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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

#331

Post by WD-42 »

tormeh wrote: post #288
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…

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.

I've thought about this and wondered if this current moment is actually peak AI usefulness: the snr is high but once training data becomes polluted with it's own slop things could start getting worse, not better.

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

#332

Post by ModernMech »

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 the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring.

Agreed. r/ProgrammingLanguages had to deal with this recently in the same way HN has to; people were submitting these obviously vibecoded languages there that barely did anything, just a deluge of "make me a language that does X", where it doesn't actually do X or embody any of the properties that were prompted.

One thing that was pointed out was "More often than not the author also doesn't engage with the community at all, instead they just share their project across a wide range of subreddits." I think HN is another destination for those kinds of AI slop projects -- I'm sure you could find every banned language posted on that forum posted here.

Their solution was to write a new rule and just ban them outright. Things have been going much better since.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1pf9j...

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

#333

Post by jongjong »

I'm so disappointed about what happened to this industry. It's worse than I could have imagined.

The market is saturated with superficial solutions that look amazing at a glance but don't work at all in the medium or long term yet it doesn't matter at all; they don't even have an incentive to improve, ever, because the founder cashes out/exits before they need to worry about the stuff under the hood. Customer support is replaced by AI agents so nobody can feel the customer's pain anymore. Then investors find ways to financialize the product so that it doesn't depend on consumers anymore and can just tap into big contracts from big institutions... And yet they still spend big on ads, just to prevent new entrants from entering the market.

It reminds me of my time in crypto; the coins were sold as one thing but all the big well known projects barely had less than half of the features implemented (compared to what was advertised)... And 10 years in, most of those projects cashed out big time and still don't have the features promised. Many shut down completely. Doesn't matter. The whole thing existed and succeeded as a pure shell project.

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

#334

Post by BananaPelican »

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 have a project that I'm hoping to launch on show HN in the next few days which was built entirely with the help of AI agents.

It's taken me about month; currently at ~500 commits. I've been obsessed with this problem for ~6 weeks and have made an enormous amount of progress, but admittedly I'm not an expert in the domain.

Being intentionally vague, because I don't want to tip my hand until it's ready. The problem is related to an existing open source tool in a particular scientific niche which flatly does not work on an important modern platform. My project, an open source repo, brings this important legacy tool to this modern platform and also offers a highly engaging visual demo that is of general interest, even to a layperson not interested in programming or this particular scientific niche.

I genuinely believe I have something valuable to offer to this niche scientific community, but also as a general interest and curiosity to HN for the programming aspects (I put a lot of thought into the architecture) as well as the visual aspects (I put a lot of thought into the design and aesthetics).

Do you have any advice on how to present this work in a compelling way to people who understandably feels as burned out on AI slop as you do?

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

#336

Post by DetroitThrow »

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 just have no interest in seeing code that hasn't even been read by the author. At that point, just show us what it does, don't show us the GitHub link.

On the front page, someone made a cool isometric NYC map via vibe coding - another front pager was someone who also claimed to make an ultra fast PDF parser that failed on very common PDFs and gamed the speed metric by (useless) out of order parsing.

Guess which one I installed and spent more time using? These vibe coded projects aren't interesting for their code and almost always not intended to be used by anyone if they're libraries/frameworks, but the applications made with vibe coding are often very cool.

An easy win is turning off the firehouse of vibe coded GitHub portfolio projects and just ask for a link to a hosted application. Easy.

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

#337

Post by DetroitThrow »

rglover wrote: post #266
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.

Proposal: - Min. 90 days account existence in order to submit - Cap on plain/Show/Ask HN posts per week Most of the spam I see in /new or /ask is from fresh accounts. This approach is simple and awards long-term engagement/users while discouraging fly-by-night spammers.

Yep, hide new accounts except to higher karma users is an easy win.

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

#338

Post by jedberg »

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.

I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. If you aren't proud enough of it to attach your real name, or your pseudonymous account, maybe it shouldn't be posted.

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

#339

Post by DetroitThrow »

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…

Wow so cool! I think a big part of the Show HN slop are GitHub links or libraries that haven't even been read or used by their authors outside of the test suite on their local machine.

I'm sure a happy medium is shutting off links to vibe coded source code, and only letting vibed hosted applications or websites. For us who want to read code, source code that means nothing to anyone is pretty disappointing for a Show HN.

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

#340

Post by jedberg »

DetroitThrow wrote: post #337
rglover wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proposal: - Min. 90 days account existence in order to submit - Cap on plain/Show/Ask HN posts per week Most of the spam I see in /new or /ask is from fresh accounts. This approach is simple and awards long-term engagement/users while discouraging fly-by-night spammers.

Yep, hide new accounts except to higher karma users is an easy win.

But very gatekeepy. New accounts are already highlighted and get mercilessly reported and downvoted if they post spam.
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