Could anyone explain to me why the HN community seems to have a particular interest in AI compared to other more "academic" areas? I have seen quite some amount of AI resources here, but at the same time for most startups discussed here they aren't particularly related to AI. Just curious.
I'm going to guess that you might be surprised at the number of startups that actually do rely on some aspect of AI, if you were to dig deep enough. Even if they're not "an AI startup" lots of companies these days are using some sort of machine learning, data mining, collaborative filtering, etc. stuff, which are aspects of AI. Look at any company that's using a recommender system of some sort... that stuff is one element of AI.
Aside from that, I think it's just that hackers have always been fascinated with AI. And lot of what we know as "hacker culture" to this day, dates back to people and events that happened in the AI research group at MIT, decades ago[1].
My interest in AI is purely practical. The fist reason (very generic) is that I am (nearly) a lone contributor on a project that grew large. I have been using every trick in the book to make my code more abstract and manageable by one person. The next step in code reduction requires declarative programming (aka Prolog, though doesn't have to be) which requires deductive reasoning, which is a major topic of AI.
The second reason (more specific) is that I need to use an ontology (stored as a database) which is basically another topic of AI.
Google is massively run on databases, but that topic isn't as popular in media (or on HN). I think a big part is that it is such a highly visible topic that is also very romanticized, partially because its a field where serious inroads have been made (at least compared to expectations and last generations science fiction)
Machine learning in particular is hugely important for startups--for example, given a rich training dataset of deals you've bought from a deal site (with predictors such as type of deal, location, price, datetime, number of friends who've bought them, etc), can we train a model that'll rank deals by likelihood that'll you'll purchase them?
