11–20 of 50 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand on that idea ? May be backed by evidence etc.
The recent batches all use the following formulas which I don't find particularly interesting: AI native ______ for _______ ______ for AI agents AI _______ for _______ https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Winter%202027&ba...
The vast majority of programs submitted to HN are rip-offs of existing programs that are being re-written by LLM's and not even changing the name in most cases. Each day I am flagging more submissions than I used to in a month or two. People are absolutely crapping up this site with LLM plagiarized ideas and rewrites of existing code converted to other languages instead of doing pull requests of existing programs and…
It's a transitional situation and will be that way for quite a while. We're doing what we can. For example, the measures described here have stemmed the runaway growth in low-quality Show HNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346516 (March 2026) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300772 (March 2026) There's still a quality problem, but (a) that's always the case, (b) at least we aren't drowning, and (c) the…
The risk I see is that if the goal is growth but the low quality submissions are drowning out other submissions that could negate growth as some of the newer accounts that legit try to be part of a community would just drift away as they are in the poisoned well. I too struggle to think of a way to separate them out of the noise without creating a system that would just be gamed by the LLM's. On one hand if the system requires the regulars to "vouch" so to speak it will create little elitist bubbles whereas too much tweaking to algorithms will just be detected and gamed by LLM's.
Out of curiosity, are the LLM posts coming from residential and mobile addresses or from AI data-centers themselves? If it's not already that could be yet another weighting factor. And/or AI user-agents as a weight. There are many bot signals that could be weighting or division factors. Bots are easy to spot from the server.
This perception has been around for almost as long as HN itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213869 (Aug 2016) Examples are legion. Here are a couple others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229249 (July 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020) I don't know of any way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the pas…
HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The recent batches all use the following formulas which I don't find particularly interesting: AI native ______ for _______ ______ for AI agents AI _______ for _______ https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Winter%202027&ba...
Isn't that how every major tech wave works? "Thing, but for $X" is what everyone was doing when $X was personal computing, the web, mobile.
This perception has been around for almost as long as HN itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213869 (Aug 2016) Examples are legion. Here are a couple others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229249 (July 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020) I don't know of any way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the pas…
One way to think about it is that for a new idea/site/community/business/government/etc to gain adoption, it must be significantly better than what came before. It comes in far above the mean, because every new idea etc that doesn't come in way above the mean dies out and never gains adoption. The rest of its life is just long, slow regression to the mean. For the most part, it continually gets worse, simply because statistically, when you are much better than average the only way to go is down. Eventually, it drops below the mean and some other better replacement takes over from it.
So people can absolutely be right when they say that everything is always getting worse! The fact of existence in the first place means that they started off much better than average - after all, the vast majority of potential configurations of atoms/molecules/cells/DNA/ideas/firms/people do not exist, and we happen to have the particular arrangement that was selected for. And then constituent parts move around in random motion, entropy takes its toll, and we read this as things decaying. Somewhat literally, this is what it means to decay.
The way to avoid this is to be constantly swapping out subsystems that aren't working for you with subsystems that are.
As someone who has been coming here for the past 8 years, I can't comment on "10-15 years" ago, but my experience hasn't changed a bit. This is and has been the only place where I visit almost daily (new account if you are looking at my profile) - and this is during vacation, during work, during weekends, etc. There is ALWAYS, literally, always an interesting discussion happening on topics that I would never be part…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that how every major tech wave works? "Thing, but for $X" is what everyone was doing when $X was personal computing, the web, mobile.
Sure, but how many of those were YC-worthy?
I guess I don't care about today's "AI agent for the agricultural industry" as much as I cared about yesterday's "Tool to help farmers plan crop rotation".