alt Hacker NewsCrackpots are downstream of the "physics community" awarding cultural cachet to certain types of questions -- those with affordances they don't necessarily "deserve"-- but not others.
(I use quotes because those are emergent concepts)
Same as "hacker community" deciding that AI is worth FOMO'ing about
Well, I'm not sure I believe that "hierarchy problems" in HEP are real, but I do think the nature of the neutrino mass is interesting (we know it has a mass so it is a something and not a nothing) as is the nature of dark matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the non-observation of proton decay. That article has nothing to say about non-accelerator "big science" in HEP such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande
which targets many of those questions.
As for the "hacker community" I think AI is really controversial. I think other people find the endless spam of slop articles about AI more offensive than I do. It's obvious that these are struggling to make it off the "new/" page. The ones that offend me are the wanna-be celebrity software managers [1] who think we care what they think about delivering software that almost works.
[1] sorry, I liked DHH's industry-changing vision behind Ruby-on-Rails, but his pronunciations about software management were always trash. You might make the case that Graham worked with a lot of startups so his essays might have had some transferable experience but they didn't. Atwood and Spolsky, likewise. Carmack is the one exception, he's a genius