Hacker News

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

2026-02-1710:29522425www.arthurcnops.blog

← BackShow HN is Hacker News’ “showcase” page where makers show and discuss what they’ve built. A few days ago I shared my own project. I had good fun building that useless little internet experience.…

← Back

Show HN is Hacker News’ “showcase” page where makers show and discuss what they’ve built. A few days ago I shared my own project. I had good fun building that useless little internet experience. The post quickly disappeared from Show HN's first page, amongst the rest of the vibecoded pulp. To be clear, I'm fine with that, but the behavior was interesting to see. So I pulled some data to look closer.

What's Happening

Show HN of course isn't dead. You could even say it's more alive than ever. What has changed is the volume of posts and engagement per post. It's only natural when more projects are being built in a single weekend. There's less "Proof of Work".

From the business side of this, Johan Halse recently used the term Sideprocalypse: the end of the small indie developer's dream. Every idea has been built, marketed better, and SEO'd into oblivion by someone with more money.

Some cool projects aren't getting through this noise, which is a pity. Here are a few I thought were interesting:

  1. Neohabit
  2. OpenRun
  3. uForwarder

I just upvoted them!

Now, let's look at some data.

Volume Is Exploding

0 1.2k 2.4k 3.6k 4.8k 6.0k 2023-02 2023-08 2024-02 2024-08 2025-02 2025-08 2026-01 4.8k Show HN Volume Feb 2023 – Jan 2026 Show HN

0.0% 4.0% 8.0% 12.0% 16.0% 20.0% 2023-02 2023-08 2024-02 2024-08 2025-02 2025-08 2026-01 15.2% Show HN Share % of all HN stories Show HN

The Graveyard Is Growing

0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 2023-02 2023-08 2024-02 2024-08 2025-02 2025-08 2026-01 37.2% 26.2% 1-Point Posts % stuck at exactly 1 point Show HN Other

Show HN started out better than regular submissions. Now it's significantly worse.

The Shrinking Window

How long does a Show HN post stay on page 1 before being pushed off? During peak hours (US daytime):

0.0h 3.0h 6.0h 9.0h 12.0h 15.0h 2023-02 2023-08 2024-02 2024-08 2025-02 2025-08 2026-01 2.9h Est. Time on Page 1 Est. hours before pushed off (peak) Show HN

Discussion Is Dying Too

0.0 2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0 10.0 2023-02 2023-08 2024-02 2024-08 2025-02 2025-08 2026-01 3.1 Comments per Post Avg comments on Show HN posts Show HN

So Is Show HN Dead?

No. There's just more noise, and less opportunity to get attention and have a discussion with other folks on HN about your project. Some gems go completely unnoticed. Maybe something for HN to think about: how do these subjective "gems" get more spotlight? How does HN remain the coolest place to talk about the coolest tech?


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Comments

  • By marginalia_nu 2026-02-1710:5621 reply

    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 you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective.

    I feel like this is what AI has done to the programming discussion. It draws in boring people with boring projects who don't have anything interesting to say about programming.

    • By jbreckmckye 2026-02-1712:2610 reply

      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

      • By fainpul 2026-02-1714:047 reply

        People who got "enabled" by AI to produce stuff, just need to learn to keep their "target audience of one"-projects to themselves. Right now it feels like those fresh parents who show every person they meet the latest photos / videos of their baby, thinking everybody will find them super cute and interesting.

        • By marginalia_nu 2026-02-1716:255 reply

          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.

          • By CamperBob2 2026-02-1717:19

            At times, it seems like the only thing that has changed is that the dinguses don't bother crediting ChatGPT.

          • By disiplus 2026-02-1720:161 reply

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

            • By marginalia_nu 2026-02-1810:09

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

          • By 3vidence 2026-02-182:13

            My manager at work still does this in work chats and it drives me a bit crazy. If I want to k own what an LLMs take on the subject is I can just go ask it.

            The chat is for people to discuss people stuff.

          • By 8note 2026-02-182:47

            is it? im very happy with my cad tools, but im only going to show off the physical stuff i make with them, rather than the tools along the way.

          • By heliumtera 2026-02-1723:44

            >went into every thread and proudly announced what ChatGPT.

            That is what Show HN has become. Nobody cares what code Claude shat in response to a random person prompt. If I cared, I would be prompting Claude myself.

