HN is a reflection of the industry and we're at peak hype-cycle at the moment. I use this when I need a break https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai.

At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore :)

These things tend to improve/get worse by themselves over time, if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on. Right now, seems we're still "discovering" new things around AI, so the submissions will surely continue, and interested parties will continue to upvote.

But AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely, where eventually you hardly see any frontpage submissions about it ever.

Thank you for posting this <3. I've been thinking it daily for about a year and feel a little bit less alone.

I understand this is a significant topic in the industry but the ratio is really high. Every time someone at OpenAI or Anthropic farts, there's top 10 post.

It makes me feel as if a lot of hackers had given up on actual hacking to just be followers of the latest commercial stuff thrown on the market. It's likely a projection of my own fears, but I have not been able to shake it off and it's gotten worse and worse.

Both of those examples wouldn't have gotten traction in the pre-AI HN in my opinion.

The Lenovo laptop jet is experimental and the details suggests that it uses 7.5w to cool 30w. That's not very efficient. You might as well have a small fan and let it spin at a low RPM to reduce noise. There doesn't seem to be a breakthrough here.

The Brax industries one is just an ad from the company's official Youtube channel. I don't think the product is interesting at all.

I miss all the programming articles. It feels like everyone has given up with the very idea of ever writing code now and the entire practice of making software has been handed over to AI.

Long time user, recently scrambled my password and gave up on HN entirely.

It's not just the AI thing - though that hasn't helped - there's been a real turn in the community. The most generous take I can offer is that a lot of people flooded into tech for the money in the last ten years, and now that the money is tighter all these people are panicking and trying to cling to anything that looks like a winning lottery ticket.

Unfortunately that means that for those of us who actually like cool tech, the space is inundated with get rich quick trash and wishcasting. So so much of it on HN right now.

I also think there's been a subtle change in the quality of the moderation. Before, stories were clearly gently spiked or promoted to encourage interesting and novel things to drift to the top every once in a while, and now that basically never seems to happen. A story about a cool new lisp would somehow appear in front of a story about a new version of React, even though it's kind of obvious it couldn't match the level of upvotes for the latter. Now it's all the latter. It's like a very smart thumb has been lifted off the scales and the community is poorer for it.

As I say, I eventually just left. HN currently detracts from my enjoyment of my day more than it adds. I hope it finds its way back over time.

I noticed it as well but I don’t see a problem with it.

I have spot-checked it at times and saw 5 to 8 of the top 10 posts about AI or directly adjacent.

We are in an emergent, dynamic periodt. AI is revolutionary and will continue to get better. The world will change drastically because of it. This seems so obvious yet many will call it purely hype, no real value, etc. We are still in the incubation period, just like the internet in the early 2000s.

    news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^\/(?:news)?$/) tr.athing:has(a:has-text(/AI|claude|A.I|harnesses|harness|OpenRouter|llm|vibecode|agi|deep learning|agent|TPU|GPT|DeepSeek|Anthropic/i)):xpath(. | following-sibling::tr[1])

Ironically the only reason I saw this post is because I was on my ipad :).

Its 13:15 UTC and 21 of the 30 submissions on the HN home page are not AI related. I'm not saying there isn't a problem with AI-related submissions, but I'm not sure its a flood.

Why limit? This is a news website where users judge if something is newsworthy by upvoting it. If the community decides it’s newsworthy it’s newsworthy. Maybe not for you but at least enough people to make it visible in front page. Unless you have strong arguments, like topics creating death threats or people doxing, there is no reason whatsoever to censure any news because you personally doesn’t care or don’t like it and prevent others from accessing it.

While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment, the ongoing automation of intelligence is, for better or worse, one of the most consequential things that can/will happen to "hackers" (as well as white-collar workers in general), and it is very difficult for us to look away from that asteroid in the sky.

The front page is a reflection of what folks want to see. AI is certainly mentioned a lot but it’s also top of mind for every industry atm. I still see a lot of diversity in posts though. After all this is a VC forum for startups.

