Glancing through the content it made me wonder if the newly launched Claude Cowork had a Show HN / Ask HN skill on launch ...
AI may be the largest bubble yet in history, and it has the ability to sustain itself directly via online hype-bots.
tulips can't specifically target all of your replies and explain why you're a cunt and should buy more
why would it be different here?
the struggle is to build consensus in an open and democratic forum and we've solved that problem via LLMs.
Possibly. Post covid many companies laid off people and that could have led to more time and interaction with HN and many more new builders and solopreneurs joining the community
Thus the rise of the influencer economy. What better way is there to learn about something than from somebody you trust?
There was no warning / taster of this. AI just dialed up to 11 real quick.
No project should ever be "overlooked" due to the use of AI coding tools.
The only valid reason for a project failing to get solid exposure on HN is that there is not much substance to it (some combination of thought, effort, ingenuity, usefulness).
Also, mods can help. They are friendly and generous. Reach out to them via email and ask them about your post. Often they have something to say and it's useful.
The challenge you encountered is nothing to do with the recent spike. I've been doing Show HN for 10 years. It's always been this way. It's never "easy" to get the attention of the community. But there are some things that can help, such as the time you post.
Check out these heatmaps of the average/mean post score versus hour/day of post and you can see the trends: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/?view=archive
How do you choose what to change? No interaction means no feedback.
Don’t overthink it. Don’t get obstructed by choice.
I mean no offense by this, but intuition literally means acquiring knowledge without an explanation. Did you mean experience or are you telling GP that you cannot explain how you do it?
Username checks out.
I'd posit that HN is only a good place to promote things that will interest the HN crowd. Ok, not a great insight, but I don't think dropping the submission in Show HN is the problem here.
I used to randomly evaluate and give honest feedback on invisible projects when I had the time. Most times I was completely ignored, even when I was the only person who really cared enough to answer. Eventually, I got bored.
I suspect for some of the non-engaging posts it's just throwing it out there, inexperience or part of the product hunt playbook
Seeing the flood of low ambition projects led me to think about the issue. I was wondering if we needed a kind of "proof of work" to help sort the entries. For instance counting a project number of contributors, number of commits, age of the project... Not that any of those metrics are good indicators or are hard to game, of course, but that could help triage good faith attempts from shallow LLM vomit.
For the record, nobody's denying how useful LLMs are, but let's also acknowledge that they excel at things that have a lot of prior art, so by definition not really a good fit for show HN any more (in the past it may have been; But what was interresting in vibe coding has never been the end result but that it was possible at all, like a dancing bear.)
It all depends on your goals but I've had similar thoughts and I decided I'm just making opinionated tool for myself that I'm perfectly fine with never making public. Since deciding on such path I think I actually moved closer to something that may be useful to others (but I'm still staying on that path for now).
I don't know any online tool which would provide me which mine does, and frankly the reality nowadays seems that it could take me more to find one if it existed (testing along all those which does not quite fit, which I did), than creating a version custom tailored for myself. It's... interesting times.
That is a pretty interesting point. I've been running into that problem quite often recently.
I don't think that's right, it's visible in both places, it's not "either or". Currently /new shows 5 "Show HN"s, which are also visible on /shownew.
> but I really don't see the value in using the Show HN: prefix.
You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time, but best of all, the users who engage with you are in a different mindset for the "Show HN" posts.
On a normal submission, you get a whole range of top-level posts that are mostly tangible related to the topic at hand. It's basically a free-for-all, as long as it's at least a bit related to the submission's theme and topic.
On "Show HN" posts you get users who view it and comment about it as a way of providing feedback what they think of the idea itself, and its implementation. Completely different mood and input, that is much more about what you're actually sharing, than a submission.
That's my experience of "Show HN" at least, YMMV.
Yeah I corrected myself in another comment. But I find with submissions to `shownew` they don't enter `top` straight away, or at all.