        • By protocolture 2026-02-180:59

          >People who got "enabled" by AI to produce stuff, just need to learn to keep their "target audience of one"-projects to themselves.

          This is what I do. I have tons of cool (to me) shit I have built with LLM assistance. I only wheel my dumb stuff out if its specifically relevant to someone.

          But I am also not doing it as a resume hobby, just as a hobby. A lot of people are trying to jump from hobby to career. The recognition is the point for some.

        • By gedy 2026-02-1723:55

          Some folks definitely give off a "How do you do, fellow coders?" vibe

        • By ch4s3 2026-02-182:031 reply

          I get that, and mostly agree but some people will really have the cutest kitten the most beautiful sunset photo. Hopefully we figure out how to discern as fast as we can churn.

          • By ehnto 2026-02-182:371 reply

            You get diminishing returns up there though, the cutest cat photo in the world would look remarkably similar to the next 2,000 photos of cats in the cutest cat photos leaderboard. I feel we should filter on diverse topics rather than best by metrics, perhaps we'll want to discern on concern.

            • By ch4s3 2026-02-189:04

              I for one am happy to live in a world awash in the cutest kittens.

        • By barrenko 2026-02-1717:10

          Like when Instagram / digital photography, that is not what you will get but you will see a lot of revealing body parts.

        • By wreath 2026-02-1717:53

          More like the fresh parents who start schooling everyone else on how to parent…

      • By dudeinhawaii 2026-02-1721:402 reply

        The other element here is that the vibecoder hasn't done the interesting thing, they've pulled other people's interesting things.

        Let's see, how to say this less inflamatory..

        (just did this) I sit here in a hotel and I wondered if I could do some fancy video processing on the video feed from my laptop to turn it into a wildlife cam to capture the birds who keep flying by.

        I ask Codex to whip something up. I iterate a few times, I ask why processing is slow, it suggests a DNN. I tell it to go ahead and add GPU support while its at it.

        In a short period of time, I have an app that is processing video, doing all of the detection, applying the correct models, and works.

        It's impressive _to me_ but it's not lost on me that all of the hard parts were done by someone else. Someone wrote the video library, someone wrote the easy python video parsers, someone trained and supplied the neural networks, someone did the hard work of writing a CUDA/GPU support library that 'just works'.

        I get to slap this all together.

        In some ways, that's the essence of software engineering. Building on the infinite layers of abstractions built by others.

        In other ways, it doesn't feel earned. It feels hollow in some way and demoing or sharing that code feels equally hollow. "Look at this thing that I had AI copy-paste together!"

        • By jihadjihad 2026-02-1721:51

          To me, part of what makes it feel hollow is that if we were to ask you about any of those layers, and why they were chosen or how they worked, you probably would stumble through an answer.

          And for something that is, as you said, impressive to you, that's fine! But the spirit of Show HN is that there was some friction involved, some learning process that you went through, that resulted in the GitHub link at the top.

        • By rustystump 2026-02-1721:59

          Idk.

          I saw this come out because my boss linked it as a faster chart lib. It is ai slop but people loved it. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706528]

          I knew i could do better so i made a version that is about 15kb and solves a fundamental issue with web gl context limits while being significantly faster.

          AI helped do alot of code esp around the compute shaders. However, i had the idea of how to solve the context limits. I also pushed past several perf bottlenecks that were from my fundamental lack of webgpu knowledge and in the process deepened my understanding of it. Pushing the bundle size down also stretched my understanding of js build ecosystems and why web workers still are not more common (special bundler setting for workers breaks often)

          Btw my version is on npm/github as chartai. You tell me if that is ai slop. I dont think it is but i could be wrong

      • By nativeit 2026-02-1717:281 reply

        I have yet to see any of these that wouldn’t have been far better off self-hosting an existing open source app. This habit of having an LLM either clone (or even worse, cobble together a vague facsimile) of existing software and claiming it as your own is just sort of sad.

        • By short_sells_poo 2026-02-1717:432 reply

          I actually came to this realization recently. I'm part of a modding community for a game, and we are seeing an influx of vibe coded mods. The one distinguishing feature of these is that they are entirely parasitic. They only take, they do not contribute.

          In the past, new modders would often contribute to existing mods to get their feet wet and quite often they'd turn into maintainers when the original authors burnt out.

