Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

This post is turning up at least every other day. The last few times my reply was "AI is 4/30 or 5/30 of the front page, it's not such a big deal", but today it is 9/30.

I am wondering what the ratio is for VC and angel dealflow in the valley right now.

Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI articles is an effective method of resistance.

No, will go away just like all the crypto stuff - remember that time? - went away.

No, it is not time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other".

I enjoy the website as-is, and simply use search when I want to get to the topics that interest me.

Feature request: HN could support a tag or label for categorizing a post. This would allow for filtering trivially, and creating views based on participant interest.

Vibe code a browser extension that uses a cheap LLM to filter out content that you don't want to see.

My experience with HackerNews would be significantly improved if I could exclude the LLM-related stuff... it's overwhelming.

Maybe we could fork it into technical discussions and complaints about technical discussions.

No for three reasons.

One, lets be honest, hn wont do it, part of their secret sauce is that they don't change, and they know that.

Two, fragmenting the community would just reduce engagement and risk making both feel like a ghost town.

Three, LLMs are (one of) the forefronts of our industry. State of the art is advancing fast. It has properties that no one knows the best practises for. And it has implications that are wide ranging. To try and bury this because it has a lot of new developments goes against why most of us are on this site.

I believe in the meritocracy of the upvote button.

Prevention of bots and other kinds of automation takes precedence over any thematic changes.

If that is done first, we might not need to separate subjects.

HN lacks even the most basic aspects of human verification.

curious, couldn't AL/llm related content also have interesting new information? im not referring to ai generated sloppy articles. more so the deep tech behind it. personally im super interested in machine learning and love it when i come across such links here.

No, I have zero interest in LLM and ignoring the posts has worked fine for me. The political posts are causing more damage IMO. There is also a "hide" button if you keep seeing a lingering high activity post.

Unfortunately, this is simply a by product of the fact that this is both news and the state of the world.

Like most it too will come to pass (as it is further adopted in the mainstream and becomes commonplace).

I built you this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered

It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories filtered out.

You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in localStorage.

o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0...

Initial prompt was:

  Build a web tool that displays the Hacker
  News homepage (fetched from the Algolia API)
  but filters out specific search terms,
  default to "llm, ai" in a box at the top but
  the user can change that list, it is stored
  in localstorage. Don't use React.

Then four follow-ups:

  Rename to "Hacker News, filtered" and add a
  clear label that shows that the terms will
  be excluded

  Turn the username into a link to
  https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xxx -
  include the comment count, which is in the
  num_comments key

  The text "392 comments" should be the link,
  do not have a separate thread link

  Add a tooltip to "1 day ago" that shows the
  full value from created_at

I have seen this question asked on subreddits, Not about AI, but for other topics that some people dislike.

They always seem to take the form of "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy"

Invariably the person who proposes this wants to remain in group A and will not be a participant in group B.

To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats"

Anyone is free to make a website with whatever content they want, they can invite people to it and grow your own community. Directing a community to divide to remove an element you dislike is an attempt to appropriate the established community.

AI/LLM has become of core part of IT. If you don't want AI then it seems like you want a retro-computing news aggregator or just HN minus personal annoyances. I get it, sometimes I want the simpler days but as long as the AI/LLM posts are not dumbed down mainstream content I'm interested it them and most visitors probably are also. I wouldn't have discovered most of the articles from other places. The posts match the site's on-topic criteria, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I havent been on here forever, but I vaguely remember other trends took over for certain periods. I could be misremembering, but crypto drove a lot of interaction for a while. I'm indifferent towards LLMs, probably because I'm not a developer in my day job, and I don't mind seeing LLM posts. It is annoying that every single LLM thread devolves into the same tired arguments between LLM zealots and detractors.

> I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.

I've had the exact same feeling a lot over the past couple years or so, and especially the last 6 months. I used to hit the front page and find 5 to 10 stories I was interested in. Exhausting those to read the second or third page wasn't common. Now I find maybe one story I want, and I routinely will scan through 4 or 5 pages (down to 120 to 160) and only find a handful (4 or 5) that I want to read.