I think this is just how it goes. Were you here in 2017-2018 when it was all blockchain all the time?

Every AI post on the front page is there because it was upvoted a lot by HN readers. So you are effectively asking these readers to not vote on a topic because you are not interested in it but they are. Why would any of them alter their behavior because of that?

I think you are looking for a different product. Reddit or another app that shows you a feed of things you are interested in is more in this vein

HN is often dominated by a Thing that is happening, during periods when there is some dominant Thing going on. In my time here, that has been many different Things over the years; social media, SaaS, Ruby on Rails, javascript frameworks, Rust, VR, self driving, crypto, and now AI (and this list is certainly missing a few). And during all those periods, lots of people have complained that the Thing of the moment is getting too much attention. But IMO, this kind of eye of sauron effect on a main Thing of a given time is mostly good. We're all here working out what we think of things, and it is useful to focus a lot of discussion on the new Thing that is developing and moving quickly.

I think there's still plenty of good stuff here, but agree that is beneficial to be kept up for to date on model evolution. We gotta get through this together.

I'm glad HN isn't a curated feed, it would end up like all the the others.

> I am trying to make is that maybe YC could start curating the content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump?

This kind of defeats the purpose of a link aggregator compared to a human curated newsletter or blog. Maybe something like https://hackernewsletter.com acts as a good filter for you?

There's already the "second chance pool" which is a human bump for interesting posts that didn't get the attention they should (Bad timing, other big news overshadowing, bad title etc.).

I do miss the fun, small side projects that used to be in the front page. Artisanal coding they call it now.

Yessss!

I like HN precisely because it tends to tell me what's happening.

GitHub or AWS down? New LLM model? Some Apple event? Some famous tech person passed away? Some language achieved 1.0?

I think removing what's currently hot opens a bad precedent.

I suggest using personal filters (or even AI) to curate what you see in HN and the internet itself.

Your suggestion would break my use case: i.e I check out HN every day to see what the latest models that have been released are, and opinions from erudite people who have taken them for a spin.

Keeping abreast of fast moving AI developments with informed opinions/comments for various new models/agents etc. is primarily what I'm here for.

For me, the appeal of HN is the DIY attitude.

In that regard AI fits the bill well. Because many of the AI related posts are about tools one can immediately tinker with.

While a new type of laptop cooling might become interesting once the laptops come out, the news is not as interesting to me as a new LLM or agent that I can experiment with right away.

Brute force being the antithesis of hacking spirit, I too wish brute force would end up in Lamer News instead.

On the brax thing - the "article" is a youtube video. There's a pretty reasonable amount of pushback here against video-only content where folks can't rip through quickly to figure out how relevant it is to them or if it's just a vapid ad.

1769379778 | Brax open_slate Android/Linux tablet | https://community.braxtech.net/t/introducing-open-slate-our-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46759121 | 0 comments

HN due to its design is easy to read, interact with and modify according to personal preference. How many other sites on the www are like that

A few projects that demonstrate this are mentioned in this thread

These are projects hosted by third parties

One of them uses "AI"

Another asks users to enable Javascript

Another only applies to the /front page

There is also DIY

For example

Transform HN HTML into SQL to create SQL database. This makes it faster and easier to search for interesting information and present it in whatever format the user prefers, all from the command line, no browser needed

Modify the web pages before they reach the browser/client using a local forward proxy. This makes it easy to filter out comments that discuss "AI" and make other cosmetic and substantive changes, for example, using Lua (no "AI" needed)

Use custom command line programs to make submissions and/or replies, instead of using a web browser

These are all DIY projects of mine, written in C (Flex as code generator), Lua and Almquist shell script (no Bash). I use older, underpowered, low spec computers, no "AI"

The discussions of AI hype in HN threads seem to follow a pattern. It goes something like

HN comment: "I dislike AI hype"

HN reply: "I think AI is useful. It saved me time." (sometimes including a personal anecdote)

But "I find AI useful. I like it because [reason(s)] I used it for [project(s)]" does not address the _hype_ issue

It could address a _"usefulness"_ issue but that's not the issue being raised

All the stuff I post that I find interesting gets instantly flagged now. Not sure why.

