There are very few sites such as Hacker News around. Looking for one that is similar in quality, but with a slightly different focus is going to be disappointing.
Perhaps it helps to consider why you'd exactly want this? You may be better off not visiting any such site, and instead focus on real human-in-the-loop activities with a group of local hackers.
I thought about writing a Firefox extension that would just auto-click the Hide button for any story containing a keyword from a configurable list. Haven't gotten around to it.
I like a lot of things about bubbles but it seems to surface a lot of negative posts that are mainly just rants. A good chunk of articles in the daily/weekly briefings kind of feel like an indie blogging spin on the negative posts/articles you'd see a lot on microblogging sites.
It regularly surfaces some good stuff so it's working but it's also kind of depressing in ways that made me leave microblogging sites. There regularly is a lot of anti ai rants, USpol rants, the web is dead, defeatist/nihilistic posts etc in the weekly/daily digests. The entire culture section are these types of posts currently.
Makes me wonder if the use of microblogging accounts to log in is partially biasing the userbase towards that kind of writing? I don't have a solution for this though and limiting to fediverse accounts probably has some upsides too.
Ultimately bubbles still gets a big thumbs up from me but I'd love to see these kinds of posts deprioritized a bit. Outside maybe a few deeper more constructive ones that link out well I don't think they represent the best of indie blogging. Anyways if you made it this deep into my ramble I hope you have a nice week.
I agree with the hype argument, but the time-frame seems optimistic. We had to endure many years of crypto hype (nice way of saying lies and delusion really), and even now you have the shattered remnants pretending that everyone swoons they talk about "replacing fiat".
There will also be a next hype cycle, and they seem to be coming faster and faster, with similar people behind them. "Oh look, NVIDIA found a new way to turn the US economy into a paperclip factory, I can't wait to see what the brain trust thinks about this. Oh they dream of getting money as a result so they're all-in for the next half-decade... fabulous."
I think the interesting thing is that if you look at /new, actually the community and moderation system is already holding back a fantastic volume of AI slop and “slop about AI”. It would be fair to say “HN has too much stuff about AI” and “the HN community is hostile/skeptical of AI”, in fact you hear both in the comments all the time.
Thankfully we (as humans) don't have the same brain and the same interests :)
Some people are excited about all that stuff, and I can understand.
But, personally, I am just getting bored of having an anthropic news per day, two from openai, and another one that claims "eeeh, developers are dead!".
Actually, Hackernews feels more anxious for me now, that's why I wanted to take a look elsewhere...
I remember the time when I did read "Ray-Tracing in One week-end", or discover some new cool websites and blogs like The Old New Thing, some interesting discussions about Android hacking and vulnerabilities, or hacking old idTech stuff from Fabien Sanglard.
I really miss that time when I was reading and learning at the same time.
Now, most of the articles published here do not have any fresh news to provide, and I don't learn anything. Except people think I will be obsolete in a few months. (Nice. /s)
funny thing is I don't even agree with it anymore, like most of the trends I didn't like have mainly blown over, and funny enough when I wrote the sequel
Myself I find the AI thing exhausting because I was involved in three efforts to make a breakthrough in natural language understanding in the 2010s and even gave this talk which went from "trendy" to "cringe" to "prophetic" over the course of the last 10 years
So when I see all these people standing on their tip toes and screaming "LOOK AT ME! I'M AN EARLY ADOPTER" I can't help think they're a bunch of laggards at best, NPCs at worst, as much as I know that's an unconstructive attitude. I'm looking for the "last mover advantage" as I use a good model now, and will use a better model in six months, but I don't rot my brain doomscrolling X to see what Andrej Karpathy wrote at 2:37am last night.
For years I've felt like HN is home because it embraces both technology and business, compare that to Progitt which is a bunch of communists [1] who will pounce on you if you admit that you are in it for the money, even just a little bit. Compared to something hardcore, HN is vulnerable to takeover from (for lack of a better term) posers.
