Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?
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 interesting 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.
295 comments
[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 11.8 ms ] threadAlmost everything in top/new/best is an interesting read. Either I don't know anything about the topic ("...the spanning tree protocol") or am seriously interested in the topic ("Remembering Hong Kong", "Automattic's board forces CEO..."). None of these made to frontpage over the last two days AFAIK.
That out of the way, The admin/moderators can hardly be unware given they work for a startup accelerator that is heavily in on the AI stuff, it is the way it is because that is the way they want it to be.
HN is great but it's bias has always skewed to what is hot in the VC market or that they are heavily in on at the time (as someone who was around when it seemed like every other post was blockchain/crypto it's not even "new").
You can't serve humanity and the machine, you have to choose a master. YC has no choice but to choose the machine because that's where the money is, so HN has no choice but to follow suit. Hacker News is an AI forum.
I'm not suggesting there is some kind of conspiracy afoot but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to just give in let nature take its course.
I don't think anyone considers AI to be something useless. It sure has its uses, I use it a lot to help with research. But it is sometimes shoehorned into things it doesn't belong, or its capabilities overblown for marketing. I think that's what people object to.
The S/N ratio entirely depends on whether you care about AI and I don't not really.
I meant I don't really care, I keep half an eye on what they are up to (have to live in the same world as them) but I'm not really interested in it at all beyond playing with some local models, the constant onslaught of it has just become tiresome, then I got to YT to watch my usual history content which mentions something I didn't know about so I do a search to see if there is a video on that and that is wall to wall AI slop and that annoys me so I go to do something else, do a search and the results are slop if the AI doesn't try and answer it for me first.
It just feels like if you want to do anything on-line you get force fed slop whether you want it or not and it's damn hard to filter it, can't even block channels on YT without an extension.
Sadly this would not end just as a joke. We'll be doing this forever from now on.
RSS: https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&ai=exclude
Scans titles and content. Also filters out vibe-coded Github repos.
Maybe there’s a hype singularity where the hype is so strong that nothing can escape.
It would seem OP is spot on. I just used this and it reduced the front page of 30 posts to 14.
The biggest tell is reposting something interesting from a year or two ago that received hundreds of upvotes. Now it will get 2 or three upvotes whilst "lulz Trump" /r/politics style culture war BS will be immediately hurled up and onto the front page.
Given that context, having a hacker site cover what's happening with that revolution makes sense. All that said, I agree with OP that it does drown out other cool things happening, but that's just how mass psychology works.
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.
I'd love to see some proof of this.
The sticks are so far up the asses of the mods here and the top karma folks that no random AI company would be able to get upvoted here. The moment something like that happens outside the in-group, they would get flagged to death.
Instead HN sells propaganda as a product. So we get to hear about Claude, Kagi, and AT Proto every hour of every day :D
I'm just wondering how you'd do that. Only thing I can see working is a web of trust.
Thank god.
> it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter
If people quit talking about AI, it'll be because it's become foundational infrastructure, so it's not the primary focus of the articles, but just the atmosphere they all exist within, like the computer, or the internet.
Don't get me wrong, I leverage these AI tools as well to be more productive, I'm not against using it or anything else. But I'm also old enough to know that eventually AI will be "old news" when the next hot topic comes around.
I really don't understand anyone who can say something like this with a straight face. Comparing AI to Bootstrap? I...
Which will happen in due time, like electricity and the general computer.
True, but I think the point I am trying to make is that amybe YC could start curating this content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump.
If you don't want to see Ruby posts and AI posts, why are you here? Do you realize that you have control over what media you consume? A lot of HN readers like Ruby and we like AI and we would like to have one place to do that without all the negativity, hatred, and low quality comments coming from people that don't care about the things we care about.
Whether I programmed in this or that framework did not matter so much, as I was still typing.
Now I (allmost) don't code anymore. That is a pretty big change and I still try to cope with it and I suspect many who hate AI, just don't want to face this new reality. But it really is not just another technology where the hype will fade out and it becomes forgotten. It becomes part of the standard and we are still figuring out how. So more diverse submission on the front page would be nice, but AI just is what keeps most programmer busy these days, whether they like it or not. So naturally there is interest.
or Theoretical CS and algorithms.
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.
https://www.computerbase.de/news/notebooks/lenovo-x-airjet-i...
It’s relevant and current technology.
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.
This takes all the fun out of programming for me.
Some of the fun is redirecting coding agents when they get stuck, by showing them code or design they could not work out on their own. Some of the fun is designing tools to rein-in AI coding agents, keep them on track, and verify their outputs. Some of the fun is exploring new areas for me: compilers, game dev, language design, emulators, embedded, etc.
So I am having fun at the CTO/PM/Engineering Manager level but also at the lowest coding level.
I've been coding since the early 70s. This brings back the joy I had discovering microprocessors and electronics.
Again, the problem is with the flooding that drowns-out other news. I intentionally say "limit the AI news" in this post's title.
I was irritated by AI news until it became one of my main tools.
Keeping abreast of fast moving AI developments with informed opinions/comments for various new models/agents etc. is primarily what I'm here for.
While I also somewhat dislike it. I don’t think limiting them resolves the issue.
I'm glad HN isn't a curated feed, it would end up like all the the others.
And AI affects the actual act of programming which most of us do
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.
A simple truth with HN is that you don't have to click on every link. And if you go into the comment threads, you don't have to react at everything. This whole "somebody is wrong on the internet" cliche starts with people's own behavior. In my case, AI agents are giving me a lot of quality procrastination time. I'm waiting for two things to finish right now. Anyway, that's just me looking into the mirror.
AI definitely is a hot topic on HN. IMHO a lot of the material being upvoted is a bit low quality. I wouldn't mind a bit more aggressive pruning for that. I know the HN editors put their fingers on the scale when things get out of hand sometimes.
There are always a lot of HN top stories that I'm not interested in, but I just scroll past them. If I really cared, I'd use a community site that provides a filter, an app that provides a filter, or just vibecode one for myself.
The community does a pretty good job of following the guidelines and that's helped to suppress the echo chamber effect that any personalization would add to.
AI is novel and exciting and terrifying (my how we live in interesting times!) and all of that will fade with time.
But, like you said, if somebody really wants to change their view of HN, the tools are out there.
As others pointed out: a) HN absolutely does apply weighs to some topics b) bots
But with Hugging Face hack, and Navier–Stokes. You're going to be flooded with news for at least a few more weeks.
Someday you will look back and see this as the good old days.