Comment by ksec
7 days ago
People who are a little late to the site may not know there was a time on HN where Erlang has even more frontage submission than the best of AI / LLM.
Ruby Rails, Postgres, SQLite, Rust, etc. They all have their moments and I dont think LLM right now is as overwhelming as any other hyped moments. Certainly not Erlang.
That was very different. Somehow the entire front page was Erlang, but it was only for a day or 2. AI is different from that. It's like a good 40-50% of the posts for at least a year or more, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. It's also different from web3/etc. as those were at most 10% of the posts and most of us can see it's just hype.
I'm not fighting for a split/fork, just stating the fact that it's nothing compared to Erlang.
IIRC that was a deliberate campaign to make the site unattractive to a spate of non-technical folks who had apparently all simultaneously discovered it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178
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https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It all depends if you care about the tech side of HN or the startup side of HN. I love the tech articles above all else and could easily do without the general trend fluff.
With that said, I don’t find the AI posts nearly as bad as the Blockchain era.
I don’t remember blockchain ever being as big as AI here. More annoying? Yes.
As annoyed as I am with the constant deluge of uninteresting AI/LLM articles, I would much rather see a split between tech and startup news. I think that's a lasting and useful distinction.
Isn't topical subcommunities just Reddit?
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Personally, I'm more interested in the think-pieces than the actual news.
(And I could very much do without the content that revolves around US politics. Even if it draws me in sometimes.)
Lobste.rs provides that distinction.
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I wouldn't mind the Erlang-dominated front page coming back :)
Seconded :)
Erlang is kind of a special case, since there was that period when the community's preferred response to "too much politics" was to spam submissions about Erlang. Agreed though, it doesn't seem to have taken over more than (say) Bitcoin or Rust have at times.
I miss the days of daily Haskell posts.
I can imagine you would, with that username :)
I would definitely follow a HN fork with posts of such amusing spirit.
"tell me you like Haskell without telling me you like Haskell" moment
I mean, he basically said directly that he likes Haskell lol
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I've been here a while and this is certainly more, prolonged, and has no end in sight compared to most other hype cycles we've experienced.
It's also exceedingly generic such that AI isn't really a topic, it's an entire classification or maybe domain to steal from the animal kingdom hierarchy.
to be fair, AI is replacing all computers so talking e.g. about languages is believed to be soon obsolete.
I would like to see more nuanced and interesting articles about AI though. Right now it's all about VCs measuring the size of their investments and the politics of alleged superstar programmers.
Microservices had a micro moment not much longer than xml.
If it follows the name, it's gonna be terrible since we're dealing with large language models
The best one was the 2048 era: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=2048
I hope I'm not the only one here who never heard of Erlang until I read your comment (I arrived in 2016).
Oh my god, the years of the JS frameworks. Millions traumatized for life
One might argue that those technologies are sunsetting now
Yes, but unlike AI & Crypto, Erlang came with little grift, slop and Show HN spam.
The atmosphere on the site was very different then. There was plenty of Erlang vaporware and lots of "how to grow your startup" growth spam which wasn't called growth spam yet. The community was a lot less cynical then (though obviously the middlebrow dismissal [1] tendency of the site is quite old.)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248