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

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

#581

Post by CrociDB » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC

> code is just a means to an end

that's just objectively not true. code is not just the thing that "builds" the final program, it's also the blueprint of that program.

it's both the most detailed _description_ of what the program does and also the instructions on how to build that program. and it's deterministic, which means that the same compiler will *always* generate the same program based on that code (search for bootstrapping, and you'll understand better why that is). you can think that a very detailed prompt is like a "code" in the sense that you'll always be able to build the same thing, but that's simply not the case because LLMs are not deterministic.

the other thing I like to comment is that you mention _"product"_ a few times, but you never mentioned a _"program"_, which is what it becomes after it's built (or executed, for that matter). I think those are in different levels of abstractions. if you're looking for a way to come up with a product faster than your competitors, good for you. code is waaaay more than that.

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

#582

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #166

mkl wrote: post #24

A lot of people on HN are anti- overhyping , which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.

The hype was totally justified for AI now that coding has been completely transformed for the most part. Trying to “correct the hype” just looks like clowning in hindsight. It’s like people in 1990s were trying to correct the internets hype: oh you know it won’t change anything and the tech bros want to create hype out of nothing! So it’s not neutral to be anti hype for AI. It is just wrong.

The hype was completely justified for blockchain now that money has been completely transformed for the most part.

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

#583

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

hunterpayne wrote: post #561

trumpdong wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that's specific to AI. It seems accountability levels are in hell right now. Consider anything the president has done and how that would have gone if any other president ever did it. Or anything AI companies do. Or anything Tesla does. Or X.

Don't bring politics into it. We can literally see the software being produced getting worse very quickly since the introduction of LLMs for coding. I expect a wave of data breaches to come soon when the hackers realize how many new holes have been created lately and adjust their tactics.

But it's not just software and it's not just LLMs. Everything was starting to turn to slop before LLMs hit the scene.

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

#584

Post by theappsecguy » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #472

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…

The argument that LLMs are "feeding me back free and open internet" seems to skip the most useful aspect of the tool. I could never, as an individual read, let alone synthesize and make decisions with, the amount of information on the internet. The LLM takes that free and open information and feeds me back novel information based on that free information. It gives me ideas, opinions, and hard data based on that infor…

Nothing about the information it feeds you is novel. It's all stolen repetition of someone else's work.

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

#585

Post by dang » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:56 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…

Yes, the binary comments are more predictable and therefore less interesting. Mixey ones, like what you've posted here, are much better. (That probably applies to any divisive topic, of course.)

Your comment reminds me of another important variable: time. We're still at the beginning of figuring out what these tools even are, let alone how best to use them.

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

#586

Post by pixl97 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

saltcured wrote: post #439

uxhacker wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is dialectical. In other words both sides are right. There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, and what is the root cause of the weaknesses. Is it intrinsic to the models that LLM's use, or the way thy have been trained. In this knowledge is where the gold mine is for the next start up. For…

> There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, ... I think some of this pro/anti AI discussion is really a proxy for something else though. There is another unstated, societal disagreement about personal responsibility and the behaviors of the AI tool users. It isn't entirely new, as people have always been…

And this is why I'm glad we don't have full continuous learning AGI at this point. Humanity is not ready. We neither have the legal system nor the responsibility of handling something that would be capable of agency when turned on.

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

#587

Post by dijit » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

This topic is so hot that this comment will be impossible to find, but I really want to add my take because I so rarely see my specific concerns mentioned.

Every single technological improvement that has helped "developers" in the last 16 years has been worse for users (with very few exceptions).

I tried constantly to reconcile why this is a fact, but I find it hard because I don't "speak" finance, I don't "speak" PM, and I don't "speak" sales.

I only speak: goals of the product, outcomes for users and dependability of my service, and those aren't the drivers of business decisions.

My industry niche has been reliability, and I've all but seen my role be eliminated because nobody wants to pay for things to work properly, they don't want to pay for the friction of someone slowing the gears of business in order to actually satisfy uptime or performance requirements: unless they're forced to.

There's a pattern that once you notice you can't stop seeing;

Every abstraction layer that saves developer time has a direct cost to users; in latency, in memory, in compute.

Sometimes that cost is direct, sometimes it's laundered through your cloud bill and passed quietly downstream. But it's always there.

If you build your programs using electron, they're laggy unless you're on a and they don't even integrate with accessibility toolchains of the system itself.

Heavy web-frameworks exhaust compute so completely that we have to run complex orchestration systems and deployment schemes to operate them now, what was once considered slow because it was interpreted is now many orders of magnitude slower anyway due to those orchestration overheads. We run containers, on VMs, inside of dedicated sandboxes, on generic CPUs with low single-core clock speeds, on expensive vendors..

An issue that compounds.

.. to save developer time from writing something more efficient, to build quickly, find a market and "figure it out never".

You can, as a developer: enjoy these times, because each of these improvements saves you from drudge work. But make no mistake, they want to minimise the amount of time you spend making things because they want to employ less of you.

AI is just another step in this direction. LLMs generate passable code, it's not good, I will definitely have to go in and clean it up when it inevitably fails. You will generate your first $10M with a good idea, but then you'll hit a scaling issue and I will have to come in and add to my grey hairs: and you will resent me the entire time I am helping you.

AI will make worse things more ubiquitous. Eventually the public won't even want to use technology, because we made it so fucking awful.

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

#588

Post by sanderjd » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

trumpdong wrote: post #480

pj_mukh wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To OP's point, I am curious why a tech forward crowd would consider AI-training/inference anywhere close to a significant contributor of greenhouse gasses? Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots [1] I think AI is a convenient foil to get people whipped up and out to vote, but I know HN is not the forum for that. The technical data clearly says that closed-loop water coolers don't use that much water and…

Are currently, but at the scale AI corps are trying to deploy at they'll be the largest user of electricity.

But we have figured out how to create electricity without destroying the planet. It's true that we need to actually do that, and that we are to a large degree not doing so at the moment. But that's a problem we already needed to solve. It does make it more important to solve that problem, but it also improves the incentives to solving it (electricity is more valuable now).

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

#589

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

mikodin wrote: post #468

pj_mukh wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think we’ve built that many data centers next to coal fired power plants that the emissions have gotten anywhere close to the emissions of all the iron smelters and the billions of people that commute in gas cars? We could triple the data centers since 2023 and run them all on coal or natural gas and then maybe they’d even show up as a significant slice on these pie charts. Our bubbles have blinded us to the scal…

I'm curious what part of the charts would data centers fall under? I'm assuming it would be under the Energy emissions category, but I didn't find anything particular around data centers or "technology" or "internet" or something like that. Would it fall under "Electricity and heat"? Or just general "Buildings"? or "Commercial buildings"? Or am I way off base?

[deleted]

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

#590

Post by dang » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

enaaem wrote: post #250

oceanplexian wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that society is divided on AI therefore HN, being society, should also be divided is an absurd take. I expect the people in here to be domain experts, understand simple concepts like closed loop water cooling, deterministic vs non-deterministic systems, maybe some basic concept of how a GPU and vector math works and most notably the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient. Unfo…

I find that the more you know about a subject the worst impression you will have of AI. What it knows is kinda shallow and basic, and if you have a more difficult question the answers are confidently random.

That's something we've probably all noticed - Gell-Mann amnesia à la LLM.

But the opposite is also true: shallow basic knowledge about almost anything, instantly available in a form that directly applies to one's problem, is an incredible resource. Not only can you get pretty far on that alone, it also gets you moving in a way that inertia would otherwise have prevented. That's my experience at least.