Excluding Hacker News AI articles in my Newsboat RSS

2026-06-14

There's been too many AI articles in Hacker News recently, and it's become so boring that I was thinking about removing Hacker News from my RSS reader, Newsboat. Then, I suddenly remembered something I had read in Newsboat's manual a long time ago: the possibility to filter out articles!

I've solved the problem by adding the following to my config:

ignore-mode "display"
ignore-article "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss" "title =~ \"(^|[^A-Za-z])AI([^A-Za-z]|$)|artificial intelligence|GPT|Claude|Copilot\""

ignore-mode

The ignore-mode option has two values, "display" and "download". The default, which is "download", only limits what would be downloaded the next time Newsboat checks for new articles, but "display" applies the filter when showing the articles, which has two advantages in the short-term:

It applies to your old articles as well, and so you can more easily check to see if it works well.
It's a better option when you want to find a good ignore-article value by trial and error.

ignore-article

The ignore-article option gets two values, the scope and the filter. The scope can be "*" to apply it to everything. In this case, I've limited it to Hacker News using its RSS feed's URL.

For the filter, I have excluded everything that has at least one of the following:

(^|[^A-Za-z])AI([^A-Za-z]|$)
artificial intelligence
GPT
Clause
Copilot

I may add more phrases in the future. However, most of the unwanted articles are filtered out by "AI", which is the first one. However, "AI" is too short and exists in the middle of many innocent words, such as "sustainable"! So, the complicated syntax you see above makes sure only instances of "AI" that are not immediately before or after alphabet characters are excluded.

Positive vs. negative

What's too boring is articles from AI fanboys, but this filter excludes all AI articles, even this article, if it goes to the front page of Hacker News ;) But I'm fine with it because

Not seeing any AI article is a price I'd happily pay for not seeing AI fanboys' articles.
The articles that criticise AI are more or less boring as well at this point!

Bonus

Newsboat is absolutely great! When you add the AI filter, you can go on and add the following line as well to get rid of "short" videos in YouTube feeds:

ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"youtube.com/shorts/\""

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