It would be interesting to see some time-series sentiment analysis of HN. Subjectively it feels like there's much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong.

You may like this old comment by dang who did this type of analysis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 (2020)

Bunch of software engineers are worried about their future employment prospects.

Add in time zone of the commenter and potentially some really interesting data emerges.

> time-series sentiment analysis [...] much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong

Depending on the members, there certainly is. Put aside the "dismissers", those who have a habit or a hormonal reliance to cast a "meh". Those who objectively assess according to the input that the development of facts provide may bend their "apparent mood" accordingly. This may be more evident here because in brighter times we may be more inclined to post and submit about more idle intellectual beauty ("complications in ancient clocks"), and in darker times it makes sense that we are more focused on the problems.

Personally I'm just bored of AI releases. I kinda dread it because it'll hog the front page of HN for a couple of days and it's just the same comments every time: people showing what it generated, people signalling that they aren't luddites etc.

For me this is like announcing a slightly more efficient form of coal-powered steam engine. Great, but it's still running on coal. I'm excited about moving beyond coal to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. Current "AI", based on machine learning, is just recycling existing human works: books, films, code, forum posts etc. But those works, like the coal, is going to run out. We've decided to stop making new things and just burn the coal that's already been deposited.