I opened shownew just to make sure, 10 out of 30 posts there are AI-related.
I caught myself thinking that because of this AI-hype I read HN less and less.
Sure, it is clear that AI is interesting to people (or at least someone wants more hype around AI), but it would be nice to read about real hacker news and projects somewhere.
I think the problem isn't AI, but the hype attracted a lot of low IQ script kids that think they are programmers because chatgpt can write simple code.
Not weird really. On the one hand, you have a flagging policy that lets any random man-child with some specific bias and enough karma completely eliminate a post for whatever bullshit emotional reaction of their own, and at the same time, you have a bunch of people here who suffer from AI-fanboy derangement and hate to see any criticism of their fantasies about a glorious future in which current LLMs are just a hop away from making all things wonderful.
As sick as I am of them, I wonder how it compares to past trends. What does the data show about Crypto/NFT related show-HNs? Is HN consistent across trends or is AI unique?
I had the same thought about crypto/NFTs... Before AI exploded it seemed like that was the "big topic" on HN for a long time. But there may have been less Show HNs for crypto since it has fewer applications.
Have you seen the YC batches since 2023? I think legitimately every single one mentions AI in one way or another, the hype is truly mind boggling once you start reading through them for a bit, so many pure BS startups getting funded solely on the premise of wrapping some ChatGPT APIs
This is probably really well known here but hackaday.com is where I get actually hacker news. The stuff here is 90% valley drama, AI stuff, and random product launches that generally don’t interest me. I do love this community and have learned a lot from it over the years. But the hacker ethos has left HN a decade ago.
It’s a blog, not a news aggregator. Front page is a little different than others but it also just lists blog posts. Once you skim those, scroll to the button that says Older Posts and that will bring you to the next page.
Being a blog it also has RSS which you can use to consume it in the reader of your choice.
They feature projects done by people from across the web so they refer to people’s names using square brackets e.g. [josvdwest]. Each post has comments which I find to be quite thoughtful.
There is also https://hackaday.io/ which is a repository of hardware projects. In very simplified terms it’s like a cross between Facebook and GitHub for your side project that involves custom hardware. People post the details and their progress. It ranges from half baked attempts that were abandoned early on to some really amazing and unique things. When people complain that the old web is dead, this is the antidote: just clever people creating and collaborating on cool shit.
I think it's partly because we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day. And the harder you work, it seems the more you have to do. On top of cognitive processing of all the ambient events in our time, which is a heavy load just by itself.
Most of the time, AI tools promise to be timesavers. So it's natural many folks look for shortcuts. We're simply overloaded, partly due to current situations generated by existing machine learning tools deployed elsewhere in the system.
Nothing is ever ideal, but centuries of labor laws gets us in the right direction. A 4 day workweek would do wonders while still having plenty of work to be done.
Your statement is also why I fear this supposed promise that "AI will do all the work, society won't need jobs!". I don't think we're getting this post-work utopia that tecunocrats love to promise.
I didn't use it much growing up since they moved west when I was young. but it turns out that "y'all" is surprisingly nifty: a gender neutral, 2nd person pronoun for a group of peope. So I picked it up more in adulthood and put it into my daily vernacular.
I don't think most people care much about the copyright violations (or at least they haven't though this trough properly), it's more about corporations taking even more control over information and knowledge at an unprecedented scale, sucking up virtually all of humanity's output in the last thousands of years and profiting from it without giving a cent back to society.
Maybe you are fine with corporations doing that, but imagine now if instead of corporations they were an alien race doing all that to us, would you not be worried for our future and autonomy?
Blockchains are not real? Tell that to my neighbor who regularly uses bitcoin to send some money to some relative in some far away place. (I'm not arguing that that's a good idea. It's likely not. But it's pretty real for my neighbor.)
Quantum computing seems like useful tech that will happen, and I'm not sure what the crime angle is for it... People are designing quantum computing resistant cryptography, if that's what you mean.
AI was also too technical. Until LLMs and prompt engineering mase it so everyone can play. Maybe QC will have a similar moment. Maybe not for decades though.
I mean I wrote a small Firefox plugin that just removes the AI posts... I only saw this one because I was debugging as I tried to remove Apple Intelligence posts.
I am not sure if it's ironic or not, but this post itself is also AI related :). An it's getting quite a lot of votes & comments...
Meanwhile, I really liked the blog theme/design. (reading on an iPad) Simple, yet powerful, with a nice touch of the blinking underline at the end of the title. (It's a simple trick via CSS, but nice to see!)
I'm surprised it's only 1 in 5 to be honest. That actually makes me happy. It means not everyone is trying to build the next AI thing. There's still innovation in other spaces.
Looking at the post, the methodology (checking the presence of a few keywords, not even including "LLM") is very simple with a lot of potential false negatives. 20% is closer to the lower bound.
It could also explain the lower votes, "AI" or "GPT" being more generic terms is correlated in my personal experience with lower quality.
unless your goal is to give yourself a fat income and sell your useless company for a bunch of money to some other speculator, pretty soon you’re a “serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits” and ready to be a CEO
Browse some job postings if you haven't for a while. Its even worse among job ads where just about everything posted out there is on working on some LLM project. It is so lopsided I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were a lot more than 1/5 for job postings in tech.
How do you define an AI doomer? I’m wondering if I’m one too.
