Data on AI-related Show HN posts

by rfarley04 • 1 year ago

274 155 1 year ago

d00mB0t• 1 year ago

Remember Map-Reduce and Quantum Computing?

rfarley04• 1 year ago

And blockchain. Should probably go back and compare how the frequency of those buzzwords (as a ratio of total posts) compare to AI

umanwizard• 1 year ago

Unlike blockchain and quantum computing, AI is both (1) real, and (2) widely useful for something other than committing crimes.

oblio2• 1 year ago

Map reduce powers Google, so that's established tech.

Quantum computing is progressing slowly but it's most likely going to be mainstream, yet too technical for the average person to care about it.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

AI was also too technical. Until LLMs and prompt engineering mase it so everyone can play. Maybe QC will have a similar moment. Maybe not for decades though.

paulsutter• 1 year ago

Mapreduce was a simple way to harness large clusters back in 2006

Today’s tools like Spanner are vastly more sophisticated, but were built by people who learned to work at petabyte scale developing in Mapreduce

We’re getting better AI tools every month, and the best way to be ready for next year’s tools is to work with the tools we have now

dgellow• 1 year ago

How many are written by Claude code or similar? I wouldn’t be surprised if it is the majority

belter2• 1 year ago

I think you mean 4 in 5 are AI-related...

robinson7d• 1 year ago

Do you have numbers for that? The graph in the article says 21.31% by their analysis

belter2• 1 year ago

If there is an ML classifier for HN posts, it is closer to "AI all day" than "AI once in a while"

busymom0• 1 year ago

Meanwhile, unfortunately my non-AI Show HN didn't get any votes or comments and seemed to have not even displayed on the Show HN page. Not sure why :(

readthenotes1• 1 year ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424537

If you add "not made with AI" you can get counted in the author's totals for AI generated stuff

jedberg2• 1 year ago

You have to get at least two upvotes I think to appear on the Show HN page (and have the title start with "Show HN: ")

hdivider• 1 year ago

I think it's partly because we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day. And the harder you work, it seems the more you have to do. On top of cognitive processing of all the ambient events in our time, which is a heavy load just by itself.

Most of the time, AI tools promise to be timesavers. So it's natural many folks look for shortcuts. We're simply overloaded, partly due to current situations generated by existing machine learning tools deployed elsewhere in the system.

johnnyanmac7• 1 year ago

Who's pushing y'all/us to do do much work? Maybe that institution or society should take responsibility instead of putting the burden on the workers.

zvorygin• 1 year ago

I think society has never, does not, and probably will never work the way you suggest it should.

doug_durham• 1 year ago

"y'all"??? Is this a 1970's episode of "Hee Haw"? This faux authenticity is annoying.

fuzztester4• 1 year ago

I think it's partly because we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day. And the harder you work, it seems the more you have to do.

Yeah(, right). Or rather, yeesh. Or maybe, yikes!

we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day.

... in the richest country in the world, which some inhabitants there also call the greatest nation in the world.

jakelazaroff• 1 year ago

Title nit: the actual title says "less than half" but the title on HN says "> half" (more than half)

stirfish• 1 year ago

Thank you, I thought it was talking about the > symbol for qoutes

creativenolo• 1 year ago

It is a very confusing title that only gets more confusing when starting to read the article

4b11b4• 1 year ago

this inspires a HN viewer that uses an LLM given "dun want AI hype" to filter out AI related posts

or a more complicated prompt to include "machine learning" or computer vision, etc

or another method... such as filtering on tags is there a HN viewer with tags...?

found this HN post from 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988

mrweasel2• 1 year ago

I mean I wrote a small Firefox plugin that just removes the AI posts... I only saw this one because I was debugging as I tried to remove Apple Intelligence posts.

