YHK - yet another hacker news clone

420 points cromka 1 hour ago 217 comments

Over past couple months I noticed that HN feed is almost exclusively AI or AI-adjacent news. Meanwhile the legitimately, broadly-hacker stuff gets left out for the most part.

I noticed that because the things I find genuinely interesting that I post here now get zero traction, which is the stuff that I believe would previously be met with some discussion.

Note that I don't care that my submissions were ignored, I don't need that validation. Problem is that if my stuff gains no traction, I am myself not seeing similar stuff posted by others, stuff I am genuinely also interested in and would want to hear about from this community.

Here are two most recent examples:

- Lenovo showed a model that incorporates solid-state air cooling. That technology has been around for a while but it looks like it matured and is production-ready. This allows for super-light and slim designs, which, in turn, should allow for bigger batteries installed and I think it's some sort of breakthrough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580229

- Brax Industries devices, genuinely interesting, open-soruce and innovative, especially the wall display, with its modularity and on-device processing compatible with Home Assistant. I also appreciate the very clean design: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643215

As said, I honestly believe this would gain some traction here on HN a year or two ago. I no longer find HN a good source of "what's new" in the industry, it's almost exclusively AI talk now.

So I think the point I am trying to make is that maybe YC could start curating the content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump?

Or, at the very least, introduce simple tagging, so we can start filtering stuff out.

leonheld 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jstummbillig 1 hour ago | parent

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

execat 1 hour ago | parent

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.

flexagoon 1 hour ago | parent

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

tetris11 1 hour ago | parent

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

cromka 56 minutes ago | parent

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

utopiah 1 hour ago | parent

thanks, rebinded my Tridactyl shortcut for HN to this.

pixel_popping 1 hour ago | parent

Thank you, could you make the UI match exactly?

leonheld 1 hour ago | parent

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

flexagoon 1 hour ago | parent

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

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

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.

sammy0910 1 hour ago | parent

theres also

https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai

which additionally lets you add and modify custom filters

otherayden 1 hour ago | parent

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.

krapp 1 hour ago | parent

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

nickthegreek 1 hour ago | parent

So nothing to worry about then.

krapp 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

flexagoon 10 minutes ago | parent

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

mdp2021 31 minutes ago | parent

> 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".

domador 24 minutes ago | parent

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

notpushkin 20 minutes ago | parent

Neural networks.

otherayden 1 hour ago | parent

Thank you for plugging my site :)

slowpacket 37 minutes ago | parent

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

wolvoleo 23 minutes ago | parent

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.

esjeon 19 minutes ago | parent

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.

wolvoleo 24 minutes ago | parent

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

postalcoder 12 minutes ago | parent

Same goes with https://hcker.news/?view=frontpage&ai=exclude

RSS: https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&ai=exclude

Scans titles and content. Also filters out vibe-coded Github repos.

kurtis_reed 1 hour ago | parent

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

shermantanktop 1 hour ago | parent

Peak so far.

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

vanschelven 1 hour ago | parent

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

hellon3wheels 1 hour ago | parent

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

Tanjreeve 1 hour ago | parent

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.

vanschelven 1 hour ago | parent

As inspired by this tumblr which did not age well:

https://www.tumblr.com/picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes

polonbike 1 hour ago | parent

Thank you so much for sharing this

the__alchemist 1 hour ago | parent

Hero

griffiths 1 hour ago | parent

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.

burningChrome 42 minutes ago | parent

Fascinating.

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

eggfriedrice 40 minutes ago | parent

This is great! I hope it was vibe coded

Cerium 1 hour ago | parent

Unfortunately, no. People talk about the times. I was sick and tired of covid posts a few years ago. Or nodejs before that.

iLoveOncall 1 hour ago | parent

It has been like this for more than a year, a lot longer than just the past couple of months.

HackerNews, just like all other platforms, is heavily astroturfed and the big AI labs have bots commenting and voting, so it'll never end.

The only solution is a platform that only allows humans, with a proof of humanity before posting anything, but not too sure what that can be, and it would ultimately be unsuccessful.

But we have to see the positive, at least less posts about SQLite make it to the frontpage.

skeledrew 1 hour ago | parent

> big AI labs have bots commenting and voting

I'd love to see some proof of this.

mschuster91 1 hour ago | parent

Turn on showdead and watch the AI bros yell into the void.

ChickeNES 1 hour ago | parent

All I ever see are the Anti's and the crazies? Like the guy (who is in this very post) who keeps opening accounts to complain about Claude related posts and saying various slurs. Almost feels like the old days when Terry Davis would post technical rants with slurs applied liberally.

BoxOfRain 27 minutes ago | parent

To be honest I have showdead on and while I see the things you see, I also see a lot of blatant AI slop getting killed off too. I'm sure most people on here are at least somewhat attuned to Claude's 'voice' by now.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore :)

These things tend to improve/get worse by themselves over time, if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on. Right now, seems we're still "discovering" new things around AI, so the submissions will surely continue, and interested parties will continue to upvote.

But AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely, where eventually you hardly see any frontpage submissions about it ever.

andrewstuart 1 hour ago | parent

>> At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore

Thank god.

springtimesun 1 hour ago | parent

I thought the last round was the (JS) framework wars

Tomte 1 hour ago | parent

The Erlang front page was nice, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, Haskell, Erlang and also the whole functional programming wave was fun and is missed dearly. Also Clojure used to be featured on the frontpage a lot more, would be a fun exercise to write some small script to see what specific day had to most Clojure-stories at the same time, I remember one day we had two of them at least!

shmolyneaux 56 minutes ago | parent

For reference, the glut of Erlang posts was due to pg posting "Why HN is slow lately": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

> it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter

ipsod 1 hour ago | parent

That's a hot take. AI has fundamentally shifted things. Start-ups can start up 10x faster, and HN is start-up flavored.

If people quit talking about AI, it'll be because it's become foundational infrastructure, so it's not the primary focus of the articles, but just the atmosphere they all exist within, like the computer, or the internet.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.

Don't get me wrong, I leverage these AI tools as well to be more productive, I'm not against using it or anything else. But I'm also old enough to know that eventually AI will be "old news" when the next hot topic comes around.

user43928 1 hour ago | parent

That seems like comparing the internet to jQuery.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

Only if you're actively inside of the hype-machine and don't see it from the outside with the experience of previously having been inside of the hype-machine.

ipsod 27 minutes ago | parent

No. RoR lets you build a certain class of web apps faster. AI lets you build almost anything faster.

embedding-shape 6 minutes ago | parent

Again, I'm not bashing AI and I'm much more productive with AI myself too, no need to try to defend something I'm not attacking...

ChickeNES 11 minutes ago | parent

> But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.

I really don't understand anyone who can say something like this with a straight face. Comparing AI to Bootstrap? I...

skeledrew 1 hour ago | parent

> because it's become foundational infrastructure

Which will happen in due time, like electricity and the general computer.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

> if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on

True, but I think the point I am trying to make is that amybe YC could start curating this content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump.

jermaustin1 1 hour ago | parent

They already do this. It's called the "second chance" pile. You will get an email saying that your submission didn't get the love they felt it should, and will add it to a list of submissions that get submitted to the front page, to see if the community agrees.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

Fair, but I think that's only for "Show HN" stuff?

jermaustin1 1 hour ago | parent

Not in my experience. Multiple submissions (non Show HN) of mine have been second chanced. I can't be certain, but I don't think any of my Shows have been... I guess that says more about the content I create than the content I share.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

Fair, didn't know that. But that proves some editing is in place, it could be a bit more active, perhaps.

mschuster91 1 hour ago | parent

Nope. If you email hn@ycombinator.com with the subject "second chance pool" and it is not your submission, there is a very high chance one of the lovely mods will take the submission and second-chance it.

Often enough, they even email the original authors and submissions about it if it is a really good submission!

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

Fair, didn't know that. But that proves some editing is in place, it could be a bit more active, perhaps.

unsupp0rted 1 hour ago | parent

I remember those days! And Elixir/Phoenix had to be hyped in every 5th post.

cphoover 1 hour ago | parent

This is like when cryptocurrency was in full hype cycle, but even more severe as it touches every inch of the industry.

throwaway323929 1 hour ago | parent

HN has a lot of Ruby posts because it was, and still is, a really good language and ecosystem for making web applications, and most of the companies at the time were web startups. It's a solid language, still one of the better ones for making real, practical web apps.

If you don't want to see Ruby posts and AI posts, why are you here? Do you realize that you have control over what media you consume? A lot of HN readers like Ruby and we like AI and we would like to have one place to do that without all the negativity, hatred, and low quality comments coming from people that don't care about the things we care about.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

> If you don't want to see ruby posts and AI posts, why are you even here?

I don't know what feeling you got of me from my comment, but it's wrong. I don't mind either Ruby posts or AI posts, and I'd personally probably put Ruby somewhere along 1-3 top programming languages I like to work with professionally, so not sure why you feel like you have to defend something here.

> HN has a lot of Ruby posts because it was, and still is, a really good language

Agreed, but I was talking about specifically frontpage submissions, it used to be filled with them, almost every day, and now there is hardly any anymore. I think most of us long-term users can clearly see the trends over time, or at least feel them.

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

Go to new, click down vote on every AI post.

That is how we have less AI stuff on the front page.

But if other people are interested in it and there are more of them than you then you might not get your way.

krapp 1 hour ago | parent

You'll just get banned.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

> Go to new, click down vote on every AI post.

I'm sorry, why would I? Is most of my comment not coherent English or what's going on?

> you might not get your way.

Please do tell me, what is "my way" I'm advocating for here, or implied advocating for?

bdelmas 39 minutes ago | parent

I miss these times!

probably_wrong 1 hour ago | parent

No. You will have your slop and you'll like it, too.

bbor 1 hour ago | parent

Well, Lenovo's new air cooling and Brax's new open source devices would both be made pretty moot if everyone on earth dies in the coming months. Sooooooo

fithisux 1 hour ago | parent

I would like more news on native dev (C++/assembly/Nim/D/...)

or Theoretical CS and algorithms.

andyjohnson0 1 hour ago | parent

Its 13:15 UTC and 21 of the 30 submissions on the HN home page are not AI related. I'm not saying there isn't a problem with AI-related submissions, but I'm not sure its a flood.

uberman 1 hour ago | parent

If it is on the homepage then is it not algorithmically what the community wants? Have you tried the https://news.ycombinator.com/newest link? I find that I prefer it over the homepage and have does so for years.

nottorp 1 hour ago | parent

at 13:31 there are 11 "AI" related submissions from just the titles. Bet a good half of the others are "AI" slop.

aurareturn 1 hour ago | parent

Both of those examples wouldn't have gotten traction in the pre-AI HN in my opinion.

