# Hugging Face 92 Hacker News commenters recommended Hugging Face and 62 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. **Verdict:** People recommend it as the main place to find, download and run open AI models, with a large community. Main caveat: security incidents and throttled downloads. ## Why people recommend it - Main place to find and download models (6 comments): "I am not aware of any alternative for choosing and downloading the right model for local inference that is superior to using directly the Huggingface site" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47791554)) "I went with Hugging Face mainly because it is simple and already handles distribution and versioning" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47437282)) "One good way to find inference providers for open models is through hugging face" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49122805)) - Trusted open model community (3 comments): "HF has become the front runner in open model hosting. They have a lot of trust from the wider community." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464873)) "nothing else has been as effective at accelerating model development and research sharing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660986)) "building such a huge AI community around a single place is probably impossible by now" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49462420)) - Free or cheap model hosting (3 comments): "Freemium seems to be working pretty well for them—what's the alternative website, after all. They seem to command their niche." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090410)) "there's places (hugging face?) that will host and run your updated model for cheaper than you could run it yourself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355283)) "who already did all the setup for you and just waits for your credit card per minute/seconds/token" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47790014)) - Useful libraries and tooling (3 comments): "they also have training, inference hosting, and they develop/maintain a bunch of core AI infrastructure software" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459079)) "HF is super valuable with their transformers library, their code, tutorials, smol-models, etc" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089068)) "Getting stuff to run before huggingface and uv and docker containers with cuda was way worse." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328436)) ## What people warn about - Security incidents and hacks (3 comments): "It is extremely embarrassing to get owned because you are letting arbitrary programs/users call out to the open web from the infra" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49706017)) "If you think otherwise, look no further than the Huggingface hack and what happens when they run completely autonomously." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50119187)) "HuggingFace wasn't doing at all while also allowing any user's arbitrary programs to call out to the open web from prod" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757721)) - Lock-in and control after acquisitions (4 comments): "This acquisition will likely solidify this general stance, reduce free compute allowance for a subscription, cap downloads" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49460773)) "now the company that sells the GPUs also owns the registry that decides which models are easy to find and download" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476674)) "Combined with recent acquisition of OpenRouter we see exactly what we were increasingly concerned about" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461163)) - Gated downloads, throttling and telemetry (3 comments): "an onerous license agreement that must be agreed to during registration and a bloated cli interface with loads of telemetry" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568701)) "Previously with non-gated models, you could download the XET files with any program, no special software needed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50118775)) "pulling models is an absolute nightmare when I basically have to use HF and even with a token getting throttled" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459587)) - Inference hosting feels unserious (2 comments): "Their inference hosting is a joke (I don't think I ever had a working response from a "try this model" form)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464710)) "Huggingface for a serious service has never felt truly serious to me for reasons like these." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130049)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [ModelScope](https://hackerapproved.com/p/modelscope.md): 9 recommend - [Civitai](https://hackerapproved.com/p/civitai.md): 7 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://huggingface.co/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Hugging Face", https://hackerapproved.com/p/hugging-face/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).