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

That was very different. Somehow the entire front page was Erlang, but it was only for a day or 2. AI is different from that. It's like a good 40-50% of the posts for at least a year or more, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. It's also different from web3/etc. as those were at most 10% of the posts and most of us can see it's just hype.

I'm not fighting for a split/fork, just stating the fact that it's nothing compared to Erlang.

It all depends if you care about the tech side of HN or the startup side of HN. I love the tech articles above all else and could easily do without the general trend fluff.

With that said, I don’t find the AI posts nearly as bad as the Blockchain era.

I wouldn't mind the Erlang-dominated front page coming back :)

I've been here a while and this is certainly more, prolonged, and has no end in sight compared to most other hype cycles we've experienced.

It's also exceedingly generic such that AI isn't really a topic, it's an entire classification or maybe domain to steal from the animal kingdom hierarchy.

Erlang is kind of a special case, since there was that period when the community's preferred response to "too much politics" was to spam submissions about Erlang. Agreed though, it doesn't seem to have taken over more than (say) Bitcoin or Rust have at times.

The best one was the 2048 era: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=2048

I miss the days of daily Haskell posts.

Microservices had a micro moment not much longer than xml.

Great example of the power of vibe coding. The first item is literally "Kiro: A new agentic IDE".

There's a special kind of irony to use AI to help out the people who hate AI.

It's not hypocrisy or anything negative like that, but I do find it amusing for some reason.

5 prompts? Not impressed. I can give a human (you) one prompt, and then that human will go off, create the site, promote it on social media, read and incorporate feedback, and then discuss potential future iterations.

It's really not even close ;)

I updated it to fetch 200 stories instead of 30, so even after filtering you still get hopefully 140+ things to read.

https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/ccde4586a1d95ce9f5615...

Top story: Kiro: new agentic IDE

An interesting example of both LLMs' strengths and weaknesses. It is strong because you wrote a useful tool in a few minutes. It is weak because this tool is strongly coupled to the problem: filtering HN. It's an example of the more general problem of people wanting to control what they see. This has existed at least since the classic usenet "killfiles", but is an area that, I believe, has been ripe for a comprehensive local solution for some time.

OTOH, narrow solutions validate the broader solution, especially if there are a lot of them. Although in that case you invite a ton of "momentum" issues with ingrained user bases (and heated advocacy), hopelessly incompatible data models and/or UX models, and so on. It's an interesting world (in the Chinese curse sense) where such tools can be trivially created. It's not clear to me that fitness selection will work to clean up the landscape once it's made.

Probably would work better as a userscript, so you don't have to rely on a random personal website never going down just to use HN. I don't have a ChatGPT account but I am curious as to if it could do that automatically too.

I also built https://lessnews.dev (HN filtered by webdev links)

One decision I had to make was whether the site should update in real time or be curated only. Eventually, I chose the latter because my personal goal is not to read every new link, but to read a few and understand them well.

Hacker news, like everything in tech, is susceptible to hype. Today it's AI, a few years ago it was Bitcoin.

I do think it's worthwhile to occasionally have a discussion about what content we want to see, and if a particular topic is getting too much attention.

It's also totally reasonable for a group of people to not want their agenda hijacked.

So, IMO, let the discussion continue. Let's see what comes out of it.

It is also possible to appropriate an established community by bringing in new members over time with views opposing the founding principles. This is much easier if the leadership preaches tolerance.

This is one of those things that is kind of hard to say without people getting triggered because of negative stereotypes but sometimes you have to stand up for principles and kick people out of social groups to keep a good thing going.

To begin with, this would be a non issue if HN just introduced something like user provided tags and users can vote for/against (to circumvent abuse)

Then the people wanting to filter "x" could just do it via simple grease monkey scripts or if HN natively supported it.

Sure, it wouldn't be perfect, but neither does it have to be.

I don't think the poster has the power to split HN in twain.

I don't think the poster believes some kind of democracy could bring about this.

I do believe that by entertaining the idea, the subsequent discussion will be useful for moderators to get a feel of what their userbase thinks of the current state of things.

From my understanding, the soul of HN and what makes it what it is is the moderation - having discussions on issues is an efficient way to signal to them.

For myself, i often want to be able to just "shift views" on an existing community, rather than wholesale move to somewhere else that fits better.

I find I can do that with granular enough subreddits, or the (maybe old) feature in Twitter where you could group people you follow into lists and see multiple "homepages".

This for me has solved the issue of dividing community, which at the least from a practical level can be tricky.

Ive been exploring how to achieve this effect "on top" of HN lately, rather than by controlling followers, by popping a very simple AI filter on top that re-ranks it for me, and found it quite satisfying, but not sure what the ultimate value/usecase might be.

> I have seen this question asked on subreddits, "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy" To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here"

I don't disagree with this observation about Reddit. However, I feel HN readers are more topic-oriented. Folks really do come to HN to read the articles and then maybe get drawn into a discussion.

I grant there are some topics here that tend to be more engagement driven but on balance I think the above holds.

> 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"

It could just as easily be "I don't feel like there is a place here for me anymore and I wish I had another place to go"

> 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"

I am truly tired of AI being rammed down my throat, not just via the tech news, but in article content (slop), in un-asked-for tech product features, and at my own tech job. The solution is not to divide the community and make people unwelcome, but to provide at least some minimal set of filters and ways to opt out of the hype frenzy. I don't want people to feel unwelcome, but I do wish there was a way to turn the AI firehose off.