The Lenovo laptop jet is experimental and the details suggests that it uses 7.5w to cool 30w. That's not very efficient. You might as well have a small fan and let it spin at a low RPM to reduce noise. There doesn't seem to be a breakthrough here.

The Brax industries one is just an ad from the company's official Youtube channel. I don't think the product is interesting at all.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

> and the details suggests that it uses 7.5w to cool 30w.

"Secondly, AeroBlade reportedly uses four AirJet Mini modules rated at roughly 7.5W each, theoretically amounting to 30W of cooling."

How about some less skimming of the text before you jump the contrarian gun?

> I don't think the product is interesting at all.

Which one?

blitzar 1 hour ago | parent

> How about some less skimming of the text before you jump the contrarian gun?

That would be against the rules

fwip 19 minutes ago | parent

Looking into it more, it seems like the actual consumption is close to 1W per module, for an approximately 1:7.5 ratio. Regular fans are still likely more efficient, but the other advantages of the "AirJet" make it interesting.

layer8 1 hour ago | parent

The Brax products and the company values look very interesting to me, thanks OP for pointing them out.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

I thought so, too! There aren't too many in this field that do this and I think they deserve some recognition only because of that. They're also not entirely new, their previous product has been around for a while.

BTW. Their tablet is also interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyEYum3cIQQ

andrewstuart 1 hour ago | parent

I like it.

It’s relevant and current technology.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

Are the Lenovo and Braxx examples I provided not relevant nor current?

StrLght 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think they are, and given amount of votes on each — seems like so does the community.

Regarding Lenovo: it's the first laptop with AirJet, sure, but it's not the first computer in general. Zotac released a mini PC with the very same AirJet in 2023. It looks dope, but it's just not that interesting or new.

Regarding Brax: Braxman is a well-known scammer. The world would be a better place if nobody paid any attention to this person.

cromka 59 minutes ago | parent

> not that interesting or new.

Its parameters are! That's the whole point! 830g with regular 30W TDP Lunar Lake is impressive.

> Braxman is a well-known scammer

Which is interesting as I didn't know that and seems like you're right. Still warrants some discussion around those products and even some ad-hominem?

ofrzeta 1 hour ago | parent

Lenovo is just vaporware currently as was their laptop with translucent display. YMMV but I no longer waste my time with things that are not available (and may never be). The Lenovo page that is linked from the page you posted is super light on details and just fluffy marketing.

Doing some research on "AirJet solid-state cooling" turns up products that have been announced at CES 2023. More info may be found at the Frore Systems homepage. Funy enough Airjets seems to be used in some NVidia systems such as Jetson Orin.

I don't want to shill Apple but my Macbook Air with M4 performs great and never runs the fan (does it have one, I don't know), so the Airjet thing (for me) is pretty much a solution in search of a problem.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

> never runs the fan (does it have one, I don't know)

> so the Airjet thing (for me) is pretty much a solution in search of a problem.

That's it? Fan is about noise and nothing else? The much lower volume/dissipation and weight/dissipation ratios, which made this Lenovo latop 830g, which easily allows for some 200-300g of extra battery is a solution in search of a problem?

Sorry, if you don't see this then we have nothing to discuss.

pixl97 55 minutes ago | parent

We get it, your interests aren't the same as others. The problem here is you want your vote to count more than others because your interests are super important and everything, but that's not how upvote based sites on general tech topics work.

cromka 37 minutes ago | parent

> The problem here is you want your vote to count more

That's just your projection.

ofrzeta 48 minutes ago | parent

Ironically "Project AeroBlade and Project Swan proof-of-concepts explore the future of AI-powered business computing" but anyway I just read this when I re-visited the Lenovo site to learn more about that prototype with respect to the CPU it is using. I could not find anything, though.

My point is that maybe it's better to develop CPUs with less power consumption than to invent new cooling techniques (hence "solution in search of a problem"). This is what Apple silicon does.

cromka 36 minutes ago | parent

> My point is that maybe it's better to develop CPUs with less power consumption than to invent new cooling techniques

And why not both? Because that's exactly what's happening. Vapor chambers? Heatsinks before that?

dahdum 32 minutes ago | parent

The Brax example you posted was a YouTube link, which is an instant skip for me. Personally, no phone with dated tech is going to interest me. Their WallUp looks interesting but there’s no product just a waitlist and an animation. I already have TRMNL displays around my home, so I’m in their market.

For Lenovo, their Yoga was interesting ~15 years ago but Aeroblade is just a proof of concept, and thinner laptops in general are irrelevant to me. I use a powerful laptop and a tablet, not a compromise between them.

smt88 1 hour ago | parent

I’ve been a hacker since I was 10, so about 30 years now.

A couple of years ago, I felt the same way you did. And then I started properly/seriously using Claude Code. When Opus 4.5 came out, it was sincerely life-changing. I can prototype working projects in possibly 1/30th the time, and I can do them simultaneously.

This post has made me realize that the flood of AI news isn’t annoying or boring to me anymore because I think my profession is the only one that’s actually being replaced by it, for better or worse. For coders, there’s nothing even close to the level of importance as AI (which doesn’t mean it’s interesting).

Honestly I’d like to see more news about AI, but actually about the way it’s devastated the labor side of our industry and will kill the middle classes of countries like India.