It's what it is, I skip past it. If I really want to feel out-of-touch with current trends I go to LinkedIn which flooded by AI slop articles about "what AI all means" from people who don't know what they are talking about in the least. To their credit, if you smash "I'm not interested" consistently their recommender does eventually learn from that and you see less of it.
I've noticed myself and several colleagues have all taken to making little SaaS's for sport -- I'm not sure WHY we've all done that, but it's totally a thing.
Maybe if there was a monthly "Show us your (project/vibe/slop)" thread, it would provide a centralized spot for it all, then you could ignore it, once, at leisure, instead of the filters working overtime. :)
Good luck with that. If something is easily accessible, it will be accessed by easy people, and if it can flood a platform, it will. Easy people don't care. Easy people will never care.
You'd have to make LLM access harder, or make all platform harder to access, or both. And both will also penalize the not easy people. Like it always does.
'pends. You gotta be antimimetic without saying you are antimimetic.
One answer is to move on from the party when it isn't fun anymore and start a new party. Like the way you are at the bar at last call and get an invitation to a party where they're drinking at someone's house.
More than one statue of limitations ago I was in an activist group that helped take down a public corporation (they deny our responsibility) and it was not hypothetical, we were being infiltrated by the FBI, and pretty regularly we made a new mailing list with names that we trusted and moved our planning there.
You might want to refine your question. The real problem is the author not having something interesting to say in their own voice. The lack of perspective and insight to share is disrespectful to the reader.
With this broader definition, you'll find there's a ton of other slop we've long since needed to clean up. It's one thing to at least share something mildly interesting, but there's still a lot of points farming and ragebait that has brought down the enjoyability of reading HN.
I hoped so but there's a well-used "vibecoding" tag there and an admonishing/narrow focus that excludes many other interesting topics. A site needs some of that but they are strict to the point the place is kinda barren.
e.g. I recently submitted a page about new FOSS-oriented hardware and it was rejected as "business news - offtopic." Well, no wonder this place is a ghost town.
I like Lobsters' design and would love to switch over, but it's still invite-only… I guess it works for them but it feels elitist to an anti-social nerd like me.
It's also kind of hard to know if you already know someone who could give you an invite, since I don't really know the online handles of people I know in meatspace. I've resigned myself to maybe someday getting something posted that gets picked up there and asking for an invite at that time.
The RSS feeds though are pretty neat, it's what I use to fetch articles for archiving so that I can get a curated set of things to read on the go.
You could try a browser extension that just filters all terms like LLM, AI, agent, agentic and removes those posts.
Or better yet, call back to a certain classic and replace those words with "butt" and keep them in.
Then your front page will simply be filled with things like:
"Show HN: Look what I did with my butt."
"This new butt harness will revolutionize butt coding."
I'm not into any of those butt stuff, but I'll definitely enjoy that butt idea. Wait, what were we talking about?
www.nobuttnews.net, reserved :)
There are very few sites such as Hacker News around. Looking for one that is similar in quality, but with a slightly different focus is going to be disappointing.
Perhaps it helps to consider why you'd exactly want this? You may be better off not visiting any such site, and instead focus on real human-in-the-loop activities with a group of local hackers.
I don't do web stuff, but I wonder if one could easily create a browser extension that hides AI-centric submissions?
https://hackaday.com/
Oh nice, I didn't know this one. Thanks!
Maybe there could be an AI-generated HN mirror: the AI would monitor HN continuously, and filter out the AI related news. Fight fire with fire.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but I just did something similar for displaying only substacks: https://hnsubstacks.com/. I'm pretty sure something like this can be adapted to filtering out AI news, repo here: https://github.com/ariroffe/hnsubstacks/
I thought about writing a Firefox extension that would just auto-click the Hide button for any story containing a keyword from a configurable list. Haven't gotten around to it.