My position is that I think AI is an amazing tool, but that’s it. It’s like any other tool we humans have developed before – we use it to create more quickly, with less effort.
Personally, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to achieving AGI, and I find the tech bros’ AGI fantasies appalling.
Well, you apparently just did. Saturation is indeed relative (or rather, on a spectrum with varying subjective lines). You can explain why it's saturated, but that still means it's saturated.
>Like it or not AI is not only a huge trend, it really is a paradigm shift in all sorts of aspects
Sure, so was fracking. I wasn't in this community back then, but I'd wager somehow we didn't have 1 in 5 articles about how much better society can drill oil.
I don’t know why you felt compelled to reply with a “duh are you stupid” type of response, but if that’s just your style I guess that’s fine
I was literally expressing curiosity and wondering what the frequency relative to past topics and trends is and totally open to it being actually saturated
I didn’t define or explain what saturated is, I said it’d be good to see those stats - you don’t know the answer as you’re obviously conjecturing about fracking popularity quantified on HN but don’t actually know anything regarding those numbers (you might now after you go look them up to reply to this, nj)
And fwiw hn includes a lot of article types but it’s obviously already slanted towards tech so if you don’t see how much closer ai is related to tech and why it’d be more popular than fracking then I don’t know what to tell you
If anything, I should have noticed that they are talking about show HN because that does change things but I’d still be curious to see stats
Like it’s not that serious I don’t know why you got so offended
Either way, not interesting in engaging with some hn smart ass atm so have a good day and feel free to have the last word
Last thing I’ll say is HN is so fickle, have no clue why I’m getting downvoted
Sometimes I feel like it would be great if it were required to enter a reason
This shows a huge surge starting in 2023. I see you're counting all .AI TLDs; how much is this responsible for the surge? I think .AI TLD registrations took off starting in 2023, and one thing I wonder is if prior to 2023 we're mostly missing real AI Show HN entries, and afterwards we're mostly catching them.
Seems likely to be at least partially selection bias.
When large emphasis is on the technology (whether it's made with AI or written in Rust or whatever), it seems at least in some cases like there is less substance to the idea itself, as a good product is a good product regardless of how it's built.
A post like "Show HN: I'm using AI to sort a list of integers" is inherently boring since if you remove the AI part it's something we've been doing for half a century.
A post like "Show HN: I'm using AI to translate Linear A" is interesting and would be interesting even if AI wasn't involved.
1. I love AI/ML hearing about stuff, and seeing it boom this much is great.
2. I really do enjoy working with LLMs and seeing what they can do.
3. It is quite amazing what non-technical people can now do with AI Assisted coding.
4. Working with LLMs within IDEs is getting quite good too.
I understand that there are still people who are not buying it, but quite honestly, its becoming harder to side with them. I have been in Software for 2 decades, and this "craze" has given me the most amount of enjoyment I have gotten since I figured out how to build a website sometime in my teens!
I think you're missing the general complaint. It's not against any of the the things you like, it's the over-saturation of not only AI, but a very small segment of AI.
It’s why i read HN through rss. My rss app lets me filter based on keywords in the subject, so i can filter out the nth post about the incremental updates to commonly used models. If i don’t have control over the feed, i cant read this site.
Not a fan of the heavy AI slant of HN these days but I find it preferable to the increase in meta posting which I have never seen turn out well for any online community. Once discussion about what a community is or should be gets established it never seems to turn out well.
I only ingest HackerNews through a vibe coded lightweight AI first viewer, comprised of articles that GPT4o thinks match with my personality, and these too are summarised using AI to give me the gist.
Back when Bitcoin had it's first hype around ~5-1000USD/Bitcoin it was almost the same just with blockchain stuff. Would be very curious how that has changed over time as well.
I don't see it as anything bad. LLMs are a interesting, alright. They can very quickly do a lot of mind-numbing work that used to be done by hand, and then they can stumble and produce total nonsense that no human being would even consider writing. And then you tweak the prompt in a weird way, and you're suddenly back in business.
To me, it feels like studying a new physical phenomenon. Like when Nicola Tesla was playing around with coils and wires, eventually loading to the creation of an entire industry.
Except, with LLMs, you don't need multi-million dollar equipment to play around with models. You can get pretty cool stuff done with a regular GPU, and even cooler if you use cloud.
I would say, if you are not spending some spare time fiddling around with LLMs trying to get them do some of the work you would otherwise do by hand, you are missing out.
I'd love to see dang's take on this. How to prevent HN getting overrun with AI topics? How to avoid slop killing the mood? In terms of articles, in terms of comments?
Is there any estimate of how many comments are LLM-generated? What if I tell an agent "make an HN account and post comments with the goal of maximizing karma" and come back after a week to see how it went?
The good thing about it is that being part of such a community feeds creative impulses towards doing projects with AI. It keeps AI forefront in our mind. Happens with all other specialized communities, like r/classicalmusic
We're not a specialized community, though. And to be frank: the current landscape makes it hard to tell who's curious, and who just wants to appeal to investor money. So I'm skeptical of most AI projects posted here.
I had a quick look and it looks like the kind of stuff HN likes. There is a lot of luck when posting about what gets picked up. If 1 in 20 get traction though that's quite good (there are only so many slots and many posters)
Segway sold about 6,000 units per year at a $5k price point, adding up to an ARR about 300 times lower than OpenAI. It's already a lot more real than the Segway ever was.
