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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe all this time we were just in a ZIRP bubble and the people who claimed to be "interested in programming" were just grifting to the top all a long.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
There's also https://unslop.news, which removes just the posts about AI, rather than all posts that mention it at all
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.
> 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".
What does the "NN" in "NN revolution" mean?
Neural networks.
theres also
https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai
which additionally lets you add and modify custom filters
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.
tildes.net is also great, though it's not just for tech stuff
The fediverse. Mastodon or Lemmy are viable alternatives if you curate well enough.
So nothing to worry about then.
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.
"92 of 179 articles survived the filter". So about half of the posts are about AI now, more than I expected.
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.
Thank you for plugging my site :)
"Ironically, this project was built with AI coding and uses AI to filter out articles about AI. Go figure."
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.
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.
This is just asking for a parody-site that displays literally an empty page though.
As inspired by this tumblr which did not age well:
https://www.tumblr.com/picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes
Good idea, I'll ask Claude to spin that up
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.
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.
They're all on the front page, just buried between all the AI stuff
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
Which kind of makes my point: these pages filter AI stuff, but do not make room for non-AI stuff.
It's unlikely that right now is peak anything AI.
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.
Fascinating.
It would seem OP is spot on. I just used this and it reduced the front page of 30 posts to 14.
Thank you so much for sharing this
This is great! I hope it was vibe coded
People have been saying we've been "at peak hype-cycle" for years
Peak so far.
Maybe there’s a hype singularity where the hype is so strong that nothing can escape.
thanks, rebinded my Tridactyl shortcut for HN to this.
Hero
Thank you, could you make the UI match exactly?
To be clear: I'm not the author. I just use the service.
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.
The Erlang front page was nice, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11
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
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!
I thought the last round was the (JS) framework wars
> 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.
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.
Fair, but I think that's only for "Show HN" stuff?
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.
Fair, didn't know that. But that proves some editing is in place, it could be a bit more active, perhaps.
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!
Fair, didn't know that. But that proves some editing is in place, it could be a bit more active, perhaps.
This is like when cryptocurrency was in full hype cycle, but even more severe as it touches every inch of the industry.
I remember those days! And Elixir/Phoenix had to be hyped in every 5th post.
I miss these times!
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.
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.
> 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...
That seems like comparing the internet to jQuery.
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.
No. RoR lets you build a certain class of web apps faster. AI lets you build almost anything faster.
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...
> because it's become foundational infrastructure
Which will happen in due time, like electricity and the general computer.
>> At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore
Thank god.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
You'll just get banned.
Ironically the only reason I saw this post is because I was on my ipad :).
I think you should replace vibecode with vibecod so that you can catch vibecoding too.
Also add "vibe cod" with a space.
And add token, Gemini, OpenAI, llama
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.
> 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?
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.
> How about some less skimming of the text before you jump the contrarian gun?
That would be against the rules
The Brax products and the company values look very interesting to me, thanks OP for pointing them out.
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
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.
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.
Maybe all this time we were just in a ZIRP bubble and the people who claimed to be "interested in programming" were just grifting to the top all a long.
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.
All github trending projects are AI related
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.
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.
> 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.
Thankfully due to AI, it is an extremely simple matter to set up your own HN feed and filter it absolutely however you want
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.
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.
at 13:31 there are 11 "AI" related submissions from just the titles. Bet a good half of the others are "AI" slop.
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.
All the stuff I post that I find interesting gets instantly flagged now. Not sure why.
We absolutely must discuss SVGs of animals riding vehicles, that is the only compelling topic these days.
HN/YC should be called "News Venture Capital Cares About". VC cares about AI, so AI is what you're gonna get
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.
Surprised you put "hackers" in quotes but not intelligence.
I think this is just how it goes. Were you here in 2017-2018 when it was all blockchain all the time?
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.
I think it goes past 2018, but yes. It's a similar proportion of activity.
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
I am not, HN was this product, it just changed. Hence the invitation to discussion on the subject.
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.
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).
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.
> 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!
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.
> 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.
You are taking comments in this thread as personal attacks, when the they are not.
Dewey you are annoying as hell bro. They should ban your stupid account since you’re such a fag every time you talk
> > 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
No? It's still about tech, same as always
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.
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.
> 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.).
Dewey literally takes dick up the ass so take his advice with a grain of salt.
He never made anything cool or interesting either
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.
It would be nice to at least have a day in the week without AI news. Some kind of "No AI Friday," for example.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think he's meme-ing
https://xkcd.com/1172/
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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
This is a solved problem. Hacker News without AI: https://hcker.news/?view=frontpage&ai=exclude
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.
Are posts like that really DIY? They're more like increasingly elaborate and convoluted ways of getting something else to do it for you
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.
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.
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.
Brute force being the antithesis of hacking spirit, I too wish brute force would end up in Lamer News instead.
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
Been here a long time and wouldn't upvote any of those things. Sounds like you're looking for a different site.
But this post is about AI news!
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.
I already miss rust and erlang articles
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.
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.
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.
Says the green account astroturfer!
It's the biggest 'thing' in the industry.
Previously this site was swamped with Blockchain news...
You think that would have been some kind of lesson, but no!
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
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.
No, the people promising AGI 6 months ago are now saying it's here. (and I agree)
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.
> 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!)
There are almost as many posts like this as there are about AI.
Keep both. AI and banning AI are both high-interest topics.
I'm sorry, who said anything about banning AI?
I would like more news on native dev (C++/assembly/Nim/D/...)
or Theoretical CS and algorithms.
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
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.
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.
Well...at the rate things are going, probably not tapering off after a few weeks :P
Hn is the propaganda arm of yc. Yc is heavily invested in ai. Follow the money.
I like it.
It’s relevant and current technology.
Are the Lenovo and Braxx examples I provided not relevant nor current?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> The problem here is you want your vote to count more
That's just your projection.
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?
Yes.
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.
> Please stop discussing one of the most pivotal moments in history
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps you could lead the change you wish to see?
Well, I do, don't I, by trying and posting some other stuff than explicitly AI?
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.
That's why lobste.rs is a good plance, almost no AI.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The AI posts are better than the reddit tier politics slop
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.
> big AI labs have bots commenting and voting
I'd love to see some proof of this.
Turn on showdead and watch the AI bros yell into the void.
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.
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.
HN already has an upvote/downvote system to surface what's interesting to people here.
> 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.
You cannot downvote posts, which is an issue IMO.
Its a unlocked feature once you have enough points
Unfortunately, no. People talk about the times. I was sick and tired of covid posts a few years ago. Or nodejs before that.
"what i post here gets no traction"
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).
This site is all Claudeslop and angry users on sock puppets now lmao
Go to lobste.rs and hide the 'vibecoding' tag.
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?
That should be somewhat feasible to be done objectively, now that we have LLM text fingerprinting regulations in place.
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.
Or they could...just use Reddit or Lobsters, it's so weird that they want to fight the whole purpose of this site.
The whole purpose of this site is to "satisfy intellectual curiosity," not to post LLM generated content.
What is stopping "LLM generated content" from "satisfy[ing] intellectual curiosity"?
No. You will have your slop and you'll like it, too.
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
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