          But vibe coders never do this. They basically unilaterally just take existing mods' source code, feed this into their LLM of choice and generate a derivative work. They don't contribute back anything, because they don't even try to understand what they are doing.

          Their ideas might be novel, but they don't contribute in any way to the common good in terms of capabilities or infrastructure. It's becoming nigh impossible to police this, and I fear the endgame is a sea of AI generated slop which will inevitably implode once the truly innovative stuff dies and and people who actually do the work stop doing so.

          • By godelski 2026-02-1721:31

            Even before vibe coding blew up I think this problem existed, but was slowly increasing. Vibe coding accelerated the problem.

            I think "good for you, you built a mod, but now I'm searching through 1000 entries that are all the same things and mostly shit".

            I think it's like many popular forums or Reddit communities. The shitty comments float to the top and all the replies are some meme or "me too". It doesn't help anyone else and it feels masturbatory.

          • By samiv 2026-02-1721:52

            That's the essence of the corporations behind these commercial products as well. Leech off of all the work of others and then sell a product that regurgitates that said work without attribution or any back contribution.

      • By yoyohello13 2026-02-1717:242 reply

        Sometimes 'gatekeeping' is a good thing.

        • By pesus 2026-02-1720:371 reply

          It often is. The concept of "gatekeeping" becoming well known and something people blindly rail against was a huge mistake. Not everything is for everyone, and "gatekeeping" is usually just maintaining standards.

          • By plagiarist 2026-02-1721:35

            Ideally the standard would just be someone's genuine interest in a project or a hobby. In the past, taking the effort to write code often was sufficient proof of that.

            AI agent coding has introduced to writing software a sort of interaction like what brands have been doing to social media.

        • By malfist 2026-02-1720:271 reply

          I think the word you're looking for is curation. Which people who don't pass jury might call gatekeeping.

          • By zahlman 2026-02-1720:55

            I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make, but it seems like you might be distinguishing between keeping out substandard work versus keeping out the submitters.

            In which case, I kinda disagree. Substandard work is typically submitted by people who don't "get it" and thus either don't understand the standard for work or don't care about meeting it. Either way, any future submission is highly likely to fail the standard again and waste evaluation time.

            Of course, there's typically a long tail of people who submit one work to a collection and don't even bother to stick around long enough to see how the community reacts to that work. But those people, almost definitionally, aren't going to complain about being "gatekept" when the work is rejected.

      • By zahlman 2026-02-1720:50

        To be fair, one probably needs at least one idea in order to build stuff even with AI. A prompt like "write a cool computer program and tell me what it does" seems unlikely to produce something that even the author of that prompt would deem worthy of showing to others.

      • By SCdF 2026-02-1712:533 reply

        Agreed, and were gonna see this everywhere that AI can touch. Our filter functions for books, video, music, etc are all now broken. And worst of all that breaking coincides with an avalanche of slop, making detection even harder.

        There is this real disconnect between what the visible level of effort implies you've done, and what you actually have to do.

        It's going to be interesting to see how our filters get rewired for this visually-impressive-but-otherwise-slop abundance.

        • By kykat 2026-02-1713:344 reply

          My prediction is that reputation will be increasingly important, certain credentials and institutions will have tremendous value and influence. Normal people will have a hard time breaking out of their community, and success will look like acquiring the right credentials to appear in the trusted places.

          • By b00ty4breakfast 2026-02-1717:52

            That's been the trajectory for at least the last 100 years, an endless procession of certifications. Just like you can no longer get a decent-paying blue collar job without at least an HS diploma or equivalent, the days of working in tech without a university education are drying up and have been doing so for a while now.

          • By lotsofpulp 2026-02-1714:161 reply

            The recent past was a nice respite from a strict caste system, but I guess we’re going back.

            • By ghaff 2026-02-1720:27

              I think the recent past was a respite in very specific contexts like software maybe. Others, like most blue collar jobs, were always more of an apprentice system. And, still others, like many branches of engineering, largely required degrees.

          • By cbm-vic-20 2026-02-1714:201 reply

            This isn't new- it's been happening for decades.

            • By vpribish 2026-02-1715:43

              Not new. No. But will be more.

