Dearth of original ideas, lots of pointless retro stuff like "I did x on mac os classic" lots of reinventing the wheel with LLMs and LLM cargo culting. What is the perpetual growth myth to do once physics is known and energy is constraining?
HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
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Re: HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
#2HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.
Re: HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
#3HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.
Can you expand on that idea ?
May be backed by evidence etc.
Re: HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
#4HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.
I agree there. Back in 2009 I used to be excited by each new YC batch. There were fresh new ideas like Dropbox, AirBnB, Instacart. I feel like there were cool stories around those startups, like Drew losing a thumbdrive and coming up with the idea for DropBox, or the AirBnB marketing hack with the cereal, or Instacart's founder having beer delivered during the YC interview. I can't think of any recent YC startups that I've cared about. Maybe it just became saturated or maybe I just moved on to other things. I will say this, that the ideas I had 15 years ago needed a startup and investment. Now I'm able to build a lot of those ideas using the cloud and AI. It seems inevitable that some solo founder will soon be able to build a unicorn with no investment and no employees.
Re: HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
#5HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.
Can you expand on that idea ? May be backed by evidence etc.
The recent batches all use the following formulas which I don't find particularly interesting:
AI native ______ for _______
______ for AI agents
AI _______ for _______
Re: HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
#6The vast majority of programs submitted to HN are rip-offs of existing programs that are being re-written by LLM's and not even changing the name in most cases. Each day I am flagging more submissions than I used to in a month or two. People are absolutely crapping up this site with LLM plagiarized ideas and rewrites of existing code converted to other languages instead of doing pull requests of existing programs and enhancing them assuming LLM's can do such a thing. The voting ring detector probably needs some tuning as well. I can't tell if the goal is to poison the search engines and AI platforms so nobody can find the original open source programs or what else may be going on. Robert Hanlon said, never attribute to malice..., well I do.
Re: HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
#7This perception has been around for almost as long as HN itself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213869 (Aug 2016)
Examples are legion. Here are a couple others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229249 (July 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020)
I don't know of any way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the past, which is why "things have always been getting worse" is such a great line. How people perceive these things is strongly conditioned by how they're feeling about the things in general.
Re: HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
#8The vast majority of programs submitted to HN are rip-offs of existing programs that are being re-written by LLM's and not even changing the name in most cases. Each day I am flagging more submissions than I used to in a month or two. People are absolutely crapping up this site with LLM plagiarized ideas and rewrites of existing code converted to other languages instead of doing pull requests of existing programs and…
It's a transitional situation and will be that way for quite a while. We're doing what we can. For example, the measures described here have stemmed the runaway growth in low-quality Show HNs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346516 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300772 (March 2026)
There's still a quality problem, but (a) that's always the case, (b) at least we aren't drowning, and (c) the community needs growth, just not runaway growth.
Major new tools like LLMs are inevitably going to get widely used, as they should. Figuring out what the best uses are will take time. Figuring out how to share what one is doing with them is an unsolved problem.
Re: HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
#9This perception has been around for almost as long as HN itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213869 (Aug 2016) Examples are legion. Here are a couple others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229249 (July 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020) I don't know of any way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the pas…
I agree about the bias to believe the past was better than it actually was. I think it's called rosy retrospection, like when people are nostalgic for their high school days even though they were bullied and had no friends. Maybe HN isn't getting worse, it's just that the negative parts are more recent and noticeable.
Re: HN seems dead compared to say 10-15 years ago
#10The vast majority of programs submitted to HN are rip-offs of existing programs that are being re-written by LLM's and not even changing the name in most cases. Each day I am flagging more submissions than I used to in a month or two. People are absolutely crapping up this site with LLM plagiarized ideas and rewrites of existing code converted to other languages instead of doing pull requests of existing programs and…
It's a transitional situation and will be that way for quite a while. We're doing what we can. For example, the measures described here have stemmed the runaway growth in low-quality Show HNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346516 (March 2026) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300772 (March 2026) There's still a quality problem, but (a) that's always the case, (b) at least we aren't drowning, and (c) the…
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