FridgeSeal• 1 year ago

Is your plugin public? Some friends and I were lamenting the AI-ification of HN, so is use anything that filtered it down in a heartbeat.

shaldengeki• 1 year ago

This shows a huge surge starting in 2023. I see you're counting all .AI TLDs; how much is this responsible for the surge? I think .AI TLD registrations took off starting in 2023, and one thing I wonder is if prior to 2023 we're mostly missing real AI Show HN entries, and afterwards we're mostly catching them.

authorfly• 1 year ago

I think you're right. About 20-30% of product hunt products were AI in late 2022 for example, but very few of them then used .ai.

jedberg2• 1 year ago

I'm surprised it's only 1 in 5 to be honest. That actually makes me happy. It means not everyone is trying to build the next AI thing. There's still innovation in other spaces.

johnnyanmac7• 1 year ago

One in 5 on a news site that covers pretty much all topics is extremely saturated, though.

Also, 1 in 5 being talked about is different from what is actually getting funding.

gxs2• 1 year ago

Who’s to say it’s saturated?

I’d say you can only say saturated relative to the historical popularity of other topics on HN throughout the years. There’s no real golden rule here

Like it or not AI is not only a huge trend, it really is a paradigm shift in all sorts of aspects

Would be curious to see the breakdown of this statistic

4hg4ufxhy3• 1 year ago

This is show HN. From articles and discussions it feels more than half being about AI. As an AI doomer the interesting content on HN has plummetted.

omneity2• 1 year ago

Looking at the post, the methodology (checking the presence of a few keywords, not even including "LLM") is very simple with a lot of potential false negatives. 20% is closer to the lower bound.

It could also explain the lower votes, "AI" or "GPT" being more generic terms is correlated in my personal experience with lower quality.

mewpmewp2• 1 year ago

Ironically would have been better to use LLM to classify posts.

pvg• 1 year ago

20% is closer to the lower bound

I think the methodology is too poor to actually make that call. It's closer to "the 20% is kind of made up".

mycall• 1 year ago

So which comments here are in the 20-percentile?

visarga• 1 year ago

The good thing about it is that being part of such a community feeds creative impulses towards doing projects with AI. It keeps AI forefront in our mind. Happens with all other specialized communities, like r/classicalmusic

gambiting• 1 year ago

Good for who, exactly? I guess it's satire?

>Happens with all other specialized communities

I don't recall HN being specialised in AI, but maybe I missed something.

saubeidl• 1 year ago

But this used to not be an AI enthusiast community, and to be honest I don't care much for the fact it's becoming more of one.

It's like posting your hardstyle remixes into /r/classicalmusic.

johnnyanmac7• 1 year ago

We're not a specialized community, though. And to be frank: the current landscape makes it hard to tell who's curious, and who just wants to appeal to investor money. So I'm skeptical of most AI projects posted here.

Macha• 1 year ago

Harder to do, but would also be interesting:

How do posts where the point of the thing is to "be AI" do compared to posts that just mention AI as a tool used?

winterrx• 1 year ago

I first read the title as AI generated, and I wasn't surprised.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

I was curious the number.

I would have guessed higher.

AI is a seismic event for technology, venture investment, and eventually society.

namuol3• 1 year ago

Seismic events for venture investment tend to be seismic events for the economy, and thus for society, whether or not the investments pay off as expected.

ryandrake3• 1 year ago

AI is a seismic event for technology, venture investment, and eventually society.

I think this definitely remains to be seen. Might be, might not be. They were saying the same thing about the Segway.

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

Maybe after the VCs set fire to enough money my own dollars will be worth a little more.

SpicyLemonZest• 1 year ago

Segway sold about 6,000 units per year at a $5k price point, adding up to an ARR about 300 times lower than OpenAI. It's already a lot more real than the Segway ever was.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

That’s such a ridiculous comparison in the current year.

Segway sold at most 10k units in a year.

