Build a web tool that displays the Hacker
News homepage (fetched from the Algolia API)
but filters out specific search terms,
default to "llm, ai" in a box at the top but
the user can change that list, it is stored
in localstorage. Don't use React.
Then four follow-ups:
Rename to "Hacker News, filtered" and add a
clear label that shows that the terms will
be excluded
Turn the username into a link to
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xxx -
include the comment count, which is in the
num_comments key
The text "392 comments" should be the link,
do not have a separate thread link
Add a tooltip to "1 day ago" that shows the
full value from created_at
That exclusion filter seems to be just a very dumb substring test? Try filtering out "a" and almost everything disappears. That means filtering out "ai" filters out "I used my brain not a computer".
I’ve built a site that does the same sort of exclusion filtering, with a lot more bells and whistles. Very much in the spirit of “what if HN stayed HN, but had actual, very useful features.”
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see there. From my point of view, this is a low-effort, vibe coded app that doesn't solve the problem the OP had but it's solving a different one. You'd need to at least train a small classifier based on something like BERT to actually address the issue.
What I showed in my comment just demonstrates that this doesn't solve the problem OP had.
Huge respect for all your articles and work on llms, but this example should have been using AI to create a tool that uses AI to intelligently filter hacker news :)
Probably would work better as a userscript, so you don't have to rely on a random personal website never going down just to use HN. I don't have a ChatGPT account but I am curious as to if it could do that automatically too.
Interesting idea, we could consider that as an alternative implementation to https://www.hackernews.coffee/. While we are planning on making it open-source, a userscript would be even more robust as a solution, although would need a personal API key to one of the services.
An interesting example of both LLMs' strengths and weaknesses. It is strong because you wrote a useful tool in a few minutes. It is weak because this tool is strongly coupled to the problem: filtering HN. It's an example of the more general problem of people wanting to control what they see. This has existed at least since the classic usenet "killfiles", but is an area that, I believe, has been ripe for a comprehensive local solution for some time.
OTOH, narrow solutions validate the broader solution, especially if there are a lot of them. Although in that case you invite a ton of "momentum" issues with ingrained user bases (and heated advocacy), hopelessly incompatible data models and/or UX models, and so on. It's an interesting world (in the Chinese curse sense) where such tools can be trivially created. It's not clear to me that fitness selection will work to clean up the landscape once it's made.
Not sure what a local solution would look like when what you see is on websites, maybe a browser extension? we just made a similar reskin as a website, and it works great, but is ultimately another site you have to go to. Its another narrow solution with some variation (we do use AI to do the ranking rather than keyword filtering), but im interested in the form factors that might give maximal control to a user.
It is strong because you believed it created something of value. Did it work ? Maybe. But regardless of whether it worked, you still believed in the value, and that is the "power" of AIs right now, that humans believe that they create value.
I mean, many people who "hate AI" don't think that LLMs are useless for everything. I'm very unconvinced by e.g. using LLMs for coding, but that they'd be good at tagging content, sentiment analysis, etc.? That's not really hard to believe.
This is neat, but with the given filters you autoselected (just the phrases "llm" and "ai"), of the 14 stories I see when I visit the page, 4 of them (more than 25%!) are still stories about AI. (At least one of them can't be identified by this kind of filtering because it doesn't use any AI-related words in its headline, arguably maybe two.)
This is interesting, but I found it amusing that you used:
"I built..." and "o3 knocked it out in a couple minutes...", not ironically, talking about a tool to keep us from having to be inundated with AI/LLM stuff.
One decision I had to make was whether the site should update in real time or be curated only. Eventually, I chose the latter because my personal goal is not to read every new link, but to read a few and understand them well.
I had to switch away from Algolia - the problem is they only model "show items on the homepage" using a tag that's automatically applied to exactly 30 items, which means any filtering knocks that down to eg 15.
I switched to using the older firebase API which can return up to 500 item IDs from the current (paginated) homepage - then I fetch and filter details of the first 200.
AI solving the too-much-AI complaint is heart-warming. We're at the point where we will start demanding organic and free-range software, not this sweatshop LLM one-shot vibery.
I think there is a fundamental disconnect in this response. What the user is asking for is for a procedural and cultural change. What you’ve come up with is a technical solution that kind of mimics a cultural change.
I don’t think it’s wrong, but I also don’t think we can really “AI generate” our way into better communities.
Simonw’s response is the right response. You should not bend the community to your will simply because you do not like the majority of the posts. Obviously many people do like those posts, as evidenced by them making the front page. Instead, find ways to avoid the topics you do not desire to read without forcing your will on people who are happy with the current state.
Let me stop folks early, don’t make comparisons to politics or any bullshit like that. We’re talking only about hacker news here.
