34 comments
- millerm 1 day agoI 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.
- henriquemaia 1 day agoI've been training to naturally ignore AI mentions that I thought this entry was about some HN ui font change (Sans).
- altairprime 1 day agoThe 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 :)
- DavideNL 1 day ago> The style is a bit off
A much better option, in my opinion: https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
- ochrist 1 day agoYeah, that doesn't work either. E.g. it has the following stories:
- Nordstjernen 1.0 (built with Claude)
- Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
- altairprime 1 day agoThe only way to fully detect and remove AI posts from HN is using human curation by a human-selected few. Everything automated will have a higher review rate (postsReviewed / postsTotal) and also an higher error rate (incorrectReview / postsReviewed) in return for not being subject to puny human weaknesses like sleep, sickness, and (until curator selection is itself automated), spam/troll malice. To misquote my favorite blooper reel ever, “That’s not something that code can fix, that’s gonna be a little harder to fix”.
- DavideNL 1 day agoI don't see the "Claude" story. Did you change the filters? (i can clearly see a message that the AI filter is active in the top of the page.)
"GenAI" is not filtered indeed. Maybe it's not working perfectly, but it does work for most/many AI stories. Good enough!
PS. You can just add the word "GenAI" to your manual filters, in settings...
- geniium 1 day agoWas about to write the same
- simonw 1 day agoI 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
- Bolwin 1 day agoIt is a little ironic coming from the most prolific AI poster here
- simonw 1 day agoI have a quirky sense of humor.
- maxkosty 1 day agoLove that this is configurable unlike OPs version. That way I can exclude "I rewrote ____ in Rust".
Would be nice to have "include" option... for those of use who may want to ONLY read posts about AI or whatever else niche interest.
- zuzululu 1 day agointeresting 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.
- phildenhoff 1 day agoHow 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 day agoI 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".
- tlavoie 11 hours agoI've found a workable approach, browsing HN with my feed reader (FreshRSS, in this case). I have bookmarks for various things, one of which is what I've labeled "AI nonsense". It's not HN-specific, but selects for unread articles that match a variety of AI-adjacent terms. One or two might look interesting enough to read, all the rest get the "mark as read" treatment, and so much clutter just goes away.
- 0xbadcafebee 1 day agoI 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).
- factorialboy 1 day agoFor one sec, I got excited for a new font!
- 866-RON-0-FEZ 1 day agoInteresting this keeps moving up the front page when the site is inaccessible because it's hosted on a baked potato.
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoYep. My single core Proxmox machine sitting in my living room with horrible cache invalidation is struggling.
- 866-RON-0-FEZ 1 day agoSounds like a great use case for serving plain HTTP over cloudflare tunnel. Why terminate TLS when you don't have to?
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoYou know what's funny? Most of this site is exactly that. The _one_ time I do something dynamic…
- consumer451 1 day ago73% 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.
- nozzlegear 1 day ago73% 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 1 day agon=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 1 day agoReddit "users"
- LearnYouALisp 1 day agoHuh, I didn't even remember to vote for posts, i just scroll down to read (and vote sometimes on comments)
- 866-RON-0-FEZ 1 day agoThis 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.
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoD1 hater right here.
- ShinyLeftPad 1 day agoShows that there is demand for this. It works for me now btw.
- kylecazar 1 day agoI'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 day agoI 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 day agoI would argue that in a small way, this post _is_ about AI, so it wouldn't be a false positive.
- ofalkaed 1 day agoI 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 day agoIt's not an LLM.
Why use big program when regex do trick?
- Bolwin 1 day agoYou can get the best of both worlds with a small embedding model
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoShow me an embedding model that runs as fast as an optimized regex engine and I'll buy you a beer.
- Bolwin 1 day agoProbably not as fast as a simple regex but static embedding models can get stupid fast e.g https://www.flowercomputer.com/news/fast-static-embedding/
- kylecazar 1 day agoMaster of efficiency
- parliament32 1 day agoJust goes to show how much demand there is.
HN really needs a containment board.
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoIt should be accessible now.
- amelius 1 day agoMy immediate thought was already expressed in one of the few comments:
> Does this use an LLM to categorize "AI-related" vs "not-AI related" articles? Would be ironic. Lol
- flexagoon 1 day agoI'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
- Polizeiposaune 1 day agoWas hoping it was a new font.
- pkage 1 day agoThe filter doesn't appear to be perfect, one of the top posts right now is "My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development"
- rsyring 1 day agoI 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 1 day agoAt least the blog post was proofread by an AI.
- soraminazuki 1 day ago[dead]
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoThat should be fixed as soon as my server has a chance to catch up.
- 9021007 1 day agoHug of death?
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoyep. standby
- cliche 1 day agoA lot of demand for ‘Sans AI’ :)
- almogo 1 day agoProbably by bots :)
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoOur AI overlords don't want an AI-free Hacker News
- uniclaude 1 day agoOh. A little bit of a let down. I was expecting "HN without comments and posts written by LLMs".
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoThat would be cool. Although your username is a little suspicious…
- mkw5053 1 day agoAre you using AI to figure out what's about what's AI and what's not?
- ochrist 1 day agoGreat idea. But the first thread I opened (Nordstjernen 1.0) is according to the comments about a project built with Claude. So it doesn't remove all the AI stuff.
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoHopefully fixed the cache invalidation. I'm crossing my fingers.
- dtrav 1 day agoWhile 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
- kindawinda 1 day agoCoincidently he uses AI to solve this problem
- soraminazuki 1 day agoDo you have evidence? I see no indication of this.
- vitus 1 day agoI have evidence that it's not AI. It's just a regex.
https://github.com/elijah-potter/blog/blob/master/pages/hnsa...
- soraminazuki 1 day agoI thought as much. With the sheer amount of flagged comments in the comment history turning up with showdead on, it looked very suspicious.
- consumer451 1 day agoWhat would be the worse non-semantic alternative? Regex?
LLMs are the holy grail for getting beyond string matches. I would hope one was used to solve such a problem, otherwise that would be a poor product, right?
I did not investigate the product, but my point here is irony. The correct solution to implement the TFA product is to use an LLM.
- soraminazuki 1 day agoYes, keyword-based matching is more than good enough for the use case. It doesn't justify bringing in trillion dollar companies to subsidize the costs.
Even if you wanted to go beyond simple keyword matching, there are ways to determine relevance before jumping to the shiny new overkill solution.
Also for everyone's sanity, please don't turn a troll's false accusations into a cynical argument for more LLMs. That's what drives to people to reach for solutions like the one in the article in the first place.
- yubblegum 1 day agoSometimes a little poison is medicine.
- johnthescott 15 hours agootherwise limited to "keyword" search ...
- hirako2000 1 day agoA problem is it doesn't load as fast. Could it be helped?
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoYes, it can. I am having a major cache invalidation problem. One of the major blights of programmers everywhere.
- theflyestpilot 1 day ago^how about just be a devoted AI section at the top?
- BinaryMachine 1 day agoWelp, it was only a matter of time. Thank you
- edgarvaldes 1 day agoYes, please. A general-purpose filter like the one on 4chan would also work.
- postalcoder 1 day agoI built a filter for AI (inclusive and exclusive) for hcker.news a while back and continue to maintain it. It’s quite robust, and does more than just keyword filtering.
- ochrist 1 day agoSomeone mentioned this in another comment, so I'll just copy/pasta my own comment:
Yeah, that doesn't work either. E.g. it has the following stories:
- Nordstjernen 1.0 (built with Claude)
- Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
- DavideNL 1 day agoThanks, love it!
I'm now wondering, what the default filter of https://hckrnews.com/ is exactly. I can't seem to get the same result on https://hcker.news/ ....
:/
- DavideNL 1 day ago...so i think its just a cumulative view of the Hacker News front page, except grouped/ordered differently? ¯\_(ツ)_/
- wodenokoto 1 day agoGreat idea. I too have been worn out by AI talk on HN.
Right now, number 3 is an AI slop tutorial released by Microsoft.
I guess there is no real escape
- bakugo 1 day agoI have my own version of this as a browser extension paired with a backend that runs all new submissions through a small LLM to classify them, which catches more than a simple word match. Fight fire with fire, as they say.
Though I haven't used it much lately, because seeing half of the front page disappear when I enable it is a bit disheartening.
- wewewedxfgdf 1 day agoMaybe 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.
- kordlessagain 1 day agoSays the guy that uses a man-in-the-middle service to "protect" his website. So dumb. I seriously hate Cloudflare.
- ares623 1 day agoI've been thinking the same. Couldn't this be done with a browser extension that hides elements that matches a regex?
- chilipepperhott 1 day agoNot quite. Lots of articles don't mention AI in the title, even if that is their core subject.
- nubinetwork 1 day agoOkay, now filter out the VC stuff too...
- booleandilemma 1 day ago[dead]
- cliche 1 day agoLove this. Really nice to see a HN front page without AI, the fatigue is real.
Honestly it's an incredible technology the likes of which I never thought I would see in my lifetime. It's definitely not perfect, but it is improving at a frightening pace. Some days I am optimistic for how it might shape the future, and other days I am scared.
If goverments wanted to make a credible effort to limit how they are used, I would support that. But I'm not terribly optimistic that can or will happen.
True, but you're not being bombarded 24/7 with irrelevant -- and most likely false -- information about nuclear weapons.
Sure overly enthusiastic Rust fans exist and they are annoying. But it's nowhere even close to the AI mania gripping the industry.
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.