Alternatives to HN for "tech outside of AI" discussion?
55 points by summonerOS 3 days ago | 35 comments
I'm not the first to opine that recently there seems to be an effect on HN whereby the AI hypetrain has essentially drowned out discussions of anything other than stories either directly or indirectly related to AI and other terrible decisions coming out of the US.

While I do often have the instinct to completely bury my head in the sand and try to forget it's all happening I'm more concerned with the psychological impact it's having. I'm basically sick and tired of being so sick and tired and exposure to so many continuously miserable headlines isn't helping. What I would like instead is a return to the days when HN was a forum that still showcased cool things people were working on and included discussions on topics outside of the AI-saturated lens that now dominates.

If any good alternatives exist I'd like to join! Or perhaps there are some means of using HN that would allow me to filter the AI noise a bit better. If anyone has had any success with this please let me know!

  • sagrd 2 days ago |
    Was thinking the same thing. I love Hacker News, but perhaps an AI filter on the site would be really useful.
  • lordkrandel 2 days ago |
    Yeah, it's become such a boring AI marketing outlet.
    • red-iron-pine 2 days ago |
      HN is the news aggregator for an incubator / startup factory. The guy in charge of OpenAI used to run HN.

      With respect, what did you expect this place to be?

      • keiferski a day ago |
        Both of things were true 5 years ago, and yet 9/10 topics weren't about AI then.

        I'm hoping it's just a trend, but...I'm still waiting.

        • red-iron-pine a day ago |
          there were tons of AI discussions on HN 5 years ago.

          I first heard about GPT 1 here!

          They key difference is that now AI is taking over -- why would 90% of all tech discussions be about it? AFAIK based on stats the only real economic growth globally right now is AI...

    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2 days ago |
      “it’s a technology that i don’t like therefore its marketing, but I am apparently blind to how HN is a boring marketing outlet in every other respect, too.”
      • lordkrandel 2 days ago |
        It's not that I dislike it. It's just the emptiness of conversations around it. Most discussion is not about the technology itself, or real takes, it's just "blablabla" It used to be more on point, like, 1 year ago? Even the Musk/Twitter times have gone now :D And that rich dude is even more richer now.

        "Money is a problem for those who don't have it", "Google declaring war on the web", "AI didn't invent slop, it scaled it", "Declining America", "Linus Torvalds says he has a love-hate relationship with AI"... I mean... Ok, but ... who cares?

        • consumer451 2 days ago |
          The good thing about this place is that people such as you and I can communicate, and tell people where to learn more.

          For me, as someone just trying to learn, these two very recent Dwarkesh pod/lectures have begun to educate me a bit:

          > Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served

          https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/reiner-pope

          > Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

          https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/eric-jang

          However, I feel you. I wish that HN was a place where each of the links above had hundreds of upvotes, and really good discussion. The both deserve it.

      • mattmanser 2 days ago |
        Says the account of random characters created 4 months ago.
  • pogue 2 days ago |
    lobster?
    • summonerOS 2 days ago |
      You're referring to https://lobste.rs/ ?
      • pogue 2 days ago |
        Correct
        • summonerOS 2 days ago |
          Had a browse and it is definitely reminiscent of HN's early days! Thanks for the recommendation :)
        • deflator 2 days ago |
          I like it, thanks for recommending
    • aqsa_sajjad 2 days ago |
      I agree, Lobsters is probably the closest alternative
  • faangguyindia 2 days ago |
    Everything on HN these days get downvoted to Oblivion. And people are heavily pushing ai and cloud products, the builder/hacker mindset is gone imho.
    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2 days ago |
      Do you need to be reminded that you’re on a “news” website run by a venture capital company? If this isn’t a “dead dove do not eat” situation then I truly do not know what is. You are just becoming disillusioned.
      • mattmanser 2 days ago |
        You've literally been here 4 months.
  • Maledictus 2 days ago |
    I've been thinking for a while to create an AI tool to classify articles (not just on HN), and filter the ones I'm not in the mood for.
    • summonerOS 2 days ago |
      Ironically you would miss the articles proclaiming your new invention is the next big thing! /sarcasm
    • chistev 2 days ago |
      I think one was posted a while ago.
  • Leena-ch 2 days ago |
    Lobste.rd for general tech, specific subreddits or Discord communities for narrower topics. HN is probably not coming back from this one the AI industry is too concentrated in the same demographic that posts there.
  • dundunUp 2 days ago |
    boring AI marketing outlet.
  • JCSlim 2 days ago |
    I would agree. While not quite what you’re looking for, I recently built a site, RNKFlow.com (Rank Flow), to bring in multiple tech/science feeds including HN and Product Hunt to pull in more interesting posts. There is a filter option so can search across all feeds and only see what you’re interested in. Also an alerting function where you can add keyword tags and get an email digest. And Categories to limit posts only Robotics or Show HN/PH as an example. So not quite what you’re going after, but maybe a better overall experience for you.
    • summonerOS 2 days ago |
      Thanks for sharing! Definitely like the ability to filter and incorporating multiple sources although from what I could see stories are all from HN. One thing I will say though is the UI is challenging to use on mobile, would recommend the layout used for things like comments that you see on Harmonic/lobst.er. Very nice project keep it up!
      • JCSlim a day ago |
        Thank you for the feedback. It’s a fair point about feeling like it’s mostly based on HN. I started it thinking it would be cool to have a Digg style HN feed. I remember how alive Digg felt in a static web world. I quickly realized as I broke the feed down by categories there wasn’t much content in some areas and started adding feeds that could bring in more articles I liked. The challenge is not to bring in too much where the site just becomes overwhelming. Brutalist is a good example. It’s has a huge list of great sources, but my brain turns off as soon as the scroll bar never ends. Currently, I’m pulling from HN, Algolia, Product Hunt, and arXiv. Appreciate your point about comments. I do agree it’s not ideal, and I’ve been tossing around what the right path is. Thanks for the reply!
  • JCSlim 2 days ago |
    I’ve updated the RNKFlow.com filter to use a comma separated list of terms. Using a negative term will filter out stories you don’t want to see. If you sign in, you can save a default filter list and I’ve made it part of the free tier. Hope this helps a bit.
  • Ecys 2 days ago |
    Everything that's not AI is just irrelevant. AI is diverse enough to replace the other things you'd talk about.
    • piuvas 2 days ago |
      subpar ragebait, try harder.
  • maryamshafaqat 2 days ago |
    I miss the old look what someone built vibe too. There is still good stuff in Show HN threads but it does take more digging now than it used to.
  • ChrisArchitect 2 days ago |
    Hard to meet the criteria exactly but maybe poke around some of these older threads for some ideas:

    Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708

    Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919

    On a skim just now one that jumped out at me was https://tildes.net

  • andyjohnson0 2 days ago |
    > there seems to be an effect on HN whereby the AI hypetrain has essentially drowned out discussions of anything other than stories either directly or indirectly related to AI

    As a data point, 7 out of the current‡ top 30 submissions are AI related - just under 25%. Doesn't doesn't seem that excessive to me.

    ‡ 2026-05-20 20:00 UTC

  • rhythmshahriar a day ago |
    Lobste.rs is worth trying. Invite only, which keeps the quality up, and the tag system lets you actually filter what you see. Much less AI noise in practice.
  • ra0x3 a day ago |
    Can someone invite me to lobste.rs ? HN user since 2014. Would love to try something new :)

    Email is on my profile