10 ms·

How much of HN is AI?

• jdw64 2mo ago
  Is Pangram's detection capability considered to be on the higher side? This post seems to be written under the assumption that Pangram's detection is highly effective. Is it actually considered to be on the higher side in English-speaking circles?
  • bigfishrunning 2mo ago
    My confidence in Pangram is pretty low -- seems like a lot of false positives *and* negatives
  • jrflo 2mo ago
    Yes, from my experience it is highly effective
  • gibspaulding 2mo ago
    Pangram links several third party evaluations [1] that all seem to agree with 90+% detection, and very close to 0% false positives. Obviously those could be cherry picked, but I’ve yet to see arguments to the contrary that actually include any supporting data. (E.g here’s a prompt that will get Claude to spit out text that pangram doesn’t detect or here’s an article authored in 2018 that pangram says is AI.) Detection is an arms race, so this could change (though I’d expect in the direction of false negatives), but right now it seems like defense is winning. [1] https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals
    • CharlesW 2mo ago
      > Obviously those could be cherry picked… The "could" isn't required here, since Pangram calls many of the evals "collaborations", and some received direct support. Results that don't favor Pangram as being among the least-worst of a questionable product category* surely wouldn't be featured. * https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-work/ https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...
      • gibspaulding 2mo ago
        The most recent reference in that article appears to be from 2023.
  • tiagod 2mo ago
    Would be cool to see data for an older timespan, starting pre-LLM
• falsemyrmidon 2mo ago
  It's not just HN, have you seen mainstream news recently? It's just a hot topic and I think it's normal for people to talk about those a lot. If quantum computing ever goes mainstream, I'm sure you'll see a lot of articles about that as well.
  • brabel 2mo ago
    The programming Reddit forbade AI posts. Unfortunately the result is NOT better level posts, but a wasteland instead.
    • add-sub-mul-div 2mo ago
      Reddit had become a wasteland before the LLM era began.
    • VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
      Forbidding AI posts is a net positive, not negative.
• bewareofscams 2mo ago
  Did not read the article, but I would say about 40%. Btw, you can toggle [showdead] in profile settings, then you'll see messages caught by moderators, which are sophisticated bots (writing style at ChatGPT3 level) + absolutely valid points that lash out on ruling class, SV mentality, US and Israel.
  • zobzu 2mo ago
    a lot is also not caught.. and over time itll be less and less. hn has been great for a very long time, but this time has come to an end
  • moffkalast 2mo ago
    Did read the article, you'd be correct... for a few months ago. Now it's apparently up to 60%.
  • zamadatix 2mo ago
    > you'll see messages caught by moderators Much of these are caught by users downvoting and/or flagging. I think the lack of a public moderation log makes people think the mods are constantly running around every story/comment to steer the site when really it's the users doing most of the grunt work while the moderators only step in occasionally for the more serious items.
• hugs 2mo ago
  there was one glorious day years ago when every story on the hn front page was about erlang. that was fun. (anyone else remember that?)
  • philipkglass 2mo ago
    The Erlang day was on 2009-03-11. You can still see how the front page looked that day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11
    • hugs 2mo ago
      thank you!
• micromacrofoot 2mo ago
  Would be interested to see this compared to past trends, crypto and NFTs for example
• jrflo 2mo ago
  My reaction is: that's an appropriate amount. AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse.
  • mistyvales 2mo ago
    I'm sick of it, but you are 100% right. I'm sure a good number of active readers here want even more AI-related articles.
    • orphea 2mo ago
      Same. I hate that the TS is right.
  • fcanesin 2mo ago
    Upvoted: I was going to write this exact reply. Everyone is a bit tired of hearing about AI, but it's advancing fast and it's the most important thing right now. As Demis says, if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it.
    • netdevphoenix 2mo ago
      > it's advancing fast Actually, it (LLM models) has been advancing slower for a while. This is pretty much in the mainstream. And the current approach is facing all sorts of obstacles that are not exclusively technological. The compute needs are no longer sustainable. Financially, big labs are drowning in debt and backlash against data centres has grown so much that it has become an electoral topic in at least one major country.
