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

arthurcnops.blog

291–300 of 455 posts

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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make, but it seems like you might be distinguishing between keeping out substandard work versus keeping out the submitters.

In which case, I kinda disagree. Substandard work is typically submitted by people who don't "get it" and thus either don't understand the standard for work or don't care about meeting it. Either way, any future submission is highly likely to fail the standard again and waste evaluation time.

Of course, there's typically a long tail of people who submit one work to a collection and don't even bother to stick around long enough to see how the community reacts to that work. But those people, almost definitionally, aren't going to complain about being "gatekept" when the work is rejected.

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

#292

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…

"One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow people to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge." Wait, what? That's a great benefit?

For those who want to have the stuff built, yes, it absolutely is.

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

#293

Similar experience. I posted a Show HN two days ago for a children's book generator - type a story idea, get a fully illustrated printed book shipped to you. Offered a free printed book including shipping to the HN community via voucher code. Got 7 points, 2 comments, and zero voucher redemptions. Nobody even ordered the free book. One of those comments was genuinely useful feedback from Argentina about localization.…

AI art is massively downvoted here and on Reddit, but boomers on facebook seem happy to share it. So I think you'll do better on other platforms. The opinion of AI generated creative work is just very low here. I personally agree, I've never seen an AI generated story that was interesting and I don't want to expose my children to it. I'd rather they get real stories written by real people.

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

#294
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'm haunted by the criticism Dropbox received from HN users when they posted their project here. While I respect the views many of us have, I think this has the potential to have the StackOverflow effect where the community makes the whole process miserable and worse.

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

#295
I don’t agree with this drowning sentiment. It’s much easier now to build capable stuff. That’s what the data is showing you. Pre AI nostalgia - sure, I built a PPC profiler in assembly by hand, but who am I to say the latest AI induced gadgetry is not as cool. And I am an active participant.

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

#296

I am a major advocate for AI assisted development. Having said that, it used to feel part of an exclusive club to have the skills and motivation to put a finished project on HN. For me, posting a Show HN was a huge deal - usually done after years of development - remember that - when development of something worthwhile took years and was written entirely by hand? I don't mind much though - I love that programming is…

Read this at first as AI arrested development ;)

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

#297

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…

we need a Vibe HN

This, but unironically. Every submission should have an "AI?" checkbox, to indicate if the content submitted is about AI or made by AI, because I'm just absolutely fed up with 2/3 of HN front page being slop or meta-slop.

I'm not an anti-AI luddite, but for gods sake talk about (ie. submit) something else!

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

#298
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…

I missed your Show HN, but I got the game now. Looks fun, and the fact that each citizen is simulated reminds me of Banished, which I enjoyed playing! Was happy to spend some wallet money I got from CSGO cases.

Thank you for making it, and don't give up. Passion and vision > vibe coding sloptimists.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be something. Having too may subs could get out of hand, but sometimes you end up with so much paperwork generated so fast that it needs its own dedicated whole drawer in your filing cabinet ;)

Sorry about that, didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings :( It's still early and easy to underestimate the number of visitors who would absolutely love to have the main page more covered in absolute pure vibe than it is recently. I would like to hear opinions as to why the non-human touch is preferred, that could add something that not many are putting into words. Hopefully it's not a case of the lights being on but…

Sorry you got downvoted. People downvote for the most inane reasons here. Don't take it personally!

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

#300
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have talked with some friends who are long-time programmers (20+ experience). Even they (all) admit that they use Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity or AI Studio - you name it. So in future everything’s gonna be “agentic”, (un)fortunately. Everytime I write about it, I feel like a doomsayer. Anthropic admits that LLM use makes brain lazy. So as we forgot remembering phone numbers after Google and mobile…

OK, let's say there are two categories of software now. One is where the human has a complete mental map of the product, and even if they use some code generating tools, they fully take responsibility for the related matters. And there is another, emerging category, where developers don't have a full mental map as it was created by an LLM, and no one actually understands how it works and what does not. I believe thes…

> And there is another, emerging category, where developers don't have a full mental map as it was created by an LLM, and no one actually understands how it works and what does not.

I work with a large number of programmers who don't use AI and don't have an accurate mental map for the codebases they work in...

I don't think AI will make these folks more destructive. If anything, it will improve their contributions because AI will be better at understanding the codebase than them.

Good programmers will use AI like a tool. Bad programmers will use AI in lieu of understanding what's going on. It's a win in both cases.

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