Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums
Since it seems like 80% of HN nowadays is focussed on the AI industry, I’m on the search for a good tech forum that focuses on the rest. Can you post your favourite non-AI-obsessed forum? 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. There are plenty of tech forums that don't discuss AI. I think your confusion might be the result of you equating tech with "writing code for employers." By the way, have you seriously never written[1] so much as a single backup script to back up a personal system? You only use GUI backup software? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46634535#:~:text=As%20f... I haven’t actually used my personal computer for much after graduating from college. 1. To access the internet 2. To download music from Napster and later iTunes and to create mix CDs and later for my iPod 3. To mix music with CoolEdit (bought by Adobe as Adobe Audition) - I was a fitness instructor and created my own 32 bpm beat synchronized music 4. As a home media theater PC (Mac Mini + Front Row) and later a media server (Plex) My backup was running BackBlaze. When we moved and I decided Plex + bit torrent wasn’t worth the hassle, I did a one time “aws s3 -sync…” and copied my 2TB of media to AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive in my personal account. I’ve opened my personal computer - that I only bought for a one time contract for a former CTO/friend when I was between jobs for a month. Yes we already know it's omnipresent, that's the point. Some would rather lead in a different direction than follow like NPCs. I too wish the world hadn’t moved on from when I started programming on a 1Mhz Apple //e in 1986 or from my first job as a Fortran and C programmer on DEC Vax and stratus VOS mainframes… I also loved programming on these in 2007 using Windows Compact Framework. https://weareconker.com/blog/is-windows-ce-still-supported-i... But after being in this game for 30 years professionally and after half century of living on this earth, I still haven’t overcome my addictions to food and shelter and while I’m in pretty good shape, I don’t think I could start a successful career by opening an OnlyFans account so instead, I keep up to date on where the industry is… Touching on a subject doesn't make something directly topical. Makefiles touch on C programming; they are not topical in a C language forum. Most AI discussion as a tangent to another topic is utterly unproductive, uninteresting, repetitive and off-topic. The same half a dozen points are rehashed. Most of the commentary is someone's subjective experience which nobody else can exactly replicate. Almost everything in tech runs on switching power supplies. That doesn't mean tech forums on all subjects should tolerate intruders incessantly blathering about power supplies. Actually, talking about power in the age of AI is a big deal. It will either drive up energy cost or drive down energy cost. 80% of the companies that YC funding are AI something or the other. If your career has anything to do with technology - you are or will be directly affected by AI. Would you have felt the same way if people complained about all of the discussions about mobile around 2009-2010? People on Usenet complaining about the browser was going to usurp the need for Gopher servers? > I’ve had 5 projects since the beginning of last year and they have all involved Amazon hosted LLMs in some form or fashion. Cargo cultists are going to cargo cult. 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. 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? Blockchain was useless and in 5.5 years of working in cloud consulting - first at AWS and now at a 3rd party firm, I never once heard a serious business ask - “how can we make or save money using the blockchain”. You're too late, businesses absolutely did ask that before 2020 when the hype was at its peak. Regular old boring profitable f500 enterprises? Lots of examples, such as Walmart and IBM's collaboration: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326188675_Food_Trac... This is cool! Thanks for sharing it. I’m more interested in forums that attract a crowd much more measured and skeptical about AI, though - I know there are a lot of you here at HN (like me) Yeah honestly I've been racking my brain about the same question (where can I move on to). HN has been my home for learning about all sorts of things for 10+ years but blockchain + AI has just killed all interesting discussion that can be had. It's hard to define a community around "not being obsessed" with something. Maybe instead it's worth thinking about what the goal of such a community / forum is. Might be easier to find / define. If you come up with something I'm happy to check it out. 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. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There are far fewer posts about "politics" than AI, and they all get flagged ruthlessly even when they have a legitimate tech angle. If people don't like AI related content then I encourage them to treat those posts the way they do politics. On the contrary, I don't think productive discussions (or even interesting ones) can be had about AI. We've seen what it has to offer (not much), now we are just waiting for the hype bubble to burst like it did for blockchain and so many other things before. Remember to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and upvote good stuff. Most is bad, but there are undiscovered gem from time to time. 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. For most reddit posts you can generate some rage bait against an llm using an llm, this way you cut the middle man out. Most subreddits eat that up without a second thought. Lobsters stance is anti-AI and cautious at best. But plenty of AI-related articles there. I like that for all the LLM/agentic news spam they apply the tag "vibecoding" (derogatory) And more importantly users can hide articles by tag. Lobste.rs has a hard stance against AI? This can't be true. I browse the front page every so often & there seems to be a fair amount of overlap between it and HN. At least for the upvoted articles. There isn't a hard stance against it but it's generally not well received IMO and importantly, lobsters is written by people who understand other people have different needs and they provide the option to filter out articles by tags, rather than relying on a concept of "you will see everything or you will see what the crowd deems worthy". Lobsters and filter posts with vibecoding tag. Honestly, you might want to step outside tech altogether. Join a local civic or neighborhood organization or volunteer with a nonprofit. There was a nice thread last year about libraries. Channeling Steve Blank, get out of the building! You’ll run into real problems faced by real people who often have limited exposure to both AI and tech, but who can still benefit enormously. Listening and engaging is always a good first step before jumping in to suggestions. In this space, needs are far more data and visualization driven, which are not strictly AI related. It may also be both a useful and humbling antidote to hype cycles. Lambda the Ultimate used to be a great resource. Now it's kind of dead. If you are feeling 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. This is roughly what I've been doing. I consider it a duty: Occasionally (once or more a day) review "new". Flag any spam articles, or generic LLM hype articles; update science or non-LLM-focused technology ones. I even upvote AI or LLM-centered articles if they're not centered on "How agents and vibe coding have/haven't/will/will not changed everything about coding" - it's these that have grown intolerable in the past few weeks. also, RSS is an alternative to camping Tangential: Afaict mods are on our side, despite whatever "aggregated" data "suggest" This site (which I peruse everyday) claims that 3 AI articles were modded down today, but in actual fact the single nonAI article that was supposed to have been modded down was modded up. https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals?tab=rea... I trust however, that the political calls are representative One has to delve into the data before arriving at broad judgements :) hYpeCombinator the fediverse lainchan