Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?

HN is a reflection of the industry and we're at peak hype-cycle at the moment. I use this when I need a break https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai.

To see how fast hype cycles can die, check out the NFT archive on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=NFT

Top stories (critical and otherwise) were upvoted hundreds of times 4-5 years ago and had hundreds of comments. Sort by the past year, and no story has more than 9 points. NFTS have effectively disappeared from HN's front page.

AI is a different beast ... the tech and concepts have true value. But we may see the term "AI" start to fade as new terminology and companies and concepts rise to the fore ... the Sons/Daughters of AI.

At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore :)

These things tend to improve/get worse by themselves over time, if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on. Right now, seems we're still "discovering" new things around AI, so the submissions will surely continue, and interested parties will continue to upvote.

But AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely, where eventually you hardly see any frontpage submissions about it ever.

Thank you for posting this <3. I've been thinking it daily for about a year and feel a little bit less alone.

I understand this is a significant topic in the industry but the ratio is really high. Every time someone at OpenAI or Anthropic farts, there's top 10 post.

It makes me feel as if a lot of hackers had given up on actual hacking to just be followers of the latest commercial stuff thrown on the market. It's likely a projection of my own fears, but I have not been able to shake it off and it's gotten worse and worse.

I think tagging on HN is an idea whose time has come. We already had informal tags for "Show HN" and "Ask HN" for some time. A few fixed tags chosen at submission time might suffice, for example:

- Global news, Tech, AI, Explainer, Opinion, Personal project, Misc.

It does increase moderation burden for mislabelling, and introduces another nitpicking point for comments to latch on, so it's not all upsides.

I'd be ok leaving filtering and other UI concerns to extensions.

Both of those examples wouldn't have gotten traction in the pre-AI HN in my opinion.

The Lenovo laptop jet is experimental and the details suggests that it uses 7.5w to cool 30w. That's not very efficient. You might as well have a small fan and let it spin at a low RPM to reduce noise. There doesn't seem to be a breakthrough here.

The Brax industries one is just an ad from the company's official Youtube channel. I don't think the product is interesting at all.

I miss all the programming articles. It feels like everyone has given up with the very idea of ever writing code now and the entire practice of making software has been handed over to AI.

HN is often dominated by a Thing that is happening, during periods when there is some dominant Thing going on. In my time here, that has been many different Things over the years; social media, SaaS, Ruby on Rails, javascript frameworks, Rust, VR, self driving, crypto, and now AI (and this list is certainly missing a few). And during all those periods, lots of people have complained that the Thing of the moment is getting too much attention. But IMO, this kind of eye of sauron effect on a main Thing of a given time is mostly good. We're all here working out what we think of things, and it is useful to focus a lot of discussion on the new Thing that is developing and moving quickly.

This. Simple tagging and/or a dedicated AI news section would be very welcome.

Why limit? This is a news website where users judge if something is newsworthy by upvoting it. If the community decides it’s newsworthy it’s newsworthy. Maybe not for you but at least enough people to make it visible in front page. Unless you have strong arguments, like topics creating death threats or people doxing, there is no reason whatsoever to censure any news because you personally doesn’t care or don’t like it and prevent others from accessing it.

    news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^\/(?:news)?$/) tr.athing:has(a:has-text(/AI|claude|A.I|harnesses|harness|OpenRouter|llm|vibecode|agi|deep learning|agent|TPU|GPT|DeepSeek|Anthropic/i)):xpath(. | following-sibling::tr[1])

Ironically the only reason I saw this post is because I was on my ipad :).

I noticed it as well but I don’t see a problem with it.

I have spot-checked it at times and saw 5 to 8 of the top 10 posts about AI or directly adjacent.

We are in an emergent, dynamic periodt. AI is revolutionary and will continue to get better. The world will change drastically because of it. This seems so obvious yet many will call it purely hype, no real value, etc. We are still in the incubation period, just like the internet in the early 2000s.

Its 13:15 UTC and 21 of the 30 submissions on the HN home page are not AI related. I'm not saying there isn't a problem with AI-related submissions, but I'm not sure its a flood.

The front page is a reflection of what folks want to see. AI is certainly mentioned a lot but it’s also top of mind for every industry atm. I still see a lot of diversity in posts though. After all this is a VC forum for startups.

I've been hearing a lot of "Amdahl's law" regarding AI - the rule that says the slowest part of a system sets the speed of what you can accomplish. On one hand, this means that AI has sped up software (so there is more software news because you can make a 20-page blog post in one prompt now), but it doesn't speed up, say, shipping hardware products that much. I guess we need to re-weight the news to include how hard it is, not just how many tokens it makes.

I think this is just how it goes. Were you here in 2017-2018 when it was all blockchain all the time?

While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment, the ongoing automation of intelligence is, for better or worse, one of the most consequential things that can/will happen to "hackers" (as well as white-collar workers in general), and it is very difficult for us to look away from that asteroid in the sky.

AI is on the front page because those articles are upvoted. There have always been hot topics that dominated the feed in the past: Apple product releases, Steve Jobs's passing, cryptocurrency, US-only news, San Francisco-only news, coding bootcamps, NPM drama of the week, etc.

Every AI post on the front page is there because it was upvoted a lot by HN readers. So you are effectively asking these readers to not vote on a topic because you are not interested in it but they are. Why would any of them alter their behavior because of that?

All the stuff I post that I find interesting gets instantly flagged now. Not sure why.

Given that LLMs are currently the frontier of innovation in our industry, it does make sense to me that most stuff that happens and gets talked about would be somehow connected to it.

There's a lot of focus on in. People are trying it out in their workflows and learning new things.

