Hacker News, Sans AI

(elijahpotter.dev)

112 points | by chilipepperhott 2 hours ago

25 comments

  • millerm 1 hour ago
    I can deal with a launch problem. I am looking forward to being able to check it out. I stopped coming to HN as often as I used to because there has been too much AI talk. It's like a dang AI subreddit. I don't want anything to do with AI. I have lost 2 jobs to AI budgets and stupid executive decisions. It's no longer part of my personal and professional life.

    I hope it works out.

    • andrewjf 55 minutes ago
      I agree with you, but haven't really left yet since there's still a good amount of discourse outside AI related topics. Seems a significant amount of contributors here are all to eager to fall over themselves putting themselves, their juniors, children, and colleagues out of work, long term.
      • archagon 24 minutes ago
        TBH, I'm mostly here out of spite at this point. It's unhealthy but I can't seem to stop rage-reading.
    • block_dagger 21 minutes ago
      Would love to hear more detail about the job losses you mentioned, if you are willing to share.
    • johnfn 17 minutes ago
      It’s interesting how, as someone more pro-AI, I feel the exact opposite way - every comment thread just devolves into people saying AI is stupid (OK, perhaps modulo new model releases from frontier labs, those tend to be fairly positive). Like we had a thread about what your AI workflow is and people were coming in and saying they didn’t have one because AI is bad. Really? Do these people enter threads about what your favorite Rust library is and say they don’t have any and Rust is a bad language?
      • krapp 14 minutes ago
        > Do these people enter threads about what your favorite Rust library is and say they don’t have any and Rust is a bad language?

        Yes. And Rust people enter threads about other languages and projects not written in Rust and say they're bad because they aren't Rust. Welcome to Hacker News.

    • chilipepperhott 49 minutes ago
      I've addressed the issues. It should be usable now. I apologize to everyone who encountered an error page. Have a good weekend, everyone!
    • 7e 25 minutes ago
      [flagged]
  • henriquemaia 1 hour ago
    I've been training to naturally ignore AI mentions that I thought this entry was about some HN ui font change (Sans).
    • altairprime 51 minutes ago
      The style is a bit off for the usual HN fare: 'sans' should be lowercase here, or otherwise it's easy to confuse for a font. It's still pretty swell :)
    • geniium 1 hour ago
      Was about to write the same
  • 866-RON-0-FEZ 1 hour ago
    Interesting this keeps moving up the front page when the site is inaccessible because it's hosted on a baked potato.
    • chilipepperhott 1 hour ago
      Yep. My single core Proxmox machine sitting in my living room with horrible cache invalidation is struggling.
      • 866-RON-0-FEZ 1 hour ago
        Sounds like a great use case for serving plain HTTP over cloudflare tunnel. Why terminate TLS when you don't have to?
        • chilipepperhott 1 hour ago
          You know what's funny? Most of this site is exactly that. The _one_ time I do something dynamic…
    • consumer451 1 hour ago
      73% of users vote prior to reading TFA, according to this research. (I am sometimes guilty of this myself)

      We live in a world being dimished by confirmation bias, but this isn't a new thing. Those who wrote/approved the headlines always had more power than those who wrote the articles.

      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315096490_Consumers...

      edit: disclaimer, no hate on TFA. Just responding to the comment.

      • 866-RON-0-FEZ 1 hour ago
        This submission should be studied by people holding clipboards. It needs a follow-up:

        "How I made it to the top of HN with zero content beyond a catchy title"

        It further proves the key to getting your stuff on HN is not to post interesting content, it's to post something that sounds interesting.

      • nozzlegear 39 minutes ago
        73% of Reddit users vote prior to reading TFA:

        > In the present work, we introduce and make available a new dataset containing the activity logs that recorded all activity for 309 Reddit users for one year.

        • consumer451 16 minutes ago
          n=309 is better than n=1, but yeah...

          However, tracking over a year might make the subject forget about the whole thing, and act naturally. As far as HN vs Reddit, not much difference really. I mean that as more props to reddit users than anything against HNers.

        • paulnpace 8 minutes ago
          Reddit "users"
      • LearnYouALisp 1 hour ago
        Huh, I didn't even remember to vote for posts, i just scroll down to read (and vote sometimes on comments)
    • parliament32 1 hour ago
      Just goes to show how much demand there is.

      HN really needs a containment board.

    • chilipepperhott 45 minutes ago
      It should be accessible now.
    • kylecazar 1 hour ago
      I'm curious to find out if they're using a model to detect AI content. I'd be more amused than disappointed. But, alas, potato.
      • ofalkaed 1 hour ago
        I got a partial load and what it looks like it does is just search each submission for a list of key words and discards any that hits, so it would discard this submission.
        • chilipepperhott 1 hour ago
          I would argue that in a small way, this post _is_ about AI, so it wouldn't be a false positive.
          • ofalkaed 1 hour ago
            I was not suggesting that it would be a false positive, I was suggesting that this will filter out many submissions that would be of interest to those that want less AI on HN. This would flag a blog that has nothing to do with AI if some random person mentioned AI in the comments of that blog post, right?
      • chilipepperhott 1 hour ago
        It's not an LLM.

        Why use big program when regex do trick?

        • Bolwin 1 hour ago
          You can get the best of both worlds with a small embedding model
          • chilipepperhott 1 hour ago
            Show me an embedding model that runs as fast as an optimized regex engine and I'll buy you a beer.
        • 866-RON-0-FEZ 1 hour ago
          But I like using em-dashes?
        • kylecazar 1 hour ago
          Master of efficiency
  • factorialboy 1 hour ago
    For one sec, I got excited for a new font!
  • simonw 1 hour ago
    I built (well, vibe-coded) a version of this a while back that runs against the Hacker News API, it's static HTML on GitHub Pages so I don't have to run a server for it: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered
    • phildenhoff 1 hour ago
      How often do you use it?

      Immediately I started thinking how nice it would be to use natural language to have LLMs generate a deterministic filter for stories matching content I DO care about, filtered from New. Instead of filtering it out.

      • simonw 1 hour ago
        I don't use it myself. I built it for a Hacker News thread where someone else was saying "I wish I could browse Hacker News without all the AI stuff".
    • zuzululu 1 hour ago
      interesting but i rarely use any HN reader

      there's just something about this UI and its consistency

      I also don't mind all the AI related news

      If anything I just wish they had a mute/block button. its not fun when somebody is stalking you replying to every comment you make.

  • 0xbadcafebee 1 hour ago
    I have an app that does Hacker News with AI; it analyses all the stories and comments for a number of criteria, and tags them so you can skip stuff you don't want to see. I should get around to actually publishing it but I've been lazy.

    One of the fun things I noticed is the psychological impact of framing. A comment that might've made you feel the need to reply before has less emotional weight if it's highlighted in red and a diminished font. Same thing for stories; if you would normally disagree with a story and it would make you want to comment, you feel less like commenting if the story is rated as 'lacking evidence', 'unsupported by research', 'personal anecdotes only', etc. It drives down the feeling of needing to engage. Which is horrible for site engagement, but good for mental health (I think).

  • flexagoon 1 hour ago
    I've been thinking of making something like this for myself for quite a while now, glad I'm not the only one who had the idea and someone actually did it before I got to it
  • dtrav 40 minutes ago
    While you are at it can you filter out posts to subscription only sites eg economist NYT $&c. We're all here to escape click bait
  • pkage 1 hour ago
    The filter doesn't appear to be perfect, one of the top posts right now is "My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development"
    • rsyring 1 hour ago
      I guess they could run the titles through a (flash) LLM to catch ones were keyword detection won't cut it.

      Have to love the irony. :)

      • szatkus 28 minutes ago
        At least the blog post was proofread by an AI.
    • chilipepperhott 1 hour ago
      That should be fixed as soon as my server has a chance to catch up.
  • uniclaude 39 minutes ago
    Oh. A little bit of a let down. I was expecting "HN without comments and posts written by LLMs".
    • chilipepperhott 37 minutes ago
      That would be cool. Although your username is a little suspicious…
  • Polizeiposaune 1 hour ago
    Was hoping it was a new font.
  • BinaryMachine 32 minutes ago
    Welp, it was only a matter of time. Thank you
  • chilipepperhott 1 hour ago
    Hopefully fixed the cache invalidation. I'm crossing my fingers.
  • 9021007 1 hour ago
    Hug of death?
  • obsidianbases1 37 minutes ago
    People love to hate AI

    It's the biggest change in the tech and startup sector, the HN sector, for as long as HN/YC has been a thing. So I would expect nothing less than it to be the biggest topic.

    The AI discourse has gotten worse since the time when it revolved more around new papers presenting new techniques. Now it's mostly integrations and recursions with various lipstick.

    But I still think the discourse is important.

    What would be better, albeit much harder work, than complaining or sticking your head in the sand would be attempting to find novel ideas, implementations, workflows etc.

    Unfortunately, with the blanket negative attitude, when those new ideas do appear, it's much harder to recognize because often the reflex to down vote and gripe about yet another AI thing buries the potentially valuable posts.

  • cliche 57 minutes ago
    Love this. Really nice to see a HN front page without AI, the fatigue is real.
  • theflyestpilot 43 minutes ago
    ^how about just be a devoted AI section at the top?
  • mkw5053 1 hour ago
    Are you using AI to figure out what's about what's AI and what's not?
  • wewewedxfgdf 17 minutes ago
    Maybe HN could have a filter button that hides ANY threads for keywords you choose to filter.

    I would instantly hide anything about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

  • hirako2000 1 hour ago
    A problem is it doesn't load as fast. Could it be helped?
    • chilipepperhott 1 hour ago
      Yes, it can. I am having a major cache invalidation problem. One of the major blights of programmers everywhere.
  • edgarvaldes 1 hour ago
    Yes, please. A general-purpose filter like the one on 4chan would also work.
  • nubinetwork 26 minutes ago
    Okay, now filter out the VC stuff too...
  • ares623 1 hour ago
    I've been thinking the same. Couldn't this be done with a browser extension that hides elements that matches a regex?
    • chilipepperhott 50 minutes ago
      Not quite. Lots of articles don't mention AI in the title, even if that is their core subject.
  • booleandilemma 41 minutes ago
    [dead]