ChatGPT currently has 77 million MAUs in the U.S.

namuol3• 1 year ago

Meanwhile articles like this get flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44481964

(Caveat; not sure this kind of flagging is a pattern)

Link to the original article: https://www.the-independent.com/tech/chatgpt-psychosis-ai-th...

somewhereoutth• 1 year ago

As ever, it is the cover-up that is the real scandal.

BrawnyBadger53• 1 year ago

Weird to block this considering how on topic it is. Any insight as to why?

Related to the article, are there actively updated benchmarks for plan recognition?

namuol3• 1 year ago

I would love to see if there’s a pattern before making any hypotheses, but my go-to assumption is just run of the mill conflict of interest bias.

southernplaces7• 1 year ago

Not weird really. On the one hand, you have a flagging policy that lets any random man-child with some specific bias and enough karma completely eliminate a post for whatever bullshit emotional reaction of their own, and at the same time, you have a bunch of people here who suffer from AI-fanboy derangement and hate to see any criticism of their fantasies about a glorious future in which current LLMs are just a hop away from making all things wonderful.

mosquitobiten• 1 year ago

Has been discussed https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

nubinetwork2• 1 year ago

Feels more than that

nektro• 1 year ago

that "ai show hns as % of total" got a jaw drop out of me. wow.

sysmax• 1 year ago

I don't see it as anything bad. LLMs are a interesting, alright. They can very quickly do a lot of mind-numbing work that used to be done by hand, and then they can stumble and produce total nonsense that no human being would even consider writing. And then you tweak the prompt in a weird way, and you're suddenly back in business.

To me, it feels like studying a new physical phenomenon. Like when Nicola Tesla was playing around with coils and wires, eventually loading to the creation of an entire industry.

Except, with LLMs, you don't need multi-million dollar equipment to play around with models. You can get pretty cool stuff done with a regular GPU, and even cooler if you use cloud.

I would say, if you are not spending some spare time fiddling around with LLMs trying to get them do some of the work you would otherwise do by hand, you are missing out.

azhenley• 1 year ago

Anecdotal counter example: Maybe I’m just bad at writing about AI, but my AI-related blog posts rarely get traction on HN.

In contrast, my random side projects that aren’t about AI get discussed here more than 50% of the time.

ivape• 1 year ago

How hyperbolic are your titles?

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

Are you saying they need to be hyperbolic to get traction. There is some truth in that.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

I had a quick look and it looks like the kind of stuff HN likes. There is a lot of luck when posting about what gets picked up. If 1 in 20 get traction though that's quite good (there are only so many slots and many posters)

old_man_cato• 1 year ago

It's pretty important! You could make a case that there's not much else to talk about. I don't love that fact and I wish it would go away but when billionaires are talking about trying to build something that will replace everyone, that's kind of a big topic!

donperignon• 1 year ago

Yeah i am so sick and tired. It was so refreshing to read HN and always find something interesting, now its tiresome, AI marketing everywhere and comments from people that doesn't even like to program and they now can develop a todo list app at the expense of 200$ for whatever claude has release that week.. sad.

ryandrake3• 1 year ago

I've always thought it would be a sorta neat project to make a web plugin to remove certain topics from the HN main page, but I have never before been ->this<- close to starting such a project than I am now. These topics have totally taken over, and quite frankly, the volume of them make HN less interesting.

layer8• 1 year ago

You should be able to vibe-code such a plugin in an evening. ;)

I don’t like it as well, but it’s a reflection of what people are concerning themselves with, so it is what is is.

dijksterhuis• 1 year ago

i had a similar idea.

i’ve been hiding a bunch of AI/LLM posts out of habit with the background idea that it might be useful for regexs.

ghssds• 1 year ago

There is an app named "Glider" on F-Droid that allows one to filter the HN main page by keywords and url.