I think tagging on HN is an idea whose time has come. We already had informal tags for "Show HN" and "Ask HN" for some time. A few fixed tags chosen at submission time might suffice, for example:

- Global news, AI, Software, Hardware, Explainer, Tech Opinion, Personal project, Misc.

There could even be fake tags like Politics that trigger a message about appropriate topics.

It does increase moderation burden for mislabelling, and introduces another nitpicking point for comments to latch on, so it's not all upsides.

I'd be ok leaving filtering and other UI concerns to extensions.

Both of your links are basically ads, or at least the titles make them sound like it.

> Lenovo showed a model that incorporates solid-state air cooling. That technology has been around for a while but it looks like it matured and is production-ready. This allows for super-light and slim designs, which, in turn, should allow for bigger batteries installed and I think it's some sort of breakthrough

See now this sounds like something I'd click on. (The linked article doesn't really discuss any of the technology or engineering though)

I understand where you’re coming from, but would argue that the reality is that our industry is predominantly almost exclusively AI-related at this point.

A tagging feature would be nice, but HN is historically very reluctant to introduce new features. I argue that’s a good thing, given its age and the fact that it remains the gold standard for tech community news.

Adding tagging strikes me as a tall order, almost like asking Craigslist to make a major UI change - feature additions threaten the spirit of a beloved platform.

As I type this comment, 18 out of 30 links on the front page appear to be about things other than AI. I would not call this "almost exclusively AI talk."

I've been hearing a lot of "Amdahl's law" regarding AI - the rule that says the slowest part of a system sets the speed of what you can accomplish. On one hand, this means that AI has sped up software (so there is more software news because you can make a 20-page blog post in one prompt now), but it doesn't speed up, say, shipping hardware products that much. I guess we need to re-weight the news to include how hard it is, not just how many tokens it makes.

I maintain a simple browser extension to auto-hide AI news stories: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ It just scans for keywords and clicks the Hide button. Doesn't catch everything, but cuts out a ton of the noise. You can go hit the Hidden page in your profile sometimes and scan for highly-upvoted stories to see the couple that are maybe actually worth looking at.

I've been using HackerSmacker for a while to tag AI-related and non-AI-related submissions.

I find, depending on the time of day, 30-50% of submissions are about AI. Also, Users who submit AI-related content tend to also submit non-AI-related content - those I tag for non-AI-related content almost never submit AI-related content.

I can't help but feel that every 1% improvement over a benchmark from new releases of flagship LLMs isn't really that impressive anymore. To some extent it feels like LLM improvements is slowing down significantly despite increasing resources being spent on them.

The people promising AGI just 6 months ago are now more and more quiet about the possibility and rightfully so. LLMs alone are most likely not the path to AGI.

HN/YC should be called "News Venture Capital Cares About". VC cares about AI, so AI is what you're gonna get

I submitted an article today, then withdrew it when I noticed it was AI generated. I think it's a matter of self-policing.

https://studyfinds.com/telling-kids-theyre-smart-nearly-doub...

We absolutely must discuss SVGs of animals riding vehicles, that is the only compelling topic these days.

Reading threads like this always confuses me a little...

Since Corona this platform has become basically reddid as it was 10-15 yrs ago.

> Meanwhile the legitimately, broadly-hacker stuff gets left out for the most part

Those were pretty much always niche content here. This was- at least until Corona, a forum where you got usually pretty highly intelligent and critical input on various topics, strongly centered around products as a direct consequence of this being the (I think) most successful VC forum.

Pretty much every comment section had me think about something that I hadn't fully understood before. Nowadays? It's extremely rare to see anything remotely insightful. It's mostly just reactionary/knee jerk response, from people that clearly never actually thought about what they're actually talking about/just parroting political points.

