It cannot be a long-term solution, though. Most people don't use them and if HN continues to be AI-foremost, many will simply stop coming here to post other interesting, non-AI stuff. A vicious circle.
I'm curious where people would go to as an alternative. I like looking at lobste.rs for non-AI stuff, but to post there you need to be invited by an existing member so it's not a perfect alternative.
Unless you're one of those people who only ever use HN and make it a part of your identity, sure. You can just leave for greener pastures. Or learn to care less.
Thank you for that recommendation. I find the website hard to read¹, but the submissions themselves are as a whole much more interesting² than any HN homepage in the past year.
¹ But I can do something about that, as opposed to the submissions as a whole.
² Even if one of them is about someone’s son pooping in the toilet.
For the last two years I've been noticing that most comments that are somewhat "strange" are from accounts that are either outright green, or just < 1 yo.
By strange I mean comments I stopped at to check what's going on: mainly uncivil, overly hateful, etc.
There are also users who create multiple accounts that are obviously tied to the same person, after the previous one gets banned. It's an epidemic.
The NN revolution which started 15 years ago cannot be understated - if anything, some areas are not progressing as fast as they should and some of us are nervously waiting.
Have you actually multiplied the weight of submissions in your mental model by how consequential each one is?
Because we are still submitting even more idle "intellectual curiosities" - but these are in no way "times of static peace and ordinary administration".
Well it is the best way to do a 'fuzzy' filter like that. Rather than trying frantically to chase keywords.
I don't think anyone considers AI to be something useless. It sure has its uses, I use it a lot to help with research. But it is sometimes shoehorned into things it doesn't belong, or its capabilities overblown for marketing. I think that's what people object to.
This is where I’m at. I find AI to be useful but there’s a tendency for it to suck the oxygen out of the room. Other things still matter.
Edit: I'll also note that while its nice to see real novel AI news I find a lot of it is extremely marginal value. I mentally associate most discussion with debating what color of marker to use when marking the edge of your CDs to improve the sound.
Yeah I didn't word that well at all, at least you know it wasn't an LLM.
I meant I don't really care, I keep half an eye on what they are up to (have to live in the same world as them) but I'm not really interested in it at all beyond playing with some local models, the constant onslaught of it has just become tiresome, then I got to YT to watch my usual history content which mentions something I didn't know about so I do a search to see if there is a video on that and that is wall to wall AI slop and that annoys me so I go to do something else, do a search and the results are slop if the AI doesn't try and answer it for me first.
It just feels like if you want to do anything on-line you get force fed slop whether you want it or not and it's damn hard to filter it, can't even block channels on YT without an extension.
In the old days we had this thing called a redaction. It was like a dungeon master vs playing the same hardcoded level again and again. Had one suggested automating it back then even the greatest optimist wouldn't see how you replace [say] Stephen King with a calculator but here we are - true believers.
Almost everything in top/new/best is an interesting read. Either I don't know anything about the topic ("...the spanning tree protocol") or am seriously interested in the topic ("Remembering Hong Kong", "Automattic's board forces CEO..."). None of these made to frontpage over the last two days AFAIK.
Its important to use these filtered front pages though, so that eventually theres a sizable Referrer traffic chunk coming not from HN's frontpage itself that will signal to the admins that something is up
No disrespect intended at all, I like HN and have used it for what feels like a long time and the moderation team that keeps it one of the more reasonable places to have a conversation on the internet (for the most part).
That out of the way, The admin/moderators can hardly be unware given they work for a startup accelerator that is heavily in on the AI stuff, it is the way it is because that is the way they want it to be.
HN is great but it's bias has always skewed to what is hot in the VC market or that they are heavily in on at the time (as someone who was around when it seemed like every other post was blockchain/crypto it's not even "new").
oh absolutely, but if they lose half their audience due to the sloppification of their front page, then they lose both legitimacy as an interesting and impartial platform to promote said AI tech
The mods have said that they consider the cynicism and "curmudgeonliness" in the community to be a problem and they want newer people coming in. The most direct way to accomplish that would be to drive the old grumps out and replace them with a younger pro-AI userbase. After all, every startup YC will fund in the forseeable future will be first and foremost an AI startup. There just isn't going to be a place here for people who actually enjoy programming as an art, or the human element in any creative activity, nor any benefit to YC in maintaining that culture.
You can't serve humanity and the machine, you have to choose a master. YC has no choice but to choose the machine because that's where the money is, so HN has no choice but to follow suit. Hacker News is an AI forum.
I'm not suggesting there is some kind of conspiracy afoot but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to just give in let nature take its course.
I guess "hype cycle" is an accurate description, but it feels overly negative, in the sense that we now have a revolutionary technology that's still quite young and moving fast, and folks everywhere are trying to figure out how to leverage it, both to do new things, and to deal with the problems it causes. So it just feels like a high-energy time where we're going to have a billion ideas, most of them will suck, and we'll eventually find out where the real winners are.