Without question, nothing short of the web has been more impactful to our industry specifically than AI has been and will be.

cake-rusk 1 hour ago | parent

> I can prototype working projects in possibly 1/30th the time, and I can do them simultaneously.

This takes all the fun out of programming for me.

softwarewright 33 minutes ago | parent

I have the same "1/30th ... simultaneous" experience with coding agents, and I am having fun. Directing teams of agents to solve many problems (or create many useful things) for me has its own fun challenges/puzzles-to-solve.

Some of the fun is redirecting coding agents when they get stuck, by showing them code or design they could not work out on their own. Some of the fun is designing tools to rein-in AI coding agents, keep them on track, and verify their outputs. Some of the fun is exploring new areas for me: compilers, game dev, language design, emulators, embedded, etc.

So I am having fun at the CTO/PM/Engineering Manager level but also at the lowest coding level.

I've been coding since the early 70s. This brings back the joy I had discovering microprocessors and electronics.

cake-rusk 20 minutes ago | parent

Sure, if that is what you like. I for one did not get into this field because I wanted to hire people (artificial or natural) to write the programs for me. Programming as an activity / art is what I enjoyed the most. Managing people / agents is a total turn off.

cromka 52 minutes ago | parent

I do NOT have a problem with AI.

Again, the problem is with the flooding that drowns-out other news. I intentionally say "limit the AI news" in this post's title.

hannofcart 1 hour ago | parent

Your suggestion would break my use case: i.e I check out HN every day to see what the latest models that have been released are, and opinions from erudite people who have taken them for a spin.

Keeping abreast of fast moving AI developments with informed opinions/comments for various new models/agents etc. is primarily what I'm here for.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

> Your suggestion would break my use case: i.e I check out HN every day to see what the latest models that have been released are

But you can get that from some AI-specific sources, it doesn't have to be HN. That's the point, this medium used to be much more universal.

It also means you're new here, because that's not what HN was until quite recently, so your use-case wouldn't work.

Dlemlo 1 hour ago | parent

Tbh if you are long enough on hn, quite a lot of stuff gets repeated over and over.

AI gets 'that much' tracktion because it is right now the fastest changing technology we have and with the biggest impact day-to-day for a lot of people on hn.

The CVEs from the last few month? Normal topic for hn, it became an AI toopic because AI found them.

skeledrew 1 hour ago | parent

> you're new here

Their account is 2 years older than yours. Doesn't say much since you could've been using another or sans account long before then, but still.

cromka 28 minutes ago | parent

Right, but my point was about what they said about the use-case. They couldn't have been coming here for AI news since 2017. So did they finally find their use-case for HN some 2 years ago?

If they were indeed coming here before AI revolution, it was a different type of medium.

ffsm8 25 minutes ago | parent

I think he's meme-ing

https://xkcd.com/1172/

JoshTriplett 1 hour ago | parent

Limiting the flood wouldn't mean necessarily omitting stories like "new model released" (within reason); it'd mean omitting "check out my new vibecoded slop" or "check out this article that's obviously LLM-written and provides very little value" (what we once would have called "blogspam", or dismissed as SEO-bait).

skeledrew 1 hour ago | parent

There's no way to reliably filter that "vibecoded slop" or "low value LLM-written article" (BTW what about low value human-written articles?) without users actually interacting with them. And it's actually the votes/flags of said users that determines visibility, so I'd say that's an indication of where the interests of HN's most active users lie.

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

Anyone with any karma can limit the flood by upvoting/down voting. And based on the number of dead submissions they do.

I think part of the problem is people that like AI really like it and those that hate it really hate it. Hard to reconcile that.

tumdum_ 1 hour ago | parent

Go to lobste.rs and hide the 'vibecoding' tag.

proactivesvcs 1 hour ago | parent

Perhaps you could lead the change you wish to see?

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

Well, I do, don't I, by trying and posting some other stuff than explicitly AI?

proactivesvcs 25 minutes ago | parent

In the last month, excluding this post, three of your five submissions were AI focused, and one was part-AI. For the past two months, it's five of 11. Certainly not "explicitly AI" but it's about half, which in the context of this overall discussion is towards "too much", IYAM. Half of HN being AI is still a poor signal-to-noise ratio.

AyanamiKaine 1 hour ago | parent

Every platform captures the Zeitgeist somewhat, the AI related post are just a reflection of that.

While I also somewhat dislike it. I don’t think limiting them resolves the issue.

telesilla 1 hour ago | parent

I think there's still plenty of good stuff here, but agree that is beneficial to be kept up for to date on model evolution. We gotta get through this together.

I'm glad HN isn't a curated feed, it would end up like all the the others.

stormcode 1 hour ago | parent

I think this is just how it goes. Were you here in 2017-2018 when it was all blockchain all the time?

nottorp 1 hour ago | parent

Was it? Iirc there was always something interesting on the front page besides the blockchain. Now there are days when there's nothing besides the "AI" created "AI" spam.

sjs382 1 hour ago | parent

I think it goes past 2018, but yes. It's a similar proportion of activity.

nonethewiser 1 hour ago | parent

I noticed it as well but I don’t see a problem with it.

I have spot-checked it at times and saw 5 to 8 of the top 10 posts about AI or directly adjacent.

We are in an emergent, dynamic periodt. AI is revolutionary and will continue to get better. The world will change drastically because of it. This seems so obvious yet many will call it purely hype, no real value, etc. We are still in the incubation period, just like the internet in the early 2000s.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

> I noticed it as well but I don’t see a problem with it.