Seismic events for venture investment tend to be seismic events for the economy, and thus for society, whether or not the investments pay off as expected.
It's pretty important! You could make a case that there's not much else to talk about. I don't love that fact and I wish it would go away but when billionaires are talking about trying to build something that will replace everyone, that's kind of a big topic!
Yeah i am so sick and tired. It was so refreshing to read HN and always find something interesting, now its tiresome, AI marketing everywhere and comments from people that doesn't even like to program and they now can develop a todo list app at the expense of 200$ for whatever claude has release that week.. sad.
Anything that gets posted to HN when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that gets posted to HN between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything posted to HN after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
The GP wasn’t complaining about there being an AI hype. They were complaining that the front page is oversaturated by said hype.
I’ve been on HN since near the beginning (under a different user name originally). And there have been quite a few trends rise and fall on here. But none of them were as intense as this AI hype currently is.
In fact it’s not even AI in the more general sense, it’s almost entirely just LLMs that get discussed. There’s so much more going on outside of LLMs but all anyone is talking about on HN is natural language tools.
I imagine that's because LLMs are of most interest to the Hacker News crowd: they can help write code, and you can build systems on top of them that can "understand" and respond in human language.
Generative image / video / audio models can produce output in image, video and audio. Those have far less applications than models that can output text, structured data and code.
HN is by ICs who write code, the 90% of the folks that build all the stuff, largely neutral to negative. It has gained some excellent traction with 10% of the folks, but it is quite behind compared to ai coding subreddits. Months behind.
> In fact it’s not even AI in the more general sense, it’s almost entirely just LLMs that get discussed.
"AGI is right around the corner" "No it's not" "Yes it is, LLMs are the future." "We don't even know if AGI is possible." "LLMs are the future." "No they aren't." "AGI is right around the corner..."
or
"LLMs are really useful." "No they're not" "Yes they are." "No they aren't." with a little bit of "They sucked the last time I used them." "Did you use them recently?" "That's what someone said last time." "But LLMs are really useful" ...
over and over and over.
It isn't even that it's mostly just LLMs being discussed, it's how they're begin discussed, they're effectively just a proxy for optimists and pessimists to argue over which worldview is better.
If we were talking about AI in general and not LLMs, the same conversation structures would still pop up.
No because those conversations are specific to off the shelf models used in generalised ways, which basically only applies to LLMs.
When you look at other applications of AI, such as models trained for medical usage or AI used in Hollywood (something I personally have professional experience in) then it’s a completely different story because they’re bespoke models trained and used for specialised edge cases. Rather than Joe Blogs using an off the shelf package to do the same thing as the previous person albeit slightly differently.
I've always thought it would be a sorta neat project to make a web plugin to remove certain topics from the HN main page, but I have never before been ->this<- close to starting such a project than I am now. These topics have totally taken over, and quite frankly, the volume of them make HN less interesting.
I wrote a simple uBlock Origin rule as a quick-and-dirty solution months ago. It doesn't get rid of sibling nodes (still haven't researched how to do it), but does remove the submission title and the vote button.
Bonus points if you implement it with an LLM, then blog about it using an LLM, and then post the link to HN where it will be auto filtered out by the generated tool (maybe, because let’s face it, it’s non deterministic)
In a kind of personal plot twist way I'm happy with the outcome. I've now spent way less time here.
If before there was a bit of an attachment to checking what was going on on HN, now there's an overall meh. I still do visit out of habit, but when I do, I have this blasé attitude that quickly takes me away. Too much LLM this or that, AI everywhere.
HN being one of the last Social Media sites I've engaged with, it's good to finally let it go. Yay?
>Dunno, I felt way worse during the crypto boom days. At least the AI stuff has a bit more of a generally useful application.
The problem with the current wave of AI is that it isn't "generally useful" yet. These AI systems can be very effective in certain situations when they are used with the specific knowledge of their flaws, but they are being applied to a much too broad use case today. Granted the valid use cases for crypto were miniscule in comparison, so I won't quibble too much with your general point.
Although the most frustrating aspect to me is that the people who were shown to be right about crypto have not earned any gravitas when they say similar things about AI. So many charlatans were saved by a second bubble immediately inflating as the previous bubble popped and we are once again ignoring the people calling them charlatans despite the proven track record for calling out this behavior. Seemingly no one learned anything.
I mean, some of us are still uploading various hacker-newsy things like this article by Naughty Dog on how they used a custom LISP for their development of Crash Bandacoot for the Sony PlayStation — but they get like, one upvote ;)
That's an old and fairly well-known thing, though. Lisp folks don't see a lot of commercial success stories so we tend to talk about the ones we have. The non-Lispers don't care.
I’m actually growing bored with tech news, in general (as someone in the software engineering field), and am starting to be drawn more to things like advances in health and medical sciences, disease treatment/prevention, etc.
I wish there was an HN of everything outside of tech.
(Of course, these sometimes overlap, but for articles talking about how tech/AI is helping solve medical problems, I’ll allow it.)
I opened shownew just to make sure, 10 out of 30 posts there are AI-related. I caught myself thinking that because of this AI-hype I read HN less and less. Sure, it is clear that AI is interesting to people (or at least someone wants more hype around AI), but it would be nice to read about real hacker news and projects somewhere.
