4 ms·

Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap. Always a pleasure r

Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap. Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).

jonstewart 28d ago
AI slop really needs to be auto-flagged. It’s been like 20% of front page links I click on lately.
- mitxela 28d ago
  AI comments are auto-flagged, but not posts.
bcantrill 28d ago
That is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I messaged one of my colleagues: "Time to do what I do best: bluntly say what lots of people are thinking." Glad those words proved prophetic! [0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-library-verification-contest-scaled-past-manual-proof-engineering/ https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-libra...
- dcre 28d ago
  “Not every one of those 11,970 carries the same weight, and the paper is careful about that rather than rounding it up.” AAUGH IT BURNS
  - bcantrill 28d ago
    Right?! When I hit "That work was genuinely valuable" I literally hollered in exasperation.
    - juliansimioni 28d ago
      For me it was “the results speak for themselves” and then simply a (large) number of automated tests run that never had human eyes. Yes, quantity famously has a quality all its own, but perhaps not where correctness checks for something this central is concerned.
      - benmmurphy 28d ago
        I saw 'the results speak for themselves' but for me this article seemed to have less LLM-ese than some of the more recent obvious LLM prose posted to hackernews. As a reader I think its jarring because you just see a lot of articles purportedly written by different people using a very similar voice. I guess pre-LLM you might see this in a newspaper with very strong editorial oversight. So the phenomena is not completely new but it feels stranger when its not from a single source. It's also kind of sad to see a some people who have written a lot in the past about interesting technical topics in a way that was easy to read to give up their voice and outsource it to an LLM. But given this is basically free labour from the authors it feels a bit ungracious to complain.
        sunshowers 28d ago
        My complaint is directed at the Rust Foundation, not the authors, to be clear. Yes, it's free labor, but the Foundation ought to have standards. I showed Bryan the post while in a meeting room with him, left the room, and a few minutes later heard a very loud, very exasperated primal scream coming from the room!
noir_lord 28d ago
Agreed, I like the Oxide podcast as well, even though it’s hardware I’m unlikely to ever see never mind use, it’s nice that someone somewhere is still trying to be what they are trying to be. Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.
- duhhhhh1212 28d ago
  They have a ton of rfds publicly available that are worth reading. Recently, read this one: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0161 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0161 because I'm researching clickhouse for my work (there is also a podcast ep on it). Even if you never use their hardware, just reading their work around the software they use/make is incredibly valuable as an engineer.
pavo-etc 28d ago
I would go even further, I want a browser extension that scans all words on every page and colours them more and more transparent as the likelihood of llm prose is increased.
- demibabs 28d ago
  I’m working on something like this! My issue is that using Pangram for it ends up being quite expensive.
  - flashblaze 28d ago
    Are you footing the bill yourself, or would you be supporting BYOK? Not sure whether logging in with user's account would also be a good workaround or not.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 28d ago
  Years ago I used a rudimentary (text matching) Greasemonkey script that hid Reddit posts and comments from accounts matching a few behavioral/history signals. I wonder if that idea could be modernized now for this.
bakugo 28d ago
There's a website that does this: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector Unfortunately, it's not a browser extension and doesn't seem to have an API. I'd make a browser extension for this myself if it didn't involve paying for expensive Pangram usage.
- nilsherzig 28d ago
  created a little wrapper and userscript based browser extension https://hnslop.nilsherzig.com/ https://hnslop.nilsherzig.com/
  - teasnob 25d ago
    Thank you so much for sharing this!!
nilsherzig 28d ago
I have (an API, not an extension), but pangram is way to expensive for me to run, current (v4) pricing is $0.05 per 100 words. Should be absolutely doable if we split the cost between users tho. I tried searching for good opensource / reasonably priced alternatives, pangram themselves even have some of their older architecture and training data on github/hugging face, but i never got that working reliably enough.
- nilsherzig 28d ago
  update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582725 shared another page which already does the parsing and pangram requests. I wrote a little wrapper and userscript based extension around it (https://github.com/nilsherzig/hnslop https://github.com/nilsherzig/hnslop), hope that helps!

jonstewart 28d ago

AI slop really needs to be auto-flagged. It’s been like 20% of front page links I click on lately.

mitxela 28d ago
AI comments are auto-flagged, but not posts.

