Hacker News, Sans AI (elijahpotter.dev)

Hug of death?

Interesting this keeps moving up the front page when the site is inaccessible because it's hosted on a baked potato.

Was hoping it was a new font.

I have an app that does Hacker News with AI; it analyses all the stories and comments for a number of criteria, and tags them so you can skip stuff you don't want to see. I should get around to actually publishing it but I've been lazy.

One of the fun things I noticed is the psychological impact of framing. A comment that might've made you feel the need to reply before has less emotional weight if it's highlighted in red and a diminished font. Same thing for stories; if you would normally disagree with a story and it would make you want to comment, you feel less like commenting if the story is rated as 'lacking evidence', 'unsupported by research', 'personal anecdotes only', etc. It drives down the feeling of needing to engage. Which is horrible for site engagement, but good for mental health (I think).

I built (well, vibe-coded) a version of this a while back that runs against the Hacker News API, it's static HTML on GitHub Pages so I don't have to run a server for it: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered

I can deal with a launch problem. I am looking forward to being able to check it out. I stopped coming to HN as often as I used to because there has been too much AI talk. It's like a dang AI subreddit. I don't want anything to do with AI. I have lost 2 jobs to AI budgets and stupid executive decisions. It's no longer part of my personal and professional life.

I hope it works out.

Hopefully fixed the cache invalidation. I'm crossing my fingers.

I've been training to naturally ignore AI mentions that I thought this entry was about some HN ui font change (Sans).

I've been thinking of making something like this for myself for quite a while now, glad I'm not the only one who had the idea and someone actually did it before I got to it

The filter doesn't appear to be perfect, one of the top posts right now is "My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development"

A problem is it doesn't load as fast. Could it be helped?

For one sec, I got excited for a new font!

Are you using AI to figure out what's about what's AI and what's not?

I've been thinking the same. Couldn't this be done with a browser extension that hides elements that matches a regex?

Yes, please. A general-purpose filter like the one on 4chan would also work.

Love this. Really nice to see a HN front page without AI, the fatigue is real.

^how about just be a devoted AI section at the top?

[dead]

While you are at it can you filter out posts to subscription only sites eg economist NYT $&c. We're all here to escape click bait

Oh. A little bit of a let down. I was expecting "HN without comments and posts written by LLMs".

Welp, it was only a matter of time. Thank you

Okay, now filter out the VC stuff too...

Maybe HN could have a filter button that hides ANY threads for keywords you choose to filter.

I would instantly hide anything about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.