shattered debris of their lives, and try to just-stay-above-water frantically with the rest of us, the billions and billions bobbing in the froth.
And how goddamn nice is it.... that in that raging omniflux, maybe not quite at the center, but maybe also not far from it, is a little sheltered swim up bar, its orange sign still cheerily showing the Y of Y Combinator, which used to BE one of the first kids, one of the ones that pushed and pulled and flooded and floated. They still do, of course.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this little bar, is that in all this swirling, foaming, madness, it is an oasis of stability. Absolute stability: This is from the first snapshot on Feb 21st 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb.... Look familiar? See pg's post getting knocked off the top already? Shelley might have approved.
Sometimes you get to chat with the people forcing the great devouring waves that reshape the earth, sometimes you just chat about what's new in JS tooling. If you are particularly lucky that day, you will find yourself enraptured by some hacker with the mad gleam of triumph in their eye, recounting in excruciating detail their monomaniacal pursuit of some utterly pointless pet project, and you will not consider one second of it wasted. Not even on your deathbed. Not even when compared to spending more time with your beloved.
I think it would be difficult to find an example of a community that has been stewarded as well, for as long, as hacker news, and while you do get commenters of all ages, interests, walks of life, politeness levels, and hyper-fixations upon irrelevant minutia, I've often found that for the most part you are all a lovely bunch of humans and/or AI bots.
Lest you accuse me of labiogluteal angling (a classic!), I am too old and too wet and too cold and too tired to want or need anything from anyone here, beyond a pleasant place to read.
But... I thought that just once over these decades, I'd tell you this how very grateful I am to be able to swim up to this bar, sit on the familiar stools, take a moment of respite from the tempest, and read what any of you might have to share, even -- or perhaps if I am being honest, especially -- when I think I think its absolute bollocks.
Thank you all, and may Tech continue to spin you, right round, right round, like a...
All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
But when they're right, they tend to be ahead of the curve.
Most people will agree with whoever is in charge, and it takes a lot to shake them out of that. It is clearly a flaw in the human species.
Ironically, your comment could easily be a failed comment from an astroturfing LLM tasked with criticising/disagreeing with people calling out LLMs.
FWIW, I checked your profile, I don't really think you're an LLM. The internet is hard now - sorry :(
What I meant is that I’ve seen people complaining that the negativity towards AI on HN is manufactured and astroturfed. So we have people complaining on both ends of the debate.
I would bet that the AI booster side is way more astroturfed, but I’m very likely biased (I see genAI as a horrible mistake for human societies)
GenAI is amazing, how we use it is so far a horrible mistake.
Bots and genai comments also exist, of course, and are not allowed here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated).
I understand if information publicized on how this process might work is intentionally restricted, so as not to be easily circumvented. I'm also not asking this in a pointed or judgmental way with respect to HN, I'm mostly just curious how various social platforms are approaching this problem.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...>
Articles are a fuzzier area AFAIU:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149>
(Not a mod myself, though I watch mod actions fairly closely.)
I'd be very careful with believing the system that looks for bots and astroturfing works well enough to confidently say that. Some of the people, corporations and institutions interested in manipulating HN and its audience are quite capable.
This topic has a long history on HN. Here's one long post I wrote a number of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725. Others here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Here's an example of what we can say: if user A accuses user B of astroturfing, spying, manipulating, etc., and a quick look at B's posting history shows that they were posting to HN about, let's say, Erlang in 2019, the odds of that accusation being correct go down to negligible. It's possible, of course, that B was already working for "people, corporations and institutions interested in manipulating HN" 7 years ago. It's also possible that malefactors came along later and found a way to pay or coerce B into doing their dirty work (edit: or hack their account). But at this point one becomes unmoored from any evidence at all. The far more likely explanation is that A is slinging cheap accusations because they disliked something B said and are resorting to the internet's favorite trope ("you're a shill!").
When I say "People often make generic claims about astroturfing, bots, etc. that don't hold up in practice when we look at the data", what I mean is that the vast majority of such claims boil down to cases like the one I just described or something similar.
> Here's an example of what we can say: if user A accuses user B of astroturfing, spying, manipulating, etc., and a quick look at B's posting history shows that they were posting to HN about, let's say, Erlang in 2019, the odds of that accusation being correct go down to negligible
about this one tho I have noticed bot behavior (including posts that are incoherent) from old accounts - so there is the risk of 2 things going on:
- people getting hacked and their accounts being used for that
- some people that just decided to connect a bot to their account or use their account themselves to astroturf.
which is way more difficult to spot. Anyway, I don't have a solution for those problems. You have an interesting and difficult work :)) Have a nice day, dang!
Ah good point - I added that bit to the parent.
Thanks for the interesting replies!
Other folks are also calling it out as AI.
Thank you for your hard work bicep emoji
Is there something trick to it?
It's impressive, despite its ethical baggage and psychological, environmental and psychological harm. But if if filed you in awe I think you need to get away from the keyboard. Things are happening in biology, astronomy, archaeology, engineering, that are far more awesome than software that can write code for you.
And if your only response to that is to be in awe of whatever part AI may have had in the process, you're still missing the point.
Much of these are caught by users downvoting and/or flagging. I think the lack of a public moderation log makes people think the mods are constantly running around every story/comment to steer the site when really it's the users doing most of the grunt work while the moderators only step in occasionally for the more serious items.