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Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

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Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#151

Post by azath92 »

Lerc wrote: post #27

I have seen this question asked on subreddits, Not about AI, but for other topics that some people dislike. They always seem to take the form of "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy" Invariably the person who proposes this wants to remain in group A and will not be a participant in group B. To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are…

For myself, i often want to be able to just "shift views" on an existing community, rather than wholesale move to somewhere else that fits better.

I find I can do that with granular enough subreddits, or the (maybe old) feature in Twitter where you could group people you follow into lists and see multiple "homepages".

This for me has solved the issue of dividing community, which at the least from a practical level can be tricky.

Ive been exploring how to achieve this effect "on top" of HN lately, rather than by controlling followers, by popping a very simple AI filter on top that re-ranks it for me, and found it quite satisfying, but not sure what the ultimate value/usecase might be.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#152

Post by aleksituk »

NotPractical wrote: post #89
simonw wrote: post #32

I built you this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories filtered out. You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in localStorage. o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0... Initial prompt was: Build a web tool that displays the Hacker News homepage (fetched from…

Probably would work better as a userscript, so you don't have to rely on a random personal website never going down just to use HN. I don't have a ChatGPT account but I am curious as to if it could do that automatically too.

Interesting idea, we could consider that as an alternative implementation to https://www.hackernews.coffee/. While we are planning on making it open-source, a userscript would be even more robust as a solution, although would need a personal API key to one of the services.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#153

Post by Tostino »

throwaway290 wrote: post #136
raincole wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is literally an input box to put terms you want to exclude... The prompt asks for "filters out specific search terms", not "intelligently filter out any AI-related keywords." So yes, a good example of the power of vibe coding: the LLM built a tool according to the prompt.

The prompt was to exclude llm and ai by default though

And that title didn't contain either of those words...what is the complaint again?

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#154

Post by aleksituk »

pton_xd wrote: post #119
simonw wrote: post #32

I built you this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories filtered out. You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in localStorage. o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0... Initial prompt was: Build a web tool that displays the Hacker News homepage (fetched from…

[flagged]

I think it's a bifurcation between 0-1 prompts (self-driven) and a 1,000 prompts :)

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#155

Post by simonw »

th0ma5 wrote: post #128
simonw wrote: post #32

I built you this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories filtered out. You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in localStorage. o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0... Initial prompt was: Build a web tool that displays the Hacker News homepage (fetched from…

Perhaps you should add a privacy policy or just release the source rather than assume people will trust your site. Why do you do these demos if you aren't upfront about all the things the LLMs didn't do?

I released the source: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/hacker-news-filter... (Apache 2 licensed) and a commit history listing the prompts I used. https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/hacker-news-fil... - also displayed on the site here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon#hacker-news-filtere...

I don't think I need a privacy policy since the app is designed so that nothing gets logged anywhere - it works by hitting the Algolia API directly from your browser, but the filtering happens locally and is stored in localStorage so nobody on earth has the ability to see what you filtered.

The API it uses is https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=front_page - which is presumably logged somewhere (covered by Algolia's privacy policy) but doesn't serve any cookies.

> Why do you do these demos if you aren't upfront about all the things the LLMs didn't do?

What do you mean by that?

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#156

Post by lazide »

saulpw wrote: post #126
delusional wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a wonderful question, but it's very hard to answer without essentially knowing me, and that may be a little bit ambitious for a comment. I'm a software engineer. I consider this some of the most important work of our generation. The hardware we've made today has unlocked an until now impossible control over the world. We don't have to mechanically devise a way to make a clock that tracks the stars. We can jus…

Thank you, I feel similarly. We've become gods of computing through global-scale invention, production, supply-chains, and finance, and we're apparently going to use that power to "improve productivity" which in the best case means cheaper apps that make people more money. I've not heard a single actual use-case for the modern AI/LLM that helps us with our actual national and global problems.

That is because those problems aren’t being fixed not because they are not technically fixable, but because as a society we would need to agree on what ‘fixed’ means.

