As someone who quite likes AI, couldn't the AI dislikers just ignore the ~15% of stories that are about AI? Or does their mere presence offend?
Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
311–320 of 401 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
#312As someone who quite likes AI, couldn't the AI dislikers just ignore the ~15% of stories that are about AI? Or does their mere presence offend?
The mere presence does seem to a offend. HN has what seems to be on average a more negative appraisal of AI than the industry average (based on where new software jobs/funding are going), but some of the comments I read seem to imply that this page is swamped by endless AI hype posts devoid of substance.
My first instinct reading these comments is "are we on the same website?", but I realize their perspective is possibly skewed by a strong visceral dislike of AI as an affront to many fundamental things they like about software and tech. It's become a tribal conflict, based on the ethos of "whose side are you on" rather than a sober appraisal of the facts, benefits, and legitimate hazards.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I got mine in about that time, joined their IRC and asked for an invite, someone DM'd me, asked me a couple of questions and sent me the invite. This was about 7 years ago when there as a lot less people, so I imagine it should be easier now.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC that was a deliberate campaign to make the site unattractive to a spate of non-technical folks who had apparently all simultaneously discovered it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145 "We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites [...] You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang [...]" "Ok, ok, enough Erlang submissions. You guys are like the crowdsourced…
This is a great little anthropology work of you. Thanks for taking time to find this out!
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
#315I 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…
This honestly reminds me of the crypto days from 2017-2021ish.
Literally 80% of the posts were about crypto and how we were going to experience some ground shattering revolution. There were so many posts about how all the topics are about crypto and how it is annoying.
Ultimately, all that noise and the billions of dollars poured into that turned into a meme if we're honest. Most people just buy/flip crypto or hold BTC that they'll sell when they double it after a year.
AI in LLM form is at least useful in many ways and in front of millions of people without any rugpulls and other shit, but due to their inherent limitations (doesn't matter how much python it writes and executes, half the time or more its wrong for any actual/meaningful work) I think the hype will settle in the next couple of years.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent" "Agents raid home of fired Florida data scientist who built Covid-19 dashboard" "Confessions of an ex-TSA agent" "Terrible real estate agent photographs" etc etc
See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44571740#44572312
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see there. From my point of view, this is a low-effort, vibe coded app that doesn't solve the problem the OP had but it's solving a different one. You'd need to at least train a small classifier based on something like BERT to actually address the issue.
What I showed in my comment just demonstrates that this doesn't solve the problem OP had.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I just don't want to hear anything about AI ever again. Genuinely curious: Why? Don’t get me wrong, I upvoted this post, and would love to see AI separated out, or at least tagged (like a root comment suggests) so that I can filter them out if I want. But I can’t say I’d never want to hear anything about AI ever again (though I’m headed in that direction). What field are you in, and what are your interests, such th…
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…
> automating software development for ad-tech companies
A lot of technology advancements are automation of human tasks. Its been going on for decades and does eliminate a lot of jobs (or move them to a different continent). There aren’t telephone switch operators anymore, or cashiers adding up items manually in a store checkout or any other countless jobs that are now done with software.
One way to look at it is if you’re an employee at a company you don’t really have any say in what projects/products you work on. If those projects are eliminating or creating jobs or saving lives or whatever, your only choice is really about working for that employer.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
#318You can easily clone HN using other forum tools (discourse, discord, HN+) and start your own? Or HN provides APIs that are quite powerful.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No. HN is good as it is and I find it disrespectful when newcomers are demanding changes like this. There's a good reason the forum has stayed the same for almost 20 years.
Topic tags wouldn't kill HN.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"
#320We just built https://www.hackernews.coffee/ to rerank your frontpage based on a quick survey of your preference, all local storage based. In general we're thinking about how you can have a transparent profile that stands in place of an opaque algo, or in this case a dominance of a community by something you're not so into. It allows you to still engage with HN, but through the lense of a profile you have control ove…
I feel like 10 answers is too few to generate a good profile. I tried it and it marked a lot of stories as 'skip' that were pretty interesting to me, presumably because they didn't fit into the 3 or 4 categories it determined I was interested in. That said, it was useful to filter out AI stuff, so that's good I guess.