Show HN: Hacker News, without AI

Posted by postalcoder 1 day ago

19586Original

Comments

Comment by dorkrawk 1 day ago

For Hacker News without AI, can I suggest the domain of news.ycombntor.com ?

Comment by postalcoder 1 day ago

Behold, the power of suggestion: https://news.ycombntor.com

Comment by ant6n 23 hours ago

Took me a while to get this one.

Comment by snarf21 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by layer8 1 day ago

If you prefer something closer to the original layout: https://www.unslop.news/

Comment by Night_Thastus 19 hours ago

I like the idea, but have a couple problems:

* 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.

Comment by otherayden 1 day ago

Thank you for sharing my site :)

Comment by gonzalohm 1 day ago

Do you know if there is a way of pointing any of the hackernews phone apps to your site instead of the official one?

Comment by otherayden 1 day ago

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

Comment by xvinci 23 hours ago

It does not have a license so it cannot be used though.

Comment by otherayden 19 hours ago

I will throw an MIT license on it rn! edit: https://github.com/leiDnedyA/hn-without-ai?tab=MIT-1-ov-file

Comment by toomuchtodo 23 hours ago

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).

Comment by postalcoder 19 hours ago

You can do a lot of this stuff w/ the feed builder on hcker.news.

Comment by layer8 1 day ago

Thank you for basically only filtering and not changing the style. :)

Comment by WarcrimeActual 22 hours ago

Help me out here. Is AI something prevalent on HN now? I check the site a lot but just browse headlines and visit some sites.

Comment by buggy6257 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by kakwa_ 3 hours ago

I would love to have hn more curated.

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.

Comment by nilsherzig 23 hours ago

Here is an approach to filtering LLM written content: https://hnslop.nilsherzig.com/

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.

Comment by nilsherzig 23 hours ago

nvm sorry, just read the "how this works" comment from OP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660301

OPs solution does more than keyword filtering. But its still about filtering out "content about ai" not filtering out "ai written content".

Comment by adrianwaj 15 hours ago

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.

Likewise, HN-AI could well be a decent site.

[1] How much content can be derived from non-English sources using LLMs? https://share.gemini.google/ObjMQHCj8JWj"

Comment by postalcoder 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by nilsherzig 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by postalcoder 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by nilsherzig 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by postalcoder 22 hours ago

Thanks! I always forget to update the changelog for a bunch of stuff. I'm glad you have eyes on it, I'll be more mindful to add to it.

Comment by account42 1 day ago

First post shown right now is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49659245 which is essentially an ad for an AI company. So I guess this will need further fine tuning.

Comment by busymom0 1 day ago

Here's how mine looks using my method:

https://imgur.com/a/P1qMIok

9 out of 30 posts have been removed.

Steps:

Install uBlock Origin Lite. Then create a custom filter:

    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a:has-text(/\b(?:A\.?I\.?|A\.?G\.?I\.?|LLMs?|GPTs?|TPU|NPU|RAG|MoE|RLHF|xAI)\b|Anthropic|agent|super-?intelligence|Blackwell|Cerebras|ChatGPT|Claude|Cohere|Command\s*R|Context\s*window|Copilot|Cursor|DALL-E|deep\s*learning|DeepSeek|ElevenLabs|Fine-tun(?:e|ing)|Flux|Gemini|GenAI|Generative|Gemma|Grok|Groq|H100|Hallucination|harness(?:es)?|Hugging\s*Face|LangChain|Llama|LlamaIndex|Midjourney|Mistral|Ollama|OpenAI|OpenRouter|Perplexity|prompt|Qwen|Runway\s*(?:AI|ML)|Gen-[1-4](?:\.5)?|Sora|Synthetic\s*data|token|vibecod|vLLM|Whisper/i)):xpath(. | following-sibling::tr[1])

Any improvements to above filter are welcome.

Comment by amelius 1 day ago

Maybe use AI to filter the posts? :)

Comment by bronlund 1 day ago

This is like; during a war, when you just want to read the news without anything about the war :D

Comment by armchairhacker 23 hours ago

“Keep Calm and Carry On”?

TIL it was rare in the actual wartime (WWII) and only became popular in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On

Comment by loldidntwork 1 day ago

Top article is about AI eliminating jobs, nice attempt tho

Comment by postalcoder 1 day ago

Where?

Comment by TouchGrass 1 day ago

This site can’t be reached The connection was reset. Try:

Checking the connection Checking the proxy and the firewall ERR_CONNECTION_RESET

Comment by postalcoder 1 day ago

I'm guessing this is a cloudflare issue? Try again, I turned bot protection off. The site was getting flooded by requests from bot scrapers.

Comment by Gualdrapo 1 day ago

First one atm is about HuggingFace.

Comment by sajithdilshan 19 hours ago

At this rate we would have at least new one vibe coded site like this per week trying to filter AI posts. People truly have tokens to burn

Comment by postalcoder 19 hours ago

I've been serving this to users for the past year. I like to believe that i've inspired others.