bcantrill 28d ago

That is honestly the highest possible praise -- thank you. And when this piece was starting to boil inside of me last night (triggered, I'm sorry to report, by an obviously LLM-authored guest blog entry from the Rust Foundation[0]), I messaged one of my colleagues: "Time to do what I do best: bluntly say what lots of people are thinking." Glad those words proved prophetic! [0] https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-library-verification-contest-scaled-past-manual-proof-engineering/ https://rustfoundation.org/media/how-the-rust-standard-libra...

dcre 28d ago
“Not every one of those 11,970 carries the same weight, and the paper is careful about that rather than rounding it up.” AAUGH IT BURNS
- bcantrill 28d ago
  Right?! When I hit "That work was genuinely valuable" I literally hollered in exasperation.
  - juliansimioni 28d ago
    For me it was “the results speak for themselves” and then simply a (large) number of automated tests run that never had human eyes. Yes, quantity famously has a quality all its own, but perhaps not where correctness checks for something this central is concerned.
    - benmmurphy 28d ago
      I saw 'the results speak for themselves' but for me this article seemed to have less LLM-ese than some of the more recent obvious LLM prose posted to hackernews. As a reader I think its jarring because you just see a lot of articles purportedly written by different people using a very similar voice. I guess pre-LLM you might see this in a newspaper with very strong editorial oversight. So the phenomena is not completely new but it feels stranger when its not from a single source. It's also kind of sad to see a some people who have written a lot in the past about interesting technical topics in a way that was easy to read to give up their voice and outsource it to an LLM. But given this is basically free labour from the authors it feels a bit ungracious to complain.
      - sunshowers 28d ago
        My complaint is directed at the Rust Foundation, not the authors, to be clear. Yes, it's free labor, but the Foundation ought to have standards. I showed Bryan the post while in a meeting room with him, left the room, and a few minutes later heard a very loud, very exasperated primal scream coming from the room!

noir_lord 28d ago

Agreed, I like the Oxide podcast as well, even though it’s hardware I’m unlikely to ever see never mind use, it’s nice that someone somewhere is still trying to be what they are trying to be. Having dealt with Enterprise Hardware(TM) in a previous job, it’s refreshing simply to see someone look at that pile of crap and go “it doesn’t have to be that way” and then actually set out to prove it.

duhhhhh1212 28d ago
They have a ton of rfds publicly available that are worth reading. Recently, read this one: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0161 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0161 because I'm researching clickhouse for my work (there is also a podcast ep on it). Even if you never use their hardware, just reading their work around the software they use/make is incredibly valuable as an engineer.

pavo-etc 28d ago

I would go even further, I want a browser extension that scans all words on every page and colours them more and more transparent as the likelihood of llm prose is increased.

demibabs 28d ago
I’m working on something like this! My issue is that using Pangram for it ends up being quite expensive.
- flashblaze 28d ago
  Are you footing the bill yourself, or would you be supporting BYOK? Not sure whether logging in with user's account would also be a good workaround or not.
8cvor6j844qw_d6 28d ago
Years ago I used a rudimentary (text matching) Greasemonkey script that hid Reddit posts and comments from accounts matching a few behavioral/history signals. I wonder if that idea could be modernized now for this.

bakugo 28d ago

There's a website that does this: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector Unfortunately, it's not a browser extension and doesn't seem to have an API. I'd make a browser extension for this myself if it didn't involve paying for expensive Pangram usage.

nilsherzig 28d ago
created a little wrapper and userscript based browser extension https://hnslop.nilsherzig.com/ https://hnslop.nilsherzig.com/
- teasnob 25d ago
  Thank you so much for sharing this!!

nilsherzig 28d ago

I have (an API, not an extension), but pangram is way to expensive for me to run, current (v4) pricing is $0.05 per 100 words. Should be absolutely doable if we split the cost between users tho. I tried searching for good opensource / reasonably priced alternatives, pangram themselves even have some of their older architecture and training data on github/hugging face, but i never got that working reliably enough.

nilsherzig 28d ago
update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582725 shared another page which already does the parsing and pangram requests. I wrote a little wrapper and userscript based extension around it (https://github.com/nilsherzig/hnslop https://github.com/nilsherzig/hnslop), hope that helps!