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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

#341

Post by DetroitThrow »

jedberg wrote: post #340
DetroitThrow wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe just hide them if they post GitHub links.

I've loved some of the vibe coded apps that are hosted somewhere that have made the front page, but a lot of the links to GitHub projects intended to farm stars for throwaway portfolio padding (which often don't work).

Egh. No silver bullet here.

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

#342

Post by disiplus »

storystarling wrote: post #248
johnfn wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind some unsolicited and blunt feedback: I suspect the reason this didn't get a lot of traction is that it is unclear why customers would want this. Sorry, that's probably too harsh, but I find it difficult to imagine anyone buying this: - Children's books, at least the well-reviewed ones, are pretty good - This is AI generated, so I expect the quality to be significantly lower than a children's book. F…

Thanks for the blunt feedback - genuinely appreciate it. You're right that children's books can be excellent, and for generic topics a well-reviewed book from a skilled author and illustrator will beat what we generate. No argument there. Where we see real value is in the gaps the publishing industry doesn't serve. Bilingual families who can't find books in Maltese/English or Estonian/German. A child with an insulin…

As a father of two boys, i can give you some feedback. The AI stories you will generate will probably be crap and not worth paying for. What my kids love is when i put them (like i take a picture of them, and then generate them in jungle or whatever setup it is with gemini banana) They want that i print them those out, i know it's temporary but its fun for us all. So you could combine those two things.

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

#344

Post by jedberg »

DetroitThrow wrote: post #341
jedberg wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe just hide them if they post GitHub links. I've loved some of the vibe coded apps that are hosted somewhere that have made the front page, but a lot of the links to GitHub projects intended to farm stars for throwaway portfolio padding (which often don't work). Egh. No silver bullet here.

As someone who has posted a couple of Show HNs that went to GitHub, I'd have to respectfully disagree. :) We are sharing language libraries, so GH makes the most sense. You can get the library and sample apps there.

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

#345

Post by dimwiddle »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #110
SCdF wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and were gonna see this everywhere that AI can touch. Our filter functions for books, video, music, etc are all now broken. And worst of all that breaking coincides with an avalanche of slop, making detection even harder. There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do. It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired…

People will build AI 'quality detectors' to sort and filter the slop. The problem is of course it won't work very well and will drown all the human channels that are trying to curate various genres. I'm not optimistic about things not all turning into a grey sludge of similar mediocre material everywhere.

Is there a way to have a social media platform with hand-written letters, sent with ravens? That's AI proofed... for a while at least!

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

#346

Post by heliumtera »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #143
fainpul wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who got "enabled" by AI to produce stuff, just need to learn to keep their "target audience of one"-projects to themselves. Right now it feels like those fresh parents who show every person they meet the latest photos / videos of their baby, thinking everybody will find them super cute and interesting.

Yeah, I think it's sort of an etiquette thing we haven't arrived at yet. It's a bit parallel to that thing we had in 2023 where dinguses went into every thread and proudly announced what ChatGPT had to say about the subject. Consensus eventually become that this was annoying and unhelpful.

>went into every thread and proudly announced what ChatGPT.

That is what Show HN has become. Nobody cares what code Claude shat in response to a random person prompt. If I cared, I would be prompting Claude myself.

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

#347

Post by DrewADesign »

tyre wrote: post #160
DrewADesign wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

” The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs Some day I’m going to get a crystal ball for statistics. Getting bored with a project was always a thing— after the first push, I don’t encounter like 80% of my coding side projects until I’m cleaning— bu…

> 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…

> including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a minion.

That’s not really the part I’m talking about. My gut says that if tests are a blocker for weekend projects, people just don’t bother writing them. I certainly wouldn’t imagine them taking much longer to code than the core functionality.

In my experience, which seems to resonate with a lot of people, AI quickly stands up really useful boilerplate and very convenient purpose-built scaffolding… but is a lot less useful helping you solve actual problems in a way that makes sense to people that have those problems. Especially if you’re using a less-mainstream language or some other component.

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

#348

Post by gedy »

fainpul wrote: post #129
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…

People who got "enabled" by AI to produce stuff, just need to learn to keep their "target audience of one"-projects to themselves. Right now it feels like those fresh parents who show every person they meet the latest photos / videos of their baby, thinking everybody will find them super cute and interesting.

Some folks definitely give off a "How do you do, fellow coders?" vibe

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

#349

Post by hgs3 »

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…

> In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator.

You can’t necessarily judge by timeline. I’ve always developed my projects privately and then squashed to one initial public commit. I’ve got a private repo now with thousands of commits developed over years and I still intend to squash.

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

#350

Post by epolanski »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #181
acnops wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is eating up everything. So I don't think there will be two groups.

Maybe. It's basically "people who know how shit works" vs "people who don't know how shit works". I hope we still have at least some people in category 1 or else we just end up with Wall-E.

Many people that really know their shit use AI too.
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