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 article already states that distinction. It doesn’t say that everything is written by AI, the heatmap even has a legend with different colors for “article about ai” and “written by ai”

The reality is bots and bot-like behavior (honestly, much more likely the latter than the former from what I've heard IRL) are both equally effective in fucking up discourse on HN.

It absolutely has gone to shit. And a number of longtime readers and commenters have called this out as well.

The degradation started during COVID with the culture war crap (a plurality of accounts I bump into that comment and post are now created after 2021 - the fact that 0-indexing and source citations died out on HN is a good example of that shift from pre- to post-COVID HN especially becuase the only reason I started doing it was because JumpCrisscross and Raynier did it in the beforetimes), and then became a culture war after culture war. And at least in the Bay and/or amongst the younger YC crowd, most ignore HN after dealing with in-your-face toxicity or have never heard of it until they got into YC.

Hell, a deeply technical and deeply anti-AI buddy of mine got flamed on HN for supposedly using AI despite him not using any sort of AI on principal.

No one who matters care about HN anymore compared to 5 years ago, and those who are left are basically using it for the same reason a smoker continues to smoke despite feeling indifferent.

Anyhow, YCombinator owns the rights to all comments posted on HN but HN has been continually scraped by multiple repos and data stores outside of US and EU+ jurisdictions (go cry to your GDPR liaison Euro HNers who have increasingly become the plurality).

Let it burn.

A couple of years ago I considered making a simple regex-based web extension to block posts with common AI words: ChatGPT, Copilot, LLM, etc. There was one or two on every page and I didn't want to see them.

Over the next few years it flipped, most of the posts concern AI, and I scan for non-AI topics to engage with. I can't really blame HN for this, it's a massive upset in our industry and the world more broadly.

I've definitely seen 9/10. It gets ridiculous!

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 aren't all that clear yet. Some people are seeing massive improvements in how they work and it's understandable that they, like with blockchains or Kubernetes previously want to share their optimism. I just question if maybe these people are being to louder and have to much influence. There's a large silent majority for whom all the AI stuff is almost completely pointless.

It does need to take up more space on HN, compared to your normal media, because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. The hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, hence the ads. For now, it seems that AI is heavily pushed by industry and a group of fans, the amount of news and articles just doesn't line up with the actual daily use.

There's a part of me that agrees.

There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something completely different.

And that's maybe what I miss. Nowadays Hacker News feels increasingly like another social media platform: mostly a lot of opinions, war stories, and self promotion. That feeling of serendipity that so characterized earlier ages of the Web is fading here, too.

Yes, it's appropriate given the metric you have chosen ("big"ness), though maybe the word should then be "expected", since "appropriate" implies some kind of broader human-oriented concept of rightfulness/goodness.

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.

Problem is other cool hacky stuff gets drawned out. Nobody votes on those because I imagine it's no longer attractive to the type of visitor that HN attracts now. I reckon there's many more non-tech, "make me a millionaire" gold rush crowd here, as cynical as it sounds. I base that on pure logic, since it's kind of inevitable with AI having delivered a massive democratization of tech knowledge, but also on the amount of snarkier, shorter, less technical, less logical, one short sentence type of comments.

I know it's been said countless of times before, but I think this community has truly changed within last year.

Bigger than the Metaverse or monkey NFTs?

Feels more like another blockchain hype cycle to me.

Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.

> AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse.

Almost. the iphone was launched 19 years ago. It was (and still is) much more relevant than the current LLM-based AI.

I would say, AI is probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop.

LLMs went from a toy to highly capable (along many dimensions) in just a few years.

Which makes it very likely that in a few years more, we will be seeing crazy capabilities that leave us humans increasingly behind.

I'm sick of it, but you are 100% right. I'm sure a good number of active readers here want even more AI-related articles.

I really wish there was a way to filter out discussions about AI on HN. It feels like lately they take up a good 1/3 of posts on the front page. I don't want to hear about some new AI startup.

> AI has turned me away from HN more and more.

AI has made me aware how opening a tab to HN is a compulsion I no longer truly enjoy. Especially after having made the conscious choice of leaving software engineering as a career, my time here is a mildly negative experience hoping for the random chance of finding a deeply technical post that is not about LLMs, or whose discussion does not devolve into discussion with Joe Rando on how much more productive he is lately.

