7 ms·
Hacker News, Sans AI
- kindawinda 4mo agoCoincidently he uses AI to solve this problem
- soraminazuki 4mo agoDo you have evidence? I see no indication of this.
- consumer451 4mo agoWhat would be the worse non-semantic alternative? Regex? LLMs are the holy grail for getting beyond string matches. I would hope one was used to solve such a problem, otherwise that would be a poor product, right? I did not investigate the product, but my point here is irony. The correct solution to implement the TFA product is to use an LLM.
- soraminazuki 4mo agoYes, keyword-based matching is more than good enough for the use case. It doesn't justify bringing in trillion dollar companies to subsidize the costs. Even if you wanted to go beyond simple keyword matching, there are ways to determine relevance before jumping to the shiny new overkill solution. Also for everyone's sanity, please don't turn a troll's false accusations into a cynical argument for more LLMs. That's what drives to people to reach for solutions like the one in the article in the first place.
- vitus 4mo agoI have evidence that it's not AI. It's just a regex. https://github.com/elijah-potter/blog/blob/master/pages/hnsansai/index.tsx#L104-L113 https://github.com/elijah-potter/blog/blob/master/pages/hnsa...
- soraminazuki 4mo agoI thought as much. With the sheer amount of flagged comments in the comment history turning up with showdead on, it looked very suspicious.
- yubblegum 4mo agoSometimes a little poison is medicine.
- 9021007 4mo agoHug of death?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- chilipepperhott 4mo agoyep. standby
- cliche 4mo agoA lot of demand for ‘Sans AI’ :)
- almogo 4mo agoProbably by bots :)
- chilipepperhott 4mo agoOur AI overlords don't want an AI-free Hacker News
- 866-RON-0-FEZ 4mo agoInteresting this keeps moving up the front page when the site is inaccessible because it's hosted on a baked potato.
- kylecazar 4mo agoI'm curious to find out if they're using a model to detect AI content. I'd be more amused than disappointed. But, alas, potato.
- chilipepperhott 4mo agoIt's not an LLM. Why use big program when regex do trick?
- kylecazar 4mo agoMaster of efficiency
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Bolwin 4mo agoYou can get the best of both worlds with a small embedding model
- chilipepperhott 4mo agoShow me an embedding model that runs as fast as an optimized regex engine and I'll buy you a beer.
- Bolwin 4mo agoProbably not as fast as a simple regex but static embedding models can get stupid fast e.g https://www.flowercomputer.com/news/fast-static-embedding/ https://www.flowercomputer.com/news/fast-static-embedding/
- Polizeiposaune 4mo agoWas hoping it was a new font.
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo agoI have an app that does Hacker News with AI; it analyses all the stories and comments for a number of criteria, and tags them so you can skip stuff you don't want to see. I should get around to actually publishing it but I've been lazy. One of the fun things I noticed is the psychological impact of framing. A comment that might've made you feel the need to reply before has less emotional weight if it's highlighted in red and a diminished font. Same thing for stories; if you would normally disagree with a story and it would make you want to comment, you feel less like commenting if the story is rated as 'lacking evidence', 'unsupported by research', 'personal anecdotes only', etc. It drives down the feeling of needing to engage. Which is horrible for site engagement, but good for mental health (I think).
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- simonw 4mo agoI built (well, vibe-coded) a version of this a while back that runs against the Hacker News API, it's static HTML on GitHub Pages so I don't have to run a server for it: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered
- phildenhoff 4mo agoHow often do you use it? Immediately I started thinking how nice it would be to use natural language to have LLMs generate a deterministic filter for stories matching content I DO care about, filtered from New. Instead of filtering it out.
- simonw 4mo agoI don't use it myself. I built it for a Hacker News thread where someone else was saying "I wish I could browse Hacker News without all the AI stuff".
