Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?
I've noticed that over the past couple of months, the HN feed is almost exclusively AI or AI-adjacent news, while genuinely interesting broad-hacker topics get left out. I don't care that my own submissions get ignored, but the problem is that if my stuff gains no traction, I'm not seeing similar stuff posted by others—stuff I'm genuinely interested in and would want to hear about from this community. For example, Lenovo's solid-state air cooling model and Brax Industries' open-source devices would have gained traction here a year or two ago, but now HN is almost exclusively AI talk, and I no longer find it a good source of 'what's new' in the industry.
I've been on HN for over a decade. The shift is real. I think it's partly because AI is where the money and jobs are right now, so naturally more people are working on it and posting about it. But I also think the moderation and ranking algorithms could do more to surface diverse topics. Maybe a tag-based filter would help.
Honestly, I come to HN for the AI news. It's the most concentrated source of high-quality AI discussion I've found. If you want non-AI content, there are other communities. That said, I wouldn't mind a way to filter, as long as it doesn't remove AI posts entirely.
The problem isn't AI news per se, it's that low-effort AI hype pieces get upvoted while substantive technical discussions get buried. I've seen the same with other hyped topics over the years (crypto, blockchain, etc.). It's a cycle. The community's voting behavior drives this, not the moderators.
I've noticed this too. I used to find HN great for discovering new hardware, tools, and programming languages. Now it's all LLM wrappers and funding announcements. I've started visiting other sites like Lobsters for more variety. Maybe we need a separate 'AI' section on HN.
As someone who works in AI, I sympathize. But I also think the flood is a symptom of HN's success and growth. The user base has expanded beyond the original 'hacker' niche. Perhaps the solution is to have more focused sub-communities or to bring back the 'Ask HN' and 'Show HN' prominence to highlight non-AI projects.
- leonheld
HN is a reflection of the industry and we're at peak hype-cycle at the moment. I use this when I need a break https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai.
- embedding-shape
At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore :)
These things tend to improve/get worse by themselves over time, if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on. Right now, seems we're still "discovering" new things around AI, so the submissions will surely continue, and interested parties will continue to upvote.
But AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely, where eventually you hardly see any frontpage submissions about it ever.
- lta
Thank you for posting this <3. I've been thinking it daily for about a year and feel a little bit less alone.
I understand this is a significant topic in the industry but the ratio is really high. Every time someone at OpenAI or Anthropic farts, there's top 10 post.
It makes me feel as if a lot of hackers had given up on actual hacking to just be followers of the latest commercial stuff thrown on the market.
It's likely a projection of my own fears, but I have not been able to shake it off and it's gotten worse and worse.
- aurareturn
Both of those examples wouldn't have gotten traction in the pre-AI HN in my opinion.
The Lenovo laptop jet is experimental and the details suggests that it uses 7.5w to cool 30w. That's not very efficient. You might as well have a small fan and let it spin at a low RPM to reduce noise. There doesn't seem to be a breakthrough here.
The Brax industries one is just an ad from the company's official Youtube channel. I don't think the product is interesting at all.
- PaulKeeble
I miss all the programming articles. It feels like everyone has given up with the very idea of ever writing code now and the entire practice of making software has been handed over to AI.
- nonethewiser
I noticed it as well but I don’t see a problem with it.
I have spot-checked it at times and saw 5 to 8 of the top 10 posts about AI or directly adjacent.
We are in an emergent, dynamic periodt. AI is revolutionary and will continue to get better. The world will change drastically because of it. This seems so obvious yet many will call it purely hype, no real value, etc. We are still in the incubation period, just like the internet in the early 2000s.
- noir_lord
news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^\/(?:news)?$/) tr.athing:has(a:has-text(/AI|claude|A.I|harnesses|harness|OpenRouter|llm|vibecode|agi|deep learning|agent|TPU|GPT|DeepSeek|Anthropic/i)):xpath(. | following-sibling::tr[1])
I just have that in my Ublock Origin rules - it cuts the noise dramatically and if something gets through I just update the has(), it's a brute force approach.
Ironically the only reason I saw this post is because I was on my ipad :).
- andyjohnson0
Its 13:15 UTC and 21 of the 30 submissions on the HN home page are not AI related. I'm not saying there isn't a problem with AI-related submissions, but I'm not sure its a flood.
- bdelmas
Why limit? This is a news website where users judge if something is newsworthy by upvoting it. If the community decides it’s newsworthy it’s newsworthy. Maybe not for you but at least enough people to make it visible in front page. Unless you have strong arguments, like topics creating death threats or people doxing, there is no reason whatsoever to censure any news because you personally doesn’t care or don’t like it and prevent others from accessing it.
- stormcode
I think this is just how it goes. Were you here in 2017-2018 when it was all blockchain all the time?