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    Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

    465 points bookofjoe | 42 comments | 15 Jul 25 14:51 UTC | HN request time: 1.22s | source | bottom

    I would very much like to enjoy HN the way I did years ago, as a place where I'd discover things that I never otherwise would have come across.

    The increasing AI/LLM domination of the site has made it much less appealing to me.

    1. ksec ◴[15 Jul 25 17:11 UTC] No.44573458[source]▶
    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.

    replies(12): >>44573486 #>>44573519 #>>44573551 #>>44573679 #>>44574106 #>>44574213 #>>44574337 #>>44574455 #>>44575092 #>>44575245 #>>44575493 #>>44576134 #
    2. 0xdeadbeefbabe ◴[15 Jul 25 17:13 UTC] No.44573486[source]▶
    Microservices had a micro moment not much longer than xml.
    replies(1): >>44573514 #
    3. amarcheschi ◴[15 Jul 25 17:15 UTC] No.44573514[source]▶
    If it follows the name, it's gonna be terrible since we're dealing with large language models
    replies(1): >>44574714 #
    4. antonymoose ◴[15 Jul 25 17:16 UTC] No.44573519[source]▶
    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.

    replies(2): >>44573990 #>>44574679 #
    5. thm ◴[15 Jul 25 17:18 UTC] No.44573551[source]▶
    Yes, but unlike AI & Crypto, Erlang came with little grift, slop and Show HN spam.
    replies(1): >>44573918 #
    6. ghc ◴[15 Jul 25 17:29 UTC] No.44573679[source]▶
    I miss the days of daily Haskell posts.
    replies(2): >>44573936 #>>44574099 #
    7. Karrot_Kream ◴[15 Jul 25 17:50 UTC] No.44573918[source]▶
    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

    8. piperswe ◴[15 Jul 25 17:51 UTC] No.44573936[source]▶
    I can imagine you would, with that username :)
    replies(1): >>44574279 #
    9. devmor ◴[15 Jul 25 17:56 UTC] No.44573990[source]▶
    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.
    replies(3): >>44574249 #>>44574429 #>>44574703 #
    10. GZGavinZhao ◴[15 Jul 25 18:05 UTC] No.44574099[source]▶
    "tell me you like Haskell without telling me you like Haskell" moment
    replies(1): >>44576015 #
    11. cmdrk ◴[15 Jul 25 18:06 UTC] No.44574106[source]▶
    I wouldn't mind the Erlang-dominated front page coming back :)
    replies(1): >>44574342 #
    12. amalcon ◴[15 Jul 25 18:15 UTC] No.44574213[source]▶
    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.
    13. Karrot_Kream ◴[15 Jul 25 18:19 UTC] No.44574249{3}[source]▶
    Isn't topical subcommunities just Reddit?
    replies(1): >>44575155 #
    14. tsoukase ◴[15 Jul 25 18:21 UTC] No.44574279{3}[source]▶
    I would definitely follow a HN fork with posts of such amusing spirit.
    15. fuzzythinker ◴[15 Jul 25 18:26 UTC] No.44574337[source]▶
    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.

    replies(2): >>44574523 #>>44576238 #
    16. Bluestein ◴[15 Jul 25 18:27 UTC] No.44574342[source]▶
    Seconded :)
    17. sshine ◴[15 Jul 25 18:38 UTC] No.44574429{3}[source]▶
    Lobste.rs provides that distinction.
    replies(2): >>44574487 #>>44574880 #
    18. thefourthchime ◴[15 Jul 25 18:40 UTC] No.44574455[source]▶
    One might argue that those technologies are sunsetting now
    19. 201984 ◴[15 Jul 25 18:43 UTC] No.44574487{4}[source]▶
    And it's invite-only, so it's hardly an alternative.
    replies(1): >>44574536 #
    20. endtime ◴[15 Jul 25 18:47 UTC] No.44574523[source]▶
    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.
    replies(1): >>44575026 #
    21. MarceColl ◴[15 Jul 25 18:48 UTC] No.44574536{5}[source]▶
    well, it takes around 20 minutes to get an invite, so hardly a problem if you prefer only tech articles
    replies(1): >>44575225 #
    22. Bukhmanizer ◴[15 Jul 25 19:02 UTC] No.44574679[source]▶
    I don’t remember blockchain ever being as big as AI here. More annoying? Yes.
    23. zahlman ◴[15 Jul 25 19:04 UTC] No.44574703{3}[source]▶
    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.)