Ooh but then would the AI filter out discussion of itself?
https://bubbles.town/ is fun.
I like a lot of things about bubbles but it seems to surface a lot of negative posts that are mainly just rants. A good chunk of articles in the daily/weekly briefings kind of feel like an indie blogging spin on the negative posts/articles you'd see a lot on microblogging sites.
It regularly surfaces some good stuff so it's working but it's also kind of depressing in ways that made me leave microblogging sites. There regularly is a lot of anti ai rants, USpol rants, the web is dead, defeatist/nihilistic posts etc in the weekly/daily digests. The entire culture section are these types of posts currently.
Makes me wonder if the use of microblogging accounts to log in is partially biasing the userbase towards that kind of writing? I don't have a solution for this though and limiting to fediverse accounts probably has some upsides too.
Ultimately bubbles still gets a big thumbs up from me but I'd love to see these kinds of posts deprioritized a bit. Outside maybe a few deeper more constructive ones that link out well I don't think they represent the best of indie blogging. Anyways if you made it this deep into my ramble I hope you have a nice week.
current front page: out of 6 posts viisble, 3 are about AI
Hum, indeed! Thanks!
Try HN “classic” mode:
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Not completely free of AI, but it’s probably more of what you are looking for.
I find it's very similar to regular frontpage.
Might come off like a flippant joke, but it might give you what you're after.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210201005447/https://news.ycom...
You could always... vibecode your own :)
Just wait a year. It will die down just like crypto and NFTs did. Hype goes in cycles.
I agree with the hype argument, but the time-frame seems optimistic. We had to endure many years of crypto hype (nice way of saying lies and delusion really), and even now you have the shattered remnants pretending that everyone swoons they talk about "replacing fiat".
There will also be a next hype cycle, and they seem to be coming faster and faster, with similar people behind them. "Oh look, NVIDIA found a new way to turn the US economy into a paperclip factory, I can't wait to see what the brain trust thinks about this. Oh they dream of getting money as a result so they're all-in for the next half-decade... fabulous."
I think the interesting thing is that if you look at /new, actually the community and moderation system is already holding back a fantastic volume of AI slop and “slop about AI”. It would be fair to say “HN has too much stuff about AI” and “the HN community is hostile/skeptical of AI”, in fact you hear both in the comments all the time.
Thankfully we (as humans) don't have the same brain and the same interests :)
Some people are excited about all that stuff, and I can understand. But, personally, I am just getting bored of having an anthropic news per day, two from openai, and another one that claims "eeeh, developers are dead!".
Actually, Hackernews feels more anxious for me now, that's why I wanted to take a look elsewhere...
I remember the time when I did read "Ray-Tracing in One week-end", or discover some new cool websites and blogs like The Old New Thing, some interesting discussions about Android hacking and vulnerabilities, or hacking old idTech stuff from Fabien Sanglard.
I really miss that time when I was reading and learning at the same time.
Now, most of the articles published here do not have any fresh news to provide, and I don't learn anything. Except people think I will be obsolete in a few months. (Nice. /s)
People have been saying this for the longest time, like I wrote this essay
https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/
funny thing is I don't even agree with it anymore, like most of the trends I didn't like have mainly blown over, and funny enough when I wrote the sequel
https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/
articles I liked were "mostly about AI!"
Myself I find the AI thing exhausting because I was involved in three efforts to make a breakthrough in natural language understanding in the 2010s and even gave this talk which went from "trendy" to "cringe" to "prophetic" over the course of the last 10 years
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...
So when I see all these people standing on their tip toes and screaming "LOOK AT ME! I'M AN EARLY ADOPTER" I can't help think they're a bunch of laggards at best, NPCs at worst, as much as I know that's an unconstructive attitude. I'm looking for the "last mover advantage" as I use a good model now, and will use a better model in six months, but I don't rot my brain doomscrolling X to see what Andrej Karpathy wrote at 2:37am last night.
