Comment by herodoturtle
6 hours ago
Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it, I am getting kinda tired of seeing so many AI-related headlines here on HN. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel like every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.
That's like if you were in the 90s/00s and you're complaining about having to hear about this "internet" thing all the time.
The big difference is that when the web blew up, there were new players in every direction. Now, we get to hear from the same 3-4 companies over and over and over and over again.
It doesn't remotely hit the same way.
It's not the same 3-4 companies. The 3-4 companies are Anthropic, OpenAI, X/Grok, and Meta/Muse.
But there's also DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Jev, and countless services built on top of frontier or open source models. Those 3-4 companies might have the most numerous announcements that hit the front page, but there's way more than that going on in all directions.
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Or in the stone age reading about this "wheel" thing online all the dang time. I bet cave-people just wanted to read about rust in the kernel
Pre-internet there was no way to hear about things "all the time". If someone released a product and a competitor came about it would be months, if not years, before the product existed and the marketing cycle made it to trade magazines.
Now every day there are 200 links to 200 new AI tools. The internet already made the signal:noise ratio tough, with AI it's getting cranked to wondering if there even is a signal among the infinite noise.
idk I got AOL CDs like every week
It’s like almost yesterday it was CRDTs and Rust!
Hearing people talk about the “information superhighway” was exceptionally tedious.
The biggest difference to me is the tone. The dot-com era was brimming with optimism and enthusiasm. People were getting rich (on paper). The demand for someone who could write html/perl/java (or fake it) was high, and lots of smart or savvy people got pulled into tech.
The thing I hate about all of the HN posts on AI is the underlying doomerism. There’s always someone gleefully proclaiming that white color workers are super screwed and that we’re destined to be sad serfs to our AI overlords.
I miss feeling good about tech.
Since 2000, there have been more feelbad tech years than feelgood ones
yeah but everybody liked the internet
lol no they didn't
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Except that there weren't HN or Slashdot yet. By 00s you'd have gotten used to it.
Phenomenon as old as time (on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353091
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Are you implying that most people are getting their news now through HN or Slashdot?
We had Slashdot in the late 90s.
The funny thing is the front page is 100% AI and all the comments on the posts are 100% anti-AI.
What am I supposed to comment "this is cool and I'm excited to try it!"? Snark is a contagion but they're on the front page because a lot of us are having a lot of fun using these new tools and playing with the new ideas
Given that anti-AI posts are flagged faster than I thought possible despite a lot of positive comments, there are probably a lot of silent viewers that are pro-AI…
Silent members? I would also guess conspiratively, employees and founders that benefit from the current AI-hype status quo.
Because these products are over hyped and don’t work as reliably as they say on the tin and it’s annoying.
I am pro AI :p
At least there's some measure of substance to some of the posts, unlike the blockchain and big-data hype trains of yore.
Well, it is the biggest trend in tech right now.
Someday there will be other trends, but it's currently AI's turn.
> every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.
I agree, that HN has mostly lost its spirit and soul and feels more like a AI-announcement bot.
> Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it
I disagree, that the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity are for our common good. I think its the other way around.
Well, a couple of years before that it was all NFTs all the time. Then before that it was web3. Then before that it was the blockchain in general. And then before that it was Haskell and monads.
That's just how it goes.
I think I saw a lot of blockchain in HN, but I don’t remember seeing NFT that much
I don't think it lasted long. I remember finding it annoying as the whole concept of NFTs was eye rollingly stupid. At least some of the other topics have had merit.
I joined HN around the time category theory was starting to take off so not sure what the topic du jour was before that.
Sprinkled with "blazingly fast; written in Rust" each week for the last 10+ years
You 'member Kubernetes and Microservices hype cycle?
You're not wrong, but I never really got over the "Haskell and monads" phase of it.
You forgot about React.
There was a period where it felt like Hacker News was a front-end dev message board.
It's like being a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
There are far more new opportunities after AI than before AI. Try to find the positive perspective.
Can you name some of these opportunities? I see people in this thread talking about using agents to manage their budgets, buy fancy cars and houses, contract work on their home. I think a lot of people feel like AI will permanently forclose any avenue they would have had to achieving that level of wealth, so there's a bitter irony
A good software developer / engineer knows how systems interlink.
AI supercharges that. If you trust the agent's results, you can focus on far higher-level aspects. You can deliver software that was in theory in reach for you, but not in practice, else you hired 30-50 developers doing the actual work for you.
This is different from a PO / PM perspective. They manage people that know their business. You manage agents that just implement code. That'll stay true for at least a few years, I'd say.
In fact, I'm quite sure that engineering-minded people will survive AI the longest. I was of the opposite opinion a few months ago.
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The LLM filling is actually more interesting to me as the frontpage of HN had already gone far too mainstream for me.
I happen to believe AI will be the biggest change in my career in tech. I therefore think it's pretty natural that there is lots of news about it.
But I would welcome other tech news on the site. A quick count says that less than half the submission are AI related and that is split between four types of ai news (how to handle security, a new model, a non-model release from a major lab and politics). Would you complain about there being too many news about programming languages if the frontpage had C++, Ruby, Lisp and a great guide to ARM assembly?
This may explain why these days I actually rely on Slashdot more for tech news.
I'm surprised that's still around! I probably haven't been Slashdot for a decade or so.
I hadn't since CmdrTaco left. But I've been going to it more and more in the last few months. I don't read the comments - but I do like the headline curation.
there needs to be a hnews AI edition
There needs to be a HN blockchain edition. There needs to be a HN Uber for X edition. There needs to be a HN SaaS edition.
The conversation will always be dominated by the current most hyped trend. This one does seem more hyped then usual.
there is: https://news.ycombinator.com/
There's this https://news.ysimulator.run/news and probably more
SlopNews, written by AI, for AI.
I'm surprised hn doesn't have an extremely basic filtering system for this kind of thing.
People could vibecode one in a single prompt, if they really needed it. But what they really need is to yell at cloud.
so... majority of HN now? Perhaps we need a hnews non-AI edition haha
There you go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49659647
I think that as these tools coalesce and we start to see the real super-in intelligence leaders come out on top, there'll probably be less volume and fewer but deeper things to discuss.
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