Why kick it out, in the past when similar annoyances of dominating the front page occurred they created the Show link and the Ask link. For people interested in those they still exist, just away from the front page

The problem is the quality, not the topic. Understanding serious papers about AI development requires fairly specialist knowledge; there are plenty of people around (like myself) who have been programming for decades and can write really nice code in a bunch of different programming languages, but have very little if any mental model of "transformers" or whatever.

So in practice, "AI" content ends up revolving around people bandying about opinions about whether or not we're all doomed, or whether or not we're all on the edge of a utopia, or how much productivity programmers (and which ones) have lost or gained, or what kinds of tasks the LLMs are or are not currently or still good at, or whether anyone still cares about the fact that the term "AI" is supposed to mean something broader than LLMs + tool use.

The emergence of the "vibe coding" concept has made things worse because people will just share their blog posts about personal experiences with trying to write code that way, or flood the Show HN section with things that are basically just "I personally found this specific thing to be 'the boring stuff' that's actually relevant to me, so now I'm automating it" with a few dozen lines of AI-generated code that perhaps invokes some API to ask another AI to do something useful.

It means there are grumpy curmudgeons in every community.

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

Fully agree, and I in fact am finding that I actually find more stories I'm interested in that way than looking at the front page. For whatever reason, I'm increasingly getting out of sync (interests-wise) with broader HN. So many stories I think are great HN material (and would have been a few years ago) languish with almost no activity.

So there are two reasons IMHO to browse new: Surface better stories to front page for engagement, and find better stories

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

I hang out in /ask and /asknew for my part.

PS: Hey, Paul... When are you going to close my 2021 issue[0], you already merged the pull request[1] :D

Come on, man!

[0]: https://github.com/paulhoule/gastrodon/issues/10

[1]: https://github.com/paulhoule/gastrodon/pull/11

>This post is turning up at least every other day.

Res ipsa loquitur

> 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.

A bigger impact for me has been the number of mentions of AI in the comments. It's not just that a large part of the front page is dominated by LLM hype posts, it's that every single post has a least one guy near the top somehow bringing AI into the discussion. I don't even care if it's "AI will fix this" or "haha, AI sucks at this too". I just don't want to hear anything about AI ever again.

AI is eating software's lunch, AI is eating the world.

I feel it's to generic in application to be interesting to a broad audience like HN. Some things I like because I have interest in the problem space and am interested in how they applied AI to it. But most things I'm not even interested in the problem space and so could care less how they applied AI to it.

Luckily there are many other places you can spend your time.

I haven’t noticed any slowing, if anything it’s accelerating as people try vibe coding and realize they can build an mvp and get some suckers to sponsor on GitHub. Just look how many end up with donate links. I suspect a large portion of people releasing open source vibe coded projects don’t care about the project but see it as a low effort way to make a few bucks.

Wouldn't be hard to train an LLM to do it!

I don't know if you're allowed to promote alternatives to HN, but Lobste.rs has tags which you can follow or completely block. Plus I've found the quality of the discussion is higher than HN, at the cost of much lower quantity.

Keyword filters on the user side would avoid adding extra steps to submitting and moderation. Categories are an extra complication.

Someone has probably developed a personalized browser for HN.

That is a perennial proposal as far as I remember.

I second that emotion.

Very few problems were solved by crypto, so it naturally disappeared.

On the contrary, LLMs based AIs create a lot of new problems.

Unlike crypto though LLMs are actually useful.

But but the Rust stuff is still there ! (To my pleasure I must confess)

> 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.

In my experience:

Most of them are basically designed to be echo chambers from the start — opposition is only admitted in to the extent that it allows easy targets to knock down. Most people just aren't that good at explaining why they believe what they believe, let along making a convincing argument for it; so all you need to do is set up an environment where one side's position is the default.

There have been a few attempts at explicitly avoiding that problem. They do eventually collapse. But I don't think it's due to bad moderation. It's more that certain factions simply refuse to engage civilly and unemotionally with each other. They will see statements as inherently provocative that the other side genuinely consider matter-of-fact.

I was a moderator for a place like that once. It was remarkable to me how, on the "hot topics" that were polarizing and led to a lot of bans and suspensions, on one side people who were suspended would argue and whine and complain basically as long as we'd listen to them, maybe even the entire duration of the suspension, and they would never get it into their head what our standards were for respectful discourse; and they would even suggest that having such standards was inherently oppressive; and when they got back they would immediately go back to their old ways. And on the other side, people would basically say "LOL, see you on <suspension end date>" and disappear, and come back as promised, and behave themselves for a while.

And while there were a very few people who simply couldn't kick the habit of using slurs or other disparaging terms to refer to identifiable groups of people, there were far more — almost all on the opposite side — who simply couldn't kick the habit of openly insulting the people they were directly responding to. Or at insinuating negative character traits and hidden motivations not in evidence, or other such "dark hinting" as we call it. Or even just of using obnoxious, brutal sarcasm all the time when we expected people to speak plainly.

I have a similar process, but usually scan down to 60 (as I did today). I found eight stories including this one and have tabbed them to read. I don't like rust-y koolaid myself, but would never complain that it is here, nor would I complain about seeing the word 'typescript' as it is really far from my interests. To my interest -- excellent AI related white papers, AI agent paradigms and code, model announcements etc. are regularly posted here. Of the eight I picked today, half are AI related. 4 out of 60 isn't bad if I was trying to be an artificial intelligence ostrich.