Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arthurcnops.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 455 posts

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

#431

Post by lelanthran »

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.…

> 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.

As someone who taught their kid to read using the DISTAR alphabet, and then moved on from there, your idea just doesn't sound like it has any value.

I wrote (without LLMs) about 2 dozen "books" for 3.5yo to 5yo; none of them had any pictures in them, so having them professionally printed is a waste of time and money.

When it comes to teaching kids to read, what you need is volume, not prettiness. Your idea is appealing to only to the people who teach reading the wrong way (schools, mostly). Kids learning to read from books with pictures in them learn slower.

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

#432

Post by DrewADesign »

tyre wrote: post #393
DrewADesign wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Deployment, version management, debugging things like compilation errors or package version mismatch, etc.

I was using tests as an example. The tasks you refer to, as well as tests, are big time sucks in professional environments, or for established ongoing projects. I really, really, really doubt debugging, ops, and housekeeping/administrivia keep people from finishing weekend “theoretically should be simple!” projects.

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

#433

Post by c22 »

Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #426
c22 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is begging the question. What evidence is there that this is all the same "stuff" driving towards some future apex? What does it mean to "get to" the tool making state outside of a Civ-style video game?

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

#434

Post by plopz »

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…

I would imagine a trajectory similar to AlphaGo, it starts out trying to replicate humans and then at a certain point pivots to entirely self-play. I think the main hurdle with llms, is that there isn't a strong reward target to go after. It seems like the current target is to simply replicate humans, but to go beyond that they will need a different target.

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

#435

Post by dang »

ugh123 wrote: post #377
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

It's tempting, of course, but I wouldn't want to exclude submissions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852.

(more about that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056384)

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

#436

Post by c22 »

plopz wrote: post #434
c22 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would imagine a trajectory similar to AlphaGo, it starts out trying to replicate humans and then at a certain point pivots to entirely self-play. I think the main hurdle with llms, is that there isn't a strong reward target to go after. It seems like the current target is to simply replicate humans, but to go beyond that they will need a different target.

I agree in general, but defining an appropriate target seems intractable at the moment. Perhaps it is something the AIs will have to define for themselves.

I think real intelligences are working with myriad such targets, but an adversarial environment seems essential for developing intelligence along this axis.

I do think if there's a path to AGI from current efforts it will be through game play, but that could just be the impressionable kid who watched Wargames in the 80s speaking through me.

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

#438

Post by veyh »

lelanthran wrote: post #415
veyh wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I ran a WoW guild, the first sentence in our recruitment post emphasized the importance of reading the whole post (because the way to access the application form was to click the only smiley in the post, and this detail was mentioned in the last paragraph). Most people did not read the post, which was immediately evident from how they posted their application by copy-pasting and editing an application poste…

> Back when I ran a WoW guild, the first sentence in our recruitment post emphasized the importance of reading the whole post (because the way to access the application form was to click the only smiley in the post, and this detail was mentioned in the last paragraph). I mentioned the "no brown M&Ms rule" in a recent comment, and someone pointed out to me that this is more likely to by adhered to by an LLM - humans m…

I wonder if you could take advantage of the fact that the LLM is more likely to follow instructions that humans might miss. For example include instructions somewhere in the repo that says you must use a certain phrase in all pull requests, and then you just check the PR for that phrase.

Or maybe require the PR to contain something that is generated by running code, which the LLM may not be able to do without some effort on the user's part.

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

#439

Post by password4321 »

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.

(Now that the front page attention has passed...)

It should be possible to find the users with the most early upvotes on Show HN posts that wind up "succeeding" as an excellent indicator they can serve to filter them going forward. However to me it's a bit awkward for Y Combinator to plan on relying on volunteers... once these users are found one of them should be hired to do this full time.

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

#440

Post by PaulHoule »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #324
PaulHoule wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The appearance of execution is much easier, quality execution (producing something anybody wants to use) might be easier, maybe not.

This is something that I was thinking about today. We're at the point where anyone can vibe code a product that "appears" to work. There's going to be a glut of garbage. It used to be that getting to that point required a lot of effort. So, in producing something large, there were quality indicators, and you could calibrate your expectations based on this. Nowadays, you can get the large thing done - meanwhile the in…

I dunno. I'm a big offender, but maybe making things that don't look at all look Bootstrap will help!
Post reply on HN