    • jdjdjdjdjdi 2mo ago
      why exactly do we want ASI, and further, if we DID, why on Earth would we want it controlled by the likes of Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Larry Ellison? FUCK THAT
      • 2mo ago
• jerf 2mo ago
  "At the same time, it has a fair number of toxic commenters, making it a dependable source of insults hurled in my general direction; if you want a taste, {another article by same author} has been called “watered-down” and “slop”." We have gotten to the point where it is virtually guaranteed that some commenter to almost any given article will have an oversensitive AI detector and accuse the author of it being AI. I swear there's people whose AI detectors are just def is_content_ai(content): return True Occasionally such people also complain about how much of the world is AI now... well... yeah, that's what happens when that's your detector. It's not quite that bad, as bad as it is. I don't know what to do about it. Discussion about AI provenance of a given work is often a valid topic. When YouTube shovels an AI channel at me and it briefly penetrates my defenses, it's heartening to see the commentors trying to warn people about it, shortly before I block the channel. (It's annoying that so many legit channels, which I know are legit because they predate AI and the same person is on camera as before, have switched to heavily-AI thumbnails. That's the hole that the other channels sometimes get me with, because just having an AI thumbnail doesn't prove it's not a legit channel now.) On the other hand, the chorus of very annoyed people who are very annoyed because they see AI everywhere who see AI everywhere because they literally see AI everywhere are becoming a bit of a nuisance themselves.
  • mschuster91 2mo ago
    > We have gotten to the point where it is virtually guaranteed that some commenter to almost any given article will have an oversensitive AI detector and accuse the author of it being AI. Well... when the utter majority of articles written about topics surrounding AI are written with AI and a ton of newcomers to the reverse-engineering and even hardware hacking communities now have AI do their work for them, even the last remnants of areas that used to be "for humans only" are now contaminated with AI. Of course people end up being very sensitive. I come to HN to read words written by humans, not fluff hallucinated by an LLM.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
  • pton_xd 2mo ago
• mgl 2mo ago
  Democratization of access has its victims. I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes. 15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars. 10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce. 5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter. Now it is a blurry view into the future through the black mirror of AI. How could we jump back into the cozy past again? I do not have a clear answer, but what seems to work for you are small groups of friends and friends of friends hanging out on WhatsApp or Discord, discussing geeky news together in the context of their backgrounds. But these are very curated and very closed groups, still operating on the social media platforms of behemoths. Would now be the right time to restart self-hosted message boards or Mattermost/Campfire instances?
  • jklinger410 2mo ago
    I think you answered your own question, simply un-democratize access. Go places with high barriers of entry.
    • add-sub-mul-div 2mo ago
      You don't even need explicit barriers, the masses are staying on Reddit/Twitter regardless. Only the discerning are seeking out better and newer options and those options are staying the right size rather than absorbing the eternal September.
  • nemomarx 2mo ago
    Run a self hosted forum or instance of whatever you like, and just only let people sign up if they are recommended by someone or can argue their way in, basically. xenforo and some add ons can do that, and I'm sure there's a few self hosted messaging apps like you mention but I'm not as familiar
    • mgl 2mo ago
      I do not think this is a technology problem. I think it is a problem of how we changed: shorter attention spans, and a much larger volume of information to process. Short forms win, long forms vanish, which is a tragedy in itself as good writing requires good understanding, and understanding is impossible without attention. I'm in my 40s. I remember lcamtuf from pl.comp.security when I was just getting started playing with FreeBSD and other fun stuff.
• 0xbadcafebee 2mo ago
  Compare to the 2010s when 90% of the front page was about NoSQL
• brcmthrowaway 2mo ago
  Sometimes there's an obvious AI comment, how is it auto-hidden/downvoted?
  • mh- 2mo ago
    There is some LLM detection for comments that auto-flags them. It has some unfortunate side effects, though. Namely on a thread where people are discussing a text-heavy post that is LLM-authored, quoting a large enough block of that content appears to trigger it sometimes. Makes sense that it does, but..
  • VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
    Contrary to popular belief, it's quite easy to spot something written with AI. You just need the skill/gift. I usually spot them rather quickly and will flag on sight. Other users will do the same.
• thrill 2mo ago
  Far less than the constant whining about AI.
• totalconfusion 2mo ago
  Not everyone here is AI. I can't tell the difference so what does it matter? If I learn something or get inspired by a person or a bot, great. AI tools are incredibly powerful, new and rapidly evolving, you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.
  • netdevphoenix 2mo ago
    > I can't tell the difference so what does it matter? Eternal September. Just like the usenet groups
    • reaperducer 2mo ago
      Eternal September. Just like the usenet groups And CB radio before that.
  • latexr 2mo ago
    > Not everyone here is AI. That’s not the argument. > I can't tell the difference so what does it matter? It matters because you’re not the only human on HN and others have difference preferences. “I don’t care about this particular issue” is not the same thing as “this particular issue isn’t important”. > you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it. Not the argument either. No one is “surprised” this happens, people (obviously not all, but a significant number) are annoyed by it.
    • totalconfusion 2mo ago
      If people can't tell the difference but still get the shits because of some notion of being cheated or putting humanity on the pedestal, they're just being tribalistic. It's a common human rationalisation that helps entrench social hierarchies but in this case, and it's probably not the right word but Speciesism. It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop, loving a colour, painting your house, then your neighbour informing you that a person of colour or an algorithm created it, then you hating it. We were something different before we were primates, and we'll be something different after. Evolution has always been in a flux. We're all just entities processing information and in my opinion, humanity should collectively get off the high horse. Serious question, could you ever have a meaningful relationship with a teddy bear and/or an algorithm?
• my-next-account 2mo ago
  I swear that the amount of astroturfing in the comment field by AI bots being positive towards AI is at an all time high as well.
  • nephihaha 2mo ago
    For me, I'm surprised to see people proposing conformist views and trying to push whatever the establishment is pushing.
    • seizethecheese 2mo ago
      I dunno, I was a contrarian with blockchain and now am conformist with AI. Being contrarian for its own sake is pretty stupid.
      • krapp 2mo ago
        >Being contrarian for its own sake is pretty stupid. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
        • nephihaha 2mo ago
          Got to say I agree with this. Contrarians can be an annoyance, but someone's got to point out the Emperor's got no clothes on.
          • krapp 2mo ago
            Contrarians are usually wrong, they're more wrong more often than other people. But when they're right, they tend to be ahead of the curve.
            • nephihaha 2mo ago
              At the risk of being one myself... I usually find that there is some flaw in just about any set up and someone has to address that. Constant negativity is not a virtue of course, but neither is complete compliance and agreement. Most people will agree with whoever is in charge, and it takes a lot to shake them out of that. It is clearly a flaw in the human species.
• feverzsj 2mo ago
  HN really needs an AI filter. Most posts are AI company promotion now.
  • CharlesW 2mo ago
    All HN users can be part of the solution. Help mods by emailing them at hn@ycombinator.com. I recently pointed out a suspicious pattern, and the mods were able to use that to track and ban a collection of accounts.
    • rvz 2mo ago
      Some users on HN are "allowed" to do breathless AI self-promotion on HN and other readers support them by posting it anyway. Other HNers on the other hand, got banned immediately for doing the same thing. That is why many users here realized that there are protected accounts that can do that and everyone else cannot. Even in rare circumstances, the moderators sometimes unbeknownst to them, may also be indirectly allowing it. It is far more complicated and one of the reasons why users here are fed up of the constant AI deluge on this orange site and nothing is changing other than there is more of it.
      • miltonlost 2mo ago
        All the god damn pelican spam
      • ofjcihen 2mo ago
        I’ve had some luck messaging the moderators and calling them out for it. They may or may not do it on purpose, I have no idea. But it has worked to get certain golden children at least flagged when they’re doing things that would get others straight up banned.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • coldpie 2mo ago
    I wrote a browser extension to auto-hide AI-related articles. It makes HN much more readable: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/
• rzmmm 2mo ago
  Reading these comments it seems that meta-discussion of AI is the most hot button topic of all in HN.