Such a tonedeaf response... you're like the biggest enemy of people who want a break from AI/LLM stuff. Even in a thread devoted to filtering out AI, they can't get away from you.
There is literally an input box to put terms you want to exclude...
The prompt asks for "filters out specific search terms", not "intelligently filter out any AI-related keywords." So yes, a good example of the power of vibe coding: the LLM built a tool according to the prompt.
That is not what the prompt I saw above asked for. It took him a few min. Write your own with a semantic based filter instead of a keyword based filter if that's what you want.
Clearly the US needs a constitutional amendment to preserve the right to keep and bear AI tools. Then we can arm the victims of AI tools with their own AI tools, for self-defense. If we're lucky, AI will send its AI thoughts and AI prayers in carefully calculated quantities.
Add the buzzword when you see a story you don't like. Or settle with it filtering 90% of the AI content and just don't click on whatever remains, I doubt you expect the top story to be interesting to you 100% of the time.
Our brain decodes info based on context and extrapolation
This submission we're commenting on could be about filtering out any data, not just AI stuff. Politics, crypto, AI etc. Or more minute like "Trump" "fracking" "bitcoin" etc.
In any of these scenarios, with a tool designed to filter out content based on limited context, when would you ever be perfectly satisfied?
would you like AI to help you build the perfect context-filter model?
And certainly in our anti-politics filter we’d want to include the filtering of stories that promote the extreme political position that tech is somehow detached from politics! (Especially Silicon Valley startup tech that owes so much to the local politics and economy of California).
Which is to say, filtering politics out is absurd, one person’s extreme politics is another’s default view of the universe.
Isn't it enough to bury yourself under the rock? - you want the fact of your having done so concealed from you also? But what about the fact of wanting that?
...Yes? This is how this tool is coded. Machines do what one codes them to do, not what one wants them to do. If you're interested in making a more intelligent tool you can do it. This tool does exactly what @simonw says it does.
A tool was offered that can accomplish what you want, with a very small amount of added effort on your part.
No, you do not have to "stay up to date on AI stories"—if you see one, add the keyword to the list and move on. There are not as many buzzwords as you seem to be implying, anyways.
If you are dissatisfied, you are welcome to build your own intelligent version (but I am not sure this will be straightforward without the use of AI).
Of course I can discern that. I think it sounds stupid and childish, and makes someone appear less intelligent. Overused and misused word. But this is now derailing the thread.
I’m with you here - it’s a completely superfluous word that the young have adopted as some form of belonging ritual. It has no purpose, adds no emphasis and is just poor English masquerading as a statement.
Isn’t knocking out CUDA going to take out a significant chunk of GPGPU stuff with it? I can see wanting to avoid AI stuff, for sure, but I can’t imagine not wanting to hear anything about the high-bandwidth half of your computer…
Not at all. I think you misunderstood the point I was making here.
I think the idea of splitting Hacker News into AI and not AI is honestly a little absurd.
If you don't want to engage with LLM and AI content on Hacker News, don't engage with it! Scroll right on past. Don't click it.
If you're not going to do that, then since we are hackers here and we solve things by building tools, building a tool that filters out the stuff you don't want to see is trivial. So trivial I could get o3 to solve it for me in literally minutes.
(This is a pointed knock at the "AI isn't even useful crowd", just in case any of them are still holding out.)
There's a solid meta-joke here too, which is that filtering on keywords is a bad way to solve this problem. The better way to solve this profile... is to use AI!
So yeah, I'm not embarrassed at all. I think my joke and meta joke were pretty great.
5 prompts? Not impressed. I can give a human (you) one prompt, and then that human will go off, create the site, promote it on social media, read and incorporate feedback, and then discuss potential future iterations.
Perhaps you should add a privacy policy or just release the source rather than assume people will trust your site. Why do you do these demos if you aren't upfront about all the things the LLMs didn't do?
I don't think I need a privacy policy since the app is designed so that nothing gets logged anywhere - it works by hitting the Algolia API directly from your browser, but the filtering happens locally and is stored in localStorage so nobody on earth has the ability to see what you filtered.
You should try to get other people to make your demos is all I'm saying. I don't know why you keep inserting yourself either. Why didn't someone else post the thing you made? Were they waiting for you to do it or do you think people aren't smart enough to do it? I'm just trying to understand why every damned LLM story has to feature you. In what ways could you avoid such a filter of your posts?
let simonw be prolific, lots of people enjoy his content and that is why his comments in the post are always ranked in the top. This animosity isn't constructive.
It shows you the Hacker News page with ai and llm stories filtered out.
You can change the exclusion terms and save your changes in localStorage.
o3 knocked it out for me in a couple of minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/68766f42-1ec8-8006-8187-406ef452e0...
Initial prompt was:
Then four follow-ups: