21–30 of 38 posts
Cool. I think it would be nice to normalize against users (or active users). 2016-era HN had its share of negativism, but it also had a lot less people - the light green from those charts is misleading.
Pre-2020 had far more informative posts and discussions. While we still have decent conversations post-covid, the quality has slid downhill somewhat.
The advent of coding agents killed Hacker News to some degree for me. Before I could always come here to get a pause from the hype, scandal and bait. Top comments were usually insightful; I really had this feeling to learn while browsing the feed. Today every brainfart about AI makes it to the frontpage. I know this sounds very dismissive, but most pieces really have no substance at all. The good content is still the…
Personally I don't care about what news articles end up on the front page - it's AI now, but there have been other trends in the past that did the same. The bigger problem is the effect that it's had on "Show HN" postings, which in the past were things you could depend on were built by the person submitting it. That's why those posts tended to be more strongly moderated, because they often were seen as attacks on the…
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1. We might be drowning under the "top of the iceberg" at the moment (quickly generated AI slop) but there's a silent crowd of builders doing long-term work (still with the help of AI) that will only surface after months of work. I expect more of the bottom of the iceberg to show up over time.
2. A lot of the most interesting work in science was done out of sheer curiosity, not given a specific problem to solve. The current generation of AI is good -- and getting better -- at the latter, but genuinely incapable of doing the former in a remotely meaningful way.
In other words, I'm long on truly human-driven innovation.
The advent of coding agents killed Hacker News to some degree for me. Before I could always come here to get a pause from the hype, scandal and bait. Top comments were usually insightful; I really had this feeling to learn while browsing the feed. Today every brainfart about AI makes it to the frontpage. I know this sounds very dismissive, but most pieces really have no substance at all. The good content is still the…
tl;dr of the essay, we need to move back to human-to-human recommendations and trust systems, and people are already doing that a lot of ways by retreating to DMs (iMessage, email, in-person conversations) and personal recommendations rather than relying on Google + the algorithm. What this means for public forums I don't know. I think they're gone and will never come back, probably.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I don't care about what news articles end up on the front page - it's AI now, but there have been other trends in the past that did the same. The bigger problem is the effect that it's had on "Show HN" postings, which in the past were things you could depend on were built by the person submitting it. That's why those posts tended to be more strongly moderated, because they often were seen as attacks on the…
A project was one of the easiest ways to evaluate a stranger. It was a great bullshit detector. If they can make something like this then they are probably someone with ability and experience and so the rest of what they have to say is probably worth listening to. But I also agree with the parent. HN seems to be flooded with hustle and rubbish since AI has taken off. It's eternal LLMber.
Cool. I think it would be nice to normalize against users (or active users). 2016-era HN had its share of negativism, but it also had a lot less people - the light green from those charts is misleading.
Pre-2020 had far more informative posts and discussions. While we still have decent conversations post-covid, the quality has slid downhill somewhat.
Excepting the last year - things see dark for a lot of users here in the last year.