> yet every third article posted to the front page is 800 comments beating off to a new Claude feature

In addition to the bot farms, many in the AI related fields have plenty of perverse incentives to participate - for reasons other than genuine interest. That's why I don't read those threads, although the marketing angle is easy to see it's also prevalent and laboring to filter out all 90% of it isn't worth the effort.

Let's assume you're not lumping all data centers in together in bad faith. Just like Elon's tunnels are not a subway system, a repurposed crypto mine isn't a real AI data center. There's a right way to build, fund, and power data centers, and a sketchy, unethical, greedy, polluting, inflationary, and financially corrupt way to do it.

Half the traffic on this site are real, intelligent humans (among whom opinion is split different ways on the AI topic), a quarter of the traffic is propagandists trying to destroy western tech/infrastructure/society (notice how China apparently doesn't have to stop AI development or datacenter development, only the West does), and the remaining quarter is real humans who have been utterly consumed by the previously mentioned propagandists and are parroting the same messaging.

You have fallen victim to the Two Guys Fallacy.

In general, if you are observing a community, and you see what looks like a contradiction like this, almost every time what you're actually seeing is Two Guys: in this case, one portion of the HN userbase that hates datacenters, and another portion that has to change their underwear every time Anthropic puts out new release notes.

Very few communities like HN are genuinely monolithic, and very few people are going to hold such contradictory beliefs within the same individual.