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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

#391

Post by daheza »

dimwiddle wrote: post #345
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I worry that the focus on AI proofing will lead to a deanonymization of the internet. If we force every interaction to be associated with a real world id, we can kill a lot of the bots.

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

#392

Post by heresie-dabord »

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.

> a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts

A separate queue is the solution. Then the moderation system (dang, tomhow, seasoned users) can apply an adjustable threshold to promote Show HN posts to the main queue.

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

#393

Post by tyre »

DrewADesign wrote: post #347
tyre wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wasn't thinking about tests, but yes those help for iteration. Deployment, version management, debugging things like compilation errors or package version mismatch, etc.

I've done enough of this in my career that I can do it, but I don't want to. It's not fun. Having an LLM iterate on that stuff is really nice. Especially to get a scaffolding that I can then read and learn from.

For example, I recently was using an eInk screen for the first time and wanting to stream the currently playing album art to it. Claude made it so, so, so much easier to troubleshoot.

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

#394

Post by Gigacore »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #146
Gigacore wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shared a well-thought vibecoded app on ShowHN last month. It took a few hours to get POC and two weeks to fully develop a product to meet my requirements. Nobody cared.

You’re part of the problem.

How do you solve it?

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

#395

Post by lelanthran »

fdefitte wrote: post #351
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…

The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise.

> The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise.

More's the pity. I'm prepping for a ShowHN with a completely hand-coded project I started in December. It will be finished around end-march. I vibe-coded all the docs, because I spent all the time on the code.

I have no idea if the ShowHN is going to be at all useful, but I pivoted multiple times on various implementation things. Had it been coded by an AI, I don't think there would be any pivot.

The value is precisely from the pivots. An AI would have plodded on ahead anyway with a broken model for the problem-space.

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

#396

Post by Gigacore »

kranner wrote: post #368
marginalia_nu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sqfty? I mean it's a real problem, but it's also a solved problem, and also not a problem that comes up a lot unless you're doing the sort of engineering where you're using a CAD tool already. I don't doubt it's useful, and seems pretty well crafted what little I tried it, but it doesn't really invite much discussion.

Also, just a URL with no explanation and no supporting text in the post. If the poster can't be bothered to talk about why they made it... actually it's not even that. Just say hello, at least a hello. Show your audience you're a person. Humans like to talk to other humans.

I will take note of that. Thanks for pointing.

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

#397

Post by Eisenstein »

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.

I believe that a history of written work verified by stylometry will be a viable reputation system.

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

#398

Post by holoduke »

DrewADesign wrote: post #347
tyre wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My experience is that the AI is surprisingly good in providing solutions which fall in the last 20%. Examples are annoying ui challenges like proper placements or flow challenges. Or caching strategies. Or certain algorithm optimizations.

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

#399

Post by Eisenstein »

wreath wrote: post #182
onetimeusename wrote: post #147

Earlier 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 don't think that more code makes LLMs better at writing code past a certain point.

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

#400

Post by cyberrock »

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.…

Are you sure it's not just the delivery? If I want a storybook I don't want to wait 2 business days for it to print, ship, and deliver, and I'm sure most parents/guardians don't think that far ahead. The physical delivery factor turns your product into a mental burden.

If you (or Disney or Hasbro) shipped ebooks that unfolded when you tell it a prompt (in the format of "bibbidi bobbity boop tell me a story about an elephant"), then I'm sure it would fly off the shelves this Christmas. It doesn't even have to be expensive hardware; I'm sure you can build it with a Pi Zero with 2 cheap screens paired to an app on the parent's phone. But perhaps that's not the business you had in mind.

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