How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN?
For starters, most Bay Area residents are not active on HN on a sunny Sunday afternoon during peak brunch time, a Giants v Rockies game, a social race in the Marina, during the weekend right before college move-in begins for a number of UCs, and the first weekend after the K-12 school year started.
Secondly, the technical conversations on this HN are somewhat divorced from those which are common now. Firstly, no one cares about system cards or micro-level model changes and performance anymore - the name of the game now is eval, harness development, RL/reward engineering, and model-agnostic development.
Thirdly, the vibe change around layoffs the job market is completely different. While there have been plenty of layoffs (and friends and acquaintances of mine have been impacted), most have been able to land jobs within weeks with a similar base/bonus/equity structure.
Furthermore, the Ivy-versus-nonIvy division and rhetoric is nonexistent in the Bay. Everyone here knows a UCLA grad has the exact same opportunties right out of college as a Stanford grad. Most high value careers like startups, PE/VC, big tech, etc recruit from a mix of 20-30 public and private schools that I have listed multiple times on here. And to add to that - "MBAs" as a moniker is nonexistent as most of us who are in decisonmaking roles here in VC, Corporate leadership, and mid-level management are engineers who never did MBAs or any kind of grad school (except our Chinese/Indian peers because of the F1 OPT).
Additonally, most people are levelheaded about AI - they don't deride it as useless but they also don't think it's going to destroy all jobs. On HN you get very black-and-white and highly polarized thinking that AI is only going to lead to X or Y.
And finally, I notice a degree of European anti-Americanism and American anti-Europeanism that is nonexistent in the real world. I have co-hosted events with EU consulates, helped direct European startups to get American funding, and vice versa, and had pretty personal and unfiltered conversations over drinks with pretty high level Europeans and Americans, and the kind of acrimony you see on here is nonexistent IRL.
Not a single mention of pickleball, hyrox, Kdramas, Yemeni coffee, women's basketball, and other stuff currently in the zeitgeist in the Bay is very telling.
" Furthermore, the Ivy-versus-nonIvy division and rhetoric is nonexistent in the Bay. " Non existent in DACH region or CEE because why should it?
" Thirdly, the vibe change around layoffs the job market is completely different. While there have been plenty of layoffs (and friends and acquaintances of mine have been impacted), most have been able to land jobs within weeks with a similar base/bonus/equity structure." I think people with problems are more likely to post and secondly maybe you are convoluting your social circle with the whole SV.
I haven't done the analysis to see whether it's DACH influenced or not but the rhetoric here does not feel Bay Area shaped at all and hasn't for years. It feels like what happens when too many people read about the Valley from too many Techcrunch articles but don't actually live here. It's largely a worldview composed of too many online articles and gripes.
Even publications, semianalysis is the only major, decent one in my experience (excluding personal blogs).
Everything is low SNR for AI - have you seen ICML/ICLR/NeurIPS recently?? There is almost no point even going except for meeting people which we do by scheduling talks back and forth every few months anyways.
I also find IRL, then a carefully curated twitter timeline with the politics toggle on the settings page set to off, are the only ways to get high SNR information about AI.
I also feel it's topic-based. On general systems engineering, think databases, OS, architecture, webtech, the SNR on this site is generally amazing. But these days those articles are fewer than before. For example, 2 years back when every other article was about sqlite and postgres, while it was a very unidimensional few months, you could learn a lot from here.
I agree. The thing is, a lot of us moved to Lobsters [0] because of the higher SNR. That is probably the closest to what would be heard amongst engineers in the Bay.
[0] - https://lobste.rs/
Luma was always a public events app optimized for discovery. Partiful on the other hand was meant to be a a replacement for FB private events when hosting a house party or private gathering. Basically, Luma was always designed for M-F and Partiful was always meant for Sat/Sun.