• ViktorRay 2mo ago
  Reading about tech has become gradually less and less fun for me over the past 16 years. Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad? I remember those days I would read tech news and sites like Ars Technica and comments were sometimes snarky and indignant but generally people were enthusiastic about reading tech because it offered glimpses into more technically advanced futures. I wasn't browsing HN back then but I imaging the same thing was true of HN in the late 2000's and early 2010's. Now tech sites like Ars Technica consistently have comment sections filled with immense negativity cynicism indigation and just plain old boiling rage. I avoid those comment sections now because reading such things negatively affects my mood and certainly isn't fun. And over the past few years HN has gradually become more negative and nasty. All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.
  • Groxx 2mo ago
    It kinda started turning as people realized that a huge amount of the biggest people pushing tech are rabidly anti-human, incredibly racist and usually spouting nazi quotes every chance they get, and are out to exploit as many people as possible just because they can. The negativity is rather well-earned at this point. I do still enjoy tech, but the ecosystem is no longer as infused (by ratio) with nerds doing cool things.
    • redsocksfan45 2mo ago
      [dead]
    • cj 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      • dan_ggggg 2mo ago
        [dead]
  • onion2k 2mo ago
• onesandofgrain 2mo ago
  All of it, it's time to move away, go to https://outspeaker.com/ https://outspeaker.com/, it doesn't censor nor remove anti-ai content
• beekthos 2mo ago
  And what will it be in another 10 years?
• asveikau 2mo ago
  I've been noticing in recent months that even when the article is in no way related to AI, there's often comments trying to steer it into AI, often in a way that makes no sense at all. It has a way of becoming its own parody.
• NoboruWataya 2mo ago
  > In the first half of the month, roughly 60% of the daily HN lineup was AI-related or AI-generated, tapering off to ~50% as we approached the end of the month. This is up from 40% in February. This aligns with my much less scientific research. Every now and again, when I remember to do it, I will skim the top 10 stories and count how many are AI-related. I find it is very consistently in the 4-6 bracket. Probably a majority of the time, 5 out of 10 articles are AI-related, and very rarely does it drop below 4 out of 10. It also rarely goes over 6 out of 10, but I can remember it happening a couple of times. In fact, the proportion of AI representation in the top 10 is so consistent (in my, again, unscientific experience) that I wonder if it is being moderated one way or the other. Personally I find it boring that one topic gets so much discussion but who am I to argue. I do my bit by making sure to upvote non-AI stories that I find interesting.
  • Rendello 2mo ago
    A couple of years ago I considered making a simple regex-based web extension to block posts with common AI words: ChatGPT, Copilot, LLM, etc. There was one or two on every page and I didn't want to see them. Over the next few years it flipped, most of the posts concern AI, and I scan for non-AI topics to engage with. I can't really blame HN for this, it's a massive upset in our industry and the world more broadly.
    • coldpie 2mo ago
      I did exactly this: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
  • ryandrake 2mo ago
    I've definitely seen 9/10. It gets ridiculous!
• slapshot 2mo ago
  100% of the comments that I disagree with are AI-generated bots and paid shills. All of mine are human-generated.
• hn_submit 2mo ago
  I'm deeply disappointed that many of the stories on HN are directly or indirectly about A.I. and LLMs. To me this is a complete turn-off. OTOH this seems to be the case everywhere in the IT landscape these days. Many people interested in technical stories have mostly stopped reading computing related news. I know people that used to host talks about .NET software development quit because they hated all .NET developments pushed by Microsoft were related to Azure or A.I. These are developers that want to build software, not scream to/plead with an LLM to do it for them. It simply takes the fun out of being a software developer. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that in a couple of years many people will leave the sector because it's no fun anymore. Management is forcing you to use your (supposed) future replacement.
  • senordevnyc 2mo ago
    I think grief is appropriate for the part of the software engineering craft that has been lost, because it was genuinely fun and rewarding at times, and I don't think it'll ever come back. Sure, some of us will hack on things manually for fun here and there, but even that will likely become ever more niche, like doing your laundry with a washboard. And professionally, no one is going to be writing code without LLMs before long. That world is gone, and it's OK to mourn it.
