Hacker News Reader

Comment by leonheld | Hacker News Reader

HN is a reflection of the industry and we're at peak hype-cycle at the moment. I use this when I need a break https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai.

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There's also https://unslop.news, which removes just the posts about AI, rather than all posts that mention it at all

OK, this is cool, actually! Thanks!

It cannot be a long-term solution, though. Most people don't use them and if HN continues to be AI-foremost, many will simply stop coming here to post other interesting, non-AI stuff. A vicious circle.

theres also

https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai

which additionally lets you add and modify custom filters

I am inclusive in that sense and enjoy both AI and non-AI content, and will post both.

I'm curious where people would go to as an alternative. I like looking at lobste.rs for non-AI stuff, but to post there you need to be invited by an existing member so it's not a perfect alternative.

The fediverse. Mastodon or Lemmy are viable alternatives if you curate well enough.

So nothing to worry about then.

Unless you're one of those people who only ever use HN and make it a part of your identity, sure. You can just leave for greener pastures. Or learn to care less.

tildes.net is also great, though it's not just for tech stuff

Thank you for that recommendation. I find the website hard to read¹, but the submissions themselves are as a whole much more interesting² than any HN homepage in the past year.

¹ But I can do something about that, as opposed to the submissions as a whole.

² Even if one of them is about someone’s son pooping in the toilet.

Thanks for the recommendation, I had actually never heard of this but it looks promising

> if HN continues

The NN revolution which started 15 years ago cannot be understated - if anything, some areas are not progressing as fast as they should and some of us are nervously waiting.

Have you actually multiplied the weight of submissions in your mental model by how consequential each one is?

Because we are still submitting even more idle "intellectual curiosities" - but these are in no way "times of static peace and ordinary administration".

What does the "NN" in "NN revolution" mean?

Neural networks.

Frigging snipers.

"92 of 179 articles survived the filter". So about half of the posts are about AI now, more than I expected.

I made the website, and I wish I had tracked the stats from day one. I've seen it hit closer 75% on some days, though

Potentially more. Example, the data center articles don't match the AI filter, but they are certainly AI driven.

Thank you for plugging my site :)

Thank you from the bottom of our organic hearts!

Thanks for making it! Saw it on FMHY and have been using it since then

Thank you so much! Is there any plan to support news subscription? Like rss feed or mailbrew.

"Ironically, this project was built with AI coding and uses AI to filter out articles about AI. Go figure."

Well it is the best way to do a 'fuzzy' filter like that. Rather than trying frantically to chase keywords.

I don't think anyone considers AI to be something useless. It sure has its uses, I use it a lot to help with research. But it is sometimes shoehorned into things it doesn't belong, or its capabilities overblown for marketing. I think that's what people object to.

This is where I’m at. I find AI to be useful but there’s a tendency for it to suck the oxygen out of the room. Other things still matter.

Edit: I'll also note that while its nice to see real novel AI news I find a lot of it is extremely marginal value. I mentally associate most discussion with debating what color of marker to use when marking the edge of your CDs to improve the sound.

That and the sheer volume drowns out everything else.

The S/N ratio entirely depends on whether you care about AI and I don't not really.

Man, that last sentence is ambiguous as hell. I'm not sure if you do or do not care.

Yeah I didn't word that well at all, at least you know it wasn't an LLM.

I meant I don't really care, I keep half an eye on what they are up to (have to live in the same world as them) but I'm not really interested in it at all beyond playing with some local models, the constant onslaught of it has just become tiresome, then I got to YT to watch my usual history content which mentions something I didn't know about so I do a search to see if there is a video on that and that is wall to wall AI slop and that annoys me so I go to do something else, do a search and the results are slop if the AI doesn't try and answer it for me first.

It just feels like if you want to do anything on-line you get force fed slop whether you want it or not and it's damn hard to filter it, can't even block channels on YT without an extension.

In the old days we had this thing called a redaction. It was like a dungeon master vs playing the same hardcoded level again and again. Had one suggested automating it back then even the greatest optimist wouldn't see how you replace [say] Stephen King with a calculator but here we are - true believers.

An AI slop to filter out AI slops -- the pinnacle of AI.

Sadly this would not end just as a joke. We'll be doing this forever from now on.

Humans becoming the adversarial network to the AI is indeed a Black Mirror episode worthy outcome.

This is so refreshing.

