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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

#321

Post by jihadjihad »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #314
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…

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…

To me, part of what makes it feel hollow is that if we were to ask you about any of those layers, and why they were chosen or how they worked, you probably would stumble through an answer.

And for something that is, as you said, impressive to you, that's fine! But the spirit of Show HN is that there was some friction involved, some learning process that you went through, that resulted in the GitHub link at the top.

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

#322

Post by samiv »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #176
nativeit wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to see any of these that wouldn’t have been far better off self-hosting an existing open source app. This habit of having an LLM either clone (or even worse, cobble together a vague facsimile) of existing software and claiming it as your own is just sort of sad.

I actually came to this realization recently. I'm part of a modding community for a game, and we are seeing an influx of vibe coded mods. The one distinguishing feature of these is that they are entirely parasitic. They only take, they do not contribute. In the past, new modders would often contribute to existing mods to get their feet wet and quite often they'd turn into maintainers when the original authors burnt o…

That's the essence of the corporations behind these commercial products as well. Leech off of all the work of others and then sell a product that regurgitates that said work without attribution or any back contribution.

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

#323

Post by weird-eye-issue »

reconnecting wrote: post #78
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's software for running your own program so they handle most of that except the actual payment part, monitoring for fraud, etc. Plus they don't give any visibility to your program which a network would help with to an extent

Can you recommend this software? It's definitely not considered an ad, but just to understand what exactly you find useful.

If you search something like saas affiliate marketing software it's the first non ad result

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

#324

Post by dudeinhawaii »

PaulHoule wrote: post #305
gitgud wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The appearance of execution is much easier, quality execution (producing something anybody wants to use) might be easier, maybe not.

This is something that I was thinking about today. We're at the point where anyone can vibe code a product that "appears" to work. There's going to be a glut of garbage.

It used to be that getting to that point required a lot of effort. So, in producing something large, there were quality indicators, and you could calibrate your expectations based on this.

Nowadays, you can get the large thing done - meanwhile the internal codebase is a mess and held together with AI duct-tape.

In the past, this codebase wouldn't scale, the devs would quit, the project would stall, and most of the time the things written poorly would die off. Not every time, but most of the time -- or at least until someone wrote the thing better/faster/more efficiently.

How can you differentiate between 10 identical products, 9 of which were vibecoded, and 1 of which wasn't. The one which wasn't might actually recover your backups when it fails. The other 9, whoops, never tested that codepath. Customers won't know until the edge cases happen.

It's the app store affect but magnified and applied to everything. Search for a product, find 200 near-identical apps, all somehow "official" -- 90% of which are scams or low-effort trash.

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

#325

Post by atomic128 »

plagiarist wrote: post #318
atomic128 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Refresh this link 20 times to examine the poison: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/

The cost of detecting/filtering the poison is many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of generating it.

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

#326

Post by rustystump »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #314
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…

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…

Idk.

I saw this come out because my boss linked it as a faster chart lib. It is ai slop but people loved it. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706528]

I knew i could do better so i made a version that is about 15kb and solves a fundamental issue with web gl context limits while being significantly faster.

AI helped do alot of code esp around the compute shaders. However, i had the idea of how to solve the context limits. I also pushed past several perf bottlenecks that were from my fundamental lack of webgpu knowledge and in the process deepened my understanding of it. Pushing the bundle size down also stretched my understanding of js build ecosystems and why web workers still are not more common (special bundler setting for workers breaks often)

Btw my version is on npm/github as chartai. You tell me if that is ai slop. I dont think it is but i could be wrong

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

#328

Post by tptacek »

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…

A core part of the HN ethos is avoiding siloing dynamics, which is exactly what [NOAI] would be.

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

#329

Post by tptacek »

lwansbrough wrote: post #294
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 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.

Note well that the most famous example of this is a misreading that has snowballed into a kind of cultural legend. The thread in question was about Dropbox's application to YC, not the value of Dropbox itself, and the feedback was constructive and well-intentioned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42392302

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

#330

Post by tptacek »

evrenesat wrote: post #223
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.

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…

Show HN has never been restricted to open source projects and it would be weird to make the criteria more restrictive for open source than closed source work.
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