Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#421

Post by runfuyngunasdlj » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:12 PM UTC

Applejinx wrote: post #283

lenkite wrote: post #220

HN crowd is quite pro-AI. Many reddit forums like r/programming have simply banned AI topics. "Content about AI and LLMs are considered off-topic with the sole exclusion of deeply technical content about implementation." Frankly, your opinion on HN being "anti-AI" is eye-rolling - it means you are living in a pro-AI bubble and have never seen anti-AI. There are many on HN who will defend AI to the death.

The only places I've seen profoundly pro-AI bias are places full of programmers specialized in fields where they have to have extensive domain knowledge outside of what the coding part does. Typically there's a lot of acknowledgement that problems are coming rapidly, if only in the form of amateurs flooding the domain, but there's also an assumption that their domain knowledge is going to matter, in terms of staying…

You live in a bubble. HN absolutely is profoundly pro-AI. All the most celebrated thought leaders here do nothing but post pelican AI bench marks and wax poetically about building a Matryoshka brain around humanity.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#422

Post by runfuyngunasdlj » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:14 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #181

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #148

I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will no…

Respectfully, this looks like coping with the fact that a fundamentally new technology is discovered but people can’t cope with the immensity of it so they end up throwing in shallow and spread out criticisms spanning sovereignty, USA bad, replacing people bad etc. It’s my personal opinion and it looks extremely incurious analysis of what’s going on. Even if a person doesn’t like AI, I would expect a curious person t…

"Respectfully, incurious, belittling take about everyone who disagrees with me, which is completely divorced from any of the actual argumentation on the anti-AI side>"

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#423

Post by ofjcihen » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #275

dang wrote: post #14

It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…

Also, "AI good" and "AI bad" are very silly camps to describe a topic. You might have seen some comments by me receiving votes lately that some might classify as anti-AI. I'm not for banning it, I use it at work and at home, I learn about it. Here a few positions I hold, for example: - There is a fundamental deviation between what we should be seeing if we were surrounded by 100x enabled engineers and reality. We're…

I echo almost all of your points daily and it’s incredibly refreshing to see a level-headed response like this.

Tbf I think this is probably the way most people see it at the moment from my discussions with others.

The static comes from people who have essentially staked their entire reputation on AI one way or another.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#424

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

I'm not sure what the question is in your comment but this sentence is the only one that has a question mark:

>> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?

The answer is that, yes, most people do understand that. Some people like writing code regardless of whether they realise the extent to which that code is useful to others or not. Some people write code just as a means to an end and couldn't are less how that code is produced. There is, from what I've seen, a general expectation that the people who care about code are better at writing it but my experience is also that they just aren't. Some people who are "passionate about prorgramming" are horrible coders, some who are lukewarm or don't care at all are great coders.

I honestly don't know how AI comes into all that. HN is certainly not anti-AI. Just the other day a post made the first page with a title like "HN front page without the AI" but I can't find it now. There's as much AI stories submitted as anyting you could consider anti-AI.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#425

Post by ceejayoz » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #412

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This didn't happen, except for that few times where it did happen and massively blew up in the media" That you fail to understand why those students took such great offense to what was said at those speeches doesn't make it "anti-AI bias". Those students reacted like that, and I used it as an example, because it's very emblematic of how tech companies and leading figures act.

I'm specifically saying that AI leaders didn't go around making pro-AI commencement speeches. At all. The absolute closest example is Schmidt, who was last CEO of Google more than a decade before ChatGPT launched, and is now CEO of an aerospace company. No other "AI leaders" gave commencement speeches where they were booed. So you're blatantly lying and spreading misinformation to feed a negative narrative about the…

Quite recently, he was the chair of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Commission_o...

Pretending he's some AI nobody is a bit goofy.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#426

Post by paradox242 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

This is an extremely short-sighted and surface-level take.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#427

Post by claytongulick » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

rpcope1 wrote: post #139

johnfn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the deca…

There's probably a lot to say about it's merits or problems, but given the demographics (or my perception of them) is largely "software people" can you really be that surprised or angry given that this could snuff out a _lot_ of people's livelihoods like nothing we've probably seen in our lifetimes?

At least in my case, I don't think that's where the anger is coming from.

If LLMs were truly able to replace me, I'd be disappointed, sure - I've spent 30 years developing mastery of a craft, it's sad to see it go. But I'd resign myself and move on.

But that's not what makes me mad.

I get angry because I simply don't believe it is true. I have a reasonable math and tech background to where I grok how this stuff works at a fundamental level, and I'm utterly unconvinced that it is performing any sort of reasoning.

Call it a stochastic parrot, a token extrusion machine, whatever, but these things are not thinking or reasoning.

That doesn't mean they aren't useful- they clearly are very useful for many tasks.

My anger comes from the global attempt to replace things that require human reasoning with LLMs.

There's this push to use this stuff way past the point of "helpful accelerator" to "why do we need programmers/doctors/lawyers/etc..."

I think it's incredibly dangerous.

So while the tool is useful, I don't think we've figured out how to use it appropriately. For all the short term appearance of productivity boost it provides (whether this is real in a total-cost sense is still an active question), I think the risks to skill development and quality outweigh those benefits in many cases, and are being overlooked.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#428

Post by j0d1 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

Ekami wrote: post #42

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that bad code pretty directly leads to a product that doesn't work. It might work today (though... I wouldn't bet my life on it with how hit and miss LLM code is). But a year or two from now, with people just piling on more and more poorly written code, the system is going to suffer. It'll be slow, it'll be buggy, etc. Yeah, your users won't be able to say "aha, this is because they used AI!", but they w…

Why do you assume the code will be bad in the first place? Coding as someone without experience in coding? Most probably yes, but from someone with some kind of expertise who can act as a guardrail for bad code piling up? Probably not.

The AI spits out _some_ code => the developer needs to review & cleanup the mess, or accept that it worsen the system for the sake of delivering more rapidly.

That's the dynamic with AI and a lot of developers hate working like that, yet there is pressure to work this way.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#429

Post by metalspot » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:46 PM UTC

sajithdilshan wrote: post #386

metalspot wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> glorified autocomplete machine It is a next token prediction function and it is important to understand the technology accurately based on what it actually is. What is unique about a next token prediction function though is that every computer program is just a string of instructions. At the theoretical limit a next token prediction function can generate the entire instruction stream (boot loader, OS, application)…

What you’re saying is correct if the model is trained with all the knowledge humanity had, has and ever produce. But at the moment the next token prediction is quite limited to the training data. Things could change if the model supports re-inforced leaning. That way the LLM would change the weights in real time based on a feedback loop, but again that could vastly improve the quality of the token prediction or compl…

The distinction I would make here is that computer code is logical transformations on arbitrary data, not the actual data itself. An LLM can learn the entire space of logical transformation patterns from existing code, and can hallucinate new logical transformations, using a computer as a validator for the logic, so an LLM can create new logic as well as repeat existing patterns, and that logic can be applied to novel input data that the LLM has never seen before.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

#430

Post by linsomniac » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

I think it's a negative feedback loop: If you are convinced that AI is worthless you are not going to be willing to spend $100-$200 to try the best tools, and if you're not using the best tools or you have to work under severe token limitations you are going to have a bad experience which is going to further convince you that AI is worthless.