People who are a little late to the site may not know there was a time on HN where Erlang has even more frontage submission than the best of AI / LLM.
Ruby Rails, Postgres, SQLite, Rust, etc. They all have their moments and I dont think LLM right now is as overwhelming as any other hyped moments. Certainly not Erlang.
That was very different. Somehow the entire front page was Erlang, but it was only for a day or 2. AI is different from that. It's like a good 40-50% of the posts for at least a year or more, and I don't see it going away anytime soon. It's also different from web3/etc. as those were at most 10% of the posts and most of us can see it's just hype.
I'm not fighting for a split/fork, just stating the fact that it's nothing compared to Erlang.
IIRC that was a deliberate campaign to make the site unattractive to a spate of non-technical folks who had apparently all simultaneously discovered it.
"We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites [...] You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang [...]"
"Ok, ok, enough Erlang submissions. You guys are like the crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome overliteral genies. I meant more that it would be better not to submit and upvote the fluffier type of link. Without those we'll be fine."
It all depends if you care about the tech side of HN or the startup side of HN. I love the tech articles above all else and could easily do without the general trend fluff.
With that said, I don’t find the AI posts nearly as bad as the Blockchain era.
As annoyed as I am with the constant deluge of uninteresting AI/LLM articles, I would much rather see a split between tech and startup news. I think that's a lasting and useful distinction.
I got mine in about that time, joined their IRC and asked for an invite, someone DM'd me, asked me a couple of questions and sent me the invite. This was about 7 years ago when there as a lot less people, so I imagine it should be easier now.
Erlang is kind of a special case, since there was that period when the community's preferred response to "too much politics" was to spam submissions about Erlang. Agreed though, it doesn't seem to have taken over more than (say) Bitcoin or Rust have at times.
Back in the early days of HN most people thought my username was my initials. Alas, if those were actually my initials it would be a fantastic example of nominative determinism.
I've been here a while and this is certainly more, prolonged, and has no end in sight compared to most other hype cycles we've experienced.
It's also exceedingly generic such that AI isn't really a topic, it's an entire classification or maybe domain to steal from the animal kingdom hierarchy.
to be fair, AI is replacing all computers so talking e.g. about languages is believed to be soon obsolete.
I would like to see more nuanced and interesting articles about AI though. Right now it's all about VCs measuring the size of their investments and the politics of alleged superstar programmers.
The atmosphere on the site was very different then. There was plenty of Erlang vaporware and lots of "how to grow your startup" growth spam which wasn't called growth spam yet. The community was a lot less cynical then (though obviously the middlebrow dismissal [1] tendency of the site is quite old.)
Ruby Rails, Postgres, SQLite, Rust, etc. They all have their moments and I dont think LLM right now is as overwhelming as any other hyped moments. Certainly not Erlang.