Yet another Hacker News

212 points cromka 54 minutes ago 128 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 50 minutes 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 40 minutes ago | parent

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

execat 37 minutes 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 28 minutes ago | parent

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

tetris11 15 minutes 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

utopiah 35 minutes ago | parent

thanks, rebinded my Tridactyl shortcut for HN to this.

pixel_popping 32 minutes ago | parent

Thank you, could you make the UI match exactly?

leonheld 5 minutes ago | parent

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

flexagoon 29 minutes 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 26 minutes 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 22 minutes ago | parent

theres also

https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai

which additionally lets you add and modify custom filters

otherayden 6 minutes 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 4 minutes ago | parent

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

otherayden 10 minutes ago | parent

Thank you for plugging my site :)

kurtis_reed 27 minutes ago | parent

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

shermantanktop 13 minutes ago | parent

Peak so far.

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

vanschelven 27 minutes ago | parent

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

hellon3wheels 24 minutes ago | parent

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

Tanjreeve 22 minutes 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 21 minutes ago | parent

As inspired by this tumblr which did not age well:

https://www.tumblr.com/picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes

polonbike 26 minutes ago | parent

Thank you so much for sharing this

the__alchemist 19 minutes ago | parent

Hero

griffiths 15 minutes 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.

Cerium 50 minutes 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 48 minutes 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 24 minutes ago | parent

> big AI labs have bots commenting and voting

I'd love to see some proof of this.

mschuster91 15 minutes ago | parent

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

ChickeNES 3 minutes 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.

embedding-shape 48 minutes 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 43 minutes ago | parent

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

Thank god.

springtimesun 41 minutes ago | parent

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

Tomte 40 minutes ago | parent

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

ipsod 39 minutes 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 32 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.

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 13 minutes ago | parent

That seems like comparing the internet to jQuery.

embedding-shape 5 minutes 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.

skeledrew 21 minutes ago | parent

> because it's become foundational infrastructure

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

cromka 37 minutes 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 27 minutes 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 25 minutes ago | parent

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

jermaustin1 23 minutes 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 14 minutes ago | parent

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

mschuster91 20 minutes 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 13 minutes ago | parent

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

unsupp0rted 27 minutes ago | parent

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

cphoover 25 minutes 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 25 minutes 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 23 minutes 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 15 minutes 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 7 minutes ago | parent

You'll just get banned.

embedding-shape 4 minutes 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?

probably_wrong 47 minutes ago | parent

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

bbor 47 minutes 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 47 minutes ago | parent

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

or Theoretical CS and algorithms.

andyjohnson0 47 minutes 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 39 minutes 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 33 minutes 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 46 minutes 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 43 minutes 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 32 minutes ago | parent

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

That would be against the rules

layer8 25 minutes ago | parent

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

cromka 18 minutes 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 45 minutes ago | parent

I like it.

It’s relevant and current technology.

cromka 40 minutes ago | parent

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

StrLght 25 minutes 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.

ofrzeta 14 minutes 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.

smt88 43 minutes 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 10 minutes 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.

hannofcart 43 minutes 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 41 minutes 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 19 minutes 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 16 minutes 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.

JoshTriplett 39 minutes 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 7 minutes 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.

tumdum_ 42 minutes ago | parent

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

proactivesvcs 42 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps you could lead the change you wish to see?

cromka 41 minutes ago | parent

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

AyanamiKaine 40 minutes 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 39 minutes 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 39 minutes 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 35 minutes 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 29 minutes ago | parent

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

nonethewiser 38 minutes 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 32 minutes 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 2 minutes 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

r4v3n_art 38 minutes 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 29 minutes ago | parent

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

dewey 25 minutes 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 12 minutes 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!

ChickeNES 7 minutes ago | parent

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

mschuster91 16 minutes 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 38 minutes 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.

deadbabe 36 minutes 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 32 minutes 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 32 minutes 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 31 minutes 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 31 minutes 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 23 minutes ago | parent

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

xutopia 30 minutes 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 24 minutes 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.

utopiah 30 minutes 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 30 minutes 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.

Semaphor 30 minutes 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 27 minutes 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 26 minutes 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 26 minutes ago | parent

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

Dlemlo 26 minutes 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 24 minutes ago | parent

Yes.

Dlemlo 15 minutes 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 25 minutes 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 8 minutes ago | parent

All github trending projects are AI related

browningstreet 24 minutes 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.

If I had to keep one and lose one, I’d keep X and lose HN. And I hate Elon.

musha68k 24 minutes 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 24 minutes ago | parent

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

Philpax 23 minutes 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.

mschuster91 22 minutes 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 10 minutes ago | parent

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

krapp 9 minutes 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.

apexalpha 18 minutes ago | parent

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

Previously this site was swamped with Blockchain news...

teiferer 14 minutes 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 14 minutes 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 6 minutes 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

VortexLain 2 minutes 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.