Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.
You sometimes see people on reddit amazed that "reddit's opinion seems to have changed". Nothing changed, just a different subgroup. You'll see the other opinion again if you wait for another similar article.
For example, the "did bother reading the article" crowd is attracted to certain headlines, and this probably isn't one of those.
It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9RL9MuGZjzm4q3gKG/what-just-...
FWIW I think this is an artifact of site design more than anything else. A commentary site like HN in 2026 encourages hot takes and karma farming. All the "social media" with higher quality commentary like Substack and LessWrong center a large text blob of thought at the top and encourage reading more than writing. This puts up just enough of a barrier to write a hot take that you need to read the whole article and puts enough UI friction from leaving a throwaway angry comment that those folks will scroll away.
HN on the other hand all but encourages shallow posting. The article isn't posted, commentary is more prominent than the article itself. Leaving a comment takes 2-3 clicks and the comment editing flow excludes every other comment on the site, encouraging a write-first mentality. Ranking commentary based on upvotes offers a sweet dopamine hit over collecting karma. In 2026 these all encourage low quality engagement.
HN's UI has stayed relatively the same over the years while the Internet around it hasn't and I think its UI now acts as a low quality commentary attractor. LW changed its site design to stem the tide of low quality comments that show up here. LW comments certainly have their problems, but then, we humans all have problems :) On balance the community is much sharper and much more capable of having intellectually heavyweight, sober discussions on controversial topics. Of course nothing seems to trump my own friend network.
and i honestly would rather have a reddit lite site like hacker news where there appears to be at least a diversity of opinion than the pseudo-intellectualization cjing occurring among the exact same sort of AI cockgobblers on LW
Why? Isn't that available on literally every single other tech comment section on the Internet? Like what distinguishes these angry comments from the ones on Techcrunch or Ars or Reddit subs that tolerate AI? If I wanted mindless diversity I'd just have the LLM generate random perspectives.
Layoff.
My explanation is - the technology is amazing and engineers admired it, but CEOs kept talking about an exponential curve while engineers on the ground started to notice signs of Gartner hype cycle curve.
We saw this play out with the social media era. Incredible technology but it’s now ossified into deteriorating closed platforms mostly filled with algorithmic, ragebait slop surrounded by ads. Fool me once.
I agree about the ethos and ethics of early hackers. But, I note that -by volume- most of the folks who do programming and nearly all of the people who are software-industry managers [0] are not hackers.
[0] I'm including managers at all levels, including the executive levels.
Though, given that this was originally a message board and hangout for folks deeply involved with YCombinator, and that prior to LLM Mania, the most commonly posted stuff was either "Techie 'lifestyle' blogging" or "Vapid thinkpieces", it's not surprising.
Mine is based on two things:
1. The fact that i grew up in poverty and never want anyone else to suffer that fate.
2. I was raised in a religious tradition that can be accurately described as socialist.
What do you mean?
1) Those with cautious, but enthusiastic, optimism for the technology and an understanding that things never work ideally in tech and any advancement that moves the needle even slightly is worth embracing.
2) Those who are so dogmatically opposed to AI that they leave logical conversation at the door in favor of just repeating whatever negative gotcha they heard last when the topic of AI comes up.
I'll say that the ratio of these engineers seems to be about 10:1 in real life versus 1:10 online, at least in my experience, roughly speaking. I don't think I've actually ever interacted with actual "AI/Tech Bros" who are obnoxiously pro-AI the same way that many of the people who are "anti-AI" come off.
The data I'm working with is biased (I've been working in high tech for a while now), but I'm left to conclude that the people who love to hate on AI online are those who love to hate online while most other people aren't particularly interested in defending a technology online that they feel is inevitable and doesn't really need defending.
Open Source, hacker culture, scorn of "the suits", the love of sci-fi and it's attendant politics -- the bulk of actual technical people have a long history of being very politically aware and deliberately eschewing money for their values. It was rarely Marxist Class-Conciousness type stuff, but it certainly was aware of the political environment we were in.