I do miss the older content, and I've found myself getting more and more toxic as a consequence of seeing ever less insightful if not downright stupid comments here. Which - if I'm honest - objectively contributes to the problem and I should stop henceforth.

AI is on the front page because those articles are upvoted. There have always been hot topics that dominated the feed in the past: Apple product releases, Steve Jobs's passing, cryptocurrency, US-only news, San Francisco-only news, coding bootcamps, NPM drama of the week, etc.

1. Popularity != Merit and this site is not different. A lot of worthy posts get ignored.

2. Even though I find most of the AI posts interesting, I agree that tags and the ability to filter by tags would be really great. But it's probably a ton of work and additional system load.

I don't have a

People post and interact with what interests - or triggers - them. Yesterday it was one thing, today it's AI, and tomorrow it'll be another thing. Just have to ack the flow, and find another way to filter for your non-today's-thing interests.

This happened when crypto was big. Hacker News rides the bandwagon hard. Everything in tech trying to align to AI makes it more pronounced. It'll calm down, hopefully.

Here is a link to an HN feed with reduced priority for AI content

https://sprinklz.io/public/pdwt4dve5uai

this is what I use to keep the garbage out

I would like more news on native dev (C++/assembly/Nim/D/...)

or Theoretical CS and algorithms.

AI-related news are very much relevant nowadays, so limiting them would be excessive. But introducing tags to make it possible to filter out specific topics seems like a good idea.

I highly agree. I am very interested in the AI news but the distribution isn't right at the moment. It doesn't really feel like the same website to me.

Yes, believe they can down weight certain topics by keywords, let’s hope they do. This doesn’t stop the posts but just flushes them more quickly.

FWIW, one article is very short on details, it’s a slightly expanded press release, and the other is a video. I’m not sure either is what’s needed more on HN.

Every platform captures the Zeitgeist somewhat, the AI related post are just a reflection of that.

While I also somewhat dislike it. I don’t think limiting them resolves the issue.

Oh but the world is ending due to skynet anyway. So why bother with batteries? They'll turn us into ones after we pollute the sky

If intergalactic aliens landed on Earth tomorrow, HN would be flooded with alien news too ;-)

Been here a long time and wouldn't upvote any of those things. Sounds like you're looking for a different site.

There are almost as many posts like this as there are about AI.

Keep both. AI and banning AI are both high-interest topics.

It's the biggest 'thing' in the industry.

Previously this site was swamped with Blockchain news...

This. Simple tagging and/or a dedicated AI news section would be very welcome.

I wish but honestly that's unrealistic because a lot, if not most, people related to HN are currently their livelihood linked to AI, in one way or another.

Most companies, in software or not, are imposing minimum (after backtracking to suggest to maximized, until their started to pay bills) AI usage. A lot of people in HN also have stocks a lot of popular stocks is linked to AI success, whatever that might mean. A lot of AI entrepreneurs also are directly to sell AI, as it's simply where most of the VC money is currently going.

So... when it's this intertwined I think it will be difficult. If you know of other places I'd be curious.

Totally agree. An analogy would be a physics journal getting flooded with articles about psychology because "ultimately the human brain runs on atoms".

Instead, AI deserves its own field, outside (and, in my taste, far away from) CS.

So instead of the most craziest technology advantage in our lifetime, you want to see more products?

Like a lenovo laptop with a technology which is available for a bit and another product which you can pre-order?

I had the same feeling yesterday, when the front page was filled with all apple stuff.

I have been lurking in lobste even though i dont have account, which currently has this post which is right up my ally.

https://lobste.rs/s/twkkac/fastly_speedtest_test

same thing on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650630

I already miss rust and erlang articles

https://hcker.news/ > settings > quick filters > AI

There's also an extension and rss feeds.

I mean, it's not surprising. I think that most people on here are software developers.

AI is fundamentally transformative to the software development industry and threatens to put large numbers of software developers out of a job. Fable regularly does things in 20 minutes that would have taken me 2 weeks before. AI is probably the biggest revolution in software development since the development of operating systems and high-level languages. It's also potentially a fundamental turning point in the entirety of human history.

