I think yComb is showing its age in terms of venture and new products/industry/ and ultimately profit not reading the room, and now that free money is gone hopefully you need an actual new product vs undercutting and existing market. IMHO
Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
381–390 of 455 posts
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a sci-fi series I've followed religiously for probably 10 years now. It's called the 'Undying Mercenaries' series. The author is prolific, like he's been putting out a book in this series every 6 months since 2011. I'm sure he has used ghost writers in the past, but the books were always generally a good time. Last year though I purchased the next book in the series and I am 99% sure it was AI generated. None…
If you've some time to burn, write the author and/or his publisher and let them know that the guy's new ghostwriter sucks shit. If this is very seriously making your consider not picking up the next book in the series, be sure to mention that. If folks just stop purchasing the new books, they can imagine a reason for the lost sales that's convenient for them, but if folks tell them why they stopped purchasing, there'…
That’s a good idea actually. It’s easy to forget this kind of thing is an option.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#383Yes, 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 issues with the super posts is its really hard to grep for relevant information.
I've tried asking ChatGPT to recommend projects based on my interests, but ChatGPT heavily hallucinated or projected my interests onto irrelevant projects (for example, a project might be about developing a new programming language and chatgpt was like, "you could use this in your soap making hobby!").
The Who's Hiring posts have community sponsored indexers and its easy for me to query job titles relevant to me, but keyword search is not as useful here.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see a lot of projects repeated: screen capture tool, LLM wrapper, blog/newsletter, marketing tool for reddit/twitter, manage social media accounts. These things have been around for a while so it is really easy for an LLM to spit them out for someone that does not know how to code.
Agreed. I'm over here working on Quake 2 mods and reverse engineering Off world trading company so I can finish an open source server for it using AI. Thing is I worked manually on both of these a lot before I even touched Claude on them so I basically was able to hit my wishlist items that I don't have time to deal with these days but have the logic figured out already.
Whoa, that caught my eye. Offworld Trading Company is one of my favorite RTSes. What are you looking to do with the open source server?
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#385Earlier 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…
> Then what will AI be trained on in let's say 20-30 years? Old code? It's own AI developed code for vibe coded projects? I’ve seen variation of this question since first few weeks /months after the release of ChatGPT and I havent seen an answer to this from leading figures in the AI coding space, whats the general answer or point of view on this?
I suspect a more general and much more clever learning algorithm will emerge by then and will require less training data to get to a competent problem solving state faster even with dirty data. Something able to discriminate between novel information and junk. Until then I think there will be a quality decline after a few more years.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It has nothing to do with "pride". Anonymity is about being able to speak freely without having to feel the need to self-censor one's views. I don't want to feel hesitant to make a comment on a controversial subject out of fear that it will be permanently associated with my projects in a detrimental manner.
This is doubly true with anything that involves your real name. I don't think enough people understand that there is a genuine, non-zero risk that commenting on political matters with your real name risks getting you imprisoned or killed 5, 10, 20 years later. The internet is a permanent record for your views, and history has given us many examples of dictators who have purged millions of people deemed intellectuals, enemies of the regime, etc. This is true regardless of how much you trust your current government, because governments change and authoritarianism can happen anywhere. Even the self-proclaimed bastion of free speech is currently attempting to persecute people criticising the government online[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
(...that said, the LLM spam situation is so dire that even with these views on anonymity, I would be willing to create a new account where I carefully self-censor everything I say until I meet whatever proposed threshold would be necessary to submit a ShowHN, so I'm not opposed to such a limit out of necessity.)
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
"One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow people to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge." Wait, what? That's a great benefit?
Sure, there's many examples (I have a few personal ones as well) where I'm just building small tools and helpers for myself which I just wouldn't have done before because it would take me half a day. Or non-technical people at work that now just build some macros and scripts for Google Sheets that they would've never done before to automate little things.
I'm in the same boat. I use AI to generate tons of small things for work. None of it is shareable online because it's unique to my workplace and it's not some generic reusable tool, and for the most part the scripts are boring. Their most interesting attribute is how little effort they took, not their originality or grandness of scale.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#388Yes, 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'…
Bruce Schneier had the Friday Squid Blogging posts that he allowed random stuff on. Most of the noise was contained in the Friday threads.
Lobsters had a weekly thread by caius called, "What are you doing this week?" People would post personal projects or experiences in it. On top of interesting tech, that let us pray more specifically for and encourage some in need.
The weekly threads might work here.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
If those announcement posts don't take off, how do you end up finding a community of users/players?
It’s different every time, but basically “marketing”. No matter where you are showing your stuff, it’s in a subset of the population, chances are HN won’t be buying your app subscription. You need to get it in front of your actual audience.
As someone who has a small bit of skill in marketing nowadays, where would you advice me to deeply learn it? I think I have enough knowledge now to have developed a taste of what is actually good but don't know where to find a good curriculum to get started.
Re: Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
#390I 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 feel like my experience with Show HN has been pretty confusing.
Two years ago, I started work on https://phrasing.app. Extreme MVP, and a few people using the buggiest software I’ve ever seen. The Show HN took off and I collected thousands of emails.
I then spent two years grinding. I put in over 10k hours into the project. I ended up turning that crappy mvp into a product I’m genuinely proud of. I know have actual users I don’t know who pay me money and LOVE the product. I myself am using it to learn several languages, most of which I was unable to learn before due to a lack of resources.
I then posted multiple times in Show HN. Crickets.
Yet in the past few months, I’ve seen multiple vibe-coded fraudulent Show HN posts in the language learning space take off. They were eventually flagged but still, it’s just weird to see low effort projects get such massive interest.
I’m sure it’s a skill issue, but my experience is kind of painting show hn in the opposite light you do.
Hope this didn’t come across jaded, it’s just been on my mind (and confusing me) for a while now and felt quite relevant to share here.