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How much of HN is AI?

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Re: How much of HN is AI?

#321

Post by pixl97 »

encrypted_bird wrote: post #278
mrweasel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to. There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction. To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits…

>because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. I hear what you're saying, but speaking for myself: can we *not*? I really have absolutely zero interest in having ChatGPT on my microwave or refrigerator. In fact, I'd rather have my appliances *not* be connected to the Internet, all things being equal.

>I'd rather have my appliances not be connected to the Internet,

It's getting harder and harder to find things that don't connect to the internet as time goes on. The moment a manufacture figures out how to sell your appliance data for more than it costs to add it, seemingly every model they produce gets it added with the only choice of going to some other manufacture if you don't want it... and even then finding one not internet connected gets nearly impossible.

In general most people don't care enough for people like us that don't want connected devices to move the dial.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#322

Post by camdenreslink »

pixl97 wrote: post #320
jvsg_ wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that new traffic likely was from AI and their scrapers. So no, not much of a net positive.

I mean, scraper traffic should be pretty easy to tell. Now, AI posting bots are much more difficult.

I think the scrapers have gotten pretty good and can imitate real traffic. And it isn’t just scraping for model training. A large amount would be LLM tool calls searching the web (and HN) for info about some prompt.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#323

Post by calvinmorrison »

runarberg wrote: post #305
lovich wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always 1 indexed because there are non software engineers on here and I didn’t need to introduce the confusion that shibboleth would cause

Well some of use were using R (or later Julia) and have always 1-indexed as an act of defiance... There are dozens of us... DOZENS!

dozens of us PVX programmers as well. 1- index gang

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#324

Post by leephillips »

runarberg wrote: post #305
lovich wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always 1 indexed because there are non software engineers on here and I didn’t need to introduce the confusion that shibboleth would cause

Well some of use were using R (or later Julia) and have always 1-indexed as an act of defiance... There are dozens of us... DOZENS!

...and some of us Fortran.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#325

Post by seizethecheese »

ktm5j wrote: post #216
seizethecheese wrote: post #112

This is categorizing with a pretty broad brush, it seems. I took a look at a random day, and the articles that are claimed to be AI are Waymo publishing a model for self driving cars and a post about scams in Apple News ads. Sure, Waymo’s model is AI and the scams in Apple News are often AI generated, but this isn't some sort of monoculture of LLM articles. Ironically, this article could have been improved by using a…

You took a look at 5 posts made on one single day and then categorized all of the other days.. seems like you're good at categorizing with a broad brush yourself. Based on my experience as a pretty heavy HN consumer, I'm with the article author.

The inclusion of the Apple News story is sufficient to know that probably the classification here isn’t too tight. It’s not really against the article author to point this out, either, just trying to add color for the forum here. It’s not always us vs them.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#326

Post by DarmokTanagra »

sph wrote: post #254
fcanesin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoted: I was going to write this exact reply. Everyone is a bit tired of hearing about AI, but it's advancing fast and it's the most important thing right now. As Demis says, if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it.

> if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it Jesus Christ this has to be bait. Added to the favourites to laugh about it when the lunacy and hype has died down in 5 years and the trough of disillusionment has truly settled in. Or to laugh about it when ASI actually has arrived and we're waiting in line to be turned into biofuel for the Greater Good. Everybody is literally pinning their hopes that God its…

Its just the next hype cycle that all of the crypto people have moved on to.

Making hyperbolic claims about new tech makes people billions, until that changes you will always see this crap.

This site is owned an operated by people building empires around that principle.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#327

Post by alephnerd »

leephillips wrote: post #324
runarberg wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well some of use were using R (or later Julia) and have always 1-indexed as an act of defiance... There are dozens of us... DOZENS!

...and some of us Fortran.

But Fortran goes skrt skrt (Gen Z/Zillenial for fast).