I've long found myself wishing for mini-HNs on different broad topics that interest me. Sadly this was the whole point/idea behind reddit. For example, besides the actual and venerable and loved real HN, I'd love an HN for:

1. Politics: Where disagreements are encouraged and any claims are challenged, but only with factual arguments/counterarguments, and any emotional arguments are moderated (basically how we encourage HN comments to be). There have been some reddit communities over the years doing this, but IME they frequently devolve into echo chambers. It almost always comes down to bad moderators.

2. General News: Where stuff that is of broad interest (and not really tech-related) can be posted and commented on in thoughtful ways. Particularly local news would be fun

3. : Had an idea and forgot it as I was making the list. Will edit and insert when I remember!

I've kind of accepted that my dream just can't work (at least, looking at Reddit as the great experimentation of that). People on the internet are just (generally speaking) incapable of consistently humanizing the user(s) on the other end, and proceed to treat others very poorly. Pride and inability to be wrong strongly exacerbate that tendency.

If you think HN AI/LLM content is bad, try LinkedIn or X!

HN is probably the best source of informed, critical takes on AI/LLM content and that is super valuable to me. I don't think it should fork; I want the same audience to keep doing its work and having the debates :P.

I've gradually come around to reading and engaging more with AI-related topics, but I'd still appreciate this. The balance of the content is way off.

Honestly, I’ve always appreciated how much of 2007 Hacker News is still intact. It remains one of the few places on the internet where discovery still happens organically without trending algorithms or clickbait optimization. It's just manual submissions, one by one.

There’s only one other community I’ve encountered like it, run by a small liberal arts college.

From a signals perspective, HN is incredibly valuable. You get to watch in real time what’s capturing the minds of technically inclined readers. Sure, that means lots of lurkers and a few dominant topics (right now: AI). But that’s also kind of the point. HN works as a reflection of where the collective attention is, whether we like it or not.

Anyways...just two cents.

Maybe someone could make an AI service to separate them out.

That’s like saying HN but without the web stuff.

AI is the largest technology advancement of the last 2 decades…it’s going to show up.

Install firefox

then install violentmonkey

then install https://salamisushi.go-here.nl

browse around as usual and it will collect all discoverable feeds.

then export the feeds as opml

then install a robust RSS aggregator

then load the opml into the aggregator

then sort the news items by pubDate

then remove the obnoxious subscriptions

this is the way

No.

There's always a flavor of the month. Go back 3-5 years and every third post was crypto or NFT related. AI/LLM too will pass.

I've never really understood this desire of people to effectively hide content that doesn't interest them. Just... ignore it. Like there are enough people on HN who really care about academia and research. I don't. But that's fine. Let them be.

But here's the interesting part: so many on HN rail against the newsfeed concept . You will hear a significant number of HNers say they just want everything in chronological order. Well, except for the subjects that don't interest them.

If HN submissions were tagged and a recommendation algorithm decided what to show you, you'd get exactly what you want: fewer AI/LLM posts if that doesn't interest you. But somehow newsfeeds are still bad?

you're seeing more that content because it is relevant. HN should show relevant topics in tech. the AI/LLM domination of tech as a whole is what you're seeing on HN. There is lobste.rs which might be what you're looking for.

I mean, just don't click on an AI story.

Not sure if this would be practical - AI seems to be part of the startup ecosystem now.

I guess people still use HN to discover things that they never otherwise would have come across, just that it now also includes AI, for better or worse.

It is reducing my desire to read this site. I don't have anything against the subject matter necessarily, and sometimes it can be interesting, but in large parts it is attracting very low quality discussions and content about vibe coding X product.

Containerization (either the docker stuff or the literal 40 foot steel boxes) was a huge revolution in their respective industries.

There was a ton of work and howling and news about them for years, decades.

Now they’re so boring and standard that they’re just table stakes. Nobody cares about them enough to get into long discussions about them.

The same in a best case will happen with LLMs - the things they can do will become boring and assumed, and people will eventually stop trying to make them do things they can’t.

In an ideal world, you'd be able to tag a post (or a comment) with arbitrary tags, with an optional real number to turn it into a vector. This would make it possible to rank your suspected level of AI generatedness of a comment, for example, without having to disturb other things.

