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The most popular blog posts about ai & machine learning on Hacker News. 757 posts.
Several months ago, I decided that AI contributions were no longer welcome in a FOSS project I am building and maintaining - LibreWeddingPlanner. It’s not that it got a lot of contributions with AI — actually all contributions I’ve had are translations and feature requests — but I wanted to...
The AI boom is more likely a marker of the end of the 50-year digital boom than the start of a new wave of innovation.
How I used AI to investigate millions of historical records and surfaced a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinos, and unrecorded volcano eruptions.
So, my latest post went viral. And with virality, you get a ton of comments that you must reply to. I don't want to reply in HN/Reddit/Whatever to prev...
[This is a guest post by Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai, and Jie Xue. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] This is a good time for mathemat…
I’ve been surprised by - and enjoy - one aspect of using large language models more than any other. They often put into words things I have long understood, but could not write down clearly. When that happens, it feels less like learning something new and more like recognition. A kind of “ok, yeah" moment.…
Selling snake oil to the United States Congress is an ancient American craft, and the frontier artificial intelligence industry is currently attempting the most audacious hustle in modern corporate history.
In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they […]
Give any AI agent a persistent memory in minutes. Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Ollama, OpenRouter, and any MCP-compatible agent. Open source, self-hosted, model-agnostic.
Slopforks: what happens when a library gets rewritten with AI?
I like HackerNews, but I don't love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI. This is a version of HackerNews, filtered to remove any article focusing on __AI__. Refreshes about every ten minutes.
Alex Moon is an Australian-British software engineer and artist based in the North East of England.
A practical guide to getting the engagement your project deserves.
Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of "autonomous" coding agents: This post describes what we've learned from …
On quitting, the spread of AI, and the loss of an ideal.
You are relying very heavily on the priors of the model to do a good job for you. What happens when you cannot judge whether those priors are good?
Coding in Rust and others; making coding videos.
My keynote at ICML 2026
When OpenAI released their proof that solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up in finite time, they also released a formal proof in Lean 4.
Keep track of artifacts, not scratch. Alt title: Claude, please stop trying to memorize random crap
Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. 💡Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs and what it means for writing, student assessment, and thinking. "It's not x, it's y.
“Preface to the highest stakes negotiations in history.”
I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience . An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a thousand agents so they can do even more of that.
Edit: Woah, this took off! If you want more details you can subscribe at the bottom of the post or on YouTube. I’m working on a more detailed highlights/commentary post and video. Previously: We got Claude Code playing Factorio, Towards beating Factorio autonomously, and Faketorio: an agent testbed I got GPT-5.6 Sol…
At the recent EMFCamp, I bumped in to Professor Kate Devlin who was talking a little about the AI Resist List. I think one of the useful things we can do is loudly complain about shitty uses of AI. Here's an example. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm contacting companies which send malformed calendar invites. One…
[UPDATE 2026-06-09]: a few months on, I have more misgivings than certainties about this.
Exploring practical ways to make your game more legible to AI agents and how to make agentic iteration faster.
Solid core + capability-based sandboxes + LLMs = Users with superpowers
From Situational Awareness’s Blow-up to Materials Science to the HuggingFace Hack
