Yet another Hacker News

79 points botfriendsarent 2 hours ago 39 comments

Its now clear that we need to preserve tech press for non AI related things. Techmeme for example is now completely overrun with AI stories.

HN is getting closer to that every day.

If AI kickback deals, phony new model ratings, high RAM prices and your surprise at how you think you coded something with AI and it was AMAZING! even though it doesnt work is all there is count me out.

We need a filter on existing tech news sites or an alternative press.

Curiositry 2 hours ago | parent

There’s Elijah Potter’s HN sans AI: https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai

kgwxd 1 hour ago | parent

I fully expected that to be a blank page :) Not too far off.

thesmtsolver2 28 minutes ago | parent

How is the filtering done? Manually or with AI?

linzhangrun 10 minutes ago | parent

It would be interesting if this page was also created with vibe coding.

286660920 2 hours ago | parent

This topic is just naturally controversial — AI and the internet are so intertwined with it that there’s really no way to avoid the conversation.

mproud 1 hour ago | parent

And here’s a conversation.

postalcoder 1 hour ago | parent

https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude

You can also exclude github repos posted here that contain ai attribution. Filters are updated daily to catch exceptions.

justShane 55 minutes ago | parent

Now that's what's up.

Madmallard 1 hour ago | parent

I agree.

The worst part about it is like 80% of the conversation is motivated speech.

That's worse than the technology itself.

AndrewKemendo 1 hour ago | parent

What do you mean by “motivated speech?”

Do you mean it’s puffery or scammy?

throwaway81523 1 hour ago | parent

I haven't heard that exact expression before, but basically agenda-driven speech, for commercial or ideological persuasion or whatever. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

AndrewKemendo 34 minutes ago | parent

I’ll wait for OP to respond in affirmative but I’m not necessarily agreeing that that’s what they meant.

By that standard then literally everything that is opinion based (ideological) is motivated reasoning

ShinyLeftPad 25 minutes ago | parent

With cryptocurrencies/NFTs/etc. everybody talked them up because they are invested in Bitcoin or whatnot.

With LLMs, everybody talks them up because they are invested in Nvidia or have other exposure (which is almost everybody considering with all the datacenter building if this industry tanks US economy is also), or because they are invested in having jobs.

AndrewKemendo 5 minutes ago | parent

So then what of people who’ve been working in AI for decades?

specifically those who like me are very excited about the future and have been excited about every step of the way since they got started?

In my case this is all going fantastically as planned and almost perfectly on the Kurzweil timeline. so as a 40+ person who has been wanting an Oracle in my pocket forever, we are closer to that then we have ever been. why the fuck wouldn’t I be excited about that? there was nothing like this in the 1980s and that’s a fact.

The concept of the Dick Tracy watch was science fiction when I was a kid and my kids all have Dick Tracy watches casually. That’s unbelievable!

coffeecoders 51 minutes ago | parent

I think the problem is concentration. AI now absorbs almost all of the oxygen from every category. A story about new chips becomes an AI story. Cloud pricing becomes an AI story. Even personal projects get pulled into the same orbit.

ares623 50 minutes ago | parent

we need entirely new communities where "contributors" all share a common understanding that they will not publish AI for other contributors to consume.

They can all individually create and consume AI outside of this community of course.

newsomix9xl 23 minutes ago | parent

The model of crowd sourcing semi anonymous sources makes this, I think, nearly impossible.

marcus_holmes 47 minutes ago | parent

I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years.

I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discussions to be had there.

And sure, there are plenty of AI scam artists out there (most seem to have switched from Crypto experts to AI experts in the last couple of years).

But the underlying tech that is being used in AI is not only interesting, but also useful. I'm seeing people who have never coded before produce some cool apps. OK, they're not production-grade, but that's still new people doing new and interesting stuff with this tech. My own workflow is profoundly different from what it was a year ago. I've seen old problems that were really incredibly difficult to fix collapse completely using this tech. It's a useful tool if you're developing software. I suspect there are other areas of human endeavour where it will be useful too. I very much doubt it will replace all human work, or become sentient.

I think we need to separate out the AI business, which is its usual mess of scam, exaggeration, and buffoonery, and the actual AI tech, which is producing some really useful tools.

esafak 42 minutes ago | parent

Not only that but it impinges on your life; it would be irresponsible to ignore it. There goes your job while you weren't paying attention... This is the mother of all tech revolutions. There will never ever be anything as big as AI, especially after embodiment.

retired 35 minutes ago | parent

As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.

AussieWog93 32 minutes ago | parent

I'm waiting for Fable to come back online so that it can do the refactor while I sleep, for peanuts.

aspenmartin 31 minutes ago | parent

Idk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models.

ares623 27 minutes ago | parent

if you were paying attention you would've noticed that between 2025 and 2026 the pricing of these things have somewhat changed. How does the extrapolation look with that?

aspenmartin 16 minutes ago | parent

Good thing we have reams of data on this, holding performance constant the cost goes down 10-40x per year: https://epoch.ai (like the first box)

Also, frontier token prices have remained roughly constant:

3.5 sonnet: $3/$15 3.7 sonnet: $3/$15 Opus 4: $15/$75 (opus tier) opus 4.1: same Opus 4.5: $5/$25 Opus 4.6 (same) 4.7 (same) 4.8 (Same) Fable: $10/$50

So Fable is cheaper than Opus 4 was at launch.

One thing that has increased quite significantly? Spending and adoption.

zzzeek 5 minutes ago | parent

You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.

api 30 minutes ago | parent

I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM.

This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.

jerf 24 minutes ago | parent

I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time.

By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore.

marcus_holmes 10 minutes ago | parent

My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time)

The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it.

And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the industry leapt at the new tools and tooling, and COBOL faded to obscurity (though there are still AS400s out there, and some of the code they wrote is still managing vast swathes of our essential services).

And all of that was less of a revolution in the industry than the last 12 months have been.

zzzeek 15 minutes ago | parent

Sure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work

marcus_holmes 2 minutes ago | parent

I saw this play out in Y2K, and yes, I was also looking forward to getting paid an absolute fortune to refactor all those old VB applications at their end of life.

Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did.

OutOfHere 19 minutes ago | parent

> The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam

That is straight-up false. It's best to not speak of things you don't properly understand. If it were true, they wouldn't hold the financial value that they do or anywhere close to it.

marcus_holmes 17 minutes ago | parent

I don't want to get into the argument here, so won't respond.

tophnposts 43 minutes ago | parent

You’ve hit the nail on the head of what is the smoking gun of today’s tech sites — no doubt about it.

ares623 29 minutes ago | parent

A key insight. This closes the gap.

jedberg 36 minutes ago | parent

Look at /r/programming on reddit. They have explicit no AI policies.

newsomix9xl 24 minutes ago | parent

Reddit is a training ground for AI. They are part of the "AI problem " no?

And AI needs to avoid feeding itself synthetic data. Maybe this whole Anti AI frenzy is just an attempt to feed AI human content.

jedberg 22 minutes ago | parent

Any public website will be a training ground for AI.

newsomix9xl 26 minutes ago | parent

I disagree. The problem, if I concede there is a problem , is not new or unique to AI but problematic to the internet -fake news, fake reviews, AstroTurfing, etc.

This is not an AI problem.

The internet is a bad place with lots of bad actors and no one says anything about malicious state actors who pollute the internet (they might be called xenophobic !)

AI merely is another tool for bad actors to be better bad actors, but that doesn't mean AI is the problem.