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Remember Map-Reduce and Quantum Computing?
Map reduce powers Google, so that's established tech.

Quantum computing is progressing slowly but it's most likely going to be mainstream, yet too technical for the average person to care about it.

Mapreduce was a simple way to harness large clusters back in 2006

Today’s tools like Spanner are vastly more sophisticated, but were built by people who learned to work at petabyte scale developing in Mapreduce

We’re getting better AI tools every month, and the best way to be ready for next year’s tools is to work with the tools we have now

How many are written by Claude code or similar? I wouldn’t be surprised if it is the majority
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I think you mean 4 in 5 are AI-related...
Meanwhile, unfortunately my non-AI Show HN didn't get any votes or comments and seemed to have not even displayed on the Show HN page. Not sure why :(
I think it's partly because we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day. And the harder you work, it seems the more you have to do. On top of cognitive processing of all the ambient events in our time, which is a heavy load just by itself.

Most of the time, AI tools promise to be timesavers. So it's natural many folks look for shortcuts. We're simply overloaded, partly due to current situations generated by existing machine learning tools deployed elsewhere in the system.

>I think it's partly because we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day. And the harder you work, it seems the more you have to do.

Yeah(, right). Or rather, yeesh. Or maybe, yikes!

>we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day.

... in the richest country in the world, which some inhabitants there also call the greatest nation in the world.

Title nit: the actual title says "less than half" but the title on HN says "> half" (more than half)
this inspires a HN viewer that uses an LLM given "dun want AI hype" to filter out AI related posts

or a more complicated prompt to include "machine learning" or computer vision, etc

or another method... such as filtering on tags is there a HN viewer with tags...?

found this HN post from 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988

This shows a huge surge starting in 2023. I see you're counting all .AI TLDs; how much is this responsible for the surge? I think .AI TLD registrations took off starting in 2023, and one thing I wonder is if prior to 2023 we're mostly missing real AI Show HN entries, and afterwards we're mostly catching them.
I'm surprised it's only 1 in 5 to be honest. That actually makes me happy. It means not everyone is trying to build the next AI thing. There's still innovation in other spaces.
So which comments here are in the 20-percentile?
The good thing about it is that being part of such a community feeds creative impulses towards doing projects with AI. It keeps AI forefront in our mind. Happens with all other specialized communities, like r/classicalmusic
Harder to do, but would also be interesting:

How do posts where the point of the thing is to "be AI" do compared to posts that just mention AI as a tool used?

I first read the title as AI generated, and I wasn't surprised.
I was curious the number.

I would have guessed higher.

AI is a seismic event for technology, venture investment, and eventually society.

that "ai show hns as % of total" got a jaw drop out of me. wow.
I don't see it as anything bad. LLMs are a interesting, alright. They can very quickly do a lot of mind-numbing work that used to be done by hand, and then they can stumble and produce total nonsense that no human being would even consider writing. And then you tweak the prompt in a weird way, and you're suddenly back in business.

To me, it feels like studying a new physical phenomenon. Like when Nicola Tesla was playing around with coils and wires, eventually loading to the creation of an entire industry.

Except, with LLMs, you don't need multi-million dollar equipment to play around with models. You can get pretty cool stuff done with a regular GPU, and even cooler if you use cloud.

I would say, if you are not spending some spare time fiddling around with LLMs trying to get them do some of the work you would otherwise do by hand, you are missing out.

Anecdotal counter example: Maybe I’m just bad at writing about AI, but my AI-related blog posts rarely get traction on HN.

In contrast, my random side projects that aren’t about AI get discussed here more than 50% of the time.

It's pretty important! You could make a case that there's not much else to talk about. I don't love that fact and I wish it would go away but when billionaires are talking about trying to build something that will replace everyone, that's kind of a big topic!
Yeah i am so sick and tired. It was so refreshing to read HN and always find something interesting, now its tiresome, AI marketing everywhere and comments from people that doesn't even like to program and they now can develop a todo list app at the expense of 200$ for whatever claude has release that week.. sad.
I'd love to see dang's take on this. How to prevent HN getting overrun with AI topics? How to avoid slop killing the mood? In terms of articles, in terms of comments?

Is there any estimate of how many comments are LLM-generated? What if I tell an agent "make an HN account and post comments with the goal of maximizing karma" and come back after a week to see how it went?

As sick as I am of them, I wonder how it compares to past trends. What does the data show about Crypto/NFT related show-HNs? Is HN consistent across trends or is AI unique?