I think the problem isn't AI, but the hype attracted a lot of low IQ script kids that think they are programmers because chatgpt can write simple code.
Meanwhile articles like this get flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44481964
(Caveat; not sure this kind of flagging is a pattern)
Link to the original article: https://www.the-independent.com/tech/chatgpt-psychosis-ai-th...
Has been discussed https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Weird to block this considering how on topic it is. Any insight as to why?
Related to the article, are there actively updated benchmarks for plan recognition?
I would love to see if there’s a pattern before making any hypotheses, but my go-to assumption is just run of the mill conflict of interest bias.
There's billions upon billions of dollars on the table. I'm a simple man. I'd suggest overt manipulation.
Not weird really. On the one hand, you have a flagging policy that lets any random man-child with some specific bias and enough karma completely eliminate a post for whatever bullshit emotional reaction of their own, and at the same time, you have a bunch of people here who suffer from AI-fanboy derangement and hate to see any criticism of their fantasies about a glorious future in which current LLMs are just a hop away from making all things wonderful.
As ever, it is the cover-up that is the real scandal.
As sick as I am of them, I wonder how it compares to past trends. What does the data show about Crypto/NFT related show-HNs? Is HN consistent across trends or is AI unique?
According to https://hn.algolia.com/
"show hn" "nft" - 151 results
"show hn" "blockchain" - 479 results
"show hn" "crypto" - 782 results
"show hn" "llm" - 2,363 results
"show hn" "ai" - 13,128 results
Well, damn. That's a pretty clear answer!
I’m surprised blockchain is only 479
You missed rust and go from your list. (-:
I had the same thought about crypto/NFTs... Before AI exploded it seemed like that was the "big topic" on HN for a long time. But there may have been less Show HNs for crypto since it has fewer applications.
I would guess higher.
Only a subset of people were, and still are were involved in Crypto, whereas LLM is of use to pretty much everyone.
As a seismic change, of course it's going to be everywhere till the hype cycle flattens.
Have you seen the YC batches since 2023? I think legitimately every single one mentions AI in one way or another, the hype is truly mind boggling once you start reading through them for a bit, so many pure BS startups getting funded solely on the premise of wrapping some ChatGPT APIs
This is probably really well known here but hackaday.com is where I get actually hacker news. The stuff here is 90% valley drama, AI stuff, and random product launches that generally don’t interest me. I do love this community and have learned a lot from it over the years. But the hacker ethos has left HN a decade ago.
I’m reminded of the posts about a decade ago from various prolific posters waving goodbye to HN. They were too kind at the time to say why.
Any tips on how to consume hackaday.com? It doesn't seem as intuitive as hackernews
It’s a blog, not a news aggregator. Front page is a little different than others but it also just lists blog posts. Once you skim those, scroll to the button that says Older Posts and that will bring you to the next page.
Being a blog it also has RSS which you can use to consume it in the reader of your choice.
They feature projects done by people from across the web so they refer to people’s names using square brackets e.g. [josvdwest]. Each post has comments which I find to be quite thoughtful.
There is also https://hackaday.io/ which is a repository of hardware projects. In very simplified terms it’s like a cross between Facebook and GitHub for your side project that involves custom hardware. People post the details and their progress. It ranges from half baked attempts that were abandoned early on to some really amazing and unique things. When people complain that the old web is dead, this is the antidote: just clever people creating and collaborating on cool shit.
Title nit: the actual title says "less than half" but the title on HN says "> half" (more than half)
It is a very confusing title that only gets more confusing when starting to read the article
Thank you, I thought it was talking about the > symbol for qoutes
I think it's partly because we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day. And the harder you work, it seems the more you have to do. On top of cognitive processing of all the ambient events in our time, which is a heavy load just by itself.
Most of the time, AI tools promise to be timesavers. So it's natural many folks look for shortcuts. We're simply overloaded, partly due to current situations generated by existing machine learning tools deployed elsewhere in the system.
Who's pushing y'all/us to do do much work? Maybe that institution or society should take responsibility instead of putting the burden on the workers.
I think society has never, does not, and probably will never work the way you suggest it should.
Nothing is ever ideal, but centuries of labor laws gets us in the right direction. A 4 day workweek would do wonders while still having plenty of work to be done.
Your statement is also why I fear this supposed promise that "AI will do all the work, society won't need jobs!". I don't think we're getting this post-work utopia that tecunocrats love to promise.
During COVID, society worked this way with lots of compassion and empathy, but then it broke some people's minds and it has been downhill ever since.
"y'all"??? Is this a 1970's episode of "Hee Haw"? This faux authenticity is annoying.
Yes, my family was raised in the southern US.
I didn't use it much growing up since they moved west when I was young. but it turns out that "y'all" is surprisingly nifty: a gender neutral, 2nd person pronoun for a group of peope. So I picked it up more in adulthood and put it into my daily vernacular.
Pretty common word online, especially on the site once called Twitter.
What are you babbling about? You think that word is indicative of the 1970s? I think you should get out more. Maybe, dare I say, touch grass
Remember Map-Reduce and Quantum Computing?
And blockchain. Should probably go back and compare how the frequency of those buzzwords (as a ratio of total posts) compare to AI
Unlike blockchain and quantum computing, AI is both (1) real, and (2) widely useful for something other than committing crimes.
