Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

Speaking personally I was not particularly moved by the article because I have seen the same thing, in different shapes, thousands of times on HN and elsewhere. Really, AI can't feel and therefore it is inferior? Never heard that one before. Really, an AI can't feel friction and therefore can't adapt to it? Daring today, aren't we? (And a more interesting question: is that even true..?) I realize I am being unnecessarily harsh here, but this article is very much preaching to the choir on HN, which has an anti-AI bent. No one is showing up because there's nothing really to show up to here -- and that is why you are left with "sly jibes" and not much else.

View on HN

It’s bizarre to me to hear that HN has an anti-AI bent.

This is the place I see AI discussed the most. Admittedly the opinions here are mixed. A lot of people do have negative feelings but there are also a ton of pro-AI comments. There Are huge 600 comment threads about a new model release, weird rants about “Gastown”, constant “Launch HNs” for model wrappers, and people saying writing code by hand is archaic.

This is one of the most pro-AI places I spend time. The other websites I frequent are much more anti-AI and my experience in real life is that most people don’t like what AI is doing to the world (even if they grudgingly find it useful at work.)

Do you really think threads like [1], [2], [3] are pro-AI? I literally just selected three at random from today's feed. I think the only positive threads about AI here are typically new model releases.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923079 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921461 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926590

The last one isn’t negative because of AI but because of grok/elon.

Sure and OpenAI articles aren’t negative because of Sam Altman, Anthropic articles aren’t negative because of Dario etc…

They could be. But you’re delusional if you think people don’t shit on grok because of the association to Elon. Or it’s just a shitty model, who knows.

Five of the top eleven posts right now are about AI:

1. Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model [https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/]

2. High-Bandwidth Flash offers efficient storage for model weights [https://spectrum.ieee.org/high-bandwidth-flash]

3. Grok Build is open source [https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build]

4. Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf] [https://www.siegelendowment.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/f...]

5. An Interactive Map of AI [https://artifipedia.com/map]

I would only say the discussion on #3 is particularly negative and as others mentioned Grok has a lot of its own baggage: Elon Musk, recently uploading home directories without asking, making sexual imagery of minors, etc. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/22/grok-ai-g...)

---

So a little less than half of the top 10 stories are about AI and only 1 is negative but that one potentially has other factors at play.

Contrast this to how the general public feels about AI:

"A majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite. What’s more, a plurality of voters view AI negatively ... Just 26% of voters say they have positive feelings about AI, compared with 46% who hold negative views. In fact, the only topics with a lower net positive rating than AI in the NBC News survey were the Democratic Party and Iran."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-majority...

---

Given all that, I would say HN has a more pro-AI bias than the general population. Do you disagree?

I don't like what AI is doing to the world and the tools it puts into the hands of those who would make the world a worse place, but I don't have my head in the sand about the inevitability of what is about to happen in a lot of fields, for better or worse.

Companies will see it as a way to make more for less, they will lay off many people, not realising, as Henry Ford did, that to make money you need to pay your workers, so they can buy products.

What the end state will be is very unclear right now, could be bladerunner, could be star trek, could be 1984. Could be terminator.

We will just have to wait and see.

> could be bladerunner, could be star trek, could be 1984. Could be terminator.

It's a profound moment for sure, but let's ask ourselves: could the creative works of early last century have predicted our world? Would people in the 1930s say "2030, it could be like Metropolis, could be like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, could be like Flash Gordon"? No.

The real future might be nothing like any of the sci-fi movies we're so used to representing potential AI-based futures.

One thing I've been trying to remind myself about is that humans have explored only a very narrow slice of possibilities within the known universe. AI's ability to crawl the search space is going to uncover way more slices, (which yes, could lead to various outcomes like the movies listed), but more likely to be some hybrid/blend of outcomes (or entirely new outcomes) that we haven't imagined yet at all.

"May you live in interesting times" and all that

Those shows are just shorthand for 'utopian future with no need for money', 'distopian future where corporations have control', 'distopian future where machines have control', 'distopian future where the government have control' etc

Plainly, the precise future we get will be as unlike the films as our current situation is like Metropolis (robot girlfriends, skyscrapers, drones/flying transport) but the specifics are very much different.

We certainly do live in interesting times. Would be nice for them to get a bit less interesting IMO.

> It’s bizarre to me to hear that HN has an anti-AI bent.

IMHO, it's a solid 50:50. The threads about new models and whatnot will be filled by hypers, the threads detailing the social and economic consequences (or the newest scandal of major protagonists) with doomers and haters.

Yeah that seems about right to me.

And that seems fairly balanced. Especially considering polling says more people are worried about AI than excited in the general population

Look, really not trying to get into the weeds here, but since we're there: I respect your take that nothing in this article is novel, though I disagree with it.

My point wasn't as much about that as it was the lack of good faith engagement and curiosity.

Not interesting? Let the damn thing die on /new.

The article does not engage with its subject matter with good-faith engagement and curiosity. "Always has been. Always will be." is, inherently, the author's lack of engagement with the subject matter. "They cannot see the world outside" is a shut door that does not admit curiosity or an interesting comment. And so you are seeing this reflected back in the response.

There has been plenty of good faith ruined by trolls on both sides of the discussion. The vast majority of which are new accounts. HN seems to have been under attack for years now.

More generally, the AI discussions that HN regulars actually want to have are going to be limited to the business plans, press releases about new models, and the (very) occasional higher quality project that couldn't have been done without a big lift from an LLM.

Anyone genuinely wanting to discuss the truth from a philosophical or scientific perspective is never going to penetrate the profound ignorance on much of the business side (mostly startups and aging leadership), so why bother? Business is at least what everyone has in common here.

> HN, which has an anti-AI bent

In what world are you living? 90% of the front page is AI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com