          • By jbreckmckye 2026-02-1714:39

            Maybe my expensive university degree was worth it after all

        • By yoyohello13 2026-02-1717:332 reply

          I have a sci-fi series I've followed religiously for probably 10 years now. It's called the 'Undying Mercenaries' series. The author is prolific, like he's been putting out a book in this series every 6 months since 2011. I'm sure he has used ghost writers in the past, but the books were always generally a good time.

          Last year though I purchased the next book in the series and I am 99% sure it was AI generated. None of the characters behaved consistently, there was a ton of random lewd scenes involving characters from books past. There were paragraphs and paragraphs of purple prose describing the scene but not actually saying anything. It was just so unlike every other book in the series. It was like someone just pasted all the previous books into an LLM and pushed the go button.

          I was so shocked and disappointing that I paid good money for some AI slop I've stopped following the author entirely. It was a real eye opener for me. I used to enjoy just taking a chance on a new book because the fact that it made it through publishing at least implied some minimum quality standard, but now I'm really picky about what books I pick up because the quality floor is so much lower than in the past.

          • By SCdF 2026-02-1717:451 reply

            Yes, I have not bought a few books after reading their free chapters and getting suspicious.

            Honestly: there is SO much media, certainly for entertainment. I may just pretend nothing after 2022 exists.

            • By vitaflo 2026-02-1718:00

              When I do YouTube searches I tend to limit the search to video’s prior to 2022 for this reason.

          • By simoncion 2026-02-182:011 reply

            If you've some time to burn, write the author and/or his publisher and let them know that the guy's new ghostwriter sucks shit. If this is very seriously making your consider not picking up the next book in the series, be sure to mention that.

            If folks just stop purchasing the new books, they can imagine a reason for the lost sales that's convenient for them, but if folks tell them why they stopped purchasing, there's a lot less room for that kind of nonsense.

            • By yoyohello13 2026-02-183:04

              That’s a good idea actually. It’s easy to forget this kind of thing is an option.

        • By Eddy_Viscosity2 2026-02-1712:583 reply

          People will build AI 'quality detectors' to sort and filter the slop. The problem is of course it won't work very well and will drown all the human channels that are trying to curate various genres. I'm not optimistic about things not all turning into a grey sludge of similar mediocre material everywhere.

          • By dimwiddle 2026-02-1723:301 reply

            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!

            • By daheza 2026-02-184:391 reply

              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.

              • By Eddy_Viscosity2 2026-02-1812:31

                > 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.

          • By joncoded 2026-02-1715:32

            Exactly, and we will have those who will "game" the "detectors" like they already "game" the social media "algorithms" :\

          • By Eisenstein 2026-02-185:32

            I believe that a history of written work verified by stylometry will be a viable reputation system.

      • By SirFatty 2026-02-1713:095 reply

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

        Wait, what? That's a great benefit?

        • By dewey 2026-02-1713:141 reply

          Sure, there's many examples (I have a few personal ones as well) where I'm just building small tools and helpers for myself which I just wouldn't have done before because it would take me half a day. Or non-technical people at work that now just build some macros and scripts for Google Sheets that they would've never done before to automate little things.

          • By evilduck 2026-02-184:00

            I'm in the same boat. I use AI to generate tons of small things for work. None of it is shareable online because it's unique to my workplace and it's not some generic reusable tool, and for the most part the scripts are boring. Their most interesting attribute is how little effort they took, not their originality or grandness of scale.

        • By jbreckmckye 2026-02-1713:19

          I am being slightly sarcastic

        • By zahlman 2026-02-1721:00

          For those who want to have the stuff built, yes, it absolutely is.

      • By yieldcrv 2026-02-1721:39

        one of the base44 ads is hilarious about this

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLdaIxDM-_Y

      • By gitgud 2026-02-1720:501 reply

        > so projects are built whether or not they're good ideas

        Let’s be honest, this was always the case. The difference now is that nobody cares about the implementation, as all side projects are assumed to be vibecoded.

        So when execution is becoming easier, it’s the ideas that matter more…

        • By PaulHoule 2026-02-1721:241 reply

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

          • By dudeinhawaii 2026-02-1721:562 reply

            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 internal codebase is a mess and held together with AI duct-tape.

            In the past, this codebase wouldn't scale, the devs would quit, the project would stall, and most of the time the things written poorly would die off. Not every time, but most of the time -- or at least until someone wrote the thing better/faster/more efficiently.