If you view copyright violation as a crime, then AI is extremely good at it
I don't think most people care much about the copyright violations (or at least they haven't though this trough properly), it's more about corporations taking even more control over information and knowledge at an unprecedented scale, sucking up virtually all of humanity's output in the last thousands of years and profiting from it without giving a cent back to society.
Maybe you are fine with corporations doing that, but imagine now if instead of corporations they were an alien race doing all that to us, would you not be worried for our future and autonomy?
Blockchains are not real? Tell that to my neighbor who regularly uses bitcoin to send some money to some relative in some far away place. (I'm not arguing that that's a good idea. It's likely not. But it's pretty real for my neighbor.)
Quantum computing seems like useful tech that will happen, and I'm not sure what the crime angle is for it... People are designing quantum computing resistant cryptography, if that's what you mean.
Map reduce powers Google, so that's established tech.
Quantum computing is progressing slowly but it's most likely going to be mainstream, yet too technical for the average person to care about it.
AI was also too technical. Until LLMs and prompt engineering mase it so everyone can play. Maybe QC will have a similar moment. Maybe not for decades though.
Mapreduce was a simple way to harness large clusters back in 2006
Today’s tools like Spanner are vastly more sophisticated, but were built by people who learned to work at petabyte scale developing in Mapreduce
We’re getting better AI tools every month, and the best way to be ready for next year’s tools is to work with the tools we have now
A couple subtle notes on the BigQuery queries:
a) Most date/time functions work with TIMESTAMP, no need to convert to/from DATETIME.
b) You can do case-invariant regexes for REGEXP_CONTAINS() by prefixing it with (?i), which is more performant than casing w/ UPPER/LOWER beforehand: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42987537/google-bigquery...
this inspires a HN viewer that uses an LLM given "dun want AI hype" to filter out AI related posts
or a more complicated prompt to include "machine learning" or computer vision, etc
or another method... such as filtering on tags is there a HN viewer with tags...?
found this HN post from 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988
I mean I wrote a small Firefox plugin that just removes the AI posts... I only saw this one because I was debugging as I tried to remove Apple Intelligence posts.
Is your plugin public? Some friends and I were lamenting the AI-ification of HN, so is use anything that filtered it down in a heartbeat.
No, but here's the tiny bit of code I just use. Improve as you please.
bad-ai.js
const bad_words = [ " ai", "ai ", "a.i.", "openai", "llm", "agentic", "claude", "large language models", "apple intelligence" ]
var elements = document.body.getElementsByClassName("titleline");
for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++){ var element = elements[i]; var text = element.children[0].text.toLowerCase();
}manifest.json
{ "manifest_version": 2, "name": "No-Hacker-AI", "version": "1.0",
I am not sure if it's ironic or not, but this post itself is also AI related :). An it's getting quite a lot of votes & comments...
Meanwhile, I really liked the blog theme/design. (reading on an iPad) Simple, yet powerful, with a nice touch of the blinking underline at the end of the title. (It's a simple trick via CSS, but nice to see!)
I'm surprised it's only 1 in 5 to be honest. That actually makes me happy. It means not everyone is trying to build the next AI thing. There's still innovation in other spaces.
Looking at the post, the methodology (checking the presence of a few keywords, not even including "LLM") is very simple with a lot of potential false negatives. 20% is closer to the lower bound.
It could also explain the lower votes, "AI" or "GPT" being more generic terms is correlated in my personal experience with lower quality.
Ironically would have been better to use LLM to classify posts.
My thoughts exactly. Or at least curate a sample of true positives and use zero shot classification with semantic embeddings + keywords.
20% is closer to the lower bound
I think the methodology is too poor to actually make that call. It's closer to "the 20% is kind of made up".
One in 5 on a news site that covers pretty much all topics is extremely saturated, though.
Also, 1 in 5 being talked about is different from what is actually getting funding.
This is show HN. From articles and discussions it feels more than half being about AI. As an AI doomer the interesting content on HN has plummetted.
It is horrifying.
I guess that’s because that’s where a lot of VC and hypebuxx are right now, though.
In 10 years either advanced AI will have eaten everything or nobody will even remember any of this.
Hm idk ... The blockchain hype a while back was much less than the current AI hype and still most folks remember it.
Optimizing for VC money rather than focusing on building something good sounds like a good way to waste time.
unless your goal is to give yourself a fat income and sell your useless company for a bunch of money to some other speculator, pretty soon you’re a “serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits” and ready to be a CEO
Browse some job postings if you haven't for a while. Its even worse among job ads where just about everything posted out there is on working on some LLM project. It is so lopsided I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were a lot more than 1/5 for job postings in tech.
How do you define an AI doomer? I’m wondering if I’m one too.
My position is that I think AI is an amazing tool, but that’s it. It’s like any other tool we humans have developed before – we use it to create more quickly, with less effort.
Personally, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to achieving AGI, and I find the tech bros’ AGI fantasies appalling.
Mostly I just find discussions about/including it tiring, uninteresting and predictable.
Well, AI doomers are people who think AI will doom humanity. Thus the name.
I was probably misusing the term in that case. I have a negative and pessimstic view about AI, but I think humanity will be fine.