> You get a lot more traffic over a longer period of time
With a regular submission, it gets on `top` for at least a short period of time as well as `new`, whereas that doesn't seem to always be the case for a Show HN. And certainly not in my case. That said, many Show HNs do make it to top with less votes than the tiny few I got organically, so maybe I tripped some HN's filters? Or maybe it was bad timing? But if I post again, it'll be without the Show HN.
I think the frontpage is both a lot harder to get into, faster to get dropped from there, but obviously also has a lot more traffic. But the traffic from Show HN frontpage seems to engage more (again probably because of the mindset) and it stays there for a lot longer.
Personally, when I want feedback about the idea and implementation, I'd go for Show HN, because you're out after comments and discussions then, not just traffic and views. But if traffic/views are what you care about, regular submission would do "better".
Traffic and views can lead to comments and discussion. I was definitely looking for feedback. I think there's a minimum threshold of interest that's required before people start engaging. But it could also be that my submission was super boring, or there was something else off-putting about it – I'd be surprised if it was the latter, because the HN audience isn't known for holding back on criticism.
Not that I have the answer unfortunately.
Right here. The problem is right here.
Unfortunately, the internet is a race to the bottom. You need to hustle (euphemism for "shamelessly spam") for attention.
I say this as someone who received a lot of great feedback and had some interesting interactions after posting about a project of mine using "Show HN" a few years ago. I didn't need to spam anything to get the attention, but I admit maybe I just got very lucky, or maybe there were just fewer posts to "compete" with at the time (this was before the recent write-everything-with-AI-and-launch-it-out-there craze).
Finally, I'm not making any moral judgments here, and if someone feels they need to do this to get the attention they want, then who am I to tell you otherwise? But we should be aware of what we give up when we tend to behave this way, even if it's the inevitable outcome we get stuck with.
Not disagreeing on that, but often this can be explained when someone lacks time. For some articles I can only skim over the top some comments; articles with like +30 comments I can barely read all and the article, so I focus just on the first page or so.
> using AI that people are fatigued from it
I think some accounts here are actually AI accounts. I have no data to prove this, but just the voting situation is very, very odd; I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it, before retiring due to crazy moderators.
I didn't notice this on reddit back when I used it
why even post that?
The fact that it’s all genAI stuff puts me off, but that might not be the same for everyone.
I think crucially, if I wanted to do this kind of challenge, I would have a better experience just using an LLM chat directly, like “Generate me an image, then judge my description of it in <language>, and give me useful language learning hints according to my level of <level>”
AI DOS practically. Unfortunate for those that have curious projects that end up drowning in slop.
That being said, I sometimes write projects with AI to get feedback fast and prototyping for my own personal use cases and share it here sometimes
But since the community doesn't show support in some cases, I move on with anything new which catches my curiosity/troubles me and build it again
I open source most of the stuff but I know that its probably gonna get lost in a sea of AI slop & mine might not be better (I just ask LLM bots to create a simple main.go file to solve X and usually much of my simple projects end up being around 600 loc)
I do feel like personal computing or making projects in domains you aren't familiar in to prototype just out of curiosity/your own pragramatic use case is probably what I feel like but long term, there should be a focus on actually transitioning from AI slop to something real if anyone plans to monetize something imo
I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN.
I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense.
We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle
It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too
So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part)
The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
I have tried to write my thought in another comment in here but the gist of that was suppose that I don't feel excited (comparatively, not by a long margin which is why asking the question in the first place, usually I use it just for prototyping/my own use case purpose) just writing code solely but I am interested in everything else from start to finish
Would this be considered substance or not (considering if the idea is still decent lets say)? Or is the project considered more substance if its solely written by human code
Because I feel like I remember simon's post in here about how he made an independent (I think HTML related tool) in python (iirc) using independent tests and so sort of simon's use cases are how I imagine AI use cases to be (reasonable for the very least)
Would you consider this an anamoly (given simon is simon and he's probably the most well known blogger in here) or something repeatable?
