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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?"

#271

Post by Karrot_Kream »

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #244
zahlman wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the quality, not the topic. Understanding serious papers about AI development requires fairly specialist knowledge; there are plenty of people around (like myself) who have been programming for decades and can write really nice code in a bunch of different programming languages, but have very little if any mental model of "transformers" or whatever. So in practice, "AI" content ends up revolving around…

Interesting take. To me it feels like golden age of hackers in the 60s-80s (which was before my time but I heard stories about) where everybody is doing their own home grown research to the best of their abilities and sharing insights of varying quality. But somehow these days if it's not all polished, HN "hackers" aren't interested.

I think both things can be true:

1. This is a great time to get your hands dirty with LLM tech and explore workflows and tooling that bring you joy.

2. The writing around this exploration is often low quality insights or low quality engagement bait that leads to flamewars. Engagement bait that often takes one of two forms. One being a novella on how surely this time the human race is doomed due to singularity/capture by the rich/fascism/etc. The other being how we're one cm away from utopia because automation/flourishing of creativity/etc.

I am enjoying playing around with the tech a lot but the presence of 2 is just annoying. I do think that's an HN problem and not a problem with tech writing as a whole. There's subreddits that, while they have their own problems, are a lot less flamey when discussing these topics.

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

#272

Post by pc86 »

johnb231 wrote: post #214
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.

[flagged]

It's bad enough to expect other people to change the way they communicate to make you feel better.

It's another thing entirely when the way they're communicating is accurate and correct.

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

#273

Post by iib »

MarceColl wrote: post #213
201984 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's invite-only, so it's hardly an alternative.

well, it takes around 20 minutes to get an invite, so hardly a problem if you prefer only tech articles

How exactly does it take 20 minutes to get an invite? I have not tried it, but I can't see how that would be easy.

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

#274

Post by rickcarlino »

zahlman wrote: post #252
rickcarlino wrote: post #200

If you like intelligent, tech-focused discussion as seen on HN but have less of an appetite for other aspects of the HN community, you might find you really like lobste.rs

I'm seeing quite a few plugs for lobste.rs ITT. My recollection of my impression from many years ago is that they had different politics from HN (I did read it every now and then, even if I only actually joined months ago) of the time, but that many posters were still very much engaged in ideological battle, and furthermore flagging and downvoting was used more to suppress one side of the argument than it was to keep…

I can’t speak to that aspect specifically, but I have flip-flopped in the last five years or so. I don’t go there anymore hardly and conversely I find myself using HN a lot more. My decline in usage coincided with some policy changes they made years ago. I still think there are people who will really enjoy lobste.rs over HN. It’s not for everyone (and as of late, not for me).

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

#275

Post by conductr »

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.

I've been here a while and this is certainly more, prolonged, and has no end in sight compared to most other hype cycles we've experienced.

It's also exceedingly generic such that AI isn't really a topic, it's an entire classification or maybe domain to steal from the animal kingdom hierarchy.

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

#276

Post by gojomo »

azath92 wrote: post #157
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 e…

I'd expect a noticeable delay with current local LLMs - especially visiting a site for the 1st time. But then they could potentially memoize their heuristics for certain designs, including recognzing when some "deeper thought" newly required by server-side redesigns.

But of course local GPU processing power, & optimizations for LLM-like tools, all adancing rapidly. And these local agents could potentially even outsource tough decisions to heavierweight remote services. Essentially, they'd maintain/reauthor your "custom extension", themselves using other models, as necessary.

And forward-thinking sites might try to make that process easier, with special APIs/docs/recipe-interchanges for all users' agents to share their progress on popular needs.

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

#278

Post by conductr »

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #228

Weird that people are floating the idea of kicking out of a tech forum the most important tech development of the last 10 years. Not sure what that means about the community, but must mean something.

Why kick it out, in the past when similar annoyances of dominating the front page occurred they created the Show link and the Ask link. For people interested in those they still exist, just away from the front page

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

#279

Post by dmbche »

op00to wrote: post #235
ryandrake wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here, they are not like us. It's not like we have anything against them, we just don't want them ramming it down our throats" I am truly tired of AI being rammed down my throat, not just via the tech news, but in article content (slop), in un-asked-for tech product features, and at my own tech job. The solution is not to divide the community and mak…

Who’s forcing you to read the AI articles?

Some people come to HN for interesting articles, many lists exists if you want to know what I mean.

If, say, a third to two third of articles in any given frontpage, for multiple months to years, do not fit this description - can you see how one's ability to find what they are looking for gets hampered?

Like yes, you can grow nice flowers on the beautiful fertile soil there, it just sucks we need to get rid of these protected grasslands harboring endangered species on top of it.

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