    • xigoi 2mo ago
      If using a washing machine required you to send your laundry to an evil corporation, the washboard would start to get some appeal…
      • senordevnyc 2mo ago
        Yeah, I definitely don’t think all software engineers will be sending their codebase to OpenAI or Anthropic, but I think basically all of us will be using LLMs. I keep hearing about how open weight models are only six months behind, so presumably in a few years, it’ll be feasible for corporations to self-host very capable models. Still, I suspect most will just use the dominant labs, or something like Bedrock where you have stronger ZDR guarantees.
• yndoendo 2mo ago
  AI has turned me away from HN more and more. Most of the content is about using some data center based ML provider. My view is how so many ignore the environmental harm these constructs are doing; increasing ambient temperatures, inducing heavy metals into the water table, decreasing the access to water for human consumption in numerous drought areas, hostel ambient noise ... The wealth who are the majority finical backers do not care about these issues. ML is a tool and hardly focused on it being able to operate as a local based solution. Frameworks are tie to expensive hardware. This creates a hyper pay-to-play scenario. While hand written coding can be done on a computer from 20 years ago. Local based solutions are the only means to decrease the wealth gap. Data center solutions increase the wealth gap. I don't find value in ML summaries. I want to consume the answer and the ideas around them that lead to the answer. This creates more long-term value. _Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.
  • Aurornis 2mo ago
    > increasing ambient temperatures, That study was so bad that I can’t believe it’s becoming an actual concern that people use against data centers. They were barely able to register a temperature increase a couple hundred meters directly downwind. > _Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions. Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related.
    • miltonlost 2mo ago
      One AI psychotic's "barely able to register" is another person's "increasing ambient temperature".
    • latexr 2mo ago
      > Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related. The top five most filtered-out tags¹, excluding meta², are (in order): vibecoding, dotnet, php, emacs, ai. Two of the five are AI-related. The top spot (vibecoding) has 60% more people filtering it than the second spot. ¹ https://lobste.rs/filters https://lobste.rs/filters ² In the sense of being about the website itself, not Facebook’s parent company.
• BorisMelnik 2mo ago
  holy shit I've been here since 2013, I need to get a job
• utopiah 2mo ago
  Upvoted obviously just to counterbalance how often I got downvoted for stating how popular posts from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc are just ads. The author is most subtle or diplomatic than me and thus call them "AI vendor press releases" or "AI vendor marketing" but we know.
• VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
  Too much. And most of the posts are slop or low quality syncophantic drivel.
• qarl2 2mo ago
  Surely you're aware of the various theories that AI is going to up-end the entire world. How can you be surprised it's up-ending a geek forum first?
  • dgellow 2mo ago
    Nobody is surprised
    • qarl2 2mo ago
      The author of the article seems to be surprised. As well as many people in these comments.
      • dgellow 2mo ago
        Nothing in the article is expressing surprise
        • qarl2 2mo ago
          "That said, the recent shift feels more profound: almost every day, it feels that the lineup is dominated by stories focused on AI, written by AI, or commented on by AI." I interpreted that as surprise. I apologize if you disagree.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• giancarlostoro 2mo ago
  I think its very easy to note and come to the conclusion that this is the most disruptive tech of our industry. HN is full of people from all walks of life, but people from all walks of life are using AI (or LLMs). The way I hear people describe using AI is the way people used to talk about Google. As much as I am one of the "In Betweeners" of AI (not hyper loving, nor hyper hating it) I do wish HN wasn't flooded with it, but its just the nature of LLMs currently, they are the new thing that has taken over our society in a drastic way, those who pretend otherwise will be surprised to know that the rest of society has moved forward with it.
• seizethecheese 2mo ago
  This is categorizing with a pretty broad brush, it seems. I took a look at a random day, and the articles that are claimed to be AI are Waymo publishing a model for self driving cars and a post about scams in Apple News ads. Sure, Waymo’s model is AI and the scams in Apple News are often AI generated, but this isn't some sort of monoculture of LLM articles. Ironically, this article could have been improved by using an LLM to categorize things and also publishing the prompt, so we could inspect what it means to “be AI”.
