[Smerity]

First, nawwwww, thanks :)

Second though, I've sadly stopped responding (or even reading) many of the machine learning and especially broader artificial intelligence posts on Hacker News. The discussions are rarely discussions that one can contribute to constructively meaning the time spent rarely provides a positive return. My primary social channel for ML/AI is Twitter - a great community but a depressingly inadequate tool for such discussions. For many other topics however Hacker News is still my goto community.

It's a shame as I love to discuss machine learning and artificial intelligence but, amongst other things, there's a Godwin style law that these discussions inevitably lead to comparisons to the human brain and/or the singularity and/or killer robots and/or "no bias" in machine learning.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Yes, people on HN are very enthusiastic about ANNs and Deep Learning, because they've heard it's a big technological revolution and they want to keep informed. In their enthusiasm, some say things that don't make sense (my favourite is a comment that proposed to train an ANN to acquire an imagination- presumably by training it on pictures of unicorns and elves as examples thereof).

On the other hand, I think there's also enough people on HN who know enough about those subjects, that the comments that get the most upvotes (and, consequently, rise to the top) are the ones that make the most sense.

Edit: to be fair, all the stuff about brains and singularities is not the fault of HN users. Very prominent researchers (Hinton, Schmidhuber, others) keep pushing the "based on the rain" line, for instance.

[choxi]

What do you think about r/machinelearning? That community is much more informed, but there are still very few comments probably because it's much smaller than HN.

[im3w1l]

You don't have to respond to comments that don't interest you.