other?"

468 points bookofjoe | 2 comments | 15 Jul 25 14:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.582s | source

I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.

The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.

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simonw ◴[15 Jul 25 15:11 UTC] No.44571983[source]▶

>>44571740 (OP) #

I built you this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-filtered

It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories filtered out.

You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in localStorage.

o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0...

Initial prompt was:

  Build a web tool that displays the Hacker
  News homepage (fetched from the Algolia API)
  but filters out specific search terms,
  default to "llm, ai" in a box at the top but
  the user can change that list, it is stored
  in localstorage. Don't use React.

Then four follow-ups:

  Rename to "Hacker News, filtered" and add a
  clear label that shows that the terms will
  be excluded

  Turn the username into a link to
  https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xxx -
  include the comment count, which is in the
  num_comments key

  The text "392 comments" should be the link,
  do not have a separate thread link

  Add a tooltip to "1 day ago" that shows the
  full value from created_at

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1. voxl ◴[15 Jul 25 23:12 UTC] No.44576896[source]▶

>>44571983 #

Have you no sense of embarrassment that you displayed exactly the kind of bullshit that AI skeptics talk about all the time? You put in almost no effort to spit out some garbage that doesn't solve the issue even in a technical sense.

replies(1): >>44577226 #

2. simonw ◴[15 Jul 25 23:58 UTC] No.44577226[source]▶

>>44576896 (TP) #

Not at all. I think you misunderstood the point I was making here.

I think the idea of splitting Hacker News into AI and not AI is honestly a little absurd.

If you don't want to engage with LLM and AI content on Hacker News, don't engage with it! Scroll right on past. Don't click it.

If you're not going to do that, then since we are hackers here and we solve things by building tools, building a tool that filters out the stuff you don't want to see is trivial. So trivial I could get o3 to solve it for me in literally minutes.

(This is a pointed knock at the "AI isn't even useful crowd", just in case any of them are still holding out.)

There's a solid meta-joke here too, which is that filtering on keywords is a bad way to solve this problem. The better way to solve this profile... is to use AI!

So yeah, I'm not embarrassed at all. I think my joke and meta joke were pretty great.

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