Or like, I am just curious whats substance is. Because I feel like I can build projects but they end up just being a github repo no explaination and I'd love to polish some off my old projects which are dusty with better substance and probably even share it on HN and if I don't do this, then it will still be partially better to know when I might make a project in future & I can try to keep that in my mind hopefully as well.
At the other (low-substance) end of the spectrum is "lead generation tool" or "resume generator" that was built in 3 hours (and not much works other than a signup page and a link to Product Hunt). Not much of that kind of stuff makes the front page, but we see plenty of it submitted.
You can look down the list of most highly-ever upvoted Show HNs here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Most things getting 1000+ upvotes and hundreds of comments are high-substance, in that they have a back-story, some kind of deep work and/or ingenuity, and they make a great platform for curious conversation, which is, after all, what HN is for.
Much of what I try to build is for my own difficulties/curiosities so this works perfectly for me!
I do have a question and I am interested if you can answer but does there have to be a single aha moment or can there be a multiple of aha moment which can build something enjoyable (atleast to me)
I don't know if it counts as promotion and sorry about that but in this comment here but like how I first went from building a yt extension for screenshot (I watch youtube lectures for studies and slides can change and I wanted to make a screenshot tool which can take photo of 2s or x seconds ago) store it in a folder and have a tool which can auto generate a slideshow of sorts with all new pictures and pdf/laser tool as well.
A lot of these were just when I had created the snapshot tool, I went into deeper and deeper because of curiosity.
Now firstly I am not sure if this is a unified tool, its 3 different products and much of the code was actually generated in less than 3 hours individually but let's say I had to connect the dots and build on them on what I feel like I can do better and better about it & added like this.
Now I don't know if this is worth a show hn given its 3 different products mashed together for my own use case. but supposing if it was one product with continuous aha-s but the original prototype was built in 3 hours as you mention, would it still be considered depth/substance (supposing that they actually give the product after multiple aha's and not just after one because at that point even to me it does feel like there is virtually no difference between that and the resume idea you mentioned)
Would Hackernews be more interested in something like this? Because I sometimes show HN when my project's the 3 hour thing but I still use it myself and build upon it and continue doing so and if I feel like I can have multiple aha's in my project, do you feel like it passes the substance test that HN is looking out for?
If so that's the case, So the feeling I get from this is that I can deploy it in a more tightknit community first (thinking a discord server) /personal use/friends, then slowly build it and once the project has had a decent bit of thought put into it, I can add a show HN article?
Because I just prototype and keep on growing what I feel like I would personally want but in most cases, there really isn't a single aha but continuous of small aha's :)
(for context about the other message) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702099#46703977]
But it's hard to answer these kinds of specific questions in the hypothetical. The HN audience prizes originality, and sometimes the thing that gives a project substance is different to much of what's come before. Sometimes it's just a case of "we know it when we see it".
Rotten lemons all the way down.
I recently saw a Show HN [1] that had no link to anywhere, but it did have a project name. It currently has 13 points.
[removed]
It's weird because it's named similar to a popular Android logging library: https://github.com/JakeWharton/timber
Lesson learned. Extension uninstalled. Sorry for the noise.
All of the fun has been sucked out of it.
Honestly, I used to be one of them. I recently saw a great library (atcute) that changed my opinion. I think most AI sceptics haven't had this experience. They saw AI slops and set their opinion: AI-generated codes are bad. I can't really blame them, though, because there are so many of AI slops.
> anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back.
It's true. However, I think people who create AI slops are worse than those who don't use it. They are diligently making this world a worse place.
Like, If we are using AI to build yet another next.js App, then perhaps its me but I personally find it doesn't satisfy my curiosity.
I want to see projects be written in niche languages and new languages and AI can be perfect for that. See which language you like the most and each language/idea has their own tradeoffs but just follow what you want and now you are less likely to be stuck.