Again, I don't have a problem with AI news, I have a problem with missing out on other news that simply don't surface the news from the "New" abyss.

jatora 1 hour ago | parent

Thankfully due to AI, it is an extremely simple matter to set up your own HN feed and filter it absolutely however you want

jillesvangurp 10 minutes ago | parent

A few years ago, it was all web3 and block chains. I was just last week reflecting on how long ago it was I'd seen anything in that category make it to the HN front page. I think a lot of it has to do with where the investment money is going. Interesting how times change and topics that people are passionate about reflect that.

A simple truth with HN is that you don't have to click on every link. And if you go into the comment threads, you don't have to react at everything. This whole "somebody is wrong on the internet" cliche starts with people's own behavior. In my case, AI agents are giving me a lot of quality procrastination time. I'm waiting for two things to finish right now. Anyway, that's just me looking into the mirror.

AI definitely is a hot topic on HN. IMHO a lot of the material being upvoted is a bit low quality. I wouldn't mind a bit more aggressive pruning for that. I know the HN editors put their fingers on the scale when things get out of hand sometimes.

r4v3n_art 1 hour ago | parent

I think you are looking for a different product. Reddit or another app that shows you a feed of things you are interested in is more in this vein

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

I am not, HN was this product, it just changed. Hence the invitation to discussion on the subject.

dewey 1 hour ago | parent

Or the main topics just changed to something you are not that interested in, there was always a temporary bias to some bigger topics.

If I would not like to hear about funding rounds when money was cheap, being here 5 years ago wouldn't have been fun.

If I don't like to hear about Go being here 10 years ago would not be fun.

My timelines may be off, but the general industry trends showing up on HN were always there (and it would be weird if they wouldn't).

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

> Or the main topics just changed to something you are not that interested in,

I never said I AM NOT interested in AI. Can you re-read my post with an open mind?

> If I would not like to hear about funding rounds when money was cheap,

> If I don't like to hear about Go being here 10 years ago would not be fun.

I didn't say I don't like hearing about AI. I just don't like NOT HEARING about other stuff!

Kiro 45 minutes ago | parent

The way you're responding to the comments in this thread just makes me dislike your idea even more. You want the site to be curated with things you like instead of what the community upvotes. That's it.

cromka 32 minutes ago | parent

> You want

No, bud. That's what your projection says. I said clearly I suggest HN curate more or give tools to self-curate.

> The way you're responding

How am I responding?

> makes me dislike your idea even more.

OK.

dewey 18 minutes ago | parent

You are taking comments in this thread as personal attacks, when the they are not.

Anslopic123 11 minutes ago | parent

Dewey you are annoying as hell bro. They should ban your stupid account since you’re such a fag every time you talk

ChickeNES 6 minutes ago | parent

> > You want

> No, bud. That's what your projection says. I said clearly I suggest HN curate more or give tools to self-curate.

Those are literally the same thing

Anslopic123 12 minutes ago | parent

Agree with cromka - I like AI but hate the hourly Anslopic ads.

I’ll never use their products just to spite them.

Easily the most aggressive and obnoxious ad campaign in over a decade.

ChickeNES 1 hour ago | parent

No? It's still about tech, same as always

epihelix 8 minutes ago | parent

But HN simply ranks posts by upvotes. I know you don't intend it this way, but you're effectively suggesting that HN should not pay attention to what its userbase are upvoting, but instead curate posts by your personal opinion instead. That's ... probably not going to be a workable solution for anyone other than you, I'm sorry.

There are always a lot of HN top stories that I'm not interested in, but I just scroll past them. If I really cared, I'd use a community site that provides a filter, an app that provides a filter, or just vibecode one for myself.

mschuster91 1 hour ago | parent

Reddit has been thoroughly contaminated by AI slop as well. In the tech and sysadmin subs, even in the maker subs in general, there is sooooooo much stuff at least made with AI.

FrustratedMonky 1 hour ago | parent

There is an ebb and flow.

But with Hugging Face hack, and Navier–Stokes. You're going to be flooded with news for at least a few more weeks.

ChickeNES 1 hour ago | parent

Well...at the rate things are going, probably not tapering off after a few weeks :P

deadbabe 1 hour ago | parent

I say embrace the eras, hackernews has always be fixated on some shiny topic for a while before jumping to the next.

Someday you will look back and see this as the good old days.

swozey 1 hour ago | parent

My linkedin is just pages and pages of AI posts and layoffs.

Are lawyers, doctors, and people in non-tech fields getting the same thing? Is Doctor linkedin all about how AI is going to improve surgery while half your connections posts are about being unemployed?

wwalexander 1 hour ago | parent

I've largely moved over to lobste.rs for actual technical news. They even have a "vibecoding" tag to let you filter out anything related to coding with LLMs.

HNisDead2 1 hour ago | parent

This site is 1000% Claude ads and fake comments promoting how “great it is” now

They forgot the whole middle ground where we are developers who know more about LLMs than them.

We already tried agentic shit - it’s not ready. Models have peaked.

Anslopic actually released their crap “me too” Aai chat and because they are rich kids with endless money they are gonna advertise it to us every 30 seconds here. I literally want all rich people to die in a fucking meteor impact. I hate this timeline more than anything.

Should change the name to Anslopic News btw - this site is dead

sjs382 1 hour ago | parent

There are almost as many posts like this as there are about AI.