My current filters are:

urls: twitter.com youtube.com

keywords: gemini openai claude llm llms ai agi

Make the front page more interresting. I'm on browser right now, otherwise this thread would have been filtered.

louthy• 1 year ago

Bonus points if you implement it with an LLM, then blog about it using an LLM, and then post the link to HN where it will be auto filtered out by the generated tool (maybe, because let’s face it, it’s non deterministic)

homebrewer• 1 year ago

I wrote a simple uBlock Origin rule as a quick-and-dirty solution months ago. It doesn't get rid of sibling nodes (still haven't researched how to do it), but does remove the submission title and the vote button.

  news.ycombinator.com###hnmain .submission:has-text(/\b(llms?|vibe[ -]?cod[ei]|claude|chatgpt|altman|agentic|ai)\b/i)

The line goes to uBO settings → My filters.

I removed most words to keep it short, it's easy to adjust according to one's tastes.

henriquemaia• 1 year ago

In a kind of personal plot twist way I'm happy with the outcome. I've now spent way less time here.

If before there was a bit of an attachment to checking what was going on on HN, now there's an overall meh. I still do visit out of habit, but when I do, I have this blasé attitude that quickly takes me away. Too much LLM this or that, AI everywhere.

HN being one of the last Social Media sites I've engaged with, it's good to finally let it go. Yay?

sho_hn• 1 year ago

Dunno, I felt way worse during the crypto boom days. At least the AI stuff has a bit more of a generally useful application.

I get my "people doing interesting things" fixes on YouTube and Hackaday.

the__alchemist• 1 year ago

Same. I think this is what I need to gradually stop visiting. I'm also not sure how many of the accounts making those posts and comments are bots.

internet2000• 1 year ago

Anything that gets posted to HN when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that gets posted to HN between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything posted to HN after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

dijit• 1 year ago

Yeah, you're right. I should do more blockchain development.

brookst• 1 year ago

What a coincidence! It’s just like music! Have you heard the noise kids are listening to these days?

Aeolun• 1 year ago

I’m not so sure about that number of 35. Might be closer to 30.

hnlmorg2• 1 year ago

The GP wasn’t complaining about there being an AI hype. They were complaining that the front page is oversaturated by said hype.

I’ve been on HN since near the beginning (under a different user name originally). And there have been quite a few trends rise and fall on here. But none of them were as intense as this AI hype currently is.

In fact it’s not even AI in the more general sense, it’s almost entirely just LLMs that get discussed. There’s so much more going on outside of LLMs but all anyone is talking about on HN is natural language tools.

v3ss0n• 1 year ago

Wait, how HN is 40 years old

shakabrah• 1 year ago

I know what you’re trying to do. People say this about life in general. But that really is not what is going on here.

gdubs• 1 year ago

I mean, some of us are still uploading various hacker-newsy things like this article by Naughty Dog on how they used a custom LISP for their development of Crash Bandacoot for the Sony PlayStation — but they get like, one upvote ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44470377

spauldo• 1 year ago

That's an old and fairly well-known thing, though. Lisp folks don't see a lot of commercial success stories so we tend to talk about the ones we have. The non-Lispers don't care.

teiferer3• 1 year ago

I'd love to see dang's take on this. How to prevent HN getting overrun with AI topics? How to avoid slop killing the mood? In terms of articles, in terms of comments?

Is there any estimate of how many comments are LLM-generated? What if I tell an agent "make an HN account and post comments with the goal of maximizing karma" and come back after a week to see how it went?

jonplackett2• 1 year ago

Intentionally not upvoting this post since it is AI related.

OK, I’ve done my bit.

ysavir2• 1 year ago

As sick as I am of them, I wonder how it compares to past trends. What does the data show about Crypto/NFT related show-HNs? Is HN consistent across trends or is AI unique?

v5v3• 1 year ago

I would guess higher.

Only a subset of people were, and still are were involved in Crypto, whereas LLM is of use to pretty much everyone.