  • dgellow 2mo ago
    The article already states that distinction. It doesn’t say that everything is written by AI, the heatmap even has a legend with different colors for “article about ai” and “written by ai”
    • seizethecheese 2mo ago
      The articles I cite were in the “about ai” category not “written by ai”.
      • shwaj 2mo ago
        I don't know about the article about Apple News scams, but how is an article about Waymo publishing a model for self driving cars not about AI?
  • ktm5j 2mo ago
    You took a look at 5 posts made on one single day and then categorized all of the other days.. seems like you're good at categorizing with a broad brush yourself. Based on my experience as a pretty heavy HN consumer, I'm with the article author.
    • catchnear4321 2mo ago
      You took all of one comment to categorize a person, and closed with your subjective experience. Based on my experience, this isn’t typically done for kind reasons. But what do I know, I am but one dumb monkey pushing tokens through tubes to what claim to be other monkeys but might be nothing of the sort.
• krater23 2mo ago
  It’s sad; on the one hand, it’s true, and on the other, this story is also about AI. (translated from german by AI)
• llm_nerd 2mo ago
  Someone made an HN without AI filter and it front paged here a bit ago. https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai (That's the first one I found, maybe there were others) So...are you complainers all using it? If not, why not? Spoiler -- because when someone says "I'm tired of reading about {X}", they're really saying "I want everyone else to stop talking about {X}". This has happened repeatedly over HN's life, and it just betrays how emotional people get when they feel that they can't control the narrative. If HN doesn't work for you, stop coming to it?
  • FLeXMurphy 2mo ago
    A lot of us moved over to lobste.rs and it's been refreshing, to say the least.
• FLeXMurphy 2mo ago
  As someone who has been posting here since 2010, I don't blame AI. The exodus started long ago and continues to evolve over time. It is unfortunate what this place has become due to poor quality of moderation. Lobste.rs just hits better, and Reddit isn't half-bad as purported.
• AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
  The thing is, the AI-related topics are pretty easy to skip. Sure, you may have to go to the second page to see the same number of non-AI stories that you used to see on the front page alone, but you can just not click on them. (Same with politics, BTW.) But AI-generated content is harder, both stories and comments. HN does moderately (heh) well at filtering them out, but I would like better.
• chasd00 2mo ago
  I like this but next do how much of HN is astroturfing for Chinese AI.
  • dgellow 2mo ago
    Why would that be caused by astroturfing? The HN audience is the exact people I would expect to be looking at alternative to mainstream AI providers
• joshstrange 2mo ago
  HN is a reflection of the industry and you'd have to be living under and rock (or in denial) to ignore LLMs. People who complain about it give off a real "kids these days"-vibe that has been present on HN for the entire time I've been here. There are _always_ people complaining about the current infatuation (and I'm sure I've been one of them). I find the posts/comments bemoaning the pervasiveness of LLMs on HN to be more tiring than even some of the more annoying LLM posts. If HN didn't feature LLM-related content there would be people, rightful so, complaining that we are ignoring a huge thing happening in the industry.
• imnotr0b0t 2mo ago
  [dead]
• xphos 2mo ago
  If people feel this way they should just start a flag this AI post campaign. If people can flag anything they disagree with a little effort the community can be AI free at least on main page. That said it would be interesting to have a AI flagging so you can just filter the just AI topics. Its very different from people harping on crypto or VC focus. I dislike reading the AI output when someone says they have an opinion the original source material the AI ripped content from to me is more valuable flaws in all than a normalized AI output
  • krapp 2mo ago
    >If people can flag anything they disagree with a little effort the community can be AI free at least on main page Unfortunately AI-based articles are on topic (AI generated comments are not) and if people flag them they'll just lose their flagging rights. I'm also reasonably certain "flagging campaigns" are categorically against the rules, even though there is such a campaign implicitly against "politics." There's nothing anyone can do about it except complain (which will eventually get them filtered because such complaints are also against the rules), be quiet and tolerate it (which is the only option that follows the guidelines), or else leave to greener pastures.
