* It filters out things that are clearly not AI related (like the one titled ' Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization ') - or maybe it's just slow to update (that post was 3 hours ago)
* No ability to go to the next page
* Order is often different than on HN, even account for the missing posts. It's mostly the same, but not quite, which always throws me for a loop to see if something else is missing.
I don't personally use those apps so I'm not sure, but if they're open source I'm confident you could easily update them to work with my site. In case it's useful, here's the source code https://github.com/leiDnedyA/hn-without-ai
Huh, perhaps there is a project to be done to consume the HN firehose and serve it AT Proto style from the firehose. HN mobile clients can then pick the feed they want. AI? No AI? Politics? No politics? Frameworks? No frameworks? Choose your own HN post feed adventure. Read replica esq consumption, writes (comments, posts, votes) go to the primary data store (HN).
At the bottom of the linked site, it says "79 of 179 submissions survived the filter" so if only ~44% survived I'd say that counts as "prevalent" yeah.
The AI spam is part of the issue, but not only. Maybe it's rose tinted glasses, but it feel like HN posts and comments quality have dropped significantly compared to ~5 to 10 years ago.
It used to have a lot more really technical subjects, with comments from experts on the topic.
Now days it seems to be a lot more of "hot takes with little nuance from people who have read at most half a Wikipedia page on the topic". And the content itself, being more generalist and less specialized, is no longer unique to HN.
Quality posts and comments do still occur, but they fill more and more needle in an haystack.
Instead of filtering keywords this ranks the content using Pangram. But it's also pretty effective at filtering content about AI. Turns out that a lot of LLM tooling projects have LLM written project descriptions/blog posts.
It's amazing to see how many of the "AI hurts my brain" posts are apparently written by an LLM.
Great point. I think the key is differentiating between "prompt generated" content vs "AI as a Topic" content and then being able to toggle them at will.
I am not averse to prompt-generated content, but it should be marked and quoted as such, just like any other reference. If it's not, it's like the author is double-cheating.
In fact there are no shortage of comments here on HN, especially open-ended questions that could've been plugged into a bot for an answer. Avoiding LLMs altogether is foolhardy. It's a matter of balance, and being able to write a good prompt is a skill - no mental atrophy there. Content derived from non-English sources using English-based LLMs is also an interesting area. [1]
It's possible to obtain AIaaT from https://aibriefs.news/ and then prune it elsewhere if need be. But the best aggregators like that may be machine-generated with a lot of human moderation. I wonder if that is 100% machine generated.
Nice! I was considering doing this but the Pangram API is very expensive. Then I considered training my own model and I fortunately stopped at the edge of that rabbit hole.
Yea very expensive (hence me siphoning another page haha).
Im trying to get something cheaper to work, Pangram has some nice docs on how to build something like their service https://github.com/pangramlabs/EditLens, they even have training data online.
The harm a missclassification carries is much lower for a hn post than a masters thesis, so we might be fine with a worse model.
Yeah agree, Pangram puts out interesting material. I recently came across their v4 technical report and they shared a lot more than I would have expected them to.
But see, here I am back at the edge of the rabbit hole, and you're trying to pull me in. I refuse!
If you do end up training a model, send me an email and maybe I can tie it into the site.
Will do, thanks for hcker.news btw, has been my main mobile client for couple of months. Of all things i like the changelog most, its nice to have a quick view about new stuff, especially if the website changes somewhat faster than usual.
Would if be possible to set up push notifications for new stories matching a filter - one that's separate to the main filter? Like say, I want to get notified every time an article about "Linux" is posted. But if I go to main page, I want to see all stories (or whatever my main filter is set to).
Yeah, all possible, the infra for all of that is set up. I think I understand your request but can u send me an email so I can talk it through with you a little more?
There is also the hide button under every post, which I’ve started using generously. It only takes a few seconds to clean up the front page to your taste
I'm mixed on that. Definitely topics I hide when I think people can't discuss them like adults, but sometimes even bad stories have some great discussions in them.
Great feedback. After all this time I just realized a lot of people may not even know that menu exists. It's been like that for so long I'm literally blind to it.
Depends on what you want "without AI" to mean... is it just stories about AI, or anything that an AI has touched at all? Or purely vibe-coded projects?
Just a few high level points about how this works. It works in multiple stages:
1. I apply a domain and keyword filter to the feed
2. The content of the remaining articles are run twice daily through a Modern Bert-based classifier fine-tuned to detect AI-related content (~8000 training examples)[0].
It also filters out Github repos that contain AI authorship. My backend scans:
- Commit messages for agent attribution
- The contributor graph for agents
- Repo files for instructions/configs
0: The original workflow for this was a little different. For the better part of the past year, I had an AI agent detect AI-related stories and raise ~20 stories to me to make a judgement call on. After a while, a workflow like this just doesn't make sense when small models can do it equally as well. The training data is based on the machine and my labeling.
I think you should make it clear, that when you say "without AI" you mean AI-related content, because some people in the comments seem to think that this is about AI-generated content.
People were actually complaining specifically about OpenAI/Anthropic glazing and the countless influencer comments and posts here every hour.
And it's getting twisted into "People want HN without AI."
But that was never the case. I mean some surely do. But the blow-up this morning was specific to Anthropic ads to the point there's basically no information on this website that isn't related to Anthropic or OpenAI.
If it was announced some rando kid made a LLM in PHP or something, sure share it! If it was announced someone actually made something cool with AI (lol) then share it!
But Claude 24/7 aint it. It's at least extremely boring!
It looks nice but I can't load any comments, and I believe it's because I have Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection turned on to the strictest level.
I quite like this, particularly that the filter is just a preset! Will be back.
Minor UI feedback - when navigating comments (and maybe other stuff) with the keyboard, the actual focus change is blocked behind some automated scroll behavior, and the effect is that someone quickly hitting keybinds will collapse the wrong thread. Would suggest making the focus change happen concurrently.
Thanks for the feedback. Comment drawer nav could be a lot better. I started working on the keyboard nav but got distracted with other things. I'll fix it.
I know you guys hate X/Twitter but the muted words feature is really awesome for this kind of thing. You never have to hear about a topic you don't give a crap about ever again.
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