How come AI-related posts get so many points on HN?

27•Muhammad523•1d ago

Have we all decided to rebrand Hacker News as a platform for discussing AI? I think that the too many people love to discuss harshly about AI

Comments

Argonautlabs•1d ago

Its all about AI these days.

mdp2021•1d ago

The submitter reduced the complexity of the situation to a whim, and misrepresented it.

Reality is what it is, some heavier some lighter: we discuss reality, its details ranked by weight.

BLKNSLVR•1d ago

It's the cutting edge and it's a bit wild west. There is a lot of room for innovative use cases that, whether actually practical or not, can be marketed and sold as practical.

fuzzfactor•1d ago

Points aren't that meaningful but that's the part that is a "popularity contest."

For what it's worth.

linzhangrun•1d ago

Just like AI-related projects on GitHub always get an entirely different order of magnitude of stars. This is what people are focused on, outshines anything else.

uptownhr•1d ago

Because if the idea is interesting, it's interesting.

throwa356262•1d ago

Dont know about that.

A significant portion of the posts are of the type "new version of model X was just released" or "I just built something by prompting an LLM a few times".

Latest papers from DeepSeek and DeepMind on the other hand are rarely discussed and if ever posted the comment section quickly turns into political discussions or my bigcorp is better than your bigcorp wars.

mdp2021•1d ago

That of HN is a largely non-random public, not a fully selected public. Of course Paretian distributions are also valid here.

(Edit: and it is evident in this very page.)

AndrewDucker•1d ago

Most people here aren't experts in the underlying technology. But they do work with it regularly and are interested in the latest developments in the tooling.

mangeshmam1•1d ago

AI discussions attract people who love it, who hate it and who are tired of hearing about it. All three groups end up opening the thread and commenting.

Leonard_of_Q•1d ago

Because it is the hot new thing and HN is a hype machine. Before AI there were crypto and blockchain, after AI there will be something else.

Madmallard•1d ago

There won't be an after AI

Leonard_of_Q•1d ago

There will be on HN. Artisinal Intelligence, Biological Inference, Living Local Models, whatever. If the AI hype turns out to be real there will be a counter-revolution where the usual suspects start pushing their abacus-enhanced lifestyles, guaranteed AI-free.

Madmallard•18h ago

Doubt it

AI gonna lead to the destruction of the internet

Ekaros•1d ago

I have no doubt there is lot of boosting going on. Essentially entire industry is build on boosting in many ways. So manipulating any available discussion platform is almost certain.

dormento•19h ago

Certainly. Also, its extra weird because the product that is being boosted can be told to go and boost itself.

rich_sasha•1d ago

If the latest AI swarm from OAI decided to astroturf HN, we probably would struggle to know. It seems easy relative to coordinating a massive hack of Hugging Face.

So I half stopped paying attention to enthusiastic posts and comments about AI.

glimshe•1d ago

It's self explanatory. People are very interested in it. Every new computing Wave comes with months or years of non-stop articles here. I remember when Twitter was released, people wouldn't talk about anything else for a while.

funkyfourier•23h ago

Lately I have been finding myself thinking "let me check AI news" when going to check hacker news...

VCFundedGenYer•22h ago

A lot of people here are AI brained, unfortunately.

feverzsj•21h ago

Like most promotion posts here, colleague/friend upvotes to bring them to front page.

sph•20h ago

The post-2022 Eternal September cohort and the deluge of new green accounts really love AI

I’d rather use Lobsters if I had an invite (hint hint wink wink), they are much more moderate about LLMs if not mildly negative, which is a breath of fresh air after a few minutes on here.

mindaslab•20h ago

Since, maaybe, everyone has the natural intelligence to think AI is cool, maybe not enough to explore stuff more.

cyanydeez•20h ago

More likely the people on HN are FOMO and theyre like the zombies in the Z movie and will climb over one another to hype up the technology so they can overrun the defenses.

chistev•19h ago

Other things are discussed here too besides AI. Not all AI posts gather so many votes.

Look at the front page now, how many submissions are about AI, tell me?

Henchman21•14h ago

Because AI bots upvote them endlessly

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