Honestly love Fortran as a language but really worried about how it's both the foundation of most core packages like Numpy and Scipy and is increasingly underresourced outside of physics departments.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#328

Post by Aurornis »

latexr wrote: post #132
Aurornis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> increasing ambient temperatures, That study was so bad that I can’t believe it’s becoming an actual concern that people use against data centers. They were barely able to register a temperature increase a couple hundred meters directly downwind. > _Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions. Lobsters has a f…

> Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related. The top five most filtered-out tags¹, excluding meta², are (in order): vibecoding, dotnet, php, emacs, ai. Two of the five are AI-related. The top spot (vibecoding) has 60% more people filtering it than the second spot. ¹ https://lobste.rs/filters ² In the sense of being about the website itself…

So less than 4% of the userbase filters out vibecoding stories? This looks like a big red herring.

Every time I open up the lobste.rs home page, there's an 80% chance the most commented on stories are related to AI in some way. Other stories are lucky to get 10 comments.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#329

Post by some_furry »

bilkow wrote: post #152
writtenone wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used Matrix for almost a decade, it's hot garbage. Sync is barely working, "unable to decrypt" still exists, the encryption is flawed [0] and the whole thing is effectively just Element and everyone else follows their lead. [0]: https://soatok.blog/2026/02/17/cryptographic-issues-in-matri...

About the post you linked, see [1] and [2], which makes me question both whether that is an actual vulnerability (Signal, the messenger recommended by the author, also didn't have that check, and it's addition is absent from release notes and CVEs) and whether the post was made in good faith (the check was added to libsignal on the same day that the author disclosed the vulnerability to Matrix, which can be a coincid…

> About the post you linked, see [1] and [2], which makes me question both whether that is an actual vulnerability (Signal, the messenger recommended by the author, also didn't have that check, and it's addition is absent from release notes and CVEs)

I've edited the above linked post several times to make this clearer, but people still keep linking Matrix's flawed response as if it actually addressed the issue. It does not.

The issue is not as simple as "did the check exist? [y/n]". There are actually two issues:

1. Did the check exist? [y/n]

2. Did the group key agreement protocol fall to shit if the check was omitted? [y/n]

Matrix was (n, y) due to how Megolm manages keys in group contexts. Signal was (n, n) due to their protocol design.

Matrix tried to defend point 1 when the blog post was about both 1 and 2.

(Post-Quantum MLS, for comparison, would also have been impervious to this issue due to how KEMs work. Another point in favor of MLS adoption.)

> and whether the post was made in good faith (the check was added to libsignal on the same day that the author disclosed the vulnerability to Matrix, which can be a coincidence, but doesn't seem likely given that the code has been there for years).

Even if you assume the worst possible interpretation of this coincidence (which, sure, you're free to if you want-- you would be wrong if you did, of course): What does it even matter?

Like, what is the notion of "good faith" that's even necessary for someone to do independent security research and publish criticism of the cryptography used by a software project that's being propped up by EU sovereignty movements?

In my opinion, this is a stupid and vacuous framing.

Signal omitting the check didn't harm Signal's confidentiality. Matrix omitting the check demonstrably did.

---

Also, if you're going to decry my blog post for not enumerating unrelated security bugs (n.b., the blog post was about Matrix, not Signal, so why would I talk about Signal's code in that post???), be aware that I reported non-cryptographic bugs to Element (Matrix client) and Conversations (XMPP client) around the same time. Only XMPP actually credited me with any fixes.

https://gultsch.social/@daniel/116125064866469085

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#330

Post by SeriousM »

otherayden wrote: post #225

I run https://www.unslop.news/ which uses an LLM (ironically) to filter out content discussing AI. There's text at the bottom to indicate what fraction of the first 3 pages gets filtered out, and it's pretty much always at 50% or more.

Thank you so much for this! Generally I like to read AI news, yet it's important to know what else is out there! I hope that ycombinator is implementing this filter by themselves, one day.
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