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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

#371

Post by mathgladiator »

haute_cuisine wrote: post #312
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?

Not OP, but Opus 4.6 is crazy good at writing. I generated a 500 page book, and it took until around page 275 for things to... go off rails. My strategy was to leverage ralph and a bunch of personas, and it good my act structure, major points and was able to just GO. For the first part, it was, by far, the best sci-fi book I've read. The problem is that I can tell in the writing where context collapse happened. It's fixable, but I'm now realizing I have to rethink my entire approach to it.

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

#372

Post by dang »

abcd_f wrote: post #261
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.

It's a tough problem. Once some users have extra power to push content to the front-page, it will be abused. There will be attempts to gain that privilege in order to monetize, profit from or abuse it in some other way. The only option along this path would probably be to keep the list of such users very tightly controlled and each vouched for individually. --- Another approach might be to ask random users (above cer…

I feel like these review processes could be public threads like any other (just not linked directly from /show).

I was thinking we could call them "Show Show HN" but I suppose that joke would get old

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

#373

Post by dang »

peishang wrote: post #210
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 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.

As it happens, a great counterexample has been on the frontpage for hours:

Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852 - Feb 2026 (34 comments)

What a bummer it would be to lose excellent posts by new users. They do happen!

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

#374

Post by mathgladiator »

rjh29 wrote: post #293
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.…

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.

I'm no boomer, but I'm building a pipeline to produce books in a variety of genres.

This is one chapter of a book: https://nexivibe.com/writing/chapter_01.html

People that take it seriously, are going to focus on the architecture, universe building, characters, and arc flow and then let the writing be done in a way. The power tools of the cognitive era are arriving.

I'm reading a 500 page sci-fi book and evaluating it, the first 275 pages are fantastic until I can feel the context collapse and it craps the bed.

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

#376

Post by ehnto »

ch4s3 wrote: post #365
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.

I get that, and mostly agree but some people will really have the cutest kitten the most beautiful sunset photo. Hopefully we figure out how to discern as fast as we can churn.

You get diminishing returns up there though, the cutest cat photo in the world would look remarkably similar to the next 2,000 photos of cats in the cutest cat photos leaderboard. I feel we should filter on diverse topics rather than best by metrics, perhaps we'll want to discern on concern.

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

#377

Post by ugh123 »

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.

Could also consider requiring higher account age or points

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

#378

Post by 8note »

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.

is it? im very happy with my cad tools, but im only going to show off the physical stuff i make with them, rather than the tools along the way.

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

#379

Post by 8note »

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…

i dunno. the last 80% keeps being 80% and it just eats through tokens

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

#380

Post by 8note »

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…

i dont think we'll see that, because the niche spaces are people from other disciplines who do some code but dont consider coding important.

theyve already thought about it before reaching for code as a solution

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