alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?
Over past couple months I noticed that HN feed is almost exclusively AI or AI-adjacent news. Meanwhile the legitimately, broadly-hacker stuff gets left out for the most part.
I noticed that because the things I find genuinely interesting that I post here now get zero traction, which is the stuff that I believe would previously be met with some discussion.
Note that I don't care that my submissions were ignored, I don't need that validation. Problem is that if my stuff gains no traction, I am myself not seeing similar stuff posted by others, stuff I am genuinely also interested in and would want to hear about from this community.
Here are two most recent examples:
- Lenovo showed a model that incorporates solid-state air cooling. That technology has been around for a while but it looks like it matured and is production-ready. This allows for super-light and slim designs, which, in turn, should allow for bigger batteries installed and I think it's some sort of breakthrough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580229
- Brax Industries devices, genuinely interesting, open-soruce and innovative, especially the wall display, with its modularity and on-device processing compatible with Home Assistant. I also appreciate the very clean design: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643215
As said, I honestly believe this would gain some traction here on HN a year or two ago. I no longer find HN a good source of "what's new" in the industry, it's almost exclusively AI talk now.
So I think the point 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?
Or, at the very least, introduce simple tagging, so we can start filtering stuff out.
Comments
This is a solved problem. Hacker News without AI: https://hcker.news/?view=frontpage&ai=exclude
I would like more news on native dev (C++/assembly/Nim/D/...)
or Theoretical CS and algorithms.
It's the biggest 'thing' in the industry.
Previously this site was swamped with Blockchain news...
There are almost as many posts like this as there are about AI.
Keep both. AI and banning AI are both high-interest topics.
I wish but honestly that's unrealistic because a lot, if not most, people related to HN are currently their livelihood linked to AI, in one way or another.
Most companies, in software or not, are imposing minimum (after backtracking to suggest to maximized, until their started to pay bills) AI usage. A lot of people in HN also have stocks a lot of popular stocks is linked to AI success, whatever that might mean. A lot of AI entrepreneurs also are directly to sell AI, as it's simply where most of the VC money is currently going.
So... when it's this intertwined I think it will be difficult. If you know of other places I'd be curious.
I already miss rust and erlang articles
But this post is about AI news!
Don't look up...
does hn quickly down rank other subjects?
if i’m not mistaken they might with political subjects, if so, there’s already precedent and so the tech pieces are in place.
i would be against entirely removing it, but limiting it to like 10-20% of the front page would honestly be kind of nice.
it feels like it’s been an ai sausage fest for months and months.
So instead of the most craziest technology advantage in our lifetime, you want to see more products?
Like a lenovo laptop with a technology which is available for a bit and another product which you can pre-order?
I've largely moved over to lobste.rs for actual technical news. They even have a "vibecoding" tag to let you filter out anything related to coding with LLMs.
This is eternal September my friend
The AI is only going to increase on all forums from here. There's no stopping it, because on most forums people will start preferring AI in many areas
Variants of your Ask are a regular thing around here. Lots of stuff still floats to the top that's non-AI but traction is as ever a challenge somewhat. Stuff moves fast around here.
Some recents:
Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834961
Show HN: Hacker News with AI stories filtered out
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159018
Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886741
Just a few weeks ago:
How much of HN is AI?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435728
Also surfacing non-AI projects:
Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700460
Ask HN: What are you working on (non-AI)?
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.
Time for a category at the top? Next to new, jobs, ...? Something like "sans AI".
I like adjacent articles though. Today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656496 was a delight. It would be sad if such articles were filtered out or automatically downvoted or similar.
There is an ebb and flow.
But with Hugging Face hack, and Navier–Stokes. You're going to be flooded with news for at least a few more weeks.
I’ve been a hacker since I was 10, so about 30 years now.
A couple of years ago, I felt the same way you did. And then I started properly/seriously using Claude Code. When Opus 4.5 came out, it was sincerely life-changing. I can prototype working projects in possibly 1/30th the time, and I can do them simultaneously.
This post has made me realize that the flood of AI news isn’t annoying or boring to me anymore because I think my profession is the only one that’s actually being replaced by it, for better or worse. For coders, there’s nothing even close to the level of importance as AI (which doesn’t mean it’s interesting).
Honestly I’d like to see more news about AI, but actually about the way it’s devastated the labor side of our industry and will kill the middle classes of countries like India.
Without question, nothing short of the web has been more impactful to our industry specifically than AI has been and will be.
The Brax industries stuff you mentioned looked really sleek and fun until I noticed it's pretty much vaporvare as for today. I'm a great fan of the former submission you mentioned: a technology that seemed innovative but not in production but is available now. Stuff that will be available next year or never is simply less interesting.
The amount of useless griping and sniping on HN has made it a less interesting and resourceful community. Moreso than the flood of AI news.
Tagging may not help though. Even the latest Apple product announcement threads were just.. bad. Everyone wants to be grumpy.
If I had to keep one and lose one, I’d keep X and lose HN. And I hate Elon.
Hn is the propaganda arm of yc. Yc is heavily invested in ai. Follow the money.
> Please stop discussing one of the most pivotal moments in history
My linkedin is just pages and pages of AI posts and layoffs.
Are lawyers, doctors, and people in non-tech fields getting the same thing? Is Doctor linkedin all about how AI is going to improve surgery while half your connections posts are about being unemployed?
I say embrace the eras, hackernews has always be fixated on some shiny topic for a while before jumping to the next.
Someday you will look back and see this as the good old days.
It has been like this for more than a year, a lot longer than just the past couple of months.
HackerNews, just like all other platforms, is heavily astroturfed and the big AI labs have bots commenting and voting, so it'll never end.
The only solution is a platform that only allows humans, with a proof of humanity before posting anything, but not too sure what that can be, and it would ultimately be unsuccessful.
But we have to see the positive, at least less posts about SQLite make it to the frontpage.
That's why lobste.rs is a good plance, almost no AI.
HN already has an upvote/downvote system to surface what's interesting to people here.
Unfortunately, no. People talk about the times. I was sick and tired of covid posts a few years ago. Or nodejs before that.
The AI posts are better than the reddit tier politics slop
"One of the largest changes in human history has started, why is everyone talking about it?"
Reminder that this is primarily a Silicon Valley / VC related and owned technology news aggregator.
Fringe topics will stay fringe until they're hip (again?); currently non fringe from my intermittent read:
- anything "AI"
- retro computing (honest interest x mourning/cope in the non-deterministic agentic takeoff)
- random topics that hit the zeitgeist
Check out lobste.rs as well as SIG across forums, IRC, fediverse, discord, etc, etc – and or create your own like in the olden days :)
FWIW I prefer to come here and post, read up and comment on "AI" over having to wade through proxied shitter content (it truly stinks over there).
"what i post here gets no traction"
Go to lobste.rs and hide the 'vibecoding' tag.
I'd also SERIOUSLY ask for an "LLM generated" flag in addition to normal flags - on both comments and submissions, that is.
Obvious slop comments thankfully already get flagged or downvoted in the hell they belong, but the submissions, oh dear god I do not wish to engage with shit written by AI any more. It's questionable enough if you let LLMs do your coding work for you, but if you can't even be arsed to write a proper README.md on your own, why the fuck should I be forced to waste my time reading it?
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No. You will have your slop and you'll like it, too.
Well, Lenovo's new air cooling and Brax's new open source devices would both be made pretty moot if everyone on earth dies in the coming months. Sooooooo
To see how fast hype cycles can die, check out the NFT archive on HN:
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.
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.