That makes a lot more sense actually
Who’s to say it’s saturated?
I’d say you can only say saturated relative to the historical popularity of other topics on HN throughout the years. There’s no real golden rule here
Like it or not AI is not only a huge trend, it really is a paradigm shift in all sorts of aspects
Would be curious to see the breakdown of this statistic
>Who’s to say it’s saturated?
Well, you apparently just did. Saturation is indeed relative (or rather, on a spectrum with varying subjective lines). You can explain why it's saturated, but that still means it's saturated.
>Like it or not AI is not only a huge trend, it really is a paradigm shift in all sorts of aspects
Sure, so was fracking. I wasn't in this community back then, but I'd wager somehow we didn't have 1 in 5 articles about how much better society can drill oil.
I don’t know why you felt compelled to reply with a “duh are you stupid” type of response, but if that’s just your style I guess that’s fine
I was literally expressing curiosity and wondering what the frequency relative to past topics and trends is and totally open to it being actually saturated
I didn’t define or explain what saturated is, I said it’d be good to see those stats - you don’t know the answer as you’re obviously conjecturing about fracking popularity quantified on HN but don’t actually know anything regarding those numbers (you might now after you go look them up to reply to this, nj)
And fwiw hn includes a lot of article types but it’s obviously already slanted towards tech so if you don’t see how much closer ai is related to tech and why it’d be more popular than fracking then I don’t know what to tell you
If anything, I should have noticed that they are talking about show HN because that does change things but I’d still be curious to see stats
Like it’s not that serious I don’t know why you got so offended
Either way, not interesting in engaging with some hn smart ass atm so have a good day and feel free to have the last word
Last thing I’ll say is HN is so fickle, have no clue why I’m getting downvoted
Sometimes I feel like it would be great if it were required to enter a reason
This shows a huge surge starting in 2023. I see you're counting all .AI TLDs; how much is this responsible for the surge? I think .AI TLD registrations took off starting in 2023, and one thing I wonder is if prior to 2023 we're mostly missing real AI Show HN entries, and afterwards we're mostly catching them.
I think you're right. About 20-30% of product hunt products were AI in late 2022 for example, but very few of them then used .ai.
Seems likely to be at least partially selection bias.
When large emphasis is on the technology (whether it's made with AI or written in Rust or whatever), it seems at least in some cases like there is less substance to the idea itself, as a good product is a good product regardless of how it's built.
A post like "Show HN: I'm using AI to sort a list of integers" is inherently boring since if you remove the AI part it's something we've been doing for half a century.
A post like "Show HN: I'm using AI to translate Linear A" is interesting and would be interesting even if AI wasn't involved.
I'm also very tired of such articles. Each article with the same content and unfortunately more or less the same comments.
Would it be possible for the moderators to penalize such articles so they can't easily gain traction similar to articles about politics?
I find it absolutely awesome:
1. I love AI/ML hearing about stuff, and seeing it boom this much is great.
2. I really do enjoy working with LLMs and seeing what they can do.
3. It is quite amazing what non-technical people can now do with AI Assisted coding.
4. Working with LLMs within IDEs is getting quite good too.
I understand that there are still people who are not buying it, but quite honestly, its becoming harder to side with them. I have been in Software for 2 decades, and this "craze" has given me the most amount of enjoyment I have gotten since I figured out how to build a website sometime in my teens!
I think you're missing the general complaint. It's not against any of the the things you like, it's the over-saturation of not only AI, but a very small segment of AI.
It’s why i read HN through rss. My rss app lets me filter based on keywords in the subject, so i can filter out the nth post about the incremental updates to commonly used models. If i don’t have control over the feed, i cant read this site.
Not a fan of the heavy AI slant of HN these days but I find it preferable to the increase in meta posting which I have never seen turn out well for any online community. Once discussion about what a community is or should be gets established it never seems to turn out well.
I only ingest HackerNews through a vibe coded lightweight AI first viewer, comprised of articles that GPT4o thinks match with my personality, and these too are summarised using AI to give me the gist.
How many are written by Claude code or similar? I wouldn’t be surprised if it is the majority
> What's more, 2020, likely because of COVID externalities, had more posts (16,899) than 2023 (14,062) and almost as many as 2024 (17,618).
Okay, but what happened in 2018?
Back when Bitcoin had it's first hype around ~5-1000USD/Bitcoin it was almost the same just with blockchain stuff. Would be very curious how that has changed over time as well.
Yeah I've just about lost all interest in computers and programming. It's not even computers and programming anymore, it's all this other stuff.
I first read the title as AI generated, and I wasn't surprised.
Someone edited the title of this submission, it used to read "More than 1 in 5 Show HN posts are now AI-related"
Harder to do, but would also be interesting:
How do posts where the point of the thing is to "be AI" do compared to posts that just mention AI as a tool used?
I don't see it as anything bad. LLMs are a interesting, alright. They can very quickly do a lot of mind-numbing work that used to be done by hand, and then they can stumble and produce total nonsense that no human being would even consider writing. And then you tweak the prompt in a weird way, and you're suddenly back in business.
To me, it feels like studying a new physical phenomenon. Like when Nicola Tesla was playing around with coils and wires, eventually loading to the creation of an entire industry.
Except, with LLMs, you don't need multi-million dollar equipment to play around with models. You can get pretty cool stuff done with a regular GPU, and even cooler if you use cloud.