Given that context, having a hacker site cover what's happening with that revolution makes sense. All that said, I agree with OP that it does drown out other cool things happening, but that's just how mass psychology works.
Make sure to generate a wordy blog post on it and the ramifications of generating empty parody versions of social media pages or people won't know that you did it.
It would be cool if one could visualise (graph wise) the number of posts around different hypes (eg. crypto, not sure what else was prominent like AI) throughout the history of HN.
It's more complicated than that. This place has changed.
The biggest tell is reposting something interesting from a year or two ago that received hundreds of upvotes. Now it will get 2 or three upvotes whilst "lulz Trump" /r/politics style culture war BS will be immediately hurled up and onto the front page.
Those posts get buried really quickly by the anti flamewar algorithms. I really don’t think anything changed regarding political stuff over the past 2y on this site (other than the fact the US has a new administration doing pretty insane things, resulting in way more important political topics, such as everything related to Iran)
Man I always look at this project with nothing by awe. I'd love to start something like this... if you're in central Switzerland and would like to copy their model, hit me up.
Yep, you can do a DFU recovery on a Mac from another Mac over USB. Same as if it were an iPhone/iPad. Which makes sense since it's basically the same hardware.
I built a Claude Project with special instructions just teaching it how to do this, which means it can output full scripts for me with inline dependencies based on a single prompt: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/one-shot-python-tools/
Claude 4's training cutoff date is March 2025 though, I just checked and it turns out Claude Sonnet 4 can do this without needing any extra instructions:
Python script using uv and inline script dependecies
where I can give it a URL and it scrapes it with httpx
and beautifulsoup and returns a CSV of all links on
the page - their URLs and their link text
Using your system instructions for uv for every LLM now since first seeing your post last year, thanks! It's insanely helpful just asking e.g. Claude to give me a python script for XYZ and just using "uv run". I also added:
If you need to run these scripts, use "uv run script-name.py". It will automatically install the dependencies. Stdlibs don't need to be specified in the dependencies array.
since e.g. Cursor often gets confued because the dependencies are not installed and it doesn't know how to start the script. The last sentence is for when LLMs get confused and want to add "json" for example to the dependency array.
claude sonnet typically forgets about uv script syntax in my experience. I usually find myself having to paste in the docs every time. By default it wants to use uv project syntax.
It gives me so much nostalgia for certain Trillian 0.7x skins that I can't put my finger on. Skinning apps was one of the things I wanted to bring back.
We use it for testing binary embedded Linux distros where tricking the OS to think there's a display connected introduces a new variable that is not present in the user's deployment - and it's a cheap hardware solution. Buying and installing them is probably more cost-effective than having an engineer writing the `echo on > /sys/whatever` and the logic around it.
"So, to get ready for Saturday Night Live, he said to Bowie, 'Well so what are you doing, what's going to happen? Are you doing a staging, or are you doing costumes? What are you doing?'"
"And he said, 'Yeah, and they're making me this copy of a Tristan Tzara design from some performance art thing from the 30's.' So we look at this thing, and it's, it's beautiful."
"I remember Pat Gibbons, who was Bowie's manager at the time. He comes up and he goes, 'Well you're going to have to have something. You're going to have some costumes.'"
"And he whips out a big wad of cash, and he goes, 'How much do you need?', and he starts peeling off bills. And Joey and Klaus look at him, and their eyes widen, and they look at each other, and they go, 'We're going to need shoes, too.'"
One of my favorite performances of all time, The Man Who Sold The World lyric "We must have died alone, a long long time ago." was especially poignant given Nomi's sad fate.
At 1:42 in this video, just after that tragic lyric, Blondie's keyboardist Jimmy Destri stares gothically up into the camera.
>[TVC15] was inspired by an episode in which Iggy Pop, during a drug-fueled period at Bowie’s LA home, hallucinated and believed the television set was swallowing his girlfriend. Bowie developed a story of a holographic television, TVC 15. In the song, the narrator’s girlfriend crawls into the television and afterwards, the narrator desires to crawl in himself to find her.
Finally right the end of the live performance of "Boys Keep Swinging", Bowie pulled one over on the censors by whipping out his puppet penis on live TV, and then grinning impishly!
While others have expressed sentiments about YouTube and Google, let me tell you what I really hate - translated reddit posts.
They're polluting search results and it's the ultimate disrespect against multi-lingual users... it's made my life hell when trying to find localized information (for example, in Portuguese), when my computer is set to Portuguese but I'm searching in English.
And of course in this case I explicitly searched for that, but the point is that if Google thinks Italian is your primary language, it will surface those results automatically, even when you might prefer the English original.
Probably this is caused by Reddit offering these pages to Google, rather than Google deciding to send you to a different URL on its own accord, but it's still annoying from an end user perspective.
