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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

#311

Post by jasondigitized »

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'…

My new favorite thing to do is grab the 'What are you working on threads' and have a LLM group them categorically with one line descriptions of each app.

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

#312

Post by haute_cuisine »

storystarling wrote: post #230

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.…

Personally, I find AI generated text disengaging. A also heard some professional writers immediately notice disorganized storytelling patterns. Have you found a way to fix this? Is there any soul in generated texts?

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

#313

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

one of the base44 ads is hilarious about this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLdaIxDM-_Y

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

#314

Post by dudeinhawaii »

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…

The other element here is that the vibecoder hasn't done the interesting thing, they've pulled other people's interesting things.

Let's see, how to say this less inflamatory..

(just did this) I sit here in a hotel and I wondered if I could do some fancy video processing on the video feed from my laptop to turn it into a wildlife cam to capture the birds who keep flying by.

I ask Codex to whip something up. I iterate a few times, I ask why processing is slow, it suggests a DNN. I tell it to go ahead and add GPU support while its at it.

In a short period of time, I have an app that is processing video, doing all of the detection, applying the correct models, and works.

It's impressive _to me_ but it's not lost on me that all of the hard parts were done by someone else. Someone wrote the video library, someone wrote the easy python video parsers, someone trained and supplied the neural networks, someone did the hard work of writing a CUDA/GPU support library that 'just works'.

I get to slap this all together.

In some ways, that's the essence of software engineering. Building on the infinite layers of abstractions built by others.

In other ways, it doesn't feel earned. It feels hollow in some way and demoing or sharing that code feels equally hollow. "Look at this thing that I had AI copy-paste together!"

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

#315

Post by plagiarist »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #175
tyre wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed My experience is the opposite. It’s so much easier to have an LLM grind the last mile annoyances (e.g. installing and debugging compilation bullshit on a specific raspberry pi + unmaintained 3p library versions.) I can focus on the parts I love, including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a mi…

You both have very good points here, but once I get finished with both of the 90% programming times, and everything seems to finally work with no more bugs (and it's true), then for my heavy industry work I look forward to spending 10X as much effort testing compared to coding.

Oh yeah, especially if the domain is complex, trying to envision how it can fail is as fun of a puzzle as trying to make it correct.

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

#317

Post by plagiarist »

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…

AI will be trained on the code it wrote, our feedback on that code, and the final clean architecture(?) working(?) result after that feedback.

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

#318

Post by plagiarist »

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…

I was wondering if anyone was doing this after reading about LLMs scraping every single commit on git repos.

Nice. I hope you are generating realistic commits and they truly cannot distinguish poison from food.

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

#319

Post by tyleo »

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’m in some discord servers that have both #art and #ai-art channels. This seems to work well. It’s not perfect but it’s cheap and might be good as a start.

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

#320

Post by Lramseyer »

Crazy idea, but maybe change the rules of Show HN so that you are required to include in the headline how long you have been working on the project. As an example, something like:

Show HN: My Project - A description for my vibe coded project [3 weeks]

A lot of the good stuff I see on Show HN are projects that have been worked on for a long time. While I understand that vibe coding is newer trend, I also know that vibe coded projects are less likely to stand the test of time. With this, we don't have to worry about whether a project is AI assisted or not, nor do we ban it. Instead just incentivize longer term projects. If the developer lies about how long they worked on the project, they will get reported and downvoted into oblivion.

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