Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums
Since it seems like 80% of HN nowadays is focussed on the AI industry, I’m on the search for a good tech forum that focuses on the rest. Can you post your favourite non-AI-obsessed forum?
Absolutely everything in tech is touched by AI/ML in 2026 except micro controllers/embedded systems
On another note - YC 25 batch
https://www.extruct.ai/data-room/ycombinator-companies-s25/
YC 24 batch
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
On a personal note, I lead cloud + app dev implementations for a consulting company. I’ve had 5 projects since the beginning of last year and they have all involved Amazon hosted LLMs in some form or fashion.
Every single project I’ve been brought in with at pre sales has also involved Gen AI and/or traditional ML.
I also loved programming on these in 2007 using Windows Compact Framework.
https://weareconker.com/blog/is-windows-ce-still-supported-i...
But after being in this game for 30 years professionally and after half century of living on this earth, I still haven’t overcome my addictions to food and shelter and while I’m in pretty good shape, I don’t think I could start a successful career by opening an OnlyFans account so instead, I keep up to date on where the industry is…
By the way, have you seriously never written[1] so much as a single backup script to back up a personal system? You only use GUI backup software?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46634535#:~:text=As%20f...
1. To access the internet
2. To download music from Napster and later iTunes and to create mix CDs and later for my iPod
3. To mix music with CoolEdit (bought by Adobe as Adobe Audition) - I was a fitness instructor and created my own 32 bpm beat synchronized music
4. As a home media theater PC (Mac Mini + Front Row) and later a media server (Plex)
My backup was running BackBlaze. When we moved and I decided Plex + bit torrent wasn’t worth the hassle, I did a one time “aws s3 -sync…” and copied my 2TB of media to AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive in my personal account. I’ve opened my personal computer - that I only bought for a one time contract for a former CTO/friend when I was between jobs for a month.
Cargo cultists are going to cargo cult.
Makefiles touch on C programming; they are not topical in a C language forum.
Most AI discussion as a tangent to another topic is utterly unproductive, uninteresting, repetitive and off-topic. The same half a dozen points are rehashed. Most of the commentary is someone's subjective experience which nobody else can exactly replicate.
Almost everything in tech runs on switching power supplies. That doesn't mean tech forums on all subjects should tolerate intruders incessantly blathering about power supplies.
80% of the companies that YC funding are AI something or the other. If your career has anything to do with technology - you are or will be directly affected by AI.
Would you have felt the same way if people complained about all of the discussions about mobile around 2009-2010? People on Usenet complaining about the browser was going to usurp the need for Gopher servers?
Social media has made it normal to have closed social circles. You like a couple posts by Karpathy and LeCun and your feed is now full of AI. Or you like a post by the anti-AI folks and your feed is now on how useless or harmful it is.
With HN, we all see the same news. But now it's far to the extreme of either party.
HN is often around the early majority of the Innovation Adoption curve. I was actually going to ask why Clawdbot wasn't even mentioned on HN when it had been everywhere else... but the news did hit the front page a few days later. There's a few killer updates from the AI coding groups which only get 0-2 upvotes and disappear.
HN is not the place to go to be up to date on AI, it's where you go to see the news that has hit the mainstream. Opus 4.6 was "leaked" on media and hyped as if it were Claude 5 or something. By the time the news was actually out, people had formed their opinions.
When's the last time you saw blockchain on the front page?
https://histre.com/hn/?tags=+all-ai
(Dis: it's mine, but it's free)
I’m more interested in forums that attract a crowd much more measured and skeptical about AI, though - I know there are a lot of you here at HN (like me)
HN has been my home for learning about all sorts of things for 10+ years but blockchain + AI has just killed all interesting discussion that can be had.
It's hard to define a community around "not being obsessed" with something. Maybe instead it's worth thinking about what the goal of such a community / forum is. Might be easier to find / define.
If you come up with something I'm happy to check it out.
If people don't like AI related content then I encourage them to treat those posts the way they do politics.
You're right in HN heading down the path in favouring slop, constant posts and startups about AI with now 'influencers' (simonw in particular) aggressively posting and shilling AI.
With the moderators knowing that these 'influencers' and their kind violate the HN guidelines every day by purposefully linking back to their site for farming backlinks.
It might as well be called AI news.
Channeling Steve Blank, get out of the building! You’ll run into real problems faced by real people who often have limited exposure to both AI and tech, but who can still benefit enormously. Listening and engaging is always a good first step before jumping in to suggestions.
In this space, needs are far more data and visualization driven, which are not strictly AI related. It may also be both a useful and humbling antidote to hype cycles.
Afaict mods are on our side, despite whatever "aggregated" data "suggest"
This site (which I peruse everyday) claims that 3 AI articles were modded down today, but in actual fact the single nonAI article that was supposed to have been modded down was modded up.
https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals?tab=rea...
I trust however, that the political calls are representative
One has to delve into the data before arriving at broad judgements :)
I even upvote AI or LLM-centered articles if they're not centered on "How agents and vibe coding have/haven't/will/will not changed everything about coding" - it's these that have grown intolerable in the past few weeks.