As a seismic change, of course it's going to be everywhere till the hype cycle flattens.

spondylosaurus• 1 year ago

I had the same thought about crypto/NFTs... Before AI exploded it seemed like that was the "big topic" on HN for a long time. But there may have been less Show HNs for crypto since it has fewer applications.

simonw2• 1 year ago

According to https://hn.algolia.com/

"show hn" "nft" - 151 results

"show hn" "blockchain" - 479 results

"show hn" "crypto" - 782 results

"show hn" "llm" - 2,363 results

"show hn" "ai" - 13,128 results

ysavir2• 1 year ago

Well, damn. That's a pretty clear answer!

JdeBP• 1 year ago

You missed rust and go from your list. (-:

absoluteunit1• 1 year ago

I’m surprised blockchain is only 479

fuzztester4• 1 year ago

trends, as in, trendy, as in fashionable, as in topic du jour.

trends or trendy does not imply substance.

jonplackett2• 1 year ago

It’s 9/30 on the home page right now.

pvtmert• 1 year ago

I am not sure if it's ironic or not, but this post itself is also AI related :). An it's getting quite a lot of votes & comments...

Meanwhile, I really liked the blog theme/design. (reading on an iPad) Simple, yet powerful, with a nice touch of the blinking underline at the end of the title. (It's a simple trick via CSS, but nice to see!)

clircle• 1 year ago

It’s why i read HN through rss. My rss app lets me filter based on keywords in the subject, so i can filter out the nth post about the incremental updates to commonly used models. If i don’t have control over the feed, i cant read this site.

vmxdev• 1 year ago

I opened shownew just to make sure, 10 out of 30 posts there are AI-related. I caught myself thinking that because of this AI-hype I read HN less and less. Sure, it is clear that AI is interesting to people (or at least someone wants more hype around AI), but it would be nice to read about real hacker news and projects somewhere.

randomNumber72• 1 year ago

I think the problem isn't AI, but the hype attracted a lot of low IQ script kids that think they are programmers because chatgpt can write simple code.

spapas82• 1 year ago

I'm also very tired of such articles. Each article with the same content and unfortunately more or less the same comments.

Would it be possible for the moderators to penalize such articles so they can't easily gain traction similar to articles about politics?

fuzztester4• 1 year ago

the same is the case with the main hn page, and the subsequent pages (the More links at the bottom). it's been that way for a while now.

the AI craze is in full boom, feverishly stoked and fuelled by the hypesters and hipsters, who stand to gain from it.

reminds of the gold rushes of the last few centuries, like in California and the Klondike:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gold_rush

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush

picks and shovels, folks.

there's a sucker born every minute:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_ever...

miduil• 1 year ago

Back when Bitcoin had it's first hype around ~5-1000USD/Bitcoin it was almost the same just with blockchain stuff. Would be very curious how that has changed over time as well.

hyfgfh• 1 year ago

There clearly some bias, some post critical of LLMs have been flagged [1]

Idk is 3th party actors or an push for "AI"

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lsukqwhjvk26

IgorPartola2• 1 year ago

This is probably really well known here but hackaday.com is where I get actually hacker news. The stuff here is 90% valley drama, AI stuff, and random product launches that generally don’t interest me. I do love this community and have learned a lot from it over the years. But the hacker ethos has left HN a decade ago.

brogdan• 1 year ago

I’m reminded of the posts about a decade ago from various prolific posters waving goodbye to HN. They were too kind at the time to say why.

josvdwest• 1 year ago

Any tips on how to consume hackaday.com? It doesn't seem as intuitive as hackernews

IgorPartola2• 1 year ago

It’s a blog, not a news aggregator. Front page is a little different than others but it also just lists blog posts. Once you skim those, scroll to the button that says Older Posts and that will bring you to the next page.

Being a blog it also has RSS which you can use to consume it in the reader of your choice.

They feature projects done by people from across the web so they refer to people’s names using square brackets e.g. [josvdwest]. Each post has comments which I find to be quite thoughtful.