Sure, it's a moral failing of mine, but by god I wish we had a little more diversity in topics.

> 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 funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related.

A lot of those environmental claims are not accurate, or substantially overblown.

Heavy metals in the water table is a new one I haven't heard before, and I'm skeptical.

Most of this is motivated reasoning by people who don't like AI for other reasons and are just looking for justifications to shut it down.

Well your point on it being wrong to interact with a whole industry sounds more like a policy and political party line. This is just nerds discussing bleeding edge things.

I appreciate the way you sum up the ML vs traditional software appeal and I think it's helped me articulate why ML is so unappealing to me. The power of software has very little to do with the power of the machine it's run on (with some obvious exceptions like games and physics sims) which made it very exciting to me when I was learning to code. The same cannot be said about deep learning where more data and more compute means more power.

I've noticed that in the last few days the number of articles about A.I. has gone down dramatically, probably because of this post.

I might migrate if I could could an invite, but I haven't been able to find anyone on the inside.

Edit: Thank you kind stranger. I'm in.

Do you have lobsters invites?

I don't even care about the environmental aspect- it's just so...un-hackerlike and boring. Where are all the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels?

It is a tragedy that a handful of irresponsible outlier datacenter operators have soured public opinion so thoroughly in the past 2 years. For comparison, Loudon County, VA is among the wealthiest in the country and is home to the largest aggregation of datacenters in the world. Yet these datacenters don't have the externalities that are mentioned here.

Note the intersection between eyewitness accounts of noise, water, and light pollution from datacenters and those datacenter owners' noteworthy political activity. To be specific, the operators of these datacenters are notorious bad actors in many different public spheres.

Edit: the truth is obviously very painful and unpopular in this thread.

I'm nostalgic for the new JS framework every day era. Say what you will about that era but people were writing the code by hand, so looking back it all feels "hand-crafted" and quaint. You had to copy paste that express app from a medium.com article instead of prompting an LLM to scaffold a whole project in one second.

> How could we jump back into the cozy past again?

Delete 9/10th of the HN population. I could accept even AI discussion if there wasn't so much of it, and so many posts in general; /new is like trying to win the lottery.

It doesn't matter how interesting it is, you just have to be lucky. The corollary is that the front page isn't the most interesting stuff posted today, it's a list of who's got lucky posting the average topic for the average reader.

The issue is the tech and the motives to wield it. Cosy decentralized message boards exist, thankfully outside the realm of the greater public.

The moment that the greater public sees these high trust networks and tries to join them, all the bad actors and their armies of bots will follow and I mourn for the recreation time of any admin who has to suddenly deal with that.

Private walled gardens seem to be the only way forward for now. If you love something, do not share it here

Discord is actively torpedoing small, niche, or marginalized communities. Not a safe place.

> How could we jump back into the cozy past again?

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

Run a self hosted forum or instance of whatever you like, and just only let people sign up if they are recommended by someone or can argue their way in, basically. xenforo and some add ons can do that, and I'm sure there's a few self hosted messaging apps like you mention but I'm not as familiar

On the topic, I agree smaller groups are the only way to achieve this.

Here is a protptype of how easy it is to setup a forum on onionv3 service. Just a few commands and your off.

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum

I think you answered your own question, simply un-democratize access. Go places with high barriers of entry.

I never cared much for newsgroups, they were mostly nice for the historical stuff. I do miss IRC though, as toxic as it could be. I could run it in a little terminal on any system without download electron apps and being spammed with ads (discord).

Matrix works fine for the friend to friend, small community things. Discourse forums too. Use Signal for family and friends, perhaps work. Fediverse and Atmosphere (Bluesky) for your microblog needs, and RSS to keep track of blogs.

Is that really the problem, though, or has the audience simply changed? It seems to me that the thoughtful deep dives of years past are still being produced, but they're buried under a much larger volume of lighter content. More importantly, many of the people working at the forefront of technology and product development appear to have moved to private communities such as Discord, Slack, and similar groups, perhaps in part because of NDAs.

> Democratization of access has its victims.

