Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?
Over past couple months I noticed that HN feed is almost exclusively AI or AI-adjacent news. Meanwhile the legitimately, broadly-hacker stuff gets left out for the most part. I noticed that because the things I find genuinely interesting that I post here now get zero traction, which is the stuff that I believe would previously be met with some discussion. Note that I don't care that my submissions were ignored, I don't need that validation. Problem is that if my stuff gains no traction, I am myself not seeing similar stuff posted by others, stuff I am genuinely also interested in and would want to hear about from this community. Here are two most recent examples: - 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580229 - Brax Industries devices, genuinely interesting, open-soruce and innovative, especially the wall display, with its modularity and on-device processing compatible with Home Assistant. I also appreciate the very clean design: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643215 As said, I honestly believe this would gain some traction here on HN a year or two ago. I no longer find HN a good source of "what's new" in the industry, it's almost exclusively AI talk now. So I think the point 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? Or, at the very least, introduce simple tagging, so we can start filtering stuff out.
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
leonheld
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 .
Cerium
Unfortunately, no. People talk about the times. I was sick and tired of covid posts a few years ago. Or nodejs before that.
iLoveOncall
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.
embedding-shape
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.
probably_wrong
No. You will have your slop and you'll like it, too.
bbor
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
fithisux
I would like more news on native dev (C++/assembly/Nim/D/...) or Theoretical CS and algorithms.
andyjohnson0
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.
aurareturn
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.
andrewstuart
I like it. It’s relevant and current technology.
smt88
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.
hannofcart
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.
tumdum_
Go to lobste.rs and hide the 'vibecoding' tag.
proactivesvcs
Perhaps you could lead the change you wish to see?
AyanamiKaine
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.
telesilla
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.
stormcode
I think this is just how it goes. Were you here in 2017-2018 when it was all blockchain all the time?
nonethewiser
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.
r4v3n_art
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
FrustratedMonky
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.