    24. ◴[15 Jul 25 19:05 UTC] No.44574714{3}[source]▶
    25. sugarpimpdorsey ◴[15 Jul 25 19:24 UTC] No.44574880{4}[source]▶
    A socially awkward speakeasy with deranged moderation?

    Where do I sign up?

    A forum that is exclusionary-by-design has already failed.

    26. waterhouse ◴[15 Jul 25 19:40 UTC] No.44575026{3}[source]▶
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

    "We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites [...] You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang [...]"

    "Ok, ok, enough Erlang submissions. You guys are like the crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome overliteral genies. I meant more that it would be better not to submit and upvote the fluffier type of link. Without those we'll be fine."

    Also some fun comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178

    replies(2): >>44576241 #>>44576676 #
    27. faizshah ◴[15 Jul 25 19:47 UTC] No.44575092[source]▶
    The best one was the 2048 era: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=2048
    28. aydyn ◴[15 Jul 25 19:53 UTC] No.44575155{4}[source]▶
    The userbase overlap is probably > 50%. To many people HN is just another subreddit.
    29. iib ◴[15 Jul 25 20:00 UTC] No.44575225{6}[source]▶
    How exactly does it take 20 minutes to get an invite? I have not tried it, but I can't see how that would be easy.
    replies(2): >>44575761 #>>44576653 #
    30. conductr ◴[15 Jul 25 20:01 UTC] No.44575245[source]▶
    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.

    replies(1): >>44575520 #
    31. seydor ◴[15 Jul 25 20:29 UTC] No.44575493[source]▶
    Oh my god, the years of the JS frameworks. Millions traumatized for life
    32. seydor ◴[15 Jul 25 20:32 UTC] No.44575520[source]▶
    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.

    33. earnestinger ◴[15 Jul 25 21:00 UTC] No.44575761{7}[source]▶
    No idea. Read only is good enough.
    34. dude187 ◴[15 Jul 25 21:30 UTC] No.44576015{3}[source]▶
    I mean, he basically said directly that he likes Haskell lol
    replies(1): >>44577720 #
    35. bookofjoe ◴[15 Jul 25 21:45 UTC] No.44576134[source]▶
    I hope I'm not the only one here who never heard of Erlang until I read your comment (I arrived in 2016).
    36. dang ◴[15 Jul 25 21:57 UTC] No.44576238[source]▶
    https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    37. ModernMech ◴[15 Jul 25 21:57 UTC] No.44576241{4}[source]▶
    lol ask a community of autists for more posts about the innards of Erlang, don't be surprised when you get posts about the innards of Erlang.
    38. MarceColl ◴[15 Jul 25 22:41 UTC] No.44576653{7}[source]▶
    I got mine in about that time, joined their IRC and asked for an invite, someone DM'd me, asked me a couple of questions and sent me the invite. This was about 7 years ago when there as a lot less people, so I imagine it should be easier now.
    39. flakiness ◴[15 Jul 25 22:43 UTC] No.44576676{4}[source]▶
    This is a great little anthropology work of you. Thanks for taking time to find this out!
    replies(1): >>44576999 #
    40. yen223 ◴[15 Jul 25 23:27 UTC] No.44576999{5}[source]▶
    Here's what the frontpage looked like on the day of Erlang:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

    41. GZGavinZhao ◴[16 Jul 25 01:12 UTC] No.44577720{4}[source]▶
    Oh haha I meant his username ;)
    replies(1): >>44580904 #
    42. ghc ◴[16 Jul 25 11:12 UTC] No.44580904{5}[source]▶
    Back in the early days of HN most people thought my username was my initials. Alas, if those were actually my initials it would be a fantastic example of nominative determinism.