Democracies require conserved stake to function. How individuals initially get that stake is a degree of freedom, but if the stake can be printed freely, the system is unstable.

For working implementations of democracy, look at: invite trees, shareholder corporations, proof-of-stake distributed ledgers, etc.

You forgot to mention the "JS-framework-of-the-month" years :-D

Usenet is still here. I'm using it on a regular basis. The point is very few others are.

Eternal September: AI edition

I thought we were all about inclusion these days. I'd be wary of sharing such retrograde sentiments, you might hurt an LLM.

"Democratization of access has its victims."

If it were democratization, we'd all have access to the data that underlies this dataset. In reality, this will destroy the origins of the data, and it will become hidden for all of humanity.

It is a tragedy of the commons of the highest order.

They will talk about how they are trying to protect humanity all while putting it behind a paywall.

the composition of HN has changed to be a lot more leftist and less capitalist, and I don't think that'll change anytime soon

I joined HN 13 years ago (2 years after you), and back then I saw it as a bunch of libertarians and venture capitalists and some open source (and/or functional programming) enthusiast with a few interesting and nerdy projects. I was mostly here for the news about new and useful technology.

I think the visual weight of the first group has increased over time as their projects of making a bunch of money while offering nothing of value has been validated more and more by our capitalist economy.

All HN users can be part of the solution. Help mods by emailing them at hn@ycombinator.com. I recently pointed out a suspicious pattern, and the mods were able to use that to track and ban a collection of accounts.

I wrote a browser extension to auto-hide AI-related articles. It makes HN much more readable: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/

If you're interested in a solution, I maintain a reader that performs client-side filtering from a given view. Here's a view with an AI filter I try to keep up to date: https://logicnow.io/hn/index.html?view=https://raw.githubuse...

The programming Reddit forbade AI posts. Unfortunately the result is NOT better level posts, but a wasteland instead.

>Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad?

Yes, and when I first saw LLMs and image generators I experienced a similar feeling of awe. We haven't had anything like this in decades.

It is unfortunate that many people are negative and nasty about it. Local politicians are getting shot at over datacenter projects. We have truly lost the plot.

I used to think that people had learned their lesson that automation was a force for good, and we had gotten past the Luddite days of smashing looms. But it seems that is not the case, people are just as short-sighted as ever.

All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.

You're 16 years older now. You will have changed. HN has too, but looking back at how great it all was without also realising that your point of view is different means you're missing a big part of why it feels worse now. I've been here a long time too so I'm not going to claim I don't see the same thing, but I imagine someone who signed up 3 months ago won't have the same opinion as us old timers.

I still maintain the notion that tech was most exciting/peaked around 2010. Macs were awesome (and the Intel transition was complete at full strength), things were fast, OSes weren't bloated, and we didn't have flavor-of-the-month fads like cloud, crypto, NFTs, or AI.

It kinda started turning as people realized that a huge amount of the biggest people pushing tech are rabidly anti-human, incredibly racist and usually spouting nazi quotes every chance they get, and are out to exploit as many people as possible just because they can.

The negativity is rather well-earned at this point. I do still enjoy tech, but the ecosystem is no longer as infused (by ratio) with nerds doing cool things.

The Erlang day was on 2009-03-11. You can still see how the front page looked that day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

I think grief is appropriate for the part of the software engineering craft that has been lost, because it was genuinely fun and rewarding at times, and I don't think it'll ever come back. Sure, some of us will hack on things manually for fun here and there, but even that will likely become ever more niche, like doing your laundry with a washboard. And professionally, no one is going to be writing code without LLMs before long. That world is gone, and it's OK to mourn it.

> I can't tell the difference so what does it matter?

Eternal September. Just like the usenet groups

> Not everyone here is AI.

That’s not the argument.

> I can't tell the difference so what does it matter?

It matters because you’re not the only human on HN and others have difference preferences. “I don’t care about this particular issue” is not the same thing as “this particular issue isn’t important”.

> you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.

Not the argument either. No one is “surprised” this happens, people (obviously not all, but a significant number) are annoyed by it.

>If people can flag anything they disagree with a little effort the community can be AI free at least on main page

Unfortunately AI-based articles are on topic (AI generated comments are not) and if people flag them they'll just lose their flagging rights. I'm also reasonably certain "flagging campaigns" are categorically against the rules, even though there is such a campaign implicitly against "politics."

