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Comment by duhhhhh1212 | Hacker News Reader

Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap.

Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).

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Agreed, I like the Oxide podcast as well, even though it’s hardware I’m unlikely to ever see never mind use, it’s nice that someone somewhere is still trying to be what they are trying to be.

Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.

They have a ton of rfds publicly available that are worth reading. Recently, read this one: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0161 because I'm researching clickhouse for my work (there is also a podcast ep on it). Even if you never use their hardware, just reading their work around the software they use/make is incredibly valuable as an engineer.

That is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I messaged one of my colleagues: "Time to do what I do best: bluntly say what lots of people are thinking."

Glad those words proved prophetic!

[0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-libra...

“Not every one of those 11,970 carries the same weight, and the paper is careful about that rather than rounding it up.”

AAUGH IT BURNS

Right?! When I hit "That work was genuinely valuable" I literally hollered in exasperation.

For me it was “the results speak for themselves” and then simply a (large) number of automated tests run that never had human eyes.

Yes, quantity famously has a quality all its own, but perhaps not where correctness checks for something this central is concerned.

I saw 'the results speak for themselves' but for me this article seemed to have less LLM-ese than some of the more recent obvious LLM prose posted to hackernews. As a reader I think its jarring because you just see a lot of articles purportedly written by different people using a very similar voice. I guess pre-LLM you might see this in a newspaper with very strong editorial oversight. So the phenomena is not completely new but it feels stranger when its not from a single source. It's also kind of sad to see a some people who have written a lot in the past about interesting technical topics in a way that was easy to read to give up their voice and outsource it to an LLM. But given this is basically free labour from the authors it feels a bit ungracious to complain.

My complaint is directed at the Rust Foundation, not the authors, to be clear. Yes, it's free labor, but the Foundation ought to have standards.

I showed Bryan the post while in a meeting room with him, left the room, and a few minutes later heard a very loud, very exasperated primal scream coming from the room!

There's a website that does this: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector

Unfortunately, it's not a browser extension and doesn't seem to have an API. I'd make a browser extension for this myself if it didn't involve paying for expensive Pangram usage.

created a little wrapper and userscript based browser extension https://hnslop.nilsherzig.com/

Thank you so much for sharing this!!

I would go even further, I want a browser extension that scans all words on every page and colours them more and more transparent as the likelihood of llm prose is increased.

I’m working on something like this! My issue is that using Pangram for it ends up being quite expensive.

Are you footing the bill yourself, or would you be supporting BYOK? Not sure whether logging in with user's account would also be a good workaround or not.

Years ago I used a rudimentary (text matching) Greasemonkey script that hid Reddit posts and comments from accounts matching a few behavioral/history signals.

I wonder if that idea could be modernized now for this.

AI slop really needs to be auto-flagged. It’s been like 20% of front page links I click on lately.

AI comments are auto-flagged, but not posts.

I have (an API, not an extension), but pangram is way to expensive for me to run, current (v4) pricing is $0.05 per 100 words. Should be absolutely doable if we split the cost between users tho.

I tried searching for good opensource / reasonably priced alternatives, pangram themselves even have some of their older architecture and training data on github/hugging face, but i never got that working reliably enough.

update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582725 shared another page which already does the parsing and pangram requests. I wrote a little wrapper and userscript based extension around it (https://github.com/nilsherzig/hnslop), hope that helps!

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