Of course though sometimes I create a python script first (I recently made a code where your png's/jpg's can automatically be updated in a slideshow like thing which I built with a custom youtube screenshot and I watched some lectures, pressed shift A and it can now have slides and I compile them to pdf and built another where I can have a pdf and then I can have a laser tool on pdf's because I love to study with notes where I can draw random things on page like whiteboard and erase them without hurting the text below for understanding._
I think converted that python tkinkter gui to fyne golang out of curiosity yesterday and I feel both tools are great fwiw
I think my point here is I'd much rather be willing to see some niche projects for ourselves and have it first meaningfully improve our lives & just experiment. I don't know not much for monetary gains but out of curiosity and seeing how far you can and cannot go.
Just build things you like/want to exist in any way that you like till AI's so damn subsidized (I don't use any agents, just claude web's free version or aistudio for free, my projects are usually around 600-700locs so I can ask it to regenerate it completely and I am fine with much of it, Perhaps I just follow KISS to its core)
You would find it funny but the problem's not in code generation but dependency management etc. atleast to me which is why I love uv scripts a lot but sometimes especially chatgpt doesn't know about uv script feature or hallucinates it hard on their web version so If I am building python applets I would paste uv script's complete docs to the LLM website I would be using.
Imagine this was a birdwatching forum and you were arguing that posting LLM generated images of birds allows birdwatchers to work on "watching" birds that they would not have had the time to watch previously, and that this should be celebrated. It's missing the entire point.
>The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion.
They have the time, they just don't want to put in the effort. Resources and education have never been more widely or freely available. One of the biggest lies people tell about LLMs is that they "democratize creativity." They don't - they commoditize it. You aren't developing the app. You aren't writing the script. You aren't making the art. The billion dollar proprietary black box service you loaded a prompt into shat out an approximation of a product and maybe at best you tweaked some code (more likely just fed it back in to another LLM.)
Yes, you wound up with a finished product of dubious quality that you probably don't even understand and can't discuss in any depth. bravo. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that people here - who actually care about the journey and the process rather than simply getting to an MVP as quickly as possible - for the most part aren't going to be impressed and aren't going to care much about it.
Some people do want their food to be made by a chef sometimes even in front of them explaining them everything and the journey to them makes it worth it
For some people, it can be that the food that they buy from a shop nearby in front of them is good
For some, they want the cooking to be done out of their visible range and just want the food served
And the last categories probably the ones who will go to supermarkets to get some chips with 3 months expiry date created in a large factory
Hackernews to me feels like its 1 & 2 for me. What you describe as birdwatching is much rather only 1st category to me.
Like, in the 1st category people want to eat the special dish created by the trials of countless nights and passion
On the 2nd category, you are still witnessing a person but they are probably following a much more experience and in the start by say following tutorials or watching recipes. But they are much more democratized
I don't know, I don't go in hotels that much so I don't know the 1st part and how possible it is but I do go to 2nd category and I go around my local shops and see people make french fries and chat with them and ask how long have they been here and making french fries etc., they are willing to tell you everything.
I do feel like "AI slop" is kind of the 2nd category because like I am not only just interested in whether or not this recipe's entirely unique but I am rather interested in everything around it, what infrastructure choices they make and what coding tech stack they used & are they passionate about the project or what did they end up creating the prototype for.
the 3rd part is what I despise where think burger king or mcdonald etc. where the recipes come from franchise and everything comes and the person just serves you. All decisions are bland (think yet another nextjs app).
I don't think much of us want HN to be a supermarket or another macD but do we want this to be a cooking show where chefs build the whole recipes to serve us or do we want it to be a lot of neighbourly shops who have friendly people working who will chat with us and we can eat the french fries they make :)
(I love the french fries my neighbourhood makes, they are really spicy combine them with spring rolls and some drink or a good yogurt and it feels soo good lol, plus all of this costs less a 1$ or 2$ at most 3$ where I live, I can go and eat without worrying at all about the cost of eating outside usually if picked from the right shops)
Although I have never had the opportunity of seeing a chef cook his own dish in such sense but I can imagine that its great & I would like them as well but to me hackiness includes both, them hacking around with recipes to build something nice and the other hacking around with infrastructure like what logo and how close they are to me and even things like pricing imo.