There is also https://hackaday.io/ which is a repository of hardware projects. In very simplified terms it’s like a cross between Facebook and GitHub for your side project that involves custom hardware. People post the details and their progress. It ranges from half baked attempts that were abandoned early on to some really amazing and unique things. When people complain that the old web is dead, this is the antidote: just clever people creating and collaborating on cool shit.

sensanaty• 1 year ago

Have you seen the YC batches since 2023? I think legitimately every single one mentions AI in one way or another, the hype is truly mind boggling once you start reading through them for a bit, so many pure BS startups getting funded solely on the premise of wrapping some ChatGPT APIs

randomNumber72• 1 year ago

Where did the people that were here before the ai hype goto?

Just asking for a friend.

jraph• 1 year ago

Still here, patiently hoping and waiting for this to calm down. Etymology of "patiently" relevant.

Babkock• 1 year ago

Yeah I've just about lost all interest in computers and programming. It's not even computers and programming anymore, it's all this other stuff.

nubinetwork2• 1 year ago

Someone edited the title of this submission, it used to read "More than 1 in 5 Show HN posts are now AI-related"

ofalkaed• 1 year ago

Not a fan of the heavy AI slant of HN these days but I find it preferable to the increase in meta posting which I have never seen turn out well for any online community. Once discussion about what a community is or should be gets established it never seems to turn out well.

ai_assisted_dev• 1 year ago

I find it absolutely awesome:

1. I love AI/ML hearing about stuff, and seeing it boom this much is great.

2. I really do enjoy working with LLMs and seeing what they can do.

3. It is quite amazing what non-technical people can now do with AI Assisted coding.

4. Working with LLMs within IDEs is getting quite good too.

I understand that there are still people who are not buying it, but quite honestly, its becoming harder to side with them. I have been in Software for 2 decades, and this "craze" has given me the most amount of enjoyment I have gotten since I figured out how to build a website sometime in my teens!

skeeter2020• 1 year ago

I think you're missing the general complaint. It's not against any of the the things you like, it's the over-saturation of not only AI, but a very small segment of AI.

marginalia_nu• 1 year ago

Seems likely to be at least partially selection bias.

When large emphasis is on the technology (whether it's made with AI or written in Rust or whatever), it seems at least in some cases like there is less substance to the idea itself, as a good product is a good product regardless of how it's built.

A post like "Show HN: I'm using AI to sort a list of integers" is inherently boring since if you remove the AI part it's something we've been doing for half a century.

A post like "Show HN: I'm using AI to translate Linear A" is interesting and would be interesting even if AI wasn't involved.

dankwizard• 1 year ago

I only ingest HackerNews through a vibe coded lightweight AI first viewer, comprised of articles that GPT4o thinks match with my personality, and these too are summarised using AI to give me the gist.

minimaxir• 1 year ago

A couple subtle notes on the BigQuery queries:

a) Most date/time functions work with TIMESTAMP, no need to convert to/from DATETIME.

b) You can do case-invariant regexes for REGEXP_CONTAINS() by prefixing it with (?i), which is more performant than casing w/ UPPER/LOWER beforehand: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42987537/google-bigquery...

ada19812• 1 year ago

We are on the cusp of AGI, the largest development of our species in our history… makes sense this would be increasing in discussion.

qwerty59• 1 year ago

You actually believe this? lol

ada19812• 1 year ago

Yes. Have been studying this for over 20+ years, and the speed at which things are developing is wild.

zahlman• 1 year ago

What's more, 2020, likely because of COVID externalities, had more posts (16,899) than 2023 (14,062) and almost as many as 2024 (17,618).

Okay, but what happened in 2018?

jader201• 1 year ago

I’m actually growing bored with tech news, in general (as someone in the software engineering field), and am starting to be drawn more to things like advances in health and medical sciences, disease treatment/prevention, etc.

I wish there was an HN of everything outside of tech.

(Of course, these sometimes overlap, but for articles talking about how tech/AI is helping solve medical problems, I’ll allow it.)

Data on AI-related Show HN posts

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