You buried a popular post because of the public accusation or just your "hunch"?
Why not let your audience decide what it wants to read?
I say this as a long time HN reader, who feels like the community has become grumpier over the years. Which I feel like is a shame. But maybe that's just me.
It's my job to read HN posts and comments all day, every day, and these days that means spending a lot of time evaluating whether a post seems LLM-generated. In this case the post seems LLM-generated or heavily LLM-edited.
We have been asking the community not to publicly call out posts for being LLM-generated, for the reasons I explained in the latest edit of the comment you replied to. But if we're going to ask the community that, we also need to ask submitters to not post obviously-LLM-influenced articles. We've been asking that ever since LLMs became commonplace.
> I say this as a long time HN reader, who feels like the community has become grumpier over the years. Which I feel like is a shame. But maybe that's just me.
We've recently added this line to the guidelines: Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
HN has become grumpier, and we don't like that. But a lot of it is in reaction to the HN audience being disappointed at a lot of what modern tech companies are serving up, both in terms of products and content, and it doesn't work for us to tell them they're wrong to feel that way. We can try, but we can't force anyone to feel differently. It's just as much up to product creators and content creators to keep working to raise the standards of what they offer the audience.
Thanks Tom, I appreciate the openness. You are seemingly overriding the wishes of the community, but it your community and you have the right to do so. I still think it's a shame, but that's my problem.
> You are seemingly overriding the wishes of the community
That's false. The overwhelming sentiment of the community is that HN should be free of LLM-generated content or content that has obvious AI fingerprints. Sometimes people don't immediately realize that an article or comment has a heavy LLM influence, but once they realize it does, they expect us to act (this is especially true if they didn't realize it initially, as they feel deceived). This is clear from the comments and emails we get about this topic.
If you can publish a new version of the post that is human-authored, we'd happily re-up it.
>> You are seemingly overriding the wishes of the community
> That's false. The overwhelming sentiment of the community is that HN should be free of LLM-generated content or content that has obvious AI fingerprints.
Yeah it is indeed, and for good reason: why would I spend time reading something the author didn't spend time thinking through and writing?
It's not that people don't like Postgres articles (otherwise, the upvotes would be much lower), but once you read a bit of the article, the LLM stench it gives off is characteristic. You know: Standard. LLM. Style. It's tiresome. Irksome. Off-putting.
What I'm wondering is, if LLMs are trained on "our" (in the wider sense of the word) writing style, and spew it back at us, what data set was it that overused this superficial emphatic style to such a degree, that it's now overwhelmingly the bog-standard generative output style?
I’d be grumpy over wasting my time on an HN post that’s LLM generated which doesn’t state that it is. If I wanted this, I could be prompting N number of chat models available to me instead of meandering over here.
In terms of that example: they should link to how they got those numbers, and it should state the benchmark used, the machines used, what they controlled for etc.
Is this something that can happen? We just ran into this limitation and I really want to keep using pgvectorscale... am exploring other solutions on EKS but RDS would be so much easier. From my reading it seems like this isn't something we can get done as a single AWS customer though.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I used to roll my eyes every time someone said “agentic,” too. But after using Claude Code myself, and seeing how our best engineers build with it, I changed my mind. Agents aren’t hype, they’re genuinely useful, make us more productive, and honestly, fun to work with. I’ve learned to approach this with curiosity rather than skepticism.
We just launched a bunch around “Postgres for Agents” [0]:
forkable databases, an MCP server for Postgres (with semantic + full-text search over the PG docs), a new BM25 text search extension (pg_textsearch), pgvectorscale updates, and a free tier.
Thanks. We are already using timescale postgres image for pgvectorscale with some customizations on tsvector and GIN indexes. Would be nice to have bm25 as well. Any specific reason why this was not made open source from the get go or is it the usual phased approach by Timescale (now Tigerdata)? If not, it is a worrying signal as the same could happen with pgvectorscale development as well.
Anyways really appreciate the free offerings by timescale. Really makes things easy.
That's interesting. Personally I did not find it vague and ambiguous.
ClickHouse was fast but required a lot of extra pieces for it to work:
Writing data to Clickhouse
Your service must generate logs in a clear format, using Cap'n Proto or Protocol Buffers. Logs should be written to a socket for logfwdr to transport to PDX, then to a Kafka topic. Use a Concept:Inserter to read from Kafka, batching data to achieve a write rate of less than one batch per second.
Oh. That’s a lot. Including ClickHouse and the WARP client, we’re looking at five boxes to be added to the system diagram.
So it became clear that ClickHouse is a sports car and to get value out of it we had to bring it to a race track, shift into high gear, and drive it at top speed. But we didn’t need a race car — we needed a daily driver for short trips to a grocery store. For our initial launch, we didn’t need millions of inserts per second. We needed something easy to set up, reliable, familiar, and good enough to get us to market. A colleague suggested we just use PostgreSQL, quoting “it can be cranked up” to handle the load we were expecting. So, we took the leap!
PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB did the job. Why overcomplicate things?
Why not let your audience decide what it wants to read?
I say this as a long time HN reader, who feels like the community has become grumpier over the years. Which I feel like is a shame. But maybe that's just me.