What other subject matters?

This is more like way too much about ChatGPT than any other era I have seen before in HN. Lot of cool stuff in every area imaginable.

There's a new era all the time. Previously, it was NFT rise and fall, Ukraine war, Great Resignation, COVID. Rust hasn't been the hype topic for a while. I'm surprised Web3 hasn't taken off here, but then again it's the worst crowd for it.

HN tends to be a little irrational - back during Ukraine War, everyone would accuse each other of being Russian sockpuppets lol. And then with COVID, we'd have cameras that track if you were touching your face, and all kinds of contact tracing apps.

I've been trying to get people interested in AI for years. I'd get downvoted all the time saying that AI can understand sarcasm or that it would be as good as a human in writing code by 2025. It's a bit frustrating to see it get so overhyped now.

Show HN also boosts the hype further. There's a lot of stuff here that are cool ideas, but they were made overnight. Then there's the cooler stuff that took a week to build. And every now and then you see something properly thought through.

> I'm surprised Web3 hasn't taken off here

Well, people on HN tend to have more than 2 brain cells.

It's really just decentralized cloud computing. Where people used to make money from mining and trading crypto, some people realize they could make money by selling the computing resources for well, computing. It can match popular tools like AWS in price and latency. I would not vouch for it yet, but it's interesting, reminds me of the GPT-2 era.

But it's still in the Innovation stage of the innovation curve, while HN lies in the early majority group.

I'd say Show HN actually lies on the shifting point from early adopter to early majority and that's where the hype sweet spot is at.

It feels like the early dialup Internet / Netscape navigator days

Never thought I would miss all the Wordle clones :)

And Flappy Bird and 2048

A thousand percent.

- Rust was a bit memetic.

- Blockchain had more of a sceptic tone to it.

- But ChatGPT, is really different.

You have posts on how to use it better, how it's so good that it may turn against us, and things built on top of it. I don't think this is going to stop. Especially with the pace that OpenAI has shown by shipping GPT-4, updating the models, plugins, and so on. They may be fine-tuning GPT-5 right now.

this is exactly the point. Is this a natural progression ? or being promoted ?

It's legitimately mind-blowing, paradigm shifting technology. Most of us haven't experienced a shift like this since the arrival of smart phones, and the personal computer before that.

There's a reason a lot of smart people are talking about it. It's not just mindless hype followers and crypto bros moving to AI, although of course there's an element of that to it. The fact of the matter is that ChatGPT is insanely cool, whether you like it or not. It's the beginning of a new era and everyone feels it.

I think we're entering a new era of the economy and of the tech business and many other businesses. I was in the software biz when the internet took off and nothing since then reminds of that time like LLMs do.

The amount of actual products coming out every single day that incorporate LLMs, and the new tooling that shows up for devs and experimenters on HN is amazing. This community is way ahead of the curve on this topic. It's quite exciting to be here!

Hacker News have been through so many fads I've lost count at this point. Here are some I remember clearly:

- Ruby on Rails

- React

- NodeJS

- Bitcoin and much later, cryptocurrencies and blockchain

- Docker

- Golang

- Kubernetes

- Serverless

- "JAMStack" / static websites

- Remote work / Digital nomadism

- no code / low-code platforms (although this was never that intense compared to others like Ruby on Rails or Golang)

I'm sure others can remember more fads that have come and go :)

Don't forget Gig marketplaces

There was also an extremely annoying mini-AI boom when everyone was talking about putting support/chat bots on their site.

Stable diffusion is now forgotten lol!

Yeah but just hope that the AI winter is coming pretty soon

Yeah, at this point, I'm hankering for a "ChatGPT-to-butt" browser extension like the old "cloud" variant.

AI is currently a trending topic. So it’s natural that everyone and their dog is talking about it right now. Plus, it’s impressive.

At first I thought mist if these headlines were related to new functional languages from the ML family. Since I enjoy reading the headlines without immediately clicking on the links, it took me a little time to understand that ML had nothing to do with functional programming.

The current AI hype has single-handedly reduced the time I spend in here by 80%.

It's all everybody talks about, starry-eyed. Hey, I made a ChatGPT programming language. Hey, I put ChatGPT into my doorbell. Hey, why don't we solve world hunger with ChatGPT?

And the most irritating of all: For any topic, there is a comment saying "I have asked ChatGPT about <topic>, here's what it has to say about it: ..."

The AI winter can't come soon enough.

> The AI winter can't come soon enough.

The "winters" are when all the interest work actually happens, as things aren't as hyped-driven as during the "summers". Same for cryptocurrency stuff, when everything is going up and all the hype is happening, it stops being interesting, but when everything is going down, is when the real innovation starts happening.

Winter = research, Summer = applied research.

> The current AI hype has single-handedly reduced the time I spend in here by 80%.

I personally wouldn’t mind if there was some interesting discussion going on, but it seems to be mostly people worshipping it’s the second coming of Christ, cynical dismissals of LLMs, or doomsday predictions.

I'm not sure about filtering comments, but you can filter posts by creating a blacklist on top of something like Hacker News RSS (https://hnrss.github.io/). I did something similar a while back (https://hnbest.pythonanywhere.com/).

> The AI winter can't come soon enough.

You'll have to wait for a nuclear winter before that happens

It makes me feel like HN is back to the good old days.

New era of hype definitely.

It is clearly exciting but this is so hyped that people I talk to want to use it for everything.

No no, just a fad. It's the same signal pulse as a dopamine spike, as a fad coming and going through a culture (think hula hoops or fidget spinners).

Not that ChatGPT it's self is a fad, just the discussion here.

Every LLaMa commit gets a damn submission