I consider the latter to be like much more reachable than the former and to me I don't know how to explain but the idea of hackiness isn't just some clean final product, its also like just building something and gluing things and its messy too. And I love both of them both clean and messy hacking, I just want to know how much an human has been in the loop, where'd they get the idea and what they implemented in etc.
I don't know I live in a small city connected to a large city and I feel like I enjoy much more the messy aspects whereas people from large cities are much more likely to want to go to a large hotel for a dine or have a more artisanal taste.
So I have seen my fair share of people who want both.
Right now, I feel like it honestly depends on how large or small community you feel HN is.
If you consider HN to be too large aka you find it less likely to trust projects who get to here in the first place, you would want an artisanal person to build things for hand for you to enjoy
But if you consider HN to be small and there is just this idea of treating each person more individually and just this unwritten rule of law which generates more trust and faith in trying out new options even if they are hacky as long as I can sort of trust them decently and they are still involved in the loop and not completely 100% detached unlike say a large conglomerate franchise imo
Honestly I want HN to be a small place and not a large place but I feel like even HN is a large place for me but the problem with completely small places or building one's own is that you don't get visitors at all. We probably need something in between HN and no social media promotions (only via word of mouth) imo.
I have been trying to replace HN for quite a while now for something more nicher but still well connected place as well. Honestly have thought multiple times to create an HN alternative with the same UI and everything and same rules but just smaller and probably federated (ironically Gonna have it be vibe coded in single main.go golang :) hosting on a cheap recurring deal netcup server I got) but moderation of >0 people is hard and getting >0 people interested in a new website is hard as well which is precisely what the main post is about.
If you want a chef to explain and show his recipe and then you find out he asked chat gpt or got it from a recipe website, would you still be interested in hearing about the 'journey' he took?
If that chef then also ordered the food from a catering service by forwarding that recipe to them, does it make sense to interview him about his craft and listen to him?
It's the same with creative things. Sure, you can ask a musician or a painter about their inspiration/process etc., because they went through the process and made something. You could learn something from them, other than 'here's how i asked someone else to make this'.
So, going to an art forum and displaying your AI generated art there, ready to answer questions about the process is pretty much completely pointless and also cheapens every actual artist that came there to display and talk about something they actually made.
It also has a psychological effect on the people that use it. I know some people that get immense feelings of accomplishment out of using AI to generate art and music. They feel like they made something and are proud about it. For a lot of people like that, any incentive to learn about things is gone, because they get the exact same feeling by using AI to make it.
On the other hand: If you are an artist making things and there are a million people generating things every 5 minutes and showing it around everywhere, it dilutes recognition of what you made. You show it to your friends and they're like: Oh yeah, i made like 5 of those yesterday.
Sometimes the idea itself can be interesting. If AI is used to manifest the idea then so be it!
Secondly, I think it is almost unavoidable to use some ai generated content (code, design etc) when developing these days. Its just a tool and it can be used well or used poorly.
Lastly, I agree that there does exist a lot of what can truly be labelled "AI slop" where it is just lazy regurgitated content, and that is annoying.
But i also think the majority of these cases will be bad ideas that don't need to be made at all. Or even ideas that are AI generated by asking a LLM for ideas. I don't care if they are made or not, but i would rather not have those on the internet and especially on 'show and tell' places like ShowHN etc.
I'm also not opposed to using AI as a tool in development or similar. But there are more and more examples of purely vibe-coded or generated things and those fall in a different category in my opinion.
I am much more interested in infrastructure related things and price optimizing. I've spent hours and days looking at all the options compiling resources and building scrapers to scrape information of servers and having them be made via LLM :) just to get the idea of context.