- zuzululu 4mo agointeresting but i rarely use any HN reader there's just something about this UI and its consistency I also don't mind all the AI related news If anything I just wish they had a mute/block button. its not fun when somebody is stalking you replying to every comment you make.
- maxkosty 4mo agoLove that this is configurable unlike OPs version. That way I can exclude "I rewrote ____ in Rust". Would be nice to have "include" option... for those of use who may want to ONLY read posts about AI or whatever else niche interest.
- Bolwin 4mo agoIt is a little ironic coming from the most prolific AI poster here
- simonw 4mo ago
- millerm 4mo agoI can deal with a launch problem. I am looking forward to being able to check it out. I stopped coming to HN as often as I used to because there has been too much AI talk. It's like a dang AI subreddit. I don't want anything to do with AI. I have lost 2 jobs to AI budgets and stupid executive decisions. It's no longer part of my personal and professional life. I hope it works out.
- andrewjf 4mo agoI agree with you, but haven't really left yet since there's still a good amount of discourse outside AI related topics. Seems a significant amount of contributors here are all to eager to fall over themselves putting themselves, their juniors, children, and colleagues out of work, long term.
- archagon 4mo agoTBH, I'm mostly here out of spite at this point. It's unhealthy but I can't seem to stop rage-reading.
- dijksterhuis 4mo agourgh, i'm with you on this. i need to stop, but i can't for some reason.
- freetime2 4mo agoMy personal stance is that the genie is out of the bottle, and there's likely no putting it back. Kind of like nuclear weapons: I wish they didn't exist, but since they do I'd rather be on the side that has them. Honestly it's an incredible technology the likes of which I never thought I would see in my lifetime. It's definitely not perfect, but it is improving at a frightening pace. Some days I am optimistic for how it might shape the future, and other days I am scared. If goverments wanted to make a credible effort to limit how they are used, I would support that. But I'm not terribly optimistic that can or will happen.
- 4mo ago
- chilipepperhott 4mo agoHopefully fixed the cache invalidation. I'm crossing my fingers.
- henriquemaia 4mo agoI've been training to naturally ignore AI mentions that I thought this entry was about some HN ui font change (Sans).
- geniium 4mo agoWas about to write the same
- altairprime 4mo agoThe style is a bit off for the usual HN fare: 'sans' should be lowercase here, or otherwise it's easy to confuse for a font. It's still pretty swell :)
- DavideNL 4mo ago> The style is a bit off A much better option, in my opinion: https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
- ochrist 4mo agoYeah, that doesn't work either. E.g. it has the following stories: - Nordstjernen 1.0 (built with Claude) - Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
- altairprime 4mo agoThe only way to fully detect and remove AI posts from HN is using human curation by a human-selected few. Everything automated will have a higher review rate (postsReviewed / postsTotal) and also an higher error rate (incorrectReview / postsReviewed) in return for not being subject to puny human weaknesses like sleep, sickness, and (until curator selection is itself automated), spam/troll malice. To misquote my favorite blooper reel ever, “That’s not something that code can fix, that’s gonna be a little harder to fix”.
- DavideNL 4mo ago
- flexagoon 4mo agoI've been thinking of making something like this for myself for quite a while now, glad I'm not the only one who had the idea and someone actually did it before I got to it
- pkage 4mo agoThe filter doesn't appear to be perfect, one of the top posts right now is "My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development"
- rsyring 4mo agoI guess they could run the titles through a (flash) LLM to catch ones were keyword detection won't cut it. Have to love the irony. :)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- szatkus 4mo agoAt least the blog post was proofread by an AI.
- soraminazuki 4mo ago[dead]
- chilipepperhott 4mo agoThat should be fixed as soon as my server has a chance to catch up.
- factorialboy 4mo agoFor one sec, I got excited for a new font!
- hirako2000 4mo agoA problem is it doesn't load as fast. Could it be helped?
- chilipepperhott 4mo agoYes, it can. I am having a major cache invalidation problem. One of the major blights of programmers everywhere.
