Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?
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I noticed that because the things I find genuinely interesting that I post here now get zero traction, which is the stuff that I believe would previously be met with some discussion.
Note that I don't care that my submissions were ignored, I don't need that validation. Problem is that if my stuff gains no traction, I am myself not seeing similar stuff posted by others, stuff I am genuinely also interested in and would want to hear about from this community.
Here are two most recent examples:
- Lenovo showed a model that incorporates solid-state air cooling. That technology has been around for a while but it looks like it matured and is production-ready. This allows for super-light and slim designs, which, in turn, should allow for bigger batteries installed and I think it's some sort of breakthrough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580229
- Brax Industries devices, genuinely interesting, open-soruce and innovative, especially the wall display, with its modularity and on-device processing compatible with Home Assistant. I also appreciate the very clean design: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643215
As said, I honestly believe this would gain some traction here on HN a year or two ago. I no longer find HN a good source of "what's new" in the industry, it's almost exclusively AI talk now.
So I think the point I am trying to make is that maybe YC could start curating the content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump?
Or, at the very least, introduce simple tagging, so we can start filtering stuff out.
Discussion (238 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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".
https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai
which additionally lets you add and modify custom filters
Sadly this would not end just as a joke. We'll be doing this forever from now on.
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.
https://www.tumblr.com/picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes
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.
It would seem OP is spot on. I just used this and it reduced the front page of 30 posts to 14.
Maybe there’s a hype singularity where the hype is so strong that nothing can escape.
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.
> it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter
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.
Thank god.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which will happen in due time, like electricity and the general computer.
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.
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.
"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?
That would be against the rules
BTW. Their tablet is also interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyEYum3cIQQ
Ironically the only reason I saw this post is because I was on my ipad :).
Also add "vibe cod" with a space.
And add token, Gemini, OpenAI, llama
There are about a million ways to do it better but I can accept the odd false positive :).
I used gemini to update it to:
Note that blocking token, prompt, agent, and harness will also block things like auth tokens, SSH agents.There's a lot of focus on in. People are trying it out in their workflows and learning new things.
So, potentially, this could just be organic.
Of course, in reality, it is not. There's a ton of "thought leader" LinkedIn slop, just advertising their own personal brand with at best mid takes. But grifters come with every paradigm shift. Unfortunately.
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.
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.
FACT
About every 30m another claudeslop post or comment chain is created.
If you’re a human? “You’re posting too fast”
They promote AI and ads and hide genuine statements by real people even when not violating.
Worst people alive, people like Paul Graham and Dan Gackle and Tom Howard - they cause more damage to society than most can imagine
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.
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.).
Keeping abreast of fast moving AI developments with informed opinions/comments for various new models/agents etc. is primarily what I'm here for.
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.
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.
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.
If they were indeed coming here before AI revolution, it was a different type of medium.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
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.
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).
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!
I'm glad HN isn't a curated feed, it would end up like all the the others.
https://studyfinds.com/telling-kids-theyre-smart-nearly-doub...
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.
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
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 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.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hckernews-helper/gm...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hcker-news/ https://hcker.news/notes/browser-extension
(Safari ext coming soon)
The extension itself follows the principle of least privilege. It doesn't even have access to the HN site cookie.
https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai
this is what I use to keep the garbage out
While I also somewhat dislike it. I don’t think limiting them resolves the issue.
Previously this site was swamped with Blockchain news...
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.
or Theoretical CS and algorithms.
Keep both. AI and banning AI are both high-interest topics.
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 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
Some recents:
Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886741
Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834961
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
Like a lenovo laptop with a technology which is available for a bit and another product which you can pre-order?
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.
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.
But with Hugging Face hack, and Navier–Stokes. You're going to be flooded with news for at least a few more weeks.
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.
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?
Someday you will look back and see this as the good old days.
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.
This takes all the fun out of programming for me.
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.
Again, the problem is with the flooding that drowns-out other news. I intentionally say "limit the AI news" in this post's title.
It’s relevant and current technology.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
I'd love to see some proof of this.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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