I don't know but like what i possess isn't a deep knowledge within the domain itself (one of the reasons why I love golang is that all the tradeoffs of it are okay with me and it's complexity just feels linear to me and I would have this simplicity in code where if I ever wanted to, I just feel so much more confident about tweaking LLM generated golang code than say rust)
A lot of what I love is the hacking around the project. Ooh so you used golang to make it cross compatible easier? Are you using the modernc driver? What servers are you gonna use? (hetzner,ovh,netcup etc.) while the code being completely open source and I will be transparent about how much the servers cost and how much I make in the middle and just some sustainable ideals so that it can be day one profitable but without ripping anyone off.
Y'know mixing and matching different services. I think I am really frugal so like this is like the deepest intersection of like all of my hobbies combined.
I face any problem -> use free llm from web -> python/golang code -> deploy it on my web server -> use cloudflare tunnels and custom scripts + zed/others and micro to deploy servers great (I prefer using tmux as well with zed terminal)
But even with all of this, I wouldn't say that the code isn't slop but I do feel like its pretty much reasonable and I have been vocal about how if I ever create something and a community actually occurs out of it & they want me to recreate it from scratch without any LLM assistance, I actually would even if that means reading documentations of all the libraries used in such golang project etc.
But like the reason why I still do things is because I do it for myself and I am pretty impatient. I build things which trouble me first and foremost to fix issues I have & that's kind of source of joy I have.
I don't know man, like I hate AI for all the psychological issues its gonna cause but I still want to build things without having to spend say days in a project when I would be facing the problem right now.
I think I have always imagined myself as some consultant who wants to give the best option out there and have the code back and manage it or similar.
It's just that writing the code part myself isn't the most exciting part to me. seeing computers go work the way I want to in the decision choices that I make and can justify is the most exciting part to me.
Like does this make sense? I am not exactly pro AI either, I have written so extensively about it here on how AI is a bubble and the psychological and social impact it has.
In a way, I don't think I fit in the two boxes of pro AI or completely anti AI. I just am in the middle and I don't know if there's a term for it but like, I don't know if someone knows a term for what I feel about AI it will be brilliant but even if there isn't a mainstream word for it. I just don't really want to change myself to fit in any box. I have my nuanced opinion and I have thought about joining either of these boxes but being honest neither fits my worldview.
Does this make sense?
Once again if HN is solely for the 1st sector of chefs 100%, then AI use should be completely restricted against
But if HN falls into what I call the 2nd category too then does it really matter if the local chef's using a recipe built by chatgpt?
I completely understand what you are saying man and the psychological effects are real.
And this is why I feel like if Hackernews is targetted for people in the 1st category or the 2nd
Because if there is a forum where both local shops who say makes fries which are built in less time and there is also the chef which takes hours building teh perfect food and both of them are on the same forum & they probably get the same space in it then a conflict between them is sort of meant to occur with all the effects which you mention and feels to me like a prisoners dilemma because if artisanal chefs are impacted by local normal cooks lets say then just being a local cook would get stigmatized in a forum. Overall its a net negative for both.
But it honestly depends on how negative if the eyeballs come on both, sure they can split and create different forums but neither wants to leave the large one and the large forum owner has had incentives in both artisanal and local cooks (YC funding AI companies and hackernews once being so damn creative that I hear stories about when one day the moderator decided to have the front page be all about erlang/elixir from a story I remember from a HN "veteran")
I mean I love em both. It's not an or condition but honestly what I hear in HN is the path of least resistance ie. if you don't like moderation, then make your own place but I do feel like the moderation's atleast a bit confused about their interests too.
Probably another reason why I am interested in fediverse because I want it to be like a street where we can have both artisanal chef clubs and the local shops fair while on the same road but a bit of problem with fediverse atleast in this context of HN alike is that lemmy's c/technology can probably replace HN in some contexts but the streets of lemmy are empty because everybody's still here on HN.
I suspect a big chunk of programming will turn into unity game dev/blender tutorial levels of quality. Developers being bamboozled by effectiveness of LLMs are a testament of how hard normies will fall for this crap, huge market ahead.