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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

#91

Post by armchairhacker »

Here’s a dumb idea:

Give people the ability to submit a “Show HN” one year in advance. Specifically, the user specifies the title and a short summary, then has to wait at least year until they can write the remaining description and submit the post. The user can wait more than a year or not submit at all; the delay (and specifying the title/summary beforehand) is so that only projects that have been worked on for over a year are submit-able.

Alternatively, this can be a special category of “Show HN” instead of replacing the main thing.

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

#92

Post by habinero »

holistio wrote: post #81
reconnecting wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, let's say there are two categories of software now. One is where the human has a complete mental map of the product, and even if they use some code generating tools, they fully take responsibility for the related matters. And there is another, emerging category, where developers don't have a full mental map as it was created by an LLM, and no one actually understands how it works and what does not. I believe thes…

We never really have a complete mental map. "Oh, this library just released a new major version? What a pity, I used to know v n deeply, but v n+1 has this nifty feature that I like" It happened all the time even as a solo dev. In teams, it's the rule, not the exception. Vibing is just a different obfuscation here.

No. I see this mistake everywhere. You're confusing "knowing everything" or "making assumptions" with "mental maps". They are not at all the same thing.

The benefit of libraries is it's an abstraction and compartmentalization layer. You don't have to use REST calls to talk to AWS, you can use boto and move s3 files around in your code without cluttering it up.

Yeah, sometimes the abstraction breaks or fails, but generally that's rare unless the library really sucks, or you get a leftpad situation.

Having a mental map of your code doesn't mean you know everything, it means you understand how your code works, what it is responsible for, and how it interacts with or delegates to other things.

Part of being a good software engineer is managing complexity like that.

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

#93

Post by debarshri »

I think it is true with any distribution channel. When people figure out that it works, then everyone ends up bombarding that channel till it saturates.

Vibe coding is not helping either, I guess. Now it is even cheaper to create assets for the distribution channel.

I think same thing happened with product hunt.

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

#94

Post by frizlab »

vdupras wrote: post #70
phaser wrote: post #52

I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience. It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creativ…

> sloptimists That's a good one! Did you just come up with it? I've never seen it before.

18 relevant results in 0.96s, from Kagi.

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

#95

Post by zero_shift »

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…

One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.

One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.

It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the problem was real enough to make solving it worthwhile.

Now there's no such filter function, so projects are built whether or not they're good ideas, by people who don't know very much

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

#96

Post by xnx »

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…

My favorite part about people promoting (and probably vote stuffing) their closed-source non-free app that clone other apps is when people share the superior free alternatives in the comments.

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

#97

Post by sumeno »

Nextgrid wrote: post #89
nkrisc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't mind much though - I love that programming is being democratized and no longer only for the arcane wizards of the back room. Programming has long been democratized. It’s been decades now where you could learn to program without spending a dollar on a university degree or even a bootcamp. Programming knowledge has been freely available for a long time to those who wanted to learn.

There's a difference between documentation and LLMs. An LLM can be your own personal tutor and answer questions related to your specific code in a way no documentation can. That is extremely helpful until you master the programming language enough.

Vibecoders are never going to master anything

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

#98

Post by alexhans »

I had a similar experience trying to get feedback on my attempt to help different role families adopt AI evals as a common language (hands on tutorial or tool comparison).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026263

I attribute it mostly to my own inability to pitch something that is aimed for many audiences at once and needs more UX polishing and maybe a bit on timing.

It's tough when you're not looking to sell a product but moreso engage in a community without going the twitter/bluesky route (which I'll bregudgingly may start using).

Maybe evals is a problem that people don't have yet because they can just build their custom thing or maybe it needs a "hey, you're building agent skills, here's the mental model" (e.g. https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent... ) and once they get to the evals part, we start to interact.

In any case, I still find quite a lot of cool things in SHOW HN but the volume will definitely be a challenge going forward.

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

#100

Post by phaser »

vdupras wrote: post #70
phaser wrote: post #52

I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience. It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creativ…

> sloptimists That's a good one! Did you just come up with it? I've never seen it before.

it was in this link included in this same story https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/
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