HN only covers a very small slice of interesting things that happen in tech every day. If it's your only source of tech news and information, you are missing out on a LOT.

There are plenty of self-hosted models being released all the time, they just don't make it to HN. For that, you need to find a community that is passionate about testing and tinkering with self hosted models. A very popular one is "/r/localllama" on Reddit, but there are a few others scattered around.