Data on AI-related Show HN posts

[vmxdev]

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.

[randomNumber7]

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.

[namuol]

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...

[BrawnyBadger53]

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?

[mosquitobiten]

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

[somewhereoutth]

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

[ysavir]

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?

[simonw]

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

[spondylosaurus]

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.

[v5v3]

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.

[sensanaty]

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

[hdivider]

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.

[johnnyanmac]

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.

[fuzztester]

>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]

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

[creativenolo]

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

[stirfish]

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

[IgorPartola]

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]

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]

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

[d00mB0t]

Remember Map-Reduce and Quantum Computing?

[rfarley04]

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

[oblio]

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.

[paulsutter]

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

[minimaxir]

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...

[4b11b4]

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

[mrweasel]

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.

[pvtmert]

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!)

[jedberg]

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.

[omneity]

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.

[johnnyanmac]

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.

[shaldengeki]

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]

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.

[spapas82]

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?

[clircle]

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.

[marginalia_nu]

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.

[ai_assisted_dev]

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]

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.

[fuzztester]

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...

[ofalkaed]

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.

[paulddraper]

I was curious the number.

I would have guessed higher.

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

[ryandrake]

> 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.

[namuol]

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.