For years I've felt like HN is home because it embraces both technology and business, compare that to Progitt which is a bunch of communists [1] who will pounce on you if you admit that you are in it for the money, even just a little bit. Compared to something hardcore, HN is vulnerable to takeover from (for lack of a better term) posers.
It's what it is, I skip past it. If I really want to feel out-of-touch with current trends I go to LinkedIn which flooded by AI slop articles about "what AI all means" from people who don't know what they are talking about in the least. To their credit, if you smash "I'm not interested" consistently their recommender does eventually learn from that and you see less of it.
[1] ... y'all know I'm one of the leftists of HN!
comp.lang.c
maybe chaos.social mastodon server? You can follow it through relay.fedi.buzx if you can't actually join it.
I've noticed myself and several colleagues have all taken to making little SaaS's for sport -- I'm not sure WHY we've all done that, but it's totally a thing.
Maybe if there was a monthly "Show us your (project/vibe/slop)" thread, it would provide a centralized spot for it all, then you could ignore it, once, at leisure, instead of the filters working overtime. :)
Good luck with that. If something is easily accessible, it will be accessed by easy people, and if it can flood a platform, it will. Easy people don't care. Easy people will never care.
I can see I've made the easy people angry ^_^ Go ahead and take those points off, it will not change my life the slightest.
The answer to that is make it too hard for easy people.
You'd have to make LLM access harder, or make all platform harder to access, or both. And both will also penalize the not easy people. Like it always does.
'pends. You gotta be antimimetic without saying you are antimimetic.
One answer is to move on from the party when it isn't fun anymore and start a new party. Like the way you are at the bar at last call and get an invitation to a party where they're drinking at someone's house.
More than one statue of limitations ago I was in an activist group that helped take down a public corporation (they deny our responsibility) and it was not hypothetical, we were being infiltrated by the FBI, and pretty regularly we made a new mailing list with names that we trusted and moved our planning there.
This doesn't really answer your questions, especially as AI is permeating the field, but:
https://engineeringblogs.xyz/
https://lobste.rs/
Lobste.rs is very much still active, more than ever I think. They have a `vibecoding` tag that you can remove from your page, if you'd like.
Related (with some suggestions within):
We need tech news sources which exclude AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48713041
Hacker News but for independent blogs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48567155
https://hcker.news has an optional AI filter. I don't know how accurate it is.
Hm. The first link is about GPT-Live, from openai... I don't think it is accurate haha.
But thanks for the link, I did not know about it :)
Did you enable to filter? Here is a link with AI excluded.
https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
Oh, thanks! I completely missed the "optional".
It seems to work great actually... Thanks!
You might want to refine your question. The real problem is the author not having something interesting to say in their own voice. The lack of perspective and insight to share is disrespectful to the reader.
With this broader definition, you'll find there's a ton of other slop we've long since needed to clean up. It's one thing to at least share something mildly interesting, but there's still a lot of points farming and ragebait that has brought down the enjoyability of reading HN.
Try https://lobste.rs/, not completely without ai news but much better.
I hoped so but there's a well-used "vibecoding" tag there and an admonishing/narrow focus that excludes many other interesting topics. A site needs some of that but they are strict to the point the place is kinda barren.
e.g. I recently submitted a page about new FOSS-oriented hardware and it was rejected as "business news - offtopic." Well, no wonder this place is a ghost town.
How do you get invited?
I like Lobsters' design and would love to switch over, but it's still invite-only… I guess it works for them but it feels elitist to an anti-social nerd like me.
It's also kind of hard to know if you already know someone who could give you an invite, since I don't really know the online handles of people I know in meatspace. I've resigned myself to maybe someday getting something posted that gets picked up there and asking for an invite at that time.
The RSS feeds though are pretty neat, it's what I use to fetch articles for archiving so that I can get a curated set of things to read on the go.
email me, i got you :)
I'll send you an invite, send me an email to the address in my bio.