So it's no wonder that AI gets a lot of attention.

I've largely moved over to lobste.rs for actual technical news. They even have a "vibecoding" tag to let you filter out anything related to coding with LLMs.

"Whats new" is, I hate to break it to you, 99% AI-related. Its a pretty unique point in time here and likely will continue to be for at least 12-24 months. This is likely to go down as being as reality-altering as the internet but with the added wrinkle of things are able to progress/iterate _much_ faster. Not only are the models progressing at breakneck speed, but our understanding of how to use them effectively is as well. So theres legitimate "discoveries" happening every week.

Given that LLMs are currently the frontier of innovation in our industry, it does make sense to me that most stuff that happens and gets talked about would be somehow connected to it.

There's a lot of focus on in. People are trying it out in their workflows and learning new things.

So, potentially, this could just be organic.

Of course, in reality, it is not. There's a ton of "thought leader" LinkedIn slop, just advertising their own personal brand with at best mid takes. But grifters come with every paradigm shift. Unfortunately.

It would be nice to at least have a day in the week without AI news. Some kind of "No AI Friday," for example.

But this post is about AI news!

Get mad at me if you want, but whenever I see a new program/project posted, my first thought is "that's cool, please don't be AI slop."

There is an ebb and flow.

But with Hugging Face hack, and Navier–Stokes. You're going to be flooded with news for at least a few more weeks.

It has been like this for more than a year, a lot longer than just the past couple of months.

HackerNews, just like all other platforms, is heavily astroturfed and the big AI labs have bots commenting and voting, so it'll never end.

The only solution is a platform that only allows humans, with a proof of humanity before posting anything, but not too sure what that can be, and it would ultimately be unsuccessful.

But we have to see the positive, at least less posts about SQLite make it to the frontpage.

Time for a category at the top? Next to new, jobs, ...? Something like "sans AI".

I like adjacent articles though. Today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656496 was a delight. It would be sad if such articles were filtered out or automatically downvoted or similar.

The amount of useless griping and sniping on HN has made it a less interesting and resourceful community. Moreso than the flood of AI news.

Tagging may not help though. Even the latest Apple product announcement threads were just.. bad. Everyone wants to be grumpy and dismissive.

If I had to keep one and lose one, I’d keep X and lose HN. And while I hate Elon, HN is losing on vibes, utility, information, network, links, and tips.

Once we start dividing, filtering, or moderating content, HN will just become Reddit. The current level of moderation is good enough, if not the best. It works because the community naturally filters itself—like-minded people find a home here, while those outside the bubble quickly get bored and move on.

Yeah there really needs to be better moderation and filtering here.

Yesterday there were multitudes of blatant AI slop and AI-slop-fueled misinformation/contrarianism all over the front page. It's not getting caught and flagged fast enough.

HN already has an upvote/downvote system to surface what's interesting to people here.

This is a solved problem. Hacker News without AI: https://hcker.news/?view=frontpage&ai=exclude

Perhaps you could lead the change you wish to see?

Of course HN isn't going to stop advertising the very thing it's probably sunk a ton of money into.

If you want actual technical discussion of other subjects, maybe slashdot is still around.

Don't look up...

This is eternal September my friend

The AI is only going to increase on all forums from here. There's no stopping it, because on most forums people will start preferring AI in many areas

Variants of your Ask are a regular thing around here. Lots of stuff still floats to the top that's non-AI but traction is as ever a challenge somewhat. Stuff moves fast around here.

Some recents:

Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834961

Show HN: Hacker News with AI stories filtered out

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49159018

Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886741

Just a few weeks ago:

How much of HN is AI?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435728

Also surfacing non-AI projects:

Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700460

Ask HN: What are you working on (non-AI)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122103

The Brax industries stuff you mentioned looked really sleek and fun until I noticed it's pretty much vaporvare as for today. I'm a great fan of the former submission you mentioned: a technology that seemed innovative but not in production but is available now. Stuff that will be available next year or never is simply less interesting.