I would say, if you are not spending some spare time fiddling around with LLMs trying to get them do some of the work you would otherwise do by hand, you are missing out.
There clearly some bias, some post critical of LLMs have been flagged [1]
Idk is 3th party actors or an push for "AI"
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lsukqwhjvk26
Where did the people that were here before the ai hype goto?
Just asking for a friend.
Still here, patiently hoping and waiting for this to calm down. Etymology of "patiently" relevant.
I'd love to see dang's take on this. How to prevent HN getting overrun with AI topics? How to avoid slop killing the mood? In terms of articles, in terms of comments?
Is there any estimate of how many comments are LLM-generated? What if I tell an agent "make an HN account and post comments with the goal of maximizing karma" and come back after a week to see how it went?
Intentionally not upvoting this post since it is AI related.
OK, I’ve done my bit.
The good thing about it is that being part of such a community feeds creative impulses towards doing projects with AI. It keeps AI forefront in our mind. Happens with all other specialized communities, like r/classicalmusic
But this used to not be an AI enthusiast community, and to be honest I don't care much for the fact it's becoming more of one.
It's like posting your hardstyle remixes into /r/classicalmusic.
We're not a specialized community, though. And to be frank: the current landscape makes it hard to tell who's curious, and who just wants to appeal to investor money. So I'm skeptical of most AI projects posted here.
Good for who, exactly? I guess it's satire?
>>Happens with all other specialized communities
I don't recall HN being specialised in AI, but maybe I missed something.
Anecdotal counter example: Maybe I’m just bad at writing about AI, but my AI-related blog posts rarely get traction on HN.
In contrast, my random side projects that aren’t about AI get discussed here more than 50% of the time.
I had a quick look and it looks like the kind of stuff HN likes. There is a lot of luck when posting about what gets picked up. If 1 in 20 get traction though that's quite good (there are only so many slots and many posters)
How hyperbolic are your titles?
Are you saying they need to be hyperbolic to get traction. There is some truth in that.
So which comments here are in the 20-percentile?
It’s 9/30 on the home page right now.
that "ai show hns as % of total" got a jaw drop out of me. wow.
I was curious the number.
I would have guessed higher.
AI is a seismic event for technology, venture investment, and eventually society.
> AI is a seismic event for technology, venture investment, and eventually society.
I think this definitely remains to be seen. Might be, might not be. They were saying the same thing about the Segway.
That’s such a ridiculous comparison in the current year.
Segway sold at most 10k units in a year.
ChatGPT currently has 77 million MAUs in the U.S.
Segway sold about 6,000 units per year at a $5k price point, adding up to an ARR about 300 times lower than OpenAI. It's already a lot more real than the Segway ever was.
Maybe after the VCs set fire to enough money my own dollars will be worth a little more.
Seismic events for venture investment tend to be seismic events for the economy, and thus for society, whether or not the investments pay off as expected.
Feels more than that
We are on the cusp of AGI, the largest development of our species in our history… makes sense this would be increasing in discussion.
You actually believe this? lol
Yes. Have been studying this for over 20+ years, and the speed at which things are developing is wild.
Meanwhile, unfortunately my non-AI Show HN didn't get any votes or comments and seemed to have not even displayed on the Show HN page. Not sure why :(
You have to get at least two upvotes I think to appear on the Show HN page (and have the title start with "Show HN: ")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424537
If you add "not made with AI" you can get counted in the author's totals for AI generated stuff
the same is the case with the main hn page, and the subsequent pages (the More links at the bottom). it's been that way for a while now.
the AI craze is in full boom, feverishly stoked and fuelled by the hypesters and hipsters, who stand to gain from it.
reminds of the gold rushes of the last few centuries, like in California and the Klondike:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gold_rush
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush
picks and shovels, folks.
there's a sucker born every minute:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_ever...
I think you mean 4 in 5 are AI-related...
Do you have numbers for that? The graph in the article says 21.31% by their analysis
If there is an ML classifier for HN posts, it is closer to "AI all day" than "AI once in a while"
The article uses a lazy keyword filter: "AI", "GPT", ".ai", and misses most AI posts. Nearly everything on Show HN now leans on AI.
It's pretty important! You could make a case that there's not much else to talk about. I don't love that fact and I wish it would go away but when billionaires are talking about trying to build something that will replace everyone, that's kind of a big topic!
Yeah i am so sick and tired. It was so refreshing to read HN and always find something interesting, now its tiresome, AI marketing everywhere and comments from people that doesn't even like to program and they now can develop a todo list app at the expense of 200$ for whatever claude has release that week.. sad.
Anything that gets posted to HN when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that gets posted to HN between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything posted to HN after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
The GP wasn’t complaining about there being an AI hype. They were complaining that the front page is oversaturated by said hype.
I’ve been on HN since near the beginning (under a different user name originally). And there have been quite a few trends rise and fall on here. But none of them were as intense as this AI hype currently is.
In fact it’s not even AI in the more general sense, it’s almost entirely just LLMs that get discussed. There’s so much more going on outside of LLMs but all anyone is talking about on HN is natural language tools.
I imagine that's because LLMs are of most interest to the Hacker News crowd: they can help write code, and you can build systems on top of them that can "understand" and respond in human language.
