Non AI-obsessed tech forums

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

If you are feeling better overwhelmed with slop posts about ai, camp on the new page and upvote any halfway decent story about something else. Many of us would thank you if they knew.

Try lobsters and probably Reddit which have a hard stance against AI.

You're right in HN heading down the path in favouring slop, constant posts and startups about AI with now 'influencers' (simonw in particular) aggressively posting and shilling AI.

With the moderators knowing that these 'influencers' and their kind violate the HN guidelines every day by purposefully linking back to their site for farming backlinks.

It might as well be called AI news.

Only about 20% of front-page links are related to AI. I think it's impossible to have a productive discussion on the tech industry nowadays without AI in context.

I don't think its possible, you're just going to have to wait for the hype to die down like any hype wave

When's the last time you saw blockchain on the front page?

Asking to have a tech forum in 2026 that doesn’t discuss AI is about as much of a Luddite as asking about having tech forum anytime in the past 25 years that doesn’t discuss the internet or the 15 that doesn’t discuss mobile.

Absolutely everything in tech is touched by AI/ML in 2026 except micro controllers/embedded systems

On another note - YC 25 batch

https://www.extruct.ai/data-room/ycombinator-companies-s25/

YC 24 batch

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...

On a personal note, I lead cloud + app dev implementations for a consulting company. I’ve had 5 projects since the beginning of last year and they have all involved Amazon hosted LLMs in some form or fashion.

Every single project I’ve been brought in with at pre sales has also involved Gen AI and/or traditional ML.

[delayed]

lainchan

HN is the low AI version.

Social media has made it normal to have closed social circles. You like a couple posts by Karpathy and LeCun and your feed is now full of AI. Or you like a post by the anti-AI folks and your feed is now on how useless or harmful it is.

With HN, we all see the same news. But now it's far to the extreme of either party.

HN is often around the early majority of the Innovation Adoption curve. I was actually going to ask why Clawdbot wasn't even mentioned on HN when it had been everywhere else... but the news did hit the front page a few days later. There's a few killer updates from the AI coding groups which only get 0-2 upvotes and disappear.

HN is not the place to go to be up to date on AI, it's where you go to see the news that has hit the mainstream. Opus 4.6 was "leaked" on media and hyped as if it were Claude 5 or something. By the time the news was actually out, people had formed their opinions.