My linkedin is just pages and pages of AI posts and layoffs.

Are lawyers, doctors, and people in non-tech fields getting the same thing? Is Doctor linkedin all about how AI is going to improve surgery while half your connections posts are about being unemployed?

I say embrace the eras, hackernews has always be fixated on some shiny topic for a while before jumping to the next.

Someday you will look back and see this as the good old days.

I’ve been a hacker since I was 10, so about 30 years now.

A couple of years ago, I felt the same way you did. And then I started properly/seriously using Claude Code. When Opus 4.5 came out, it was sincerely life-changing. I can prototype working projects in possibly 1/30th the time, and I can do them simultaneously.

This post has made me realize that the flood of AI news isn’t annoying or boring to me anymore because I think my profession is the only one that’s actually being replaced by it, for better or worse. For coders, there’s nothing even close to the level of importance as AI (which doesn’t mean it’s interesting).

Honestly I’d like to see more news about AI, but actually about the way it’s devastated the labor side of our industry and will kill the middle classes of countries like India.

Without question, nothing short of the web has been more impactful to our industry specifically than AI has been and will be.

I like it.

It’s relevant and current technology.

does hn quickly down rank other subjects?

if i’m not mistaken they might with political subjects, if so, there’s already precedent and so the tech pieces are in place.

i would be against entirely removing it, but limiting it to like 10-20% of the front page would honestly be kind of nice.

it feels like it’s been an ai sausage fest for months and months.

Unfortunately, no. People talk about the times. I was sick and tired of covid posts a few years ago. Or nodejs before that.

Hn is the propaganda arm of yc. Yc is heavily invested in ai. Follow the money.

> Please stop discussing one of the most pivotal moments in history

HN frontpage in 2000: Can we please limit the Internet news flood?

That's why lobste.rs is a good plance, almost no AI.

I have found that the https://lobste.rs/ submission policy means that there is a lot less slop (and discussion of slop) over there. They focus more heavily on technical discussions, which I find more rewarding.

Reminder that this is primarily a Silicon Valley / VC related and owned technology news aggregator.

Fringe topics will stay fringe until they're hip (again?); currently non fringe from my intermittent read:

- anything "AI"

- retro computing (honest interest x mourning/cope in the non-deterministic agentic takeoff)

- random topics that hit the zeitgeist

Check out lobste.rs as well as SIG across forums, IRC, fediverse, discord, etc, etc – and or create your own like in the olden days :)

https://sive.rs/dance-lessons

FWIW I prefer to come here and post, read up and comment on "AI" over having to wade through proxied shitter content (it truly stinks over there).

Go to lobste.rs and hide the 'vibecoding' tag.

"One of the largest changes in human history has started, why is everyone talking about it?"

"what i post here gets no traction"

I'd also SERIOUSLY ask for an "LLM generated" flag in addition to normal flags - on both comments and submissions, that is.

Obvious slop comments thankfully already get flagged or downvoted in the hell they belong, but the submissions, oh dear god I do not wish to engage with shit written by AI any more. It's questionable enough if you let LLMs do your coding work for you, but if you can't even be arsed to write a proper README.md on your own, why the fuck should I be forced to waste my time reading it?

The AI posts are better than the reddit tier politics slop

No. You will have your slop and you'll like it, too.

Well, Lenovo's new air cooling and Brax's new open source devices would both be made pretty moot if everyone on earth dies in the coming months. Sooooooo

To see how fast hype cycles can die, check out the NFT archive on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=NFT

Top stories (critical and otherwise) were upvoted hundreds of times 4-5 years ago and had hundreds of comments. Sort by the past year, and no story has more than 9 points. NFTS have effectively disappeared from HN's front page.

AI is a different beast ... the tech and concepts have true value. But we may see the term "AI" start to fade as new terminology and companies and concepts rise to the fore ... the Sons/Daughters of AI.