Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- there was one glorious day years ago when every story on the hn front page was about erlang. that was fun. (anyone else remember that?)by hugs
- The Erlang day was on 2009-03-11. You can still see how the front page looked that day:by philipkglass
- I'm curious if anybody has tried to figure out roughly the % of bot comments? I keep seeing the "ai-talking cliches", but wonder if I'm crazy because people (or... other bots???) take it at face value.by tescreal
- I've been noticing in recent months that even when the article is in no way related to AI, there's often comments trying to steer it into AI, often in a way that makes no sense at all. It has a way of becoming its own parody.by asveikau
- Reading about tech has become gradually less and less fun for me over the past 16 years.
Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad? I remember those days I would read tech news and sites like Ars Technica and comments were sometimes snarky and indignant but generally people were enthusiastic about reading tech because it offered glimpses into more technically advanced futures.
I wasn't browsing HN back then but I imaging the same thing was true of HN in the late 2000's and early 2010's.
Now tech sites like Ars Technica consistently have comment sections filled with immense negativity cynicism indigation and just plain old boiling rage. I avoid those comment sections now because reading such things negatively affects my mood and certainly isn't fun.
And over the past few years HN has gradually become more negative and nasty.
All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.
by ViktorRay - It kinda started turning as people realized that a huge amount of the biggest people pushing tech are rabidly anti-human, incredibly racist and usually spouting nazi quotes every chance they get, and are out to exploit as many people as possible just because they can.
The negativity is rather well-earned at this point. I do still enjoy tech, but the ecosystem is no longer as infused (by ratio) with nerds doing cool things.
by Groxx - I still maintain the notion that tech was most exciting/peaked around 2010. Macs were awesome (and the Intel transition was complete at full strength), things were fast, OSes weren't bloated, and we didn't have flavor-of-the-month fads like cloud, crypto, NFTs, or AI.
- All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.
You're 16 years older now. You will have changed. HN has too, but looking back at how great it all was without also realising that your point of view is different means you're missing a big part of why it feels worse now. I've been here a long time too so I'm not going to claim I don't see the same thing, but I imagine someone who signed up 3 months ago won't have the same opinion as us old timers.
by onion2k - >Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad?
Yes, and when I first saw LLMs and image generators I experienced a similar feeling of awe. We haven't had anything like this in decades.
It is unfortunate that many people are negative and nasty about it. Local politicians are getting shot at over datacenter projects. We have truly lost the plot.
I used to think that people had learned their lesson that automation was a force for good, and we had gotten past the Luddite days of smashing looms. But it seems that is not the case, people are just as short-sighted as ever.
by Legend2440 - It's not just HN, have you seen mainstream news recently? It's just a hot topic and I think it's normal for people to talk about those a lot.
If quantum computing ever goes mainstream, I'm sure you'll see a lot of articles about that as well.
- The programming Reddit forbade AI posts. Unfortunately the result is NOT better level posts, but a wasteland instead.by brabel
- HN really needs an AI filter. Most posts are AI company promotion now.by feverzsj
- If you're interested in a solution, I maintain a reader that performs client-side filtering from a given view. Here's a view with an AI filter I try to keep up to date: https://logicnow.io/hn/index.html?view=https://raw.githubuse...by dandrew5
- I wrote a browser extension to auto-hide AI-related articles. It makes HN much more readable: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/by coldpie
- All HN users can be part of the solution. Help mods by emailing them at hn@ycombinator.com. I recently pointed out a suspicious pattern, and the mods were able to use that to track and ban a collection of accounts.by CharlesW
- Democratization of access has its victims.
I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes.
15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars.
10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce.
5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter.
Now it is a blurry view into the future through the black mirror of AI.
How could we jump back into the cozy past again?
I do not have a clear answer, but what seems to work for you are small groups of friends and friends of friends hanging out on WhatsApp or Discord, discussing geeky news together in the context of their backgrounds. But these are very curated and very closed groups, still operating on the social media platforms of behemoths.
Would now be the right time to restart self-hosted message boards or Mattermost/Campfire instances?
by mgl - I think you answered your own question, simply un-democratize access. Go places with high barriers of entry.by jklinger410
- On the topic, I agree smaller groups are the only way to achieve this.
Here is a protptype of how easy it is to setup a forum on onionv3 service. Just a few commands and your off.
by smalltorch - Run a self hosted forum or instance of whatever you like, and just only let people sign up if they are recommended by someone or can argue their way in, basically. xenforo and some add ons can do that, and I'm sure there's a few self hosted messaging apps like you mention but I'm not as familiarby nemomarx
- > How could we jump back into the cozy past again?
"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
by Morizero - Discord is actively torpedoing small, niche, or marginalized communities. Not a safe place.
- The issue is the tech and the motives to wield it. Cosy decentralized message boards exist, thankfully outside the realm of the greater public.
The moment that the greater public sees these high trust networks and tries to join them, all the bad actors and their armies of bots will follow and I mourn for the recreation time of any admin who has to suddenly deal with that.
Private walled gardens seem to be the only way forward for now. If you love something, do not share it here
by tetris11 - > How could we jump back into the cozy past again?
Delete 9/10th of the HN population. I could accept even AI discussion if there wasn't so much of it, and so many posts in general; /new is like trying to win the lottery.
It doesn't matter how interesting it is, you just have to be lucky. The corollary is that the front page isn't the most interesting stuff posted today, it's a list of who's got lucky posting the average topic for the average reader.
by sph - I'm nostalgic for the new JS framework every day era. Say what you will about that era but people were writing the code by hand, so looking back it all feels "hand-crafted" and quaint. You had to copy paste that express app from a medium.com article instead of prompting an LLM to scaffold a whole project in one second.by int32_64
- AI has turned me away from HN more and more.
Most of the content is about using some data center based ML provider. My view is how so many ignore the environmental harm these constructs are doing; increasing ambient temperatures, inducing heavy metals into the water table, decreasing the access to water for human consumption in numerous drought areas, hostel ambient noise ... The wealth who are the majority finical backers do not care about these issues.
ML is a tool and hardly focused on it being able to operate as a local based solution. Frameworks are tie to expensive hardware. This creates a hyper pay-to-play scenario. While hand written coding can be done on a computer from 20 years ago. Local based solutions are the only means to decrease the wealth gap. Data center solutions increase the wealth gap.
I don't find value in ML summaries. I want to consume the answer and the ideas around them that lead to the answer. This creates more long-term value.
_Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.
by yndoendo - I might migrate if I could could an invite, but I haven't been able to find anyone on the inside.
Edit: Thank you kind stranger. I'm in.
by recursive - I don't even care about the environmental aspect- it's just so...un-hackerlike and boring. Where are all the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels?by 2OEH8eoCRo0
- I appreciate the way you sum up the ML vs traditional software appeal and I think it's helped me articulate why ML is so unappealing to me. The power of software has very little to do with the power of the machine it's run on (with some obvious exceptions like games and physics sims) which made it very exciting to me when I was learning to code. The same cannot be said about deep learning where more data and more compute means more power.by otherayden
- Well your point on it being wrong to interact with a whole industry sounds more like a policy and political party line. This is just nerds discussing bleeding edge things.by unixhero
- A lot of those environmental claims are not accurate, or substantially overblown.
Heavy metals in the water table is a new one I haven't heard before, and I'm skeptical.
Most of this is motivated reasoning by people who don't like AI for other reasons and are just looking for justifications to shut it down.
by Legend2440