Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

arthurcnops.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 455 posts

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#121

Post by fuzzfactor »

dgellow wrote: post #39
conartist6 wrote: post #31

The small indie developer ain't dead yet, and from where I sit you could drive a star destroyer through the gaps in what software has been built so far. It's only that you can't claim any of the top shelf prizes by vibe coding

Vibe coding as a term is really annoying. At what point does a project stops being considered vibe coded? If I spent a year iterating on a design and implementation using Claude code, in a domain I’m an expert in, will that still be considered vibe coded?

>At what point does a project stops being considered vibe coded?

Good question, and by the same "token" when does it start?

Maybe if there's no possible way the creator could have written it by hand, perhaps due to almost complete illiteracy to code in any language, or something like that, it would be a reference point for "pure vibe". If the project is impressive, that's still nothing to be ashamed of. Especially if people can see the source code.

All kinds of creative people I see are mostly no dummies and it might be better than nothing for them to honestly rate their own submissions somewhere on the scale from pure vibe to pure manual?

With no stigma regardless, and let the upvotes or downvotes from there give an indication of how accurate the self-assessments are. Voting directly to Show HN could even have a different "currency" [0] to help regulate the fall of Show submissions, where a single upvote could mean something like infinitely more than zero.

I'm not disappointed by a project purely vibed by somebody like a visual artist, storyteller, or business enthusiast who has never written a line of code, as long as it is astoundingly impressive, in the league of the better projects, those I would like to take a look at.

I also see real accomplished coders guide their agents to arrive at things that wouldn't be as nice if they didn't have years of advanced manual ability beforehand.

Plus I think I'm in the vast majority and have no interest in "slop", in a way that aligns with so many kinds of people who are also turned off.

But so far, the best definition we have for slop is "we know it when we see it".

Oh, well that's all I've got, so far :)

[0] slop vs non-slop which is like pass/fail, or even a numerical rating could be on the "ballot".

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#122

Post by hypercube33 »

Tade0 wrote: post #57
sixtyj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have talked with some friends who are long-time programmers (20+ experience). Even they (all) admit that they use Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity or AI Studio - you name it. So in future everything’s gonna be “agentic”, (un)fortunately. Everytime I write about it, I feel like a doomsayer. Anthropic admits that LLM use makes brain lazy. So as we forgot remembering phone numbers after Google and mobile…

I don't think so. At the end of the day it's just a tool. Case in point: aside from Tabbing furiously, I use the Ask feature to ask vague questions that would take my coworkers time they don't have. Interestingly at least in Cursor, Intellisense seems to be dumbed down in favour of AI, so when I look at a commit, it typically has double digit percentage of "AI co-authorship", even though most of the time it's the res…

Weirdly I actually hate tab complete in Cursor but love it with GitHub Copilot. I feel inversely about their agentic chat however.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#123

Post by zero_shift »

SirFatty wrote: post #116
zero_shift wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the pro…

"One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow people to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge." Wait, what? That's a great benefit?

I am being slightly sarcastic

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#124

Post by kykat »

SCdF wrote: post #107
zero_shift wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the pro…

Agreed, and were gonna see this everywhere that AI can touch. Our filter functions for books, video, music, etc are all now broken. And worst of all that breaking coincides with an avalanche of slop, making detection even harder. There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do. It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired…

My prediction is that reputation will be increasingly important, certain credentials and institutions will have tremendous value and influence. Normal people will have a hard time breaking out of their community, and success will look like acquiring the right credentials to appear in the trusted places.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#126

Post by fuzzfactor »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #101

I think vibe coding something and showing it off on Show HN is probably fine, but it boils my blood when people cannot even be bothered to write the post body themselves. If someone is using an AI generated post body and title that's usually a clear signal of slop for me. The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element!

That's a meaningful sign to me too, except there are some brilliant tech people who mainly need all the help they can get just with their English.

Even before AI got so strong, some of the translations were fairly abnormal in their own way.

>The post body is supposed to be part of the human connection element!

I really think this is the best too :)

Maybe for the non-English speakers, or anyone really, if a project means a lot, have a number of people who are smart in different ways look over the text a number of times and help you edit beforehand.

To make sure it's what you the human want to really say at the time.

That would be the pg way.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#127

Post by [deleted] »

SirFatty wrote: post #116
zero_shift wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the pro…

"One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow people to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge." Wait, what? That's a great benefit?

[deleted]

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#128

Post by acnops »

armchairhacker wrote: post #91

Here’s a dumb idea: Give people the ability to submit a “Show HN” one year in advance . Specifically, the user specifies the title and a short summary, then has to wait at least year until they can write the remaining description and submit the post. The user can wait more than a year or not submit at all; the delay (and specifying the title/summary beforehand) is so that only projects that have been worked on for ov…

Makes me think about Taleb's lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

It's like books. Old but still relevant books are the best books to read.

This tech industry is changing so fast though. Maybe a year is too much?

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#129

Post by fainpul »

zero_shift wrote: post #95
marginalia_nu wrote: post #10

I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring. They generally don't have a lot of work put into them, and as a result, the author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of a discussion to be had. The cool part about pre-AI show HN is…

One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge. It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the pro…

People who got "enabled" by AI to produce stuff, just need to learn to keep their "target audience of one"-projects to themselves. Right now it feels like those fresh parents who show every person they meet the latest photos / videos of their baby, thinking everybody will find them super cute and interesting.

Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

#130

Post by acnops »

reconnecting wrote: post #6

Perhaps it's the right moment to start an AI Show HN (Vibe HN as recommended above), as I assume more than half of Show HN is now from ChatGPT/Claude, and it's impossible to cut through this noise with something reliable that humans craft over years. It's fair to give the audience a choice to learn about an AI-created product or not.

AI is eating up everything. So I don't think there will be two groups.
Post reply on HN