So, potentially, this could just be organic.

Of course, in reality, it is not. There's a ton of "thought leader" LinkedIn slop, just advertising their own personal brand with at best mid takes. But grifters come with every paradigm shift. Unfortunately.

> I am trying to make is that maybe YC could start curating the content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump?

This kind of defeats the purpose of a link aggregator compared to a human curated newsletter or blog. Maybe something like https://hackernewsletter.com acts as a good filter for you?

There's already the "second chance pool" which is a human bump for interesting posts that didn't get the attention they should (Bad timing, other big news overshadowing, bad title etc.).

I think you are looking for a different product. Reddit or another app that shows you a feed of things you are interested in is more in this vein

HN/YC should be called "News Venture Capital Cares About". VC cares about AI, so AI is what you're gonna get

I had the same feeling yesterday, when the front page was filled with all apple stuff.

I have been lurking in lobste even though i dont have account, which currently has this post which is right up my ally.

https://lobste.rs/s/twkkac/fastly_speedtest_test

same thing on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650630

Your suggestion would break my use case: i.e I check out HN every day to see what the latest models that have been released are, and opinions from erudite people who have taken them for a spin.

Keeping abreast of fast moving AI developments with informed opinions/comments for various new models/agents etc. is primarily what I'm here for.

I think there's still plenty of good stuff here, but agree that is beneficial to be kept up for to date on model evolution. We gotta get through this together.

I'm glad HN isn't a curated feed, it would end up like all the the others.

We absolutely must discuss SVGs of animals riding vehicles, that is the only compelling topic these days.

Don't look up...

It would be nice to at least have a day in the week without AI news. Some kind of "No AI Friday," for example.

I submitted an article today, then withdrew it when I noticed it was AI generated. I think it's a matter of self-policing.

https://studyfinds.com/telling-kids-theyre-smart-nearly-doub...

Reading threads like this always confuses me a little...

Since Corona this platform has become basically reddid as it was 10-15 yrs ago.

> Meanwhile the legitimately, broadly-hacker stuff gets left out for the most part

Those were pretty much always niche content here. This was- at least until Corona, a forum where you got usually pretty highly intelligent and critical input on various topics, strongly centered around products as a direct consequence of this being the (I think) most successful VC forum.

Pretty much every comment section had me think about something that I hadn't fully understood before. Nowadays? It's extremely rare to see anything remotely insightful. It's mostly just reactionary/knee jerk response, from people that clearly never actually thought about what they're actually talking about/just parroting political points.

I do miss the older content, and I've found myself getting more and more toxic as a consequence of seeing ever less insightful if not downright stupid comments here. Which - if I'm honest - objectively contributes to the problem and I should stop henceforth.

1. Popularity != Merit and this site is not different. A lot of worthy posts get ignored.

2. Even though I find most of the AI posts interesting, I agree that tags and the ability to filter by tags would be really great. But it's probably a ton of work and additional system load.

I don't have a

For me, the appeal of HN is the DIY attitude.

In that regard AI fits the bill well. Because many of the AI related posts are about tools one can immediately tinker with.

While a new type of laptop cooling might become interesting once the laptops come out, the news is not as interesting to me as a new LLM or agent that I can experiment with right away.

I mean, it's not surprising. I think that most people on here are software developers.

AI is fundamentally transformative to the software development industry and threatens to put large numbers of software developers out of a job. Fable regularly does things in 20 minutes that would have taken me 2 weeks before. AI is probably the biggest revolution in software development since the development of operating systems and high-level languages. It's also potentially a fundamental turning point in the entirety of human history.

So it's no wonder that AI gets a lot of attention.

AI-related news are very much relevant nowadays, so limiting them would be excessive. But introducing tags to make it possible to filter out specific topics seems like a good idea.

People post and interact with what interests - or triggers - them. Yesterday it was one thing, today it's AI, and tomorrow it'll be another thing. Just have to ack the flow, and find another way to filter for your non-today's-thing interests.

Here is a link to an HN feed with reduced priority for AI content

https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai

this is what I use to keep the garbage out

Brute force being the antithesis of hacking spirit, I too wish brute force would end up in Lamer News instead.

Been here a long time and wouldn't upvote any of those things. Sounds like you're looking for a different site.

This is a solved problem. Hacker News without AI: https://hcker.news/?view=frontpage&ai=exclude

FWIW, one article is very short on details, it’s a slightly expanded press release, and the other is a video. I’m not sure either is what’s needed more on HN.

I have found that the https://lobste.rs/ submission policy means that there is a lot less slop (and discussion of slop) over there. They focus more heavily on technical discussions, which I find more rewarding.

Every platform captures the Zeitgeist somewhat, the AI related post are just a reflection of that.

While I also somewhat dislike it. I don’t think limiting them resolves the issue.

I maintain a simple browser extension to auto-hide AI news stories: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ It just scans for keywords and clicks the Hide button. Doesn't catch everything, but cuts out a ton of the noise. You can go hit the Hidden page in your profile sometimes and scan for highly-upvoted stories to see the couple that are maybe actually worth looking at.

But this post is about AI news!

I can't help but feel that every 1% improvement over a benchmark from new releases of flagship LLMs isn't really that impressive anymore. To some extent it feels like LLM improvements is slowing down significantly despite increasing resources being spent on them.

The people promising AGI just 6 months ago are now more and more quiet about the possibility and rightfully so. LLMs alone are most likely not the path to AGI.

It's the biggest 'thing' in the industry.

Previously this site was swamped with Blockchain news...

I already miss rust and erlang articles

I would like more news on native dev (C++/assembly/Nim/D/...)

or Theoretical CS and algorithms.