Keep both. AI and banning AI are both high-interest topics.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

I'm sorry, who said anything about banning AI?

xutopia 1 hour ago | parent

I can't help but feel that every 1% improvement over a benchmark from new releases of flagship LLMs isn't really that impressive anymore. To some extent it feels like LLM improvements is slowing down significantly despite increasing resources being spent on them.

The people promising AGI just 6 months ago are now more and more quiet about the possibility and rightfully so. LLMs alone are most likely not the path to AGI.

Dlemlo 1 hour ago | parent

My personal experience diaagrees.

The Opus moment in November felt very different but despite that, a handful things did not woork well with Opus in November and I tried them last week and they now just work.

In parallel GPT-6 and Fable 5.1 show significant skill improvements in 3D modeling and Astra shows significant progress in computer use.

Do we live in a parallel universe? I mean it, this week was crazy from a progress point of view.

ChickeNES 8 minutes ago | parent

> Do we live in a parallel universe? I mean it, this week was crazy from a progress point of view.

This is how I feel too, wandering into some of these threads. Sure the damn things aren't perfect yet, but people act as if they are incapable of doing anything, or no more worth the hype than Bootstrap?? (the latter comes from this very thread!)

ChickeNES 10 minutes ago | parent

No, the people promising AGI 6 months ago are now saying it's here. (and I agree)

utopiah 1 hour ago | parent

I wish but honestly that's unrealistic because a lot, if not most, people related to HN are currently their livelihood linked to AI, in one way or another.

Most companies, in software or not, are imposing minimum (after backtracking to suggest to maximized, until their started to pay bills) AI usage. A lot of people in HN also have stocks a lot of popular stocks is linked to AI success, whatever that might mean. A lot of AI entrepreneurs also are directly to sell AI, as it's simply where most of the VC money is currently going.

So... when it's this intertwined I think it will be difficult. If you know of other places I'd be curious.

coldpie 1 hour ago | parent

I maintain a simple browser extension to auto-hide AI news stories: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ It just scans for keywords and clicks the Hide button. Doesn't catch everything, but cuts out a ton of the noise. You can go hit the Hidden page in your profile sometimes and scan for highly-upvoted stories to see the couple that are maybe actually worth looking at.

1295876 6 minutes ago | parent

That solves it for the individual, but still leaves gullible people exposed to the shock and awe indoctrination and ads run by the AI astroturfers.

If every sane person used this extension, there would be no pushback.

ChickeNES 5 minutes ago | parent

Says the green account astroturfer!

Semaphor 1 hour ago | parent

FWIW, one article is very short on details, it’s a slightly expanded press release, and the other is a video. I’m not sure either is what’s needed more on HN.

sammy0910 1 hour ago | parent

Here is a link to an HN feed with reduced priority for AI content

https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai

this is what I use to keep the garbage out

skeledrew 1 hour ago | parent

People post and interact with what interests - or triggers - them. Yesterday it was one thing, today it's AI, and tomorrow it'll be another thing. Just have to ack the flow, and find another way to filter for your non-today's-thing interests.

HNisDead2 1 hour ago | parent

This site is all Claudeslop and angry users on sock puppets now lmao

Dlemlo 1 hour ago | parent

So instead of the most craziest technology advantage in our lifetime, you want to see more products?

Like a lenovo laptop with a technology which is available for a bit and another product which you can pre-order?

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

Yes.

Dlemlo 1 hour ago | parent

I'm on hn for 15 years, tbh as someone else said that to you already: thats not what hn is. At least I wouldn't even expect your two examples on hn.

I would expect them on reddit, kickstarter or hackaday.

Apple always gets quite a lot of tracktion on hn (i don't like it but happens evertime). But lenovo? Framework for sure.

lta 1 hour ago | parent

Thank you for posting this <3. I've been thinking it daily for about a year and feel a little bit less alone.

I understand this is a significant topic in the industry but the ratio is really high. Every time someone at OpenAI or Anthropic farts, there's top 10 post.

It makes me feel as if a lot of hackers had given up on actual hacking to just be followers of the latest commercial stuff thrown on the market. It's likely a projection of my own fears, but I have not been able to shake it off and it's gotten worse and worse.

thewhitetulip 1 hour ago | parent

All github trending projects are AI related

browningstreet 1 hour ago | parent

The amount of useless griping and sniping on HN has made it a less interesting and resourceful community. Moreso than the flood of AI news.

Tagging may not help though. Even the latest Apple product announcement threads were just.. bad. Everyone wants to be grumpy and dismissive.

If I had to keep one and lose one, I’d keep X and lose HN. And while I hate Elon, HN is losing on vibes, utility, information, network, links, and tips.

musha68k 1 hour ago | parent

Reminder that this is primarily a Silicon Valley / VC related and owned technology news aggregator.

Fringe topics will stay fringe until they're hip (again?); currently non fringe from my intermittent read:

- anything "AI"

- retro computing (honest interest x mourning/cope in the non-deterministic agentic takeoff)

- random topics that hit the zeitgeist

Check out lobste.rs as well as SIG across forums, IRC, fediverse, discord, etc, etc – and or create your own like in the olden days :)

https://sive.rs/dance-lessons

FWIW I prefer to come here and post, read up and comment on "AI" over having to wade through proxied shitter content (it truly stinks over there).