- mkw5053 4mo agoAre you using AI to figure out what's about what's AI and what's not?
- ares623 4mo agoI've been thinking the same. Couldn't this be done with a browser extension that hides elements that matches a regex?
- chilipepperhott 4mo agoNot quite. Lots of articles don't mention AI in the title, even if that is their core subject.
- edgarvaldes 4mo agoYes, please. A general-purpose filter like the one on 4chan would also work.
- cliche 4mo agoLove this. Really nice to see a HN front page without AI, the fatigue is real.
- theflyestpilot 4mo ago^how about just be a devoted AI section at the top?
- booleandilemma 4mo ago[dead]
- dtrav 4mo agoWhile you are at it can you filter out posts to subscription only sites eg economist NYT $&c. We're all here to escape click bait
- uniclaude 4mo agoOh. A little bit of a let down. I was expecting "HN without comments and posts written by LLMs".
- chilipepperhott 4mo agoThat would be cool. Although your username is a little suspicious…
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- BinaryMachine 4mo agoWelp, it was only a matter of time. Thank you
- nubinetwork 4mo agoOkay, now filter out the VC stuff too...
- wewewedxfgdf 4mo agoMaybe HN could have a filter button that hides ANY threads for keywords you choose to filter. I would instantly hide anything about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
- amelius 4mo agoMy immediate thought was already expressed in one of the few comments: > Does this use an LLM to categorize "AI-related" vs "not-AI related" articles? Would be ironic. Lol
- bakugo 4mo agoI have my own version of this as a browser extension paired with a backend that runs all new submissions through a small LLM to classify them, which catches more than a simple word match. Fight fire with fire, as they say. Though I haven't used it much lately, because seeing half of the front page disappear when I enable it is a bit disheartening.
- kordlessagain 4mo agoSays the guy that uses a man-in-the-middle service to "protect" his website. So dumb. I seriously hate Cloudflare.
- postalcoder 4mo agoI built a filter for AI (inclusive and exclusive) for hcker.news a while back and continue to maintain it. It’s quite robust, and does more than just keyword filtering. https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
- DavideNL 4mo agoThanks, love it! I'm now wondering, what the default filter of https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ is exactly. I can't seem to get the same result on https://hcker.news/ https://hcker.news/ .... :/
- DavideNL 4mo ago...so i think its just a cumulative view of the Hacker News front page, except grouped/ordered differently? ¯\_(ツ)_/
- ochrist 4mo agoSomeone mentioned this in another comment, so I'll just copy/pasta my own comment: Yeah, that doesn't work either. E.g. it has the following stories: - Nordstjernen 1.0 (built with Claude) - Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
- postalcoder 4mo agoNever thought to check codebases for AI commits. That's very interesting. Since your comment I have added an option to filter out github submissions that contain commits from an AI assistant. I've implemented it by pulling the last 50 commits from the repo and checking for signatures of the commonly known coding assistants. Regarding your second one, I have a pretty extensive static list that missed out on "GenAI" as a keyword but I've now created an automation to check search for exceptions daily.
- ochrist 4mo agoGreat idea. But the first thread I opened (Nordstjernen 1.0) is according to the comments about a project built with Claude. So it doesn't remove all the AI stuff.
- wodenokoto 4mo agoGreat idea. I too have been worn out by AI talk on HN. Right now, number 3 is an AI slop tutorial released by Microsoft. I guess there is no real escape
- johnthescott 4mo agootherwise limited to "keyword" search ...
- tlavoie 4mo agoI've found a workable approach, browsing HN with my feed reader (FreshRSS, in this case). I have bookmarks for various things, one of which is what I've labeled "AI nonsense". It's not HN-specific, but selects for unread articles that match a variety of AI-adjacent terms. One or two might look interesting enough to read, all the rest get the "mark as read" treatment, and so much clutter just goes away.