Off-Topic: the non-technical side of Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Off-Topic: the non-technical side of Hacker News

offtopic.club

5 pointshimerzi6 comments

I wanted a version of HN without the overtly technical content, since I found a lot of the humanities and non-technical content posted here to be very good.

Gets HN posts that reach 100 points OR reach the frontpage and filters for history, books, philosophy, art, language, politics, law, economics, nature, science written for a general reader, and personal essays

Drops overtly technical posts like coding tutorials, new AI models, product launches, security bugs, startup funding news, Show HN projects.

Filters out about 70% of posts.

Uses an LLM to perform filtering.

Strange. I find most HN non technical. The technical commentary is often opinionated, sometimes factually/technically incorrect. Even in aspects of programming and even something as commonplace as React, it’s amusingly wrong. Don’t ask anything about biology, health or fitness.

Actually overtly technical content is in places like, for example, hackaday. Or science.com

For what its worth I think the filtering that Off Topic does is quite imperfect, and leans towards having more false negatives.

Heres an example of real posts that got filtered out:

- Show HN: I made an open-source laptop from scratch: 3,237 pts - Git commands I run before reading any code: 2,338 pts - Ghostty 1.0: 2,319 pts - AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1: 2,246 pts - Zed 1.0: 2,153 pts - Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code: 2,127 pts - U.S. homelessness jumps to record high (scored 7) - Macron says €300B in EU savings… (6) - Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings (6) - Celebrities say they are being censored by TikTok (5.5) - Google will still have to break up its business (4.5) - Japanese scientists develop artificial blood (4.5)

Its not just filtering non-technical things, also posts that just report something.

I'm a little disappointed that this isn't a separate platform. But it is bee-yoo-tee-ful and I dig the categorization.

Thanks. I suppose it could be its own platform. I guess I felt HN community already provides good curation, just needed needed one extra filter pass :)

How about this: take the filter, leave the community. Start a new one.

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