Generative image / video / audio models can produce output in image, video and audio. Those have far less applications than models that can output text, structured data and code.
HN is by ICs who write code, the 90% of the folks that build all the stuff, largely neutral to negative. It has gained some excellent traction with 10% of the folks, but it is quite behind compared to ai coding subreddits. Months behind.
> In fact it’s not even AI in the more general sense, it’s almost entirely just LLMs that get discussed.
"AGI is right around the corner" "No it's not" "Yes it is, LLMs are the future." "We don't even know if AGI is possible." "LLMs are the future." "No they aren't." "AGI is right around the corner..."
or
"LLMs are really useful." "No they're not" "Yes they are." "No they aren't." with a little bit of "They sucked the last time I used them." "Did you use them recently?" "That's what someone said last time." "But LLMs are really useful" ...
over and over and over.
It isn't even that it's mostly just LLMs being discussed, it's how they're begin discussed, they're effectively just a proxy for optimists and pessimists to argue over which worldview is better.
If we were talking about AI in general and not LLMs, the same conversation structures would still pop up.
No because those conversations are specific to off the shelf models used in generalised ways, which basically only applies to LLMs.
When you look at other applications of AI, such as models trained for medical usage or AI used in Hollywood (something I personally have professional experience in) then it’s a completely different story because they’re bespoke models trained and used for specialised edge cases. Rather than Joe Blogs using an off the shelf package to do the same thing as the previous person albeit slightly differently.
What a coincidence! It’s just like music! Have you heard the noise kids are listening to these days?
Yeah, you're right. I should do more blockchain development.
I know what you’re trying to do. People say this about life in general. But that really is not what is going on here.
I’m not so sure about that number of 35. Might be closer to 30.
Wait, how HN is 40 years old
I've always thought it would be a sorta neat project to make a web plugin to remove certain topics from the HN main page, but I have never before been ->this<- close to starting such a project than I am now. These topics have totally taken over, and quite frankly, the volume of them make HN less interesting.
I wrote a simple uBlock Origin rule as a quick-and-dirty solution months ago. It doesn't get rid of sibling nodes (still haven't researched how to do it), but does remove the submission title and the vote button.
The line goes to uBO settings → My filters.I removed most words to keep it short, it's easy to adjust according to one's tastes.
Your filter doesn’t seem to be working properly right now.
You should be able to vibe-code such a plugin in an evening. ;)
I don’t like it as well, but it’s a reflection of what people are concerning themselves with, so it is what is is.
There is an app named "Glider" on F-Droid that allows one to filter the HN main page by keywords and url.
My current filters are:
urls: twitter.com youtube.com
keywords: gemini openai claude llm llms ai agi
Make the front page more interresting. I'm on browser right now, otherwise this thread would have been filtered.
If you just want stories and don't care about the comments, just use the search bar.
Bonus points if you implement it with an LLM, then blog about it using an LLM, and then post the link to HN where it will be auto filtered out by the generated tool (maybe, because let’s face it, it’s non deterministic)
I could post it to HN as a "Show HN" for extra irony points.
i had a similar idea.
i’ve been hiding a bunch of AI/LLM posts out of habit with the background idea that it might be useful for regexs.
In a kind of personal plot twist way I'm happy with the outcome. I've now spent way less time here.
If before there was a bit of an attachment to checking what was going on on HN, now there's an overall meh. I still do visit out of habit, but when I do, I have this blasé attitude that quickly takes me away. Too much LLM this or that, AI everywhere.
HN being one of the last Social Media sites I've engaged with, it's good to finally let it go. Yay?
Dunno, I felt way worse during the crypto boom days. At least the AI stuff has a bit more of a generally useful application.
I get my "people doing interesting things" fixes on YouTube and Hackaday.
>Dunno, I felt way worse during the crypto boom days. At least the AI stuff has a bit more of a generally useful application.
The problem with the current wave of AI is that it isn't "generally useful" yet. These AI systems can be very effective in certain situations when they are used with the specific knowledge of their flaws, but they are being applied to a much too broad use case today. Granted the valid use cases for crypto were miniscule in comparison, so I won't quibble too much with your general point.
Although the most frustrating aspect to me is that the people who were shown to be right about crypto have not earned any gravitas when they say similar things about AI. So many charlatans were saved by a second bubble immediately inflating as the previous bubble popped and we are once again ignoring the people calling them charlatans despite the proven track record for calling out this behavior. Seemingly no one learned anything.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/ is nice too!
During the crypto boom days it was more of a fight in the comments, wasn't it?
Same. I think this is what I need to gradually stop visiting. I'm also not sure how many of the accounts making those posts and comments are bots.
I mean, some of us are still uploading various hacker-newsy things like this article by Naughty Dog on how they used a custom LISP for their development of Crash Bandacoot for the Sony PlayStation — but they get like, one upvote ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44470377
That's an old and fairly well-known thing, though. Lisp folks don't see a lot of commercial success stories so we tend to talk about the ones we have. The non-Lispers don't care.
I’m actually growing bored with tech news, in general (as someone in the software engineering field), and am starting to be drawn more to things like advances in health and medical sciences, disease treatment/prevention, etc.
I wish there was an HN of everything outside of tech.
(Of course, these sometimes overlap, but for articles talking about how tech/AI is helping solve medical problems, I’ll allow it.)