And that triggers the culture war, because Urban/Rural and other major factions have wildly different experiences, incentives, and goals on these fronts. And anyone trying to tackle those real problems who is noticed by one side or the other will inevitably get attacked.

And rather than sit down and really consider what we (as a nation!) want overall, make compromises, and agree to work together, we’d rather sit in our comfortable air conditioned places and stab each other in the back over the internet - or just check out into a comfortable bubble.

And unfortunately that means that the real problems are escalating.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#157

Post by azath92 »

gojomo wrote: post #144

~simonw's demo of a quickie customized HN front-end is great. But ultimately, your browser should have a local, open-source, user-loyal LLM that's able to accept human-language descriptions of how you'd like your view of some or all sites to change, and just like old Greasemonkey scripts or special-purpose extensions, it'd just do it, in the DOM. Then instead of needing to raise this issue via an "Ask HN", you'd just…

Its pretty easy to do the user-loyal bit, with a bit of prompting to give an llm your preferences/profile. Not ideologically loyal, but i mean acting in accordance with your interests.

The tricky part is having that act across all sites in a light and seamless way. Ive been working on a HN reskin, and it only is fast/transparent/cheap enough because HN has an api (no scraping needed), and the titles are descriptive enough that you can filter based on them, as simonws demo does. But its still HN specific.

I dont know if llms are fast enough at the moment to do this on the fly for arbitrary sites, but steps in that direction are interesting!

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#158

Post by azath92 »

pxc wrote: post #48
simonw wrote: post #32

I built you this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories filtered out. You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in localStorage. o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0... Initial prompt was: Build a web tool that displays the Hacker News homepage (fetched from…

This is neat, but with the given filters you autoselected (just the phrases "llm" and "ai"), of the 14 stories I see when I visit the page, 4 of them (more than 25%!) are still stories about AI. (At least one of them can't be identified by this kind of filtering because it doesn't use any AI-related words in its headline, arguably maybe two.)

people have said it elsewhere, but I think you might have to fight fire with fire if you want semantic filtering.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#159

Post by photonthug »

ffsm8 wrote: post #90
Lerc wrote: post #27

I have seen this question asked on subreddits, Not about AI, but for other topics that some people dislike. They always seem to take the form of "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy" Invariably the person who proposes this wants to remain in group A and will not be a participant in group B. To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are…

To begin with, this would be a non issue if HN just introduced something like user provided tags and users can vote for/against (to circumvent abuse) Then the people wanting to filter "x" could just do it via simple grease monkey scripts or if HN natively supported it. Sure, it wouldn't be perfect, but neither does it have to be.

Most platforms don't grow this feature because they can benefit from redirecting user energy into places that the platform is choosing. Or some vocal minority of the user base benefits from redirecting the platform to a place of their choosing.

Similar to nest usurpation with eusocial insects, this is by definition parasitism when the energy-redirection is unwanted or unavoidable.

In the specific case of AI it's way worse than the usual suspects where everyone is effected and so everyone has to have some opinion (looking at you politics). Because even some rant about how much you hate AI is directly feeding it at least 3 ways: first there's the raw data, then there's the free-QA aspect, then there's the free-advertisement aspect when others speak up to disagree with your rant. So yeah, even people who like some of the content sometimes quickly start to feel hijacked.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

#160

Post by Karrot_Kream »

thm wrote: post #124
ksec wrote: post #114

People who are a little late to the site may not know there was a time on HN where Erlang has even more frontage submission than the best of AI / LLM. Ruby Rails, Postgres, SQLite, Rust, etc. They all have their moments and I dont think LLM right now is as overwhelming as any other hyped moments. Certainly not Erlang.

Yes, but unlike AI & Crypto, Erlang came with little grift, slop and Show HN spam.

The atmosphere on the site was very different then. There was plenty of Erlang vaporware and lots of "how to grow your startup" growth spam which wasn't called growth spam yet. The community was a lot less cynical then (though obviously the middlebrow dismissal [1] tendency of the site is quite old.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248

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