There's nothing anyone can do about it except complain (which will eventually get them filtered because such complaints are also against the rules), be quiet and tolerate it (which is the only option that follows the guidelines), or else leave to greener pastures.

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.

Then, why are you in this thread?

Has been for quite some time.

The truth is, writing is hard and time consuming, and most people are uncomfortable with the process. AI is a very easy shortcut to lucid, logical, authoritative text. Like sugary drinks and snacks, people can't resist. Add in the pressure to keep up with everyone else and the choice is easy -- spend a few days drafting and editing, or a few minutes chatting with an LLM before hitting post?

AI has rapidly destroyed, completely destroyed, the remaining authenticity on the internet. The majority of articles are AI generated. And yeah at this point its futile to keep pointing it out. Human prose has been eliminated.

    def is_content_ai(_content):
        return True

> We have gotten to the point where it is virtually guaranteed that some commenter to almost any given article will have an oversensitive AI detector and accuse the author of it being AI.

Well... when the utter majority of articles written about topics surrounding AI are written with AI and a ton of newcomers to the reverse-engineering and even hardware hacking communities now have AI do their work for them, even the last remnants of areas that used to be "for humans only" are now contaminated with AI.

Of course people end up being very sensitive. I come to HN to read words written by humans, not fluff hallucinated by an LLM.

And 91% of all statistics on social media are fabricated out of thin air.

If that were truly a problem, why wouldn't a human-only social media platform take off like wildfire?

I see such comments but who? How can you tell?

It's like blasting white noise at max volume. I wonder if all communication will eventually be rendered into a homogenous thrumming hiss.

Why would that be caused by astroturfing? The HN audience is the exact people I would expect to be looking at alternative to mainstream AI providers

A lot of us moved over to lobste.rs and it's been refreshing, to say the least.

Pangram links several third party evaluations [1] that all seem to agree with 90+% detection, and very close to 0% false positives. Obviously those could be cherry picked, but I’ve yet to see arguments to the contrary that actually include any supporting data. (E.g here’s a prompt that will get Claude to spit out text that pangram doesn’t detect or here’s an article authored in 2018 that pangram says is AI.) Detection is an arms race, so this could change (though I’d expect in the direction of false negatives), but right now it seems like defense is winning.

[1] https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals

My confidence in Pangram is pretty low -- seems like a lot of false positives *and* negatives

Yes, from my experience it is highly effective

Would be cool to see data for an older timespan, starting pre-LLM

There is some LLM detection for comments that auto-flags them.

It has some unfortunate side effects, though. Namely on a thread where people are discussing a text-heavy post that is LLM-authored, quoting a large enough block of that content appears to trigger it sometimes. Makes sense that it does, but..

Contrary to popular belief, it's quite easy to spot something written with AI. You just need the skill/gift. I usually spot them rather quickly and will flag on sight. Other users will do the same.

Nobody is surprised

Links?

Did you know that not everyone who disagrees with you is a bot? Some people are genuinely excited about AI.

I'm not sure I'd be able to (confidently) tell the difference between human and SOTA bot comments.

Is there something trick to it?

FWIW I’ve seen people complaining of the exact opposite. Difficult to say without measuring

AI has legitimately changed everything. It's not 2022 anymore. Try a recent LLM and set it to a coding task. For even moderate tasks, things you could burn a weekend or more on, the model will complete it in minutes, to a high degree of quality. It can write code better than most programmers, faster than any human. If that doesn't inspire positive feelings, it should at least fill you with awe. We live in an age of wonders.

For me, I'm surprised to see people proposing conformist views and trying to push whatever the establishment is pushing.

a lot is also not caught.. and over time itll be less and less. hn has been great for a very long time, but this time has come to an end

> you'll see messages caught by moderators

Much of these are caught by users downvoting and/or flagging. I think the lack of a public moderation log makes people think the mods are constantly running around every story/comment to steer the site when really it's the users doing most of the grunt work while the moderators only step in occasionally for the more serious items.

Did read the article, you'd be correct... for a few months ago. Now it's apparently up to 60%.