The UI for said system, on the other hand, is something I can't even imagine.

Maybe try lurking into "Past".

Think about it. You can go into whichever pre-AI booming period you desire.

Today I think I'm gonna check out what was hot in May 2009.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-14

"Obama proposes no capital gains tax on qualified small business stock"

Sounds steamy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=608202

See you there!

It's a hype cycle that will eventually die down. People here are usually pretty excited for new hype cycles they think they can make equity windfalls from. It's looking less likely that individuals will be making windfalls even as of this week with the new style of top-talent-acquihire acquisitions that seem to be increasing in number, so there's hope that HN goes back to generally technical :)

In the last ycombinator batch, how many companies do not use AI in the core of their business?

Nobody is stopping you from creating your own HN clone with whatever rules and guidelines you want. I'd say go for it, and good luck! I'll stay here though.

People who are a little late to the site may not know there was a time on HN where Erlang has even more frontage submission than the best of AI / LLM.

Ruby Rails, Postgres, SQLite, Rust, etc. They all have their moments and I dont think LLM right now is as overwhelming as any other hyped moments. Certainly not Erlang.

No. This is a trend. HN is a tech and startups website so it will show trends. At one point it was VR, eventually it was Web 3.0. Right now it's LLMs but this too will pass and something else will come along.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void

We just built https://www.hackernews.coffee/ to rerank your frontpage based on a quick survey of your preference, all local storage based.

In general we're thinking about how you can have a transparent profile that stands in place of an opaque algo, or in this case a dominance of a community by something you're not so into. It allows you to still engage with HN, but through the lense of a profile you have control over.

Ironically it is built with AI, but its pretty straightforward no magic stuff. Keen to hear if it is useful, or could be, we're really early stages exploring where to go with it.

Yeah, definitely an adverse amount of guerilla advertising. How many veiled pro insert some code assistant posts can one r&d budget write?

You mean, blockchain and everything else?

Oh, sorry, wrong hype cycle.

Currently, for me on the front page, there is 10/30 AI/LLM related. It means you have 20/30 that is not about AI/LLM. 1 of them is blockchain btw.

Typical HN, 1/3 hype, 1/3 less hype tech, 1/3 other. AI is the current hype.

I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches on here, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants/network effects.

This is just a hype cycle, as it was with crypto and other stuff. It will normalize :)

The first fork should be one for socialists and one for capitalists… but the latter, Bookface, already exists.

I say this about Reddit all the time. If you’re on Reddit (or HN) to just consume, then you’re doing it wrong.

Threads that are “my feed isn’t what I want” are exhausting. Sure, cool, but unless someone is breaking some rule, you’re looking for an algorithm to feed you content, which is all well and good, but it’s a different type of site.

Reddit (and HN) are designed exactly so that you can share something interesting you found.

~simonw's demo of a quickie customized HN front-end is great.

But ultimately, your browser should have a local, open-source, user-loyal LLM that's able to accept human-language descriptions of how you'd like your view of some or all sites to change, and just like old Greasemonkey scripts or special-purpose extensions, it'd just do it, in the DOM.

Then instead of needing to raise this issue via an "Ask HN", you'd just tell your browser: "when I visit HN, hide all the AI/LLM posts".

No. HN is like this. It skews heavy towards startups and right now if you have one of those and you aren't putting AI in your investor propaganda, you're not going to get many investors.

Besides, it's already starting to slow as people realize AI isn't as great as the influencers want you to believe.

'Domination' in what sense? I could see a couple ways you might mean this, and as qe are HNers of similar "tenure" but as far as I recall more or less otherwise strangers to one another, I could see some interest perhaps in comparing our views of what's changed and how. (Hence being vague here to try to avoid putting too strong a stamp on initial conditions...)

ublock origin filter example, removes post, post actions/stats, and spacer:

news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission:has(:has-text(/LLM|agentic/)) + tr + tr

news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission:has(:has-text(/LLM|agentic/)) + tr

news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission:has(*:has-text(/LLM|agentic/))

I dont think its the right idea long-term

If it went thru that this changed I would not be opposed tho I would read both

Fuck no. AI/LLM is a tool like any other and we need to keep on top of it.

