When Did AI Take Over Hacker News?

One in three top 10 Hacker News posts this month were AI-related. In 2025, that's hardly surprising, but it made me wonder, when did this start? Was it ChatGPT? Was it GPT-4? Moreover, has sentiment shifted positive or negative over time? This pretty negative post topping Hacker News last month sparked these questions, and I decided to find some answers, of course, using AI.

To help with this, I discovered that the Hacker News Big Query dataset is pretty well maintained and includes the title, URL, score, and comments of every post ever made. I decided to start my analysis in 2019, so I punched in a couple quick queries, downloaded the data (24,910 top 10 stories from January 1st, 2019 to August 15th, 2025), and got to work.

I could just use simple keyword analysis at this point to answer these questions, but that wouldn't be very fun. Instead, I decided to plug every single top 10 Hacker News story, and part of its comment section, into GPT-5-mini and have it classify them.

To start, I needed LLM readable versions of each attached web page. I used the Jina.ai reader to get these (when possible due to scraping restrictions). I also fed all top level comments in for additional context when classifying.

After I downloaded all the Jina reader pages, I used the OpenAI Batch API to process structured outputs classifications of each Hacker News story. I decided to generate these three fields:

1. Summary

   • A short summary of what the post is.
   • This helps when the title isn’t descriptive and could support future low-cost LLM classification.

2. AI Mention

   • Does it talk about AI?
   • (True/False)

3. AI Sentiment

   • If AI is mentioned, is the sentiment positive, neutral, or negative?

In case anyone wants to use the data I collected for their own analysis, I'm linking the GPT-5-mini classified dataset here and the downloaded Jina pages here.

So I get the data back from the Batch API and start playing around with it, and the big thing I find, and this will probably come as no surprise to anyone, is that the AI hype train is currently at its highest point on Hacker News since the start of 2019. Here's a bar chart with total AI-related posts, bucketed by quarter. We're in the middle of Q3 2025, but if we continue at the pace we're at, we are going to have more top 10 AI posts than ever before:

Furthermore, if you know your release dates, you'll notice the first big jump occurred not when ChatGPT was released in Q3 2022, but when GPT-4 was released in Q1 2023. GPT-4 was the first time developers got access to advanced language models, and Hacker News is mostly developers, so this makes sense. Here's a bar chart where we bucket by week and narrow down to the 52 week time frame ChatGPT and GPT-4 were released. I also marked the weeks those two products were released on the chart:

In terms of sentiment, there's only one noticeable jump, and it's pre-AI-hype-cycle.
In Q3 2021, AI-related posts shifted largely negative. This quarter, Apple announced on-device CSAM scanning called NeuralHash, which sparked some major privacy backlash. Researchers showed collisions in the model, and Hacker News did not like that (check out this day in Hacker News history).

But NeuralHash isn't even the full story in Q3 2021. Earlier that quarter, GitHub Copilot dropped its first research preview, and clips of it regurgitating licensed code made the rounds (check out this day during that quarter).

To aggregate overall, of the 2816 posts that were classified as AI-related, 52.13% of them had positive sentiment, 31.46% had negative sentiment, and 16.41% had neutral sentiment.

Q3 2025 has so far been a slightly more negative quarter towards AI on Hacker News (as has the prior quarter, both by a small margin), but I wouldn't say that's enough to register a major trend yet. I'd be excited to update this in a couple months, though.

TL;DR: Hacker News didn’t buy into AI with ChatGPT or any consumer product, it spiked when GPT-4 was unlocked as a tool for developers. It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that Hacker News is talking more about AI than ever before, but surprisingly, sentiment towards AI has remained mostly stable since the Apple NeuralHash incident in 2021.