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

arthurcnops.blog

141–150 of 455 posts

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

#141
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't new- it's been happening for decades.

Not new. No. But will be more.

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

#142
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room. Programming has long been democratized. It’s been decades now where you could learn to program without spending a dollar on a university degree or even a bootcamp. Programming knowledge has been freely available for a long time to those who wanted to learn.

There's a difference between documentation and LLMs. An LLM can be your own personal tutor and answer questions related to your specific code in a way no documentation can. That is extremely helpful until you master the programming language enough.

Vibe coders aren’t interested in mastering a programming language, or even interested in programming. How can you master something you’re not even doing?

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

#143

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…

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.

Yeah, I think it's sort of an etiquette thing we haven't arrived at yet.

It's a bit parallel to that thing we had in 2023 where dinguses went into every thread and proudly announced what ChatGPT had to say about the subject. Consensus eventually become that this was annoying and unhelpful.

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

#144
I really don’t care if something is built with AI or not, however, when I check out Show HN, I’m interested in seeing new and novel things. Clawntown, the Show HN this article is about, was neither new nor novel. It’s another clone of things that I choose not to use.

Yet most of the time, if I spend five minutes a day on Show HN, I’ll find something new that I find interesting. I wouldn’t say that Show HN is drowning, but creativity should be on life support. I’m sure that’s somewhat a generative AI problem, but they’re pretty good rubber ducks and so I’m surprised by how acute the issue has gotten so quickly.

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

#145

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…

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.

Like when Instagram / digital photography, that is not what you will get but you will see a lot of revealing body parts.

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

#146

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…

I shared a well-thought vibecoded app on ShowHN last month. It took a few hours to get POC and two weeks to fully develop a product to meet my requirements. Nobody cared.

You’re part of the problem.

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

#147

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…

I think that's a fear I have about AI for programming (and I use them). So let's say we have a generation of people who use AI tools to code and no one really thinks hard about solving problems in niche spaces. Though we can build commercial products quickly and easily, no one really writes code for difficult problem spaces so no one builds up expertise in important subdomains for a generation. Then what will AI be trained on in let's say 20-30 years? Old code? It's own AI developed code for vibe coded projects? How will AI be able to do new things well if it was trained on what people wrote previously and no one writes novel code themselves? It seems to me like AI is pretty dependent on having a corpus of human made code so, for example, I am not sure if it will be able to learn how to write very highly optimized code for some ISA in the future.

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

#148
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I wish things I think are cool got more upvotes" HN has a very different personality at weekends versus weekdays. I tend to find most of the stuff I think is cool or interesting gets attention at the weekends, and you'll see slightly more off the wall content and ideas being discussed, whereas the weekdays are notably more "serious business" in tone. Both, I think, have value. So I wonder if there's maybe a strong…

I think it's just numbers. There are maybe a few dozen people that see your post on /new. That's a tiny sample size, not a good proxy for how interesting the post is. You see this on Reddit as well where the same exact post gets 1 upvotes and then finally blows up. Chasing clout through these forums is ill advised. I think people should post, sure. But don't read into the response too much. People don't really care.…

It's a good reminder that instead of hitting "refresh" on HN, hit up /new for a bit and drop some votes. Probably the most significant votes you'll have in a longtime.

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

#149

I did a Show HN a few years ago on another account. It got no upvotes but that website/app has generated over $6m in revenue in that time (over $4.5m profit). Not sure what my point is but thought I'd share

This happens all the time, it’s a good thing to really keep in mind. All of my best projects were dismissed initially and continue to be. There is a reddit post where I announced Blockheads to a handful of “looks like a crappy Minecraft ripoff” comments. It went on to be played by 50 million people.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I think it's sort of an etiquette thing we haven't arrived at yet. It's a bit parallel to that thing we had in 2023 where dinguses went into every thread and proudly announced what ChatGPT had to say about the subject. Consensus eventually become that this was annoying and unhelpful.

At times, it seems like the only thing that has changed is that the dinguses don't bother crediting ChatGPT.
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