How much of HN is AI?

How much of HN is AI? TL;DR: As of June 2026, ~50% of daily top stories are about AI or generated by AI. Mar 12, 2026 I have a complicated relationship with Hacker News . The site is the most important aggregator of geek news and a major source of traffic to this blog. At the same time, it has a fair number of toxic commenters, making it a dependable source of insults hurled in my general direction; if you want a taste, this article has been called “watered-down” and “slop”. The site is run by geeks and for geeks, so it’s not immune to tech trends; for example, around 2018, it had a fair number of stories focused on cryptocurrencies and NFTs. That said, the recent shift feels more profound: almost every day, it feels that the lineup is dominated by stories focused on AI, written by AI, or commented on by AI. HN AI singularity (July 21, 2026). That images shows a particularly bad day, so to give a more honest assessment, I also performed a more systematic survey in February 2026, and again in June of the same year. Original February 2026 investigation To get a sense of how much of the feed is occupied by AI-related topics, I took a sampling of the daily top #5 for all of February: AI took four out of five spots on Feb 4 and Feb 12 , plus arguably the entire line-up on Feb 5 (story #3 was submarine marketing for an AI vendor). The only days without LLM news in the top 5 were February 1 (with the first AI story at #7, then #9), February 9 (first at #8), and February 25 (with AI …