WithinReason 1 hour ago | parent

HN already has an upvote/downvote system to surface what's interesting to people here.

cromka 50 minutes ago | parent

> people here

The best communities are ones that do not allow to be taken over by inorganic behavior. I think we can reasonably assume that not all AI front-page stuff is as interesting as other, non-AI stuff, yet here we are.

iLoveOncall 45 minutes ago | parent

You cannot downvote posts, which is an issue IMO.

smalltorch 18 minutes ago | parent

Its a unlocked feature once you have enough points

Philpax 1 hour ago | parent

While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment, the ongoing automation of intelligence is, for better or worse, one of the most consequential things that can/will happen to "hackers" (as well as white-collar workers in general), and it is very difficult for us to look away from that asteroid in the sky.

FLeXMurphy 22 minutes ago | parent

Surprised you put "hackers" in quotes but not intelligence.

mschuster91 1 hour ago | parent

I'd also SERIOUSLY ask for an "LLM generated" flag in addition to normal flags - on both comments and submissions, that is.

Obvious slop comments thankfully already get flagged or downvoted in the hell they belong, but the submissions, oh dear god I do not wish to engage with shit written by AI any more. It's questionable enough if you let LLMs do your coding work for you, but if you can't even be arsed to write a proper README.md on your own, why the fuck should I be forced to waste my time reading it?

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

That should be somewhat feasible to be done objectively, now that we have LLM text fingerprinting regulations in place.

krapp 1 hour ago | parent

Unfortunately most of what gets posted to HN or could conceivably be posted here is already LLM generated to some degree. Because content of interest to HN tends to be written by the same people who increasingly prefer to use an LLM for everything they do, machine-generated submissions are only going to increase over time. Tagging submissions as LLM generated is ultimately futile, as one might as well tag water as wet.

Also HN's design ethos of not having "silos" precludes having tags or filters or blocklists, since they want everyone to see the same content at the same time. This is the kind of thing you're going to have to use with a browser plugin or third party service if you want it at all.

ChickeNES 1 hour ago | parent

Or they could...just use Reddit or Lobsters, it's so weird that they want to fight the whole purpose of this site.

krapp 58 minutes ago | parent

The whole purpose of this site is to "satisfy intellectual curiosity," not to post LLM generated content.

ChickeNES 51 minutes ago | parent

What is stopping "LLM generated content" from "satisfy[ing] intellectual curiosity"?

apexalpha 1 hour ago | parent

It's the biggest 'thing' in the industry.

Previously this site was swamped with Blockchain news...

EA-3167 57 minutes ago | parent

You think that would have been some kind of lesson, but no!

teiferer 1 hour ago | parent

Time for a category at the top? Next to new, jobs, ...? Something like "sans AI".

I like adjacent articles though. Today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656496 was a delight. It would be sad if such articles were filtered out or automatically downvoted or similar.

mg 1 hour ago | parent

For me, the appeal of HN is the DIY attitude.

In that regard AI fits the bill well. Because many of the AI related posts are about tools one can immediately tinker with.

While a new type of laptop cooling might become interesting once the laptops come out, the news is not as interesting to me as a new LLM or agent that I can experiment with right away.

ssfdg 1 hour ago | parent

Are posts like that really DIY? They're more like increasingly elaborate and convoluted ways of getting something else to do it for you

IAmBroom 48 minutes ago | parent

In the same sense that using a 3D printer is DIY. Moreso than buying a thing off the interwebs; less so than carving or casting your own thing.

VortexLain 1 hour ago | parent

AI-related news are very much relevant nowadays, so limiting them would be excessive. But introducing tags to make it possible to filter out specific topics seems like a good idea.

ilaksh 1 hour ago | parent

1. Popularity != Merit and this site is not different. A lot of worthy posts get ignored.

2. Even though I find most of the AI posts interesting, I agree that tags and the ability to filter by tags would be really great. But it's probably a ton of work and additional system load.

I don't have a

pluc 1 hour ago | parent

I submitted an article today, then withdrew it when I noticed it was AI generated. I think it's a matter of self-policing.

https://studyfinds.com/telling-kids-theyre-smart-nearly-doub...

ffsm8 1 hour ago | parent

Reading threads like this always confuses me a little...

Since Corona this platform has become basically reddid as it was 10-15 yrs ago.

> Meanwhile the legitimately, broadly-hacker stuff gets left out for the most part

Those were pretty much always niche content here. This was- at least until Corona, a forum where you got usually pretty highly intelligent and critical input on various topics, strongly centered around products as a direct consequence of this being the (I think) most successful VC forum.

Pretty much every comment section had me think about something that I hadn't fully understood before. Nowadays? It's extremely rare to see anything remotely insightful. It's mostly just reactionary/knee jerk response, from people that clearly never actually thought about what they're actually talking about/just parroting political points.

I do miss the older content, and I've found myself getting more and more toxic as a consequence of seeing ever less insightful if not downright stupid comments here. Which - if I'm honest - objectively contributes to the problem and I should stop henceforth.

dewey 1 hour ago | parent

> I am trying to make is that maybe YC could start curating the content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump?

This kind of defeats the purpose of a link aggregator compared to a human curated newsletter or blog. Maybe something like https://hackernewsletter.com acts as a good filter for you?

There's already the "second chance pool" which is a human bump for interesting posts that didn't get the attention they should (Bad timing, other big news overshadowing, bad title etc.).

Anslopic123 10 minutes ago | parent

Dewey literally takes dick up the ass so take his advice with a grain of salt.

