A script that hides AI topics from Hacker News

Ok. AI-backed tools are cool, but sometimes I just want to read about something else on the Hacker News website.

To tame the sea of AI-related posts on the site, I have built a Tapermonkey user script that will automatically hide all posts containing AI keywords.

Use the script for yourself!

Want to join me and hiding AI posts? Just pop this script into Tapermonkey or GreaseMonkey (or whatever you use) and you're good to go.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Hide AI articles
// @namespace    https://ewpratten.com/
// @version      0.1
// @description  Hides AI topics from HackerNews
// @author       Evan Pratten <[email protected]>
// @match        https://news.ycombinator.com/
// @match        https://news.ycombinator.com/news*
// @match        https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
// @match        https://news.ycombinator.com/?p=*
// @icon         https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=ycombinator.com
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

const BANNED_TERMS = [
    /GPT/,
    /GPT\d/,
    /GPT-\d/,
    /OpenAI/,
    /\s+AI\s+/,
    /^AI\s+/,
    /AI-/,
    /\s+A\.I\.\s+/
];

(function() {
    'use strict';

    // Find all posts on the page (HN calls them "things")
    var things = document.getElementsByClassName("athing");

    // Process each "thing" on the page
    for (var thing of things) {
        // The ID is important
        var id = thing.id;

        // Find the title text
        var title_text = thing.querySelector(".titleline").textContent;

        // If a banned term is in the title, hide it
        for (var term of BANNED_TERMS) {
            if (term.exec(title_text)) {

                // Hide the title line
                thing.hidden = true;

                // The next TR will contain a bit more information. It can be found via the thing ID
                var thing_score = document.getElementById(`score_${id}`);
                if (thing_score) {
                    thing_score.parentNode.parentNode.hidden = true;
                }
            }
        }
    }

})();

A side effect of doing this

And now, after publishing this post, I am about to share it on Hacker News... where I will never be able to find it again because the title of this post contains the term AI as well 🤦