If anything it needs less politics, I have other sites for that bs.

This is one thing lobste.rs does really well. Every submission needs a tag and you can exclude tags that you are not interested in.

One liner you can use in a GreaseMonkey/TamperMonkey script:

[...document.querySelectorAll('.titleline > a')].filter(link => link.innerText.split(' ').find(word => ['llm', 'ai'].includes(word.toLowerCase()))).forEach(el => {const sub = el.closest('.submission'); sub.nextElementSibling.remove(); sub.remove() })

I wrote this in 2 minutes so I'm sure someone is going to reply with something better.

The fact is, the vast majority of people on HN have drunk the AI kool-aid and have no desire to be critical of it or avoid it.

HN is just a reflection of the community using it. And there's always some area that's hot and trending, common challenge on any platform with a popularity-based curation.

-> But still better than a highly-personalised algo that you don't get to control?

A cynical take is if Joe learned a bit about LLMs, they could build an extension that filters AI stuff into a separate tab or something along the lines of what simonw coded up.

This too shall pass, Joe.

> I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.

So what does this mean exactly? Nothing LLM/AI related on hacker news is new to you, or you would easily have come across it without HN? Really? Where exactly are you finding your AI/LLM news?

If you like intelligent, tech-focused discussion as seen on HN but have less of an appetite for other aspects of the HN community, you might find you really like lobste.rs

This is why https://lobste.rs/ and reddit have tags/subreddits in a nutshell. They get too big and people want seperation.

As much as I love LLMs and crypto, I'm really tired of subpar LLM/AI news populating the vast majority of the feed.

But I have no idea how to separate topics on HN. Is it even possible to do so while keeping the community intact.

Weird that people are floating the idea of kicking out of a tech forum the most important tech development of the last 10 years.

Not sure what that means about the community, but must mean something.

No. Ignore the threads you do not like. Conversely start your own message board if you desire and have your own rules.

If that happens, I would like the "non AI" side to also not allow AI-generated content. (But how would that be enforced? I don't know.)

More generally: You could think about creating "sub HNs" for AI, politics, functional programming, startups, and several other categories. You could think about having something in your settings which specified which sub-HNs would put stories on your front page, with the default being "all".

I'm interested in news about current and emergent technologies. I wouldn't mind if those who are not interested made their own site and left the curious people alone. Please do.

vibecode yourself a filter ;-)

You can perform a poor guy filter via <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...>

More generally, I wish the site had tagging support. It would help solve a number of other problems, too.

HN is the way I keep up with what’s going on. AI is very much the topic of the moment. I’m fine with it the way it is.

From my perspective HN has always had certain themes I find overly repetitive and boring.

I just whack “hide” on those and never think of them again.

No it isn't.

It’s not just Hacker News. It’s everywhere else too. I want some sort of web extension that allows me to just block list items from various social media websites when the topic at hand is in my blocklist.

We had it the way we had,

Because of the way it was.

And, because of the way it is,

We have the way we have it.

I for one am happy with this site’s own little fads. Who knows, either AI stays with us and I’ll be glad to have got my helping here via osmosis. Or it goes away and I can reflect on this fun little quirk our community once had.

Nope. While the blockchain craze was less meaningful and slightly less annoying, it died down. This will too (even though there's more actual value hiding in corners).

There are certainly periods where one concept is "viral" and appears quite often; that's normal.

This happened with X/Twitter. What it resulted in was a sycophantic hug-box on Bluesky and amplified social-darwinist amoral techno-capitalism on the former site. I believe splitting the rare congregations of diversely oriented smart people leads to worse outcomes for everyone, as better ideas/conversations emerge from opposing sides rubbing up against each other. Bifurcating HN would probably lead to a hype-driven, noisy AI side and a myopic, increasingly anachronistic non-AI side.

As someone who quite likes AI, couldn't the AI dislikers just ignore the ~15% of stories that are about AI? Or does their mere presence offend?

You can easily clone HN using other forum tools (discourse, discord, HN+) and start your own? Or HN provides APIs that are quite powerful.

I concur, we need to start our "No Homers Club"