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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

#421

Post by c22 »

sockaddr wrote: post #385
wreath wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How will it emerge? In the past we've been told that the a(g)i will write itself, rapidly iterating itself into a super intelligence that handily solves all our current and future problems, but it's beginning to look like a chicken or the egg scenario.

Living systems were able to brute force their way to human brain, but it took billions of years and access to parallel processes that make the entire collective history of human computation seem like a mote to a star.

What novel spark do you see accelerating this process to such a hyperbolic extreme?

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

#422

Post by marginalia_nu »

disiplus wrote: post #280
marginalia_nu wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell that to linkedin group. they keep doing that, they dont credit it, but i assume at least 60% of other people can tell.

To be fair, linkedin has always been filled to the brim with unhinged slop, even before AI was a thing.

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

#423

Post by LoveMortuus »

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 don't mind AI, but one of the issues that I have noticed when using it, is that I can't ask you questions about how you built the project and how you overcame difficulties and much more importantly what you've learned from it so that those that follow can stand on the shoulders of giants.

I feel that actual 'understanding' is still incredibly important and it'll probably always be important. I'm talking about people actually understanding what's happening and why it's happening.

The main difference I've noticed when I built stuff with AI and without it, is that without it I understood and knew the code much more intimately, as the program was running, I could approximate with a fairly good degree of precision where in the code the program was at a given time - human based debugging.

When I'm using AI to build stuff all of this is gone. It's very little different from just opening a random Git repo, basically foreign code to me.

There are tasks that just need to be done, and then there are tasks one outta think about.

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

#425

Post by lelanthran »

zeras wrote: post #277
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.

Every system can be gamed, but if it were me and I were looking for a simple filtering solution, I would do something like this .. Set a policy of X comments required per submission in the last 30 days (not counting last 24 hours) for all submissions, not just "Show HN:" posts. Meaning, users would need to post X comments before they could post a submission and by not counting the last 24 hours, someone couldn't join…

> Set a policy of X comments required per submission in the last 30 days (not counting last 24 hours) for all submissions, not just "Show HN:" posts.

This will definitely improve the SNR of all submissions. I second this.

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

#426

Post by Jean-Papoulos »

c22 wrote: post #421
sockaddr wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How will it emerge? In the past we've been told that the a(g)i will write itself, rapidly iterating itself into a super intelligence that handily solves all our current and future problems, but it's beginning to look like a chicken or the egg scenario. Living systems were able to brute force their way to human brain, but it took billions of years and access to parallel processes that make the entire collective histor…

It took a billion years to get to the tool-making state, and then less than a 1000th of that time to making CPUs. Then a 1000th of that time to make LLMs. We are in a parabolic extreme

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

#427

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

daheza wrote: post #391
dimwiddle wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> deanonymization of the internet

This is going to happen anyway because 'the powerful' want to track what everyone does and says. AI is going to accelerate this because now they have a much more efficient means to filter and identify the people that are doing and saying things that the powerful don't like. The powerful will also be able to get real world ID credentials for their bots if they wanted or needed them, so this will not stop the problem of bots.

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

#428

Post by moWerk »

dang wrote: post #373
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.

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!

This was a super encouraging and uplifting experience for everyone involved in the project. Thanks so much for providing this excellent platform.

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

#430

Post by sota_pop »

bakugo wrote: post #16

Sadly, this problem isn't specific to HN either, any reddit sub that is even remotely related to software is absolutely flooded with "look at my slop" posts. It feels like the age of creating some cool new software on your own to solve a problem you had, sharing it and finding other people who had the same problem, and eventually building a small community around it is coming to a close. The death of open source, bas…

Is it really oss death if SO many projects are created and shared by individuals that indie dev seems commonplace?
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