He never made anything cool or interesting either

Kiro 1 hour ago | parent

Been here a long time and wouldn't upvote any of those things. Sounds like you're looking for a different site.

bdcravens 58 minutes ago | parent

AI is on the front page because those articles are upvoted. There have always been hot topics that dominated the feed in the past: Apple product releases, Steve Jobs's passing, cryptocurrency, US-only news, San Francisco-only news, coding bootcamps, NPM drama of the week, etc.

delichon 57 minutes ago | parent

Every AI post on the front page is there because it was upvoted a lot by HN readers. So you are effectively asking these readers to not vote on a topic because you are not interested in it but they are. Why would any of them alter their behavior because of that?

Rooster61 47 minutes ago | parent

> a lot by HN readers

You're assuming there are human eyes behind all of these accounts. With the rise of AI has also come a precipitous rise in astroturfed views.

Martin_Silenus 54 minutes ago | parent

Brute force being the antithesis of hacking spirit, I too wish brute force would end up in Lamer News instead.

int32_64 53 minutes ago | parent

The AI posts are better than the reddit tier politics slop

mococa 49 minutes ago | parent

That's why lobste.rs is a good plance, almost no AI.

RodgerTheGreat 7 minutes ago | parent

There's loads of slop and slop enthusiasm on lobste.rs; the only difference is that they have a moderation policy which forbids the most egregious forms of advertising and astroturfing.

itherseed 49 minutes ago | parent

It would be nice to at least have a day in the week without AI news. Some kind of "No AI Friday," for example.

bdelmas 40 minutes ago | parent

Why limit? This is a news website where users judge if something is newsworthy by upvoting it. If the community decides it’s newsworthy it’s newsworthy. Maybe not for you but at least enough people to make it visible in front page. Unless you have strong arguments, like topics creating death threats or people doxing, there is no reason whatsoever to censure any news because you personally doesn’t care or don’t like it and prevent others from accessing it.

infecto 37 minutes ago | parent

The front page is a reflection of what folks want to see. AI is certainly mentioned a lot but it’s also top of mind for every industry atm. I still see a lot of diversity in posts though. After all this is a VC forum for startups.

educar 36 minutes ago | parent

I already miss rust and erlang articles

dvfjsdhgfv 33 minutes ago | parent

The Brax industries stuff you mentioned looked really sleek and fun until I noticed it's pretty much vaporvare as for today. I'm a great fan of the former submission you mentioned: a technology that seemed innovative but not in production but is available now. Stuff that will be available next year or never is simply less interesting.

PaulKeeble 30 minutes ago | parent

I miss all the programming articles. It feels like everyone has given up with the very idea of ever writing code now and the entire practice of making software has been handed over to AI.

segmondy 26 minutes ago | parent

But this post is about AI news!

smalltorch 21 minutes ago | parent

All the stuff I post that I find interesting gets instantly flagged now. Not sure why.

poppafuze 21 minutes ago | parent

"what i post here gets no traction"

ChrisArchitect 19 minutes ago | parent

Variants of your Ask are a regular thing around here. Lots of stuff still floats to the top that's non-AI but traction is as ever a challenge somewhat. Stuff moves fast around here.

Some recents:

Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834961

Show HN: Hacker News with AI stories filtered out

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159018

Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886741

Just a few weeks ago:

How much of HN is AI?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435728

Also surfacing non-AI projects:

Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700460

Ask HN: What are you working on (non-AI)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122103

EGreg 17 minutes ago | parent

This is eternal September my friend

The AI is only going to increase on all forums from here. There's no stopping it, because on most forums people will start preferring AI in many areas

gste 17 minutes ago | parent

> Please stop discussing one of the most pivotal moments in history

bluecheese452 17 minutes ago | parent

Hn is the propaganda arm of yc. Yc is heavily invested in ai. Follow the money.

noir_lord 17 minutes ago | parent

    news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^\/(?:news)?$/) tr.athing:has(a:has-text(/AI|claude|A.I|harnesses|harness|OpenRouter|llm|vibecode|agi|deep learning|agent|TPU|GPT|DeepSeek|Anthropic/i)):xpath(. | following-sibling::tr[1])
I just have that in my Ublock Origin rules - it cuts the noise dramatically and if something gets through I just update the has(), it's a brute force approach.

Ironically the only reason I saw this post is because I was on my ipad :).

busymom0 4 minutes ago | parent

I think you should replace vibecode with vibecod so that you can catch vibecoding too.

Also add "vibe cod" with a space.

And add Gemini, OpenAI, llama

postalcoder 16 minutes ago | parent

This is a solved problem. Hacker News without AI: https://hcker.news/?view=frontpage&ai=exclude

efficax 11 minutes ago | parent

HN/YC should be called "News Venture Capital Cares About". VC cares about AI, so AI is what you're gonna get

hax0ron3 9 minutes ago | parent

I mean, it's not surprising. I think that most people on here are software developers.

AI is fundamentally transformative to the software development industry and threatens to put large numbers of software developers out of a job. Fable regularly does things in 20 minutes that would have taken me 2 weeks before. AI is probably the biggest revolution in software development since the development of operating systems and high-level languages. It's also potentially a fundamental turning point in the entirety of human history.

So it's no wonder that AI gets a lot of attention.

bschwindHN 8 minutes ago | parent

We absolutely must discuss SVGs of animals riding vehicles, that is the only compelling topic these days.