41–50 of 50 posts
Remember that "Where's the Shovelware?"¹ post? ¹ https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
A lot of friends who were not computer illiterate but also definitely not coders are now publishing websites regularly with whatever comes to their mind at the time. Quality could be questionable but quantity-wise I can definitely see the start of the exponential growth.
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Yeah. But I'd argue that it really isn't possible to know what is going to happen. But yeah. I'm trying to focus on the positive aspects. Because what else can you do?
> Because what else can you do? You can resist. Upvote quirky projects, call out fake hype, make your disapproval visible, call AI slop what it is. The term AI has become a liability in some circles, so let that be proof that you don't have to just accept whatever AI companies tell us.
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I feel like there was an attached covenant with the "Show HN" concept that implied someone had likely put some level of painstaking craft and creativity into whatever their project was. It felt like a reasonable bargain to give your own time to looking at the post and seeing what they had spent time and effort in creating. I'm struggling to see what the point is to looking at Show HN projects these days. It's like in…
Exactly how I felt reading this comment. This site is dead, no point anymore.
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Yes, a rare gem.
So long as you agree there are gems - it's not all shit.
My point was: that cannot be said about 90% of what gets posted in 2026 with a "Show HN" prefix because it is minimal-effort LLM-coded work that can be recreated easily by anyone with a Claude subscription, and we should not pretend that software developed in 2026 is the same as software developed in 2021. Everything has changed, including incentives to post, and that has changed the level of attention I can devote to that category of HN post.
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So long as you agree there are gems - it's not all shit.
The bird frame project has all the signatures of something developed with thought, care and effort put behind it, and the fact that it involves physical hardware is part of that. There's a reason it reached the front page. My point was: that cannot be said about 90% of what gets posted in 2026 with a "Show HN" prefix because it is minimal-effort LLM-coded work that can be recreated easily by anyone with a Claude subs…
And you still seem to be exaggerating - I suspect that the number of projects that can be recreated easily is much lower than 90%.
And you sound extremely angry about it. Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you?
And... as a final point - I suspect that bird detector wouldn't be terribly difficult for a Claude subscriber. Yet you already agreed it's not in the shit category, right?
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Busted? I’d think that AI would be a godsend for retro computing, a field always starved for programmer support especially in emulating obscure stuff.
It's possible to use AI to help create non-slop. However, almost nobody does.
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The bird frame project has all the signatures of something developed with thought, care and effort put behind it, and the fact that it involves physical hardware is part of that. There's a reason it reached the front page. My point was: that cannot be said about 90% of what gets posted in 2026 with a "Show HN" prefix because it is minimal-effort LLM-coded work that can be recreated easily by anyone with a Claude subs…
In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned. And you still seem to be exaggerating - I suspect that the number of projects that can be recreated easily is much lower than 90%. And you sound extremely angry about it. Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you? And... as a fin…
My apologies, I assumed that it was implied that I was speaking generally. I will try to be clearer going forward.
I stand by my 90% figure based on what I observe from the full corpus of daily "Show HN" submissions.
> And you sound extremely angry about it.
I can't even begin to imagine what part of my very plainly written comments are communicating "extreme anger" but I guess it's difficult to communicate tone online!
> I suspect that bird detector wouldn't be terribly difficult for a Claude subscriber. Yet you already agreed it's not in the shit category, right?
It depends on what you mean by "terribly difficult".
To provide some clarity on my view:
Just because something can be recreated easily does not automatically make it terrible or bad, but the fact that we can now generate software as easily as we generate a bowel movement (to borrow from my previous comment) means the bar for quality and attention has changed.
> Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you?
Yes, signal-to-noise.
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In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned. And you still seem to be exaggerating - I suspect that the number of projects that can be recreated easily is much lower than 90%. And you sound extremely angry about it. Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you? And... as a fin…
> In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned. My apologies, I assumed that it was implied that I was speaking generally. I will try to be clearer going forward. I stand by my 90% figure based on what I observe from the full corpus of daily "Show HN" submissions. > And you sound extremely angry about it. I can't even begin to imagine what part of my ve…
I think it was your comparison to fecal matter.
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People do it for the pleasure of figuring out obscure stuff. The point is dealing with that old unsupported tech as much as the games themselves.
Yeah, people on HN don't do anything for the pleasure of anything but to be productive and provide value to whoever. So, don't bet on people here understanding this mindset.