    • xphos 1mo ago
      I think you are being a little overly broad the Hacker news says on topic is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" or "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" an AI article through by how it is generate might actually default to off-topic and unles its refined enough to edify the intellect. But beyond that all of that language is loaded a Good hacker is incredibly fickle and if the community values shift on-topic as a concept shifts. I guess I just feel the community has a lot more latitude to shape its content then your saying. I.e a long winded way of saying I don't think a campaign to flag stuff actually could be abuse if its done in good faith. I think politics flagging is sometimes in good faith sometimes not. There was an article yesterday that talked about the USDA finding uninspected food which I thought was off topic but only in so much that they shared a headline article and not the actually USDA report. Not bad faith but just the wrong way of sharing. The headline wasn't edifying but the USDA report was concise factual reporting and was mildly interesting. The community is the source of what is on-topic which strong veto powers against things that become non-edifying they way that AI is becoming
• caidan 2mo ago
  I'd just like to say that as an old nerd who has been reading hacker news, often daily, for a long long time, hacker news is an absolute treasure, and dang & pg are saints for keeping it going. The Magnasanti that we call "Tech" is a little swimming pool that we first leapt into as kids, trying to splash the befuddled saps standing outside the pool. As we splashed and dunked and sprayed each other, a thrilling, unceasing mania began to build within us, and so we splashed all the harder, forcing enormous waves that slapped against the world, shocking it into noticing us. As more jumped in (or were pushed) we demanded and they forced upon us more and more and more water, until we no longer had to entice or push, the waves swept through the whole world, eating at the foundations of entire societies, once solid land crumbling into ravenous waters and spilling their hapless citizens into the vortex, spinning them head over heels, forcing them to cling to the shattered debris of their lives, and try to just-stay-above-water frantically with the rest of us, the billions and billions bobbing in the froth. And how goddamn nice is it.... that in that raging omniflux, maybe not quite at the center, but maybe also not far from it, is a little sheltered swim up bar, its orange sign still cheerily showing the Y of Y Combinator, which used to BE one of the first kids, one of the ones that pushed and pulled and flooded and floated. They still do, of course. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this little bar, is that in all this swirling, foaming, madness, it is an oasis of stability. Absolute stability: This is from the first snapshot on Feb 21st 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb.... Look familiar? See pg's post getting knocked off the top already? Shelley might have approved. Sometimes you get to chat with the people forcing the great devouring waves that reshape the earth, sometimes you just chat about what's new in JS tooling. If you are particularly lucky that day, you will find yourself enraptured by some hacker with the mad gleam of triumph in their eye, recounting in excruciating detail their monomaniacal pursuit of some utterly pointless pet project, and you will not consider one second of it wasted. Not even on your deathbed. Not even when compared to spending more time with your beloved. I think it would be difficult to find an example of a community that has been stewarded as well, for as long, as hacker news, and while you do get commenters of all ages, interests, walks of life, politeness levels, and hyper-fixations upon irrelevant minutia, I've often found that for the most part you are all a lovely bunch of humans and/or AI bots. Lest you accuse me of labiogluteal angling (a classic!), I am too old and too wet and too cold and too tired to want or need anything from anyone here, beyond a pleasant place to read. But... I thought that just once over these decades, I'd tell you this how very grateful I am to be able to swim up to this bar, sit on the familiar stools, take a moment of respite from the tempest, and read what any of you might have to share, even -- or perhaps if I am being honest, especially -- when I think I think its absolute bollocks. Thank you all, and may Tech continue to spin you, right round, right round, like a...
• seki285 2mo ago
  I disagree, the most important source of tech discussion on the internet right now is /g/ board on 4chan.
  • FLeXMurphy 2mo ago
    Has been for quite some time.
• mring33621 2mo ago
  This is a new question that is well worth sitting with! The shape of the current Hacker News experience certainly implies an abundance of AI generated content. A quiet approach to testing this insight is to ask the HN community itself, then assess the resulting replies for the load-bearing surface features. But at the end of the day, aren't we all waiting to unpack our throughlines?
