LLM research on Hacker News is drying up

Author

Affiliation

Dylan Castillo

Iwana Labs

I thought I was seeing fewer arXiv papers on the front page of Hacker News (HN) these days, and I wanted to check if that was real.

So I asked Claude to run a quick analysis: track the share of arXiv stories on HN over time. It queried the BigQuery HN dataset, bucketed the stories by month, and plotted the series:

Percentage of HN stories linking to arXiv

That confirmed my hunch. arXiv posts have been decreasing rapidly in the last few months. Interestingly, it also showed another peak around 2019, and I wanted to know what drove it.

I asked Claude to pull the top 100 papers by upvotes from 2019 and group them by topic. It was the deep learning peak. 41% of the top 100 were about deep learning.

Then I ran the same query for 2023-2026, to see how dominant LLMs were. 59% of the top 100 upvoted papers were about LLMs or AI.

So I asked him to make a nice chart with all of this:

Distribution of topics of arXiv stories

Then I wanted to see which 2019 papers aged well, so I asked Claude to pull the ones that held up from the top 100. Here’s what he got:

• MuZero — Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model (161 pts) — DeepMind’s successor to AlphaZero
• EfficientNet — Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks (119 pts) — compound scaling, set the new CV SOTA
• XLNet — Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding (79 pts) — briefly dethroned BERT
• PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library (113 pts) — the NeurIPS paper formalizing PyTorch’s design
• On the Measure of Intelligence (80 pts) — Chollet’s ARC / “human-like intelligence” manifesto

It’s too early to know which 2023-2026 papers will hold up, so I asked Claude to guess:

• DeepSeek-R1 — Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL (1,351 pts) — first open recipe for o1-style reasoning via pure RL on verifiable rewards
• Generative Agents — Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior (391 pts) — the canonical “Smallville” paper, template for LLM agent architectures
• The Era of 1-bit LLMs — BitNet b1.58, ternary parameters for cost-effective computing (1,040 pts) — first credible case for low-bit inference as the default
• Differential Transformer (562 pts) — attention with a noise-cancelling term, clean architectural contribution with a real theoretical story
• LK-99 cluster — room-temperature superconductor preprints (2,408 + 1,690 pts) — landmark meta-science, not physics: open-science-at-wire-speed and the canonical case of crowdsourced replication

That was fun. Thanks, Claude.