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

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

#251

Post by atomic128 »

onetimeusename wrote: post #147
marginalia_nu wrote: post #10

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 t…

Exactly. Prose, code, visual arts, etc. AI material drowns out human material. AI tools disincentivize understanding and skill development and novelty ("outside the training distribution"). Intellectual property is no longer protected: what you publish becomes de facto anonymous common property.

Long-term, this is will do enormous damage to society and our species.

The solution is that you declare war and attack the enemy with a stream of slop training data ("poison"). You inject vast quantities of high-quality poison (inexpensive to generate but expensive to detect) into the intakes of the enemy engine.

LLMs are highly susceptible to poisoning attacks. This is their "Achilles' heel". See: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

We create poisoned git repos on every hosting platform. Every day we feed two gigabytes of poison to web crawlers via dozens of proxy sites. Our goal is a terabyte per day by the end of this year. We fill the corners of social media with poison snippets.

There is strong, widespread support for this hostile posture toward AI. For example, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...

Join us. The war has begun.

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

#252

Post by embedding-shape »

tomxor wrote: post #220
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 about inverting the issue, highlight posts with an opt in label. e.g Show HN [NOAI]: Since it's too controversial to ban LLM posts, and would be too easy for submitters to omit an [LLM] label... Having an opt in [NOAI] label allows people to highlight their posts, and LLM posts would be easy to flag to disincentivise polluting the label. This wouldn't necessarily need to be a technical change, just an intuitive a…

I'm 90% sure this will end with endless squabbles who's right that the label is correct/incorrect, rather than actual conversations about what the project that the person is showing. It already happens without the labels, feels like it'd increase the frequency of that even more if this label gets enforced.

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

#253

Post by trollbridge »

yuppiepuppie wrote: post #236
password4321 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Internally, we have a standard that any AI written code simply includes a cut-and-paste of the chat prompt (if that were used), and/or the .md files (if those were used).

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

#254

Post by chasd00 »

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.

> HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.

hah that sounds like a Show HN incubator.

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

#255

Post by [deleted] »

fallinditch wrote: post #242
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 restrict Show HN posts to 70 or 100 characters - readers can then scan many, and quickly find stuff of interest. The clarity and focus this discipline would enforce could have a pleasant side effect of enabling a kind of natural evolution of categorizations, and alternative discovery UIs.

[deleted]

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

#256

Post by accurrent »

evrenesat wrote: post #233
accurrent wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

What about hardware projects without a code base? Those are fun too and deserve front page

I suspect automating "code base over time" metric is tricky. Not everyone will be using git or a vcs and somethings dont need a codebase to be shared.

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

#257

Post by abcd_f »

parpfish wrote: post #237
peishang wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The solution to this is to allow aliases ... or account groups if you will and then allow/disallow things based on combined karma.

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

#258

Post by trane_project »

Tried to use Show HN for my new project a couple months ago with almost no traction. It's a software literacy tutor, so I guess it's not the right audience, but my intuition aligns with this. For reference, an earlier post showing the practice engine that powers the literacy tutor did pretty well back in 2023 and it was my first post. I've had more success getting sign ups trying to do just the tiniest bit of SEO.

Trane (good post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31980069

Pictures Are For Babies (lame post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290805

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

#259

Post by zh3 »

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.

Something based on the principles of 'New'? (not clear on the details of how Show HN works, does it automatically appear?). Just shove entries under 'New' and let the group decide what is "Show HN"-worthy.

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

#260

Post by saghm »

evrenesat wrote: post #233
accurrent wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

Isn't it possible to fabricate the timestamps on commits and then push them up all at once? If you're planning on literally checking that the commits are publicly available for a certain amount of time, that seems like it would needlessly punish projects that someone worked on offline and then happened to push up once it was completed.
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