Almost everything in top/new/best is an interesting read. Either I don't know anything about the topic ("...the spanning tree protocol") or am seriously interested in the topic ("Remembering Hong Kong", "Automattic's board forces CEO..."). None of these made to frontpage over the last two days AFAIK.

They're all on the front page, just buried between all the AI stuff

Which kind of makes my point: these pages filter AI stuff, but do not make room for non-AI stuff.

Its important to use these filtered front pages though, so that eventually theres a sizable Referrer traffic chunk coming not from HN's frontpage itself that will signal to the admins that something is up

No disrespect intended at all, I like HN and have used it for what feels like a long time and the moderation team that keeps it one of the more reasonable places to have a conversation on the internet (for the most part).

That out of the way, The admin/moderators can hardly be unware given they work for a startup accelerator that is heavily in on the AI stuff, it is the way it is because that is the way they want it to be.

HN is great but it's bias has always skewed to what is hot in the VC market or that they are heavily in on at the time (as someone who was around when it seemed like every other post was blockchain/crypto it's not even "new").

oh absolutely, but if they lose half their audience due to the sloppification of their front page, then they lose both legitimacy as an interesting and impartial platform to promote said AI tech

The mods have said that they consider the cynicism and "curmudgeonliness" in the community to be a problem and they want newer people coming in. The most direct way to accomplish that would be to drive the old grumps out and replace them with a younger pro-AI userbase. After all, every startup YC will fund in the forseeable future will be first and foremost an AI startup. There just isn't going to be a place here for people who actually enjoy programming as an art, or the human element in any creative activity, nor any benefit to YC in maintaining that culture.

You can't serve humanity and the machine, you have to choose a master. YC has no choice but to choose the machine because that's where the money is, so HN has no choice but to follow suit. Hacker News is an AI forum.

I'm not suggesting there is some kind of conspiracy afoot but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to just give in let nature take its course.

They will lose half their audience and gain it back from all the Twitter AI bros.

(The Automattic story did make it to the front page.)

I guess "hype cycle" is an accurate description, but it feels overly negative, in the sense that we now have a revolutionary technology that's still quite young and moving fast, and folks everywhere are trying to figure out how to leverage it, both to do new things, and to deal with the problems it causes. So it just feels like a high-energy time where we're going to have a billion ideas, most of them will suck, and we'll eventually find out where the real winners are.

Given that context, having a hacker site cover what's happening with that revolution makes sense. All that said, I agree with OP that it does drown out other cool things happening, but that's just how mass psychology works.

This is just asking for a parody-site that displays literally an empty page though.

As inspired by this tumblr which did not age well:

https://www.tumblr.com/picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes

Good idea, I'll ask Claude to spin that up

Make sure to generate a wordy blog post on it and the ramifications of generating empty parody versions of social media pages or people won't know that you did it.

It's unlikely that right now is peak anything AI.

Yeah, that's like someone in 1998 saying we're at peak internet hype

It would be cool if one could visualise (graph wise) the number of posts around different hypes (eg. crypto, not sure what else was prominent like AI) throughout the history of HN.

People have been saying we've been "at peak hype-cycle" for years

Peak so far.

Maybe there’s a hype singularity where the hype is so strong that nothing can escape.

Fascinating.

It would seem OP is spot on. I just used this and it reduced the front page of 30 posts to 14.

Question: Why do you think it is a hype cycle?

Any idea whether there is a mobile app for that?

The peak that never stops peaking, apparently

Ironically this thread became Yet Another AI Discussion. Really its just the agi takes that are the most useless and annoying.

Thank you so much for sharing this

thanks, rebinded my Tridactyl shortcut for HN to this.

Hero

It's more complicated than that. This place has changed.

The biggest tell is reposting something interesting from a year or two ago that received hundreds of upvotes. Now it will get 2 or three upvotes whilst "lulz Trump" /r/politics style culture war BS will be immediately hurled up and onto the front page.

Those posts get buried really quickly by the anti flamewar algorithms. I really don’t think anything changed regarding political stuff over the past 2y on this site (other than the fact the US has a new administration doing pretty insane things, resulting in way more important political topics, such as everything related to Iran)

Calling AI "hype" is like calling the internet hype.

Thank you, could you make the UI match exactly?

To be clear: I'm not the author. I just use the service.

This is great! I hope it was vibe coded

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