  • gryfft 2mo ago
    It's like blasting white noise at max volume. I wonder if all communication will eventually be rendered into a homogenous thrumming hiss.
    • mring33621 2mo ago
      A thrumming hiss Bites your expanding pants While raging toward eclipse
• grebc 2mo ago
  90% of the commentators are AI/bots these days.
  • thephyber 2mo ago
    And 91% of all statistics on social media are fabricated out of thin air. If that were truly a problem, why wouldn't a human-only social media platform take off like wildfire?
    • grebc 2mo ago
      Bad bot.
  • tim333 2mo ago
    I see such comments but who? How can you tell?
    • grebc 2mo ago
      Anyone who puts references at the bottom of their reply and references them. Absolutely no one that does as it’s a pain. But the trend is growing. If it’s pro-AI in stance, chances are it is.
• otherayden 2mo ago
  I run https://www.unslop.news/ https://www.unslop.news/ which uses an LLM (ironically) to filter out content discussing AI. There's text at the bottom to indicate what fraction of the first 3 pages gets filtered out, and it's pretty much always at 50% or more.
  • kbelder 2mo ago
    Then, why are you in this thread?
    • otherayden 2mo ago
      I found it bc I started getting new traffic to the site from HN and turns out someone else was actually plugging it in another comment here
  • SeriousM 2mo ago
    Thank you so much for this! Generally I like to read AI news, yet it's important to know what else is out there! I hope that ycombinator is implementing this filter by themselves, one day.
    • otherayden 2mo ago
      Glad you like it!
• hypfer 2mo ago
  The worst IMO is the bot accounts. And the worst of that IMO are the people that behave as if they were bot accounts. The self-promoting thought-leading experts (usually on AI) with a skin as thick as a single cell membrane. At the moment, half of this site on a given day is terrible ads with a swarm of the same people defending each other's attempts at either becoming or staying relevant - utilizing the latest gold rush topic to do so. ___ I'm not quite sure what could be done about this. The moderation does do a good job, so it's not that. I also see that not everyone feels repulsed by the self-promotion. So maybe there is no problem and/or the problem is me. But I kinda doubt that too. Maybe the time of voting systems for ... uh.. "social media" is somewhat over-ish? Though if I was truly signed up on that thought, I would not be commenting here but on I guess lobsters?
• FLeXMurphy 2mo ago
  HN is about to witness the exodus/migration we've seen in prior years, except this time it will be a much larger movement rather than focused/specific top contributors who just said "fuck it" and had enough with this shithole. See also: jwz's referral redirect.
• newsomix9xl 2mo ago
  A tech site would seem to have "stories about AI". That's an odd thing to conflate with " written by AI". I've posted several stories "about AI".
• koliber 2mo ago
  I have a comment here from a few years ago where I am accused of it being generated by AI. I wear it like a badge of honor because I wrote it 100% by hand.
• newsomix9xl 2mo ago
  "for example, around 2018, it had a fair number of stories focused on cryptocurrencies and NFTs" Bro, NFTs and crypto nolonger being front page is proof of a decline since 2018? This story appears to be written by a human, and is watered down human-slop.
• janalsncm 2mo ago
  Counterpoint: what we call AI is really just more sophisticated statistical algorithms, and so all of the stories about using AI, making AI more efficient, and all of the vibe coded apps are really just the world coming to terms with a new computing paradigm. It’s what you’d expect on a computing-heavy forum. Eventually it will stop being novel, at which point people will stop calling it “AI”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
• tescreal 2mo ago
  I'm curious if anybody has tried to figure out roughly the % of bot comments? I keep seeing the "ai-talking cliches", but wonder if I'm crazy because people (or... other bots???) take it at face value.
• jreynar 2mo ago
  The post tracks two rather different things. AI is almost certainly the hottest topic in tech right now, just like mobile was hot after the iPhone launched or cloud was a decade ago. AI-generated text is a separate complaint, and it's the only one I think is controversial. Slop, no thanks. A human using AI tools to write better is fine by me, even if a tell or two slips through.