I've had mixed feelings about HN in terms of how people perceive a product over the last few years. I used to have an overwhelmingly positive opinions about the community up until COVID: everyone started making the "solution that will help researchers find a cure", which, in all instances, ended up being tons of people independently loading up papers into elasticsearch. And when I pointed out that they are all solving a problem no one has, I got jumped by a ton of people going "nooooo you just don't understand how powerful what these systems are". At the end, none of those turned out to be the silver bullet, or a bullet for that matter.

Recently it's the AI craze: you have a complex problem to solve: "AI can easily do that". You have infrastructure issues: "AI can easily do that". You have issues processing petabytes of data fast and efficiently: "AI can easily solve that". I am getting a ton of bots trying to access my home network: "AI can easily solve that". I am having a hard time falling asleep: "AI". I have a flu: "AI".

In a nutshell, the shiny new toy syndrome is very common so the reception of a product is not a guarantee for success. To give you an example: recently some people(pretty active on here) got in touch with me with regards to an initiative I am a part of: they claimed that they wanted some expertise on the subject I agreed to schedule a call. It turned out to be a sales pitch for yet another product which tries to solve a problem but it does not because the people who built it fundamentally do not understand the problem. Forget the fact that I am not interested in being their client, given that it's a volunteer project and none of the people involved are paid to do it(if anything, we are paying from our own pockets to keep it alive), it was yet another techbro product which tries to build a skyscraper starting from the roof. Except the ground underneath is partially lava, partially a swamp.

I think it is all related to the impostor syndrome: young people have it, they get a bit older and gain confidence. By the time people hit their early to mid 30s, they start realizing that most of the world operates on patches over patches and 2 layers down, no one has a clue what is going on.