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

arthurcnops.blog

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

#231

Post by Azrael3000 »

dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. Raising the quality bar would likely cut down on quantity as a side effect, and that would be a nice solution. One idea that a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.

Maybe you should train an LLM to judge the content /s

More seriously though, I think some sort of curation is unavoidable with such topics. If you get inspired by stack overflow where you have some similar mechanics at work, then I'd say that is not too bad. But of course you risk some people being angry about why their amazing vibe coded app is not being shown. Although the more I think of it, this might be a good thing.

Edit: One more thought just came to my mind. A slight modification to the curation rule, you let everything through, just like now. However, the posts are reviewed and those with enough postive review votes get marked in some shape or form, which allows them to be filtered and/or promoted on the show page.

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

#232

Post by [deleted] »

nobody_r_knows wrote: post #167
anonymous908213 wrote: post #154

The worst part of the death of Show HN is that most of these people are so allergic to putting any effort in that they can't even write the description themselves. The repo's readme, the ShowHN post, and often even their comments will all be fully LLM-generated. This doesn't even take skill! Writing good marketing copy might take skill, but ShowHN isn't (supposed to be) marketing. Just describe the project in your ow…

> I promise it's not that hard. How many non-native English speakers are on HN? If it's more than 30%, why should they have to use a whole new language if they can just let an LLM do it in a natural sounding way.

[deleted]

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

#233

Post by evrenesat »

accurrent wrote: post #226
evrenesat wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator. If it's completed within a few days, it should require more thorough human review. On the other hand, if the project has been active for a while and received contributions spread throughout that timeline, I think that would indicate accumulated effort (human and/or AI) and higher qu…

Eh IMO any metric like this can be gamed. My project that reached hn front page was coded in a short time (and yes some ai was used), but otoh I think it was something that showed hey you can do this really interesting thing (in my case vlm based indoor location). Also its not uncommon for weekend projects to be done in a shprt span with just a "first commit" message dump even pre-AI.

Yes, any metric can be gamed. But I believe measuring the entropy of a repository, comparing state of the code-base over time can be done deterministically, which would make it harder to game it.

So either we are going to completely avoid automation and create a community council to decide what deserves to be shown to rest of the community or just let best AI models to decide if a project is worth show up on front page?

Or we can do all of the above :)

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

#234

Post by ToucanLoucan »

n_e wrote: post #228
dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. Raising the quality bar would likely cut down on quantity as a side effect, and that would be a nice solution. One idea that a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.

Not sure if it would work for HN / how it could be adapted to HN, but something I noticed on opensource projects, is that once they hit a hurdle, submitters of low quality AI-written PRs don't try to solve it and go elsewhere. For example, in one project, PRs have to be submitted to the "next" branch and not the default branch. This is written in the CONTRIBUTING.md file, which is linked in the PR template, with the…

> For example, in one project, PRs have to be submitted to the "next" branch and not the default branch. This is written in the CONTRIBUTING.md file, which is linked in the PR template, with the mention that PRs that don't respect that will be close. Most if not all submitters of low-quality PRs don't do anything once their initial PR is closed.

Few things in life are as reliable and trustworthy as the laziness of others.

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

#235

Post by bostik »

password4321 wrote: post #192
dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. Raising the quality bar would likely cut down on quantity as a side effect, and that would be a nice solution. One idea that a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.

I recommend making "What are you working on [this weekend/weekly]" official like whoishiring and encouraging pre-Show HN comments there. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041973#47043174 "what's the right venue for sharing [LLM-built side projects]") Also requiring disclosure of the use of AI in repos and especially (or perhaps specifically discouraging its use) when responding with comments to HN feedback. I'…

Combining the two approaches might work. A "pre-moderation queue" for submissions that are are solid enough to pass the "Show" bar, and then the monthly "what are you working on" threads as a more free-form creative outlet.

And yes, disclosing the use of AI should be par for the course.

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

#236

Post by yuppiepuppie »

password4321 wrote: post #192
dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. Raising the quality bar would likely cut down on quantity as a side effect, and that would be a nice solution. One idea that a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.

I recommend making "What are you working on [this weekend/weekly]" official like whoishiring and encouraging pre-Show HN comments there. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041973#47043174 "what's the right venue for sharing [LLM-built side projects]") Also requiring disclosure of the use of AI in repos and especially (or perhaps specifically discouraging its use) when responding with comments to HN feedback. I'…

Interesting take on the sharing of prompts. I don’t think this is a bad idea. How would this work though given different prompts occur in different context windows?

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

#237

Post by parpfish »

peishang wrote: post #210
dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. Raising the quality bar would likely cut down on quantity as a side effect, and that would be a nice solution. One idea that a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.

How much would it help cut down if Show HN was prohibited for accounts that were green and/or only had 1 karma? Meaning you would have to demonstrate that you had or were willing to contribute to the HN community before just promoting your own stuff.

on problem here is that I don't want to share my ShowHN projects with my HN account because it'll connect my real identity to my pseudonymous HN identity.

so, in the past, i've created throwaway HN accounts for sharing things that connect to my real ID.

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

#239

Post by [deleted] »

greatgib wrote: post #13

An additional factor missing in the post I think Is AI. Before, projects were more often carefully human crafted. But nowadays we expect such projects to be "vibe coded" in a day. And so, we don't have the motivation to invest mental energy in something that we expect to be crap underneath and probably a nice show off without future. Even if the result is not the best in the world, I think that what interest us is to…

[deleted]

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

#240

Post by acnops »

password4321 wrote: post #192
dang wrote: post #177

Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what. Raising the quality bar would likely cut down on quantity as a side effect, and that would be a nice solution. One idea that a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.

I recommend making "What are you working on [this weekend/weekly]" official like whoishiring and encouraging pre-Show HN comments there. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041973#47043174 "what's the right venue for sharing [LLM-built side projects]") Also requiring disclosure of the use of AI in repos and especially (or perhaps specifically discouraging its use) when responding with comments to HN feedback. I'…

Sharing prompts, not sure it works if your project required hundreds of prompts? It’s all in history though (.jsonl) so I’m sure the AI can condense it somehow.
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