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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

#281

Post by properbrew »

pipnonsense wrote: post #104

I built my share of AI stuff (although more using AI in the product than vibe coding ), so I won’t complain. But I did got frustrated when I recently posted a Show HN that I thought HN community would like and no one did. It is a comeback from a post that stayed for a few hours in the front page a few years ago. Also, it is a useful, non-AI slop, free product. So when it got none upvotes it made me think how I don’t…

I don't think it's a case that no one liked it, there's just too much going on that it probably never came across the right eyes.

I linked one of my projects in a post and it got some really good responses. I did a bit more work on it and posted a Show HN thinking a few people might be interested but it got 0 traction.

I even made it a point to go on the new Show HN and checkout some peoples projects (how can I expect anyone to check mine out if I'm not doing the same) and it is hard to keep up.

I have another app that I've been working on for the past 3 months and whilst I want to do a Show HN to discuss how I built it, the moments I was banging my head on the wall working on a bug etc, I sadly wonder if there's any point.

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

#282

Post by malfist »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #155
zero_shift wrote: post #95

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…

Sometimes 'gatekeeping' is a good thing.

I think the word you're looking for is curation. Which people who don't pass jury might call gatekeeping.

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

#283

Post by ghaff »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #132
kykat wrote: 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.

The recent past was a nice respite from a strict caste system, but I guess we’re going back.

I think the recent past was a respite in very specific contexts like software maybe. Others, like most blue collar jobs, were always more of an apprentice system. And, still others, like many branches of engineering, largely required degrees.

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

#284

Post by overgard »

I'm not sure I agree with the Sideprocalypse idea linked in the blog. Granted, there is a lot of "hustle" content out there about how all you need to do is vibe code an existing business idea and pay for their SEO course. And if you're one of those people selling that, or one of the people believing it... well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Where the vibe coders with their slop cannons aren't present though is in things that require hard won domain knowledge. IE, stuff that requires you to actually create a new idea, off an understanding of actual areas of need.

And that kind of thing probably isn't going to do well on Show HN, because your audience probably isn't on HN.

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

#285

Post by pesus »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #155
zero_shift wrote: post #95

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…

Sometimes 'gatekeeping' is a good thing.

It often is. The concept of "gatekeeping" becoming well known and something people blindly rail against was a huge mistake. Not everything is for everyone, and "gatekeeping" is usually just maintaining standards.

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

#286

Post by password4321 »

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?

I would like to see it as extended comments in each git commit. There have been a few examples of some doing so manually but it needs to be supported by the tooling... with all the half-arsed "standards" like MCP etc. I'm surprised there isn't something already.

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

#287

Post by BrokenCogs »

carabiner wrote: post #198
phaser wrote: post #52

I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience. It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creativ…

Your site https://microlandia.city and OP blog https://www.arthurcnops.blog/death-of-show-hn/ as well as most personal sites posted on HN are almost always inaccessible via my corporate job's firewall. Does anyone know why this is? Something with security certificate? They're not explicitly blocked, because you get a "this is blocked" page in that case. With these sites they just show a "can't connect" error.

You shouldn't be browsing games while working, that's why

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

#288

Post by tormeh »

atomic128 wrote: post #251
onetimeusename wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This will happen regardless. LLMs are already ingesting their own output. At the point where AI output becomes the majority of internet content, interesting things will happen. Presumably the AI companies will put lots of effort into finding good training data, and ironically that will probably be easier for code than anything else, since there are compilers and linters to lean on.

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

#289

Post by gitgud »

zero_shift wrote: post #95
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…

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…

> so projects are built whether or not they're good ideas

Let’s be honest, this was always the case. The difference now is that nobody cares about the implementation, as all side projects are assumed to be vibecoded.

So when execution is becoming easier, it’s the ideas that matter more…

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

#290

Post by zahlman »

zero_shift wrote: post #95
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…

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…

To be fair, one probably needs at least one idea in order to build stuff even with AI. A prompt like "write a cool computer program and tell me what it does" seems unlikely to produce something that even the author of that prompt would deem worthy of showing to others.
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