Comment by d3Xt3r 18 hours ago

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).

Comment by postalcoder 18 hours ago

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?

Comment by chilipepperhott 1 day ago

This one actually works: https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai

Comment by postalcoder 1 day ago

I see like ten stories on this page.

Comment by vanschelven 1 day ago

count yourself lucky, tomorrow it will be 9

Comment by tcfhgj 23 hours ago

Hacker News, without AI needs to be a plugin for Firefox - I don´t really want to use two pages at the same time.

Comment by postalcoder 23 hours ago

Then just use one! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hcker-news/

Comment by nilsherzig 23 hours ago

If a Userscript solution is fine for you, see my recent comments :)

Comment by nilsherzig 22 hours ago

added a firefox extension :)

Comment by 17 hours ago

Comment by dr_kiszonka 22 hours ago

This is much better than I anticipated. I don't mind AI that much, but this version of HN surfaces really interesting articles I've missed.

Comment by jessetemp 1 day ago

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

Comment by datakan 1 day ago

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.

Comment by gdulli 1 day ago

I have a cron job that logs in and hides stuff based on a big list of keywords and domains I'm not interested in.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by basch 1 day ago

still prefer the simplicity of a reverse river, with a focus on votes and comments https://hckrnews.com/

its incredibly easy to immediately tell when something was posted, and how popular it was. there s no automagic rearranging or movement.

similar to https://techmeme.com/river

Comment by postalcoder 1 day ago

Open up the settings bar at the top and set the story layout to "hckr". That layout is directly inspired by hckrnews.com.

Comment by basch 22 hours ago

Nice. The word "show" threw me off, given it is on the far right and the cog is on the far left. Menu, settings, config etc would make more sense.

Comment by postalcoder 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by osquar 7 hours ago

Does it use AI to filter AI?

Comment by Tepix 1 day ago

You need to search deeper!

Looking at the iPod 6G QEMU emulation story:

> "With the help of Claude Code, I was able to create code to extract it using emCORE."

Comment by ranger_danger 23 hours ago

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?

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by dsiegel2275 19 hours ago

Would have been much better if it simply rendered a blank page.

Comment by sejje 1 day ago

Top story: huggingface

Comment by thisisauserid 23 hours ago

Ironically, this is trivial to build with LLMs.

Comment by postalcoder 1 day ago

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

RSS feed here: https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&ai=exclude

HN Frontpage minus AI: https://hcker.news/?view=frontpage&ai=exclude

You may also like Small Web HN: https://hcker.news/?view=frontpage&smallweb=include

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.

Comment by vova_hn2 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by bananaflag 1 day ago

Funny how it uses AI

Comment by postalcoder 1 day ago

Ethical, grass-fed AI!

Comment by NeedNewForums 23 hours ago

I like AI just hate Claude and Anslopic ads 24/7

Comment by niyonx 1 day ago

Great use of AI

Comment by grandwizardmarv 23 hours ago

Good idea but needs a stronger filter

Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 19 hours ago

Without Javascript

https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&ai=exclude

https://hcker.news/feeds/json?period=week&ai=exclude

More info about parameters

https://hcker.news/feeds

Comment by jrm4 1 day ago

This feels like trying to do "Hacker News, without 'the Internet.'"

Comment by NeedNewForums 23 hours ago

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!

Comment by ragall 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by postalcoder 18 hours ago

Hm, I couldnt reproduce on firefox mac. Which version of firefox are you on? can you open the network inspector to see if you're hitting the api?

Comment by ragall 16 hours ago

Firefox 155.0.1 Linux/x86_64 with uBlock Origin enabled. https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js is blocked by uBlock, while https://hcker.news/api/reply-notifications/config and https://hcker.news/api/comments/49662990?include_user_stats=... return 403.

Perhaps it's Cloudflare that's doing the blocking.

Comment by postalcoder 12 hours ago

Fixed it, it should work now.

Comment by mpalmer 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by postalcoder 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by verdverm 23 hours ago

Is it still hacker news if you manipulate the listing based on your own bias?

I suppose it depends on what point of view we answer from. It is very hacker-newsery to make something like this

Comment by ares623 18 hours ago

let's fast forward to the part where the general public can make their own "Facebook, without Ads"

Comment by visarga 1 day ago

Do you have one but only with AI? like, a toggle on what side to see?

Edit: ah yes, sure it exists

Comment by postalcoder 1 day ago

I'm thinking you saw it but yeah, you can only have AI news if you invert the argument: https://hcker.news/?ai=include

Comment by flashu 23 hours ago

Finally, I am really sick of eye-based filtering AI trash

Comment by nonsensical_ 1 day ago

I prefer lobste.rs for this.

Comment by sochowski 23 hours ago

i can't tell if the slop ui or the slop posts are worse

Comment by narrator 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by postalcoder 18 hours ago

you can essentially mute words on hcker.news. You can set exclusion filters in the settings. Those can be turned into rss feeds as well.