            How can you differentiate between 10 identical products, 9 of which were vibecoded, and 1 of which wasn't. The one which wasn't might actually recover your backups when it fails. The other 9, whoops, never tested that codepath. Customers won't know until the edge cases happen.

            It's the app store affect but magnified and applied to everything. Search for a product, find 200 near-identical apps, all somehow "official" -- 90% of which are scams or low-effort trash.

            • By Otterly99 2026-02-199:22

              To play devil's advocate, if you were serious about building a product, whether it was hand-coded or vibe-coded, you would iterate through the work and implement functionalities step-by-step. But with vibe-coding, you might not give enough thoughts about the product to think of use cases. I think you can still build good software with varying degrees of AI assistance, but it takes the same effort of testing and user feedback to make it great.

            • By PaulHoule 2026-02-1820:02

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

      • By catchcatchcatch 2026-02-1713:13

        [dead]

    • By DrewADesign 2026-02-1717:191 reply

      ” The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”

      — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

      Some day I’m going to get a crystal ball for statistics. Getting bored with a project was always a thing— after the first push, I don’t encounter like 80% of my coding side projects until I’m cleaning— but I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed. I think a lot of what we’re seeing are projects that were easy enough to reach MVP before encountering the final 90% of coding time, which AI is a lot less useful for.

      • By tyre 2026-02-1717:283 reply

        > I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed

        My experience is the opposite. It’s so much easier to have an LLM grind the last mile annoyances (e.g. installing and debugging compilation bullshit on a specific raspberry pi + unmaintained 3p library versions.)

        I can focus on the parts I love, including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a minion.

        • By DrewADesign 2026-02-1723:552 reply

          > 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 quickly stands up really useful boilerplate and very convenient purpose-built scaffolding… but is a lot less useful helping you solve actual problems in a way that makes sense to people that have those problems. Especially if you’re using a less-mainstream language or some other component.

          • By tyre 2026-02-184:561 reply

            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 eInk screen for the first time and wanting to stream the currently playing album art to it. Claude made it so, so, so much easier to troubleshoot.

            • By DrewADesign 2026-02-1814:59

              > 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.

          • By holoduke 2026-02-185:321 reply

            My experience is that the AI is surprisingly good in providing solutions which fall in the last 20%. Examples are annoying ui challenges like proper placements or flow challenges. Or caching strategies. Or certain algorithm optimizations.

            • By DrewADesign 2026-02-192:29

              Having a design background, I find it to be a hindrance to quickly creating work that meets industry standards for things like user flow, or communicating state or purpose of UI elements through placement. I’d likely find it quite useful doing low-level bare metal stuff because I don’t have much experience doing that, but my output would probably be substandard from an expert’s standpoint.

              It’s really great at making us think we’re better and more productive than we really are.

        • By fuzzfactor 2026-02-1717:431 reply

          You both have very good points here, but once I get finished with both of the 90% programming times, and everything seems to finally work with no more bugs (and it's true), then for my heavy industry work I look forward to spending 10X as much effort testing compared to coding.

          • By plagiarist 2026-02-1721:40

            Oh yeah, especially if the domain is complex, trying to envision how it can fail is as fun of a puzzle as trying to make it correct.

        • By 8note 2026-02-182:52

          i dunno. the last 80% keeps being 80% and it just eats through tokens

    • By mchaver 2026-02-1711:162 reply

      I see a lot of projects repeated: screen capture tool, LLM wrapper, blog/newsletter, marketing tool for reddit/twitter, manage social media accounts. These things have been around for a while so it is really easy for an LLM to spit them out for someone that does not know how to code.

      • By mmarian 2026-02-1714:29

        It's because the common belief that you should build copies of whatever SaaS makes decent money. What they don't mention is that people need to have a very good reason why they decide to go for your bare-bones MVP instead of a well-established solution.

      • By hypercube33 2026-02-1712:001 reply

        Agreed. I'm over here working on Quake 2 mods and reverse engineering Off world trading company so I can finish an open source server for it using AI.

        Thing is I worked manually on both of these a lot before I even touched Claude on them so I basically was able to hit my wishlist items that I don't have time to deal with these days but have the logic figured out already.

        • By 1123581321 2026-02-183:16

          Whoa, that caught my eye. Offworld Trading Company is one of my favorite RTSes. What are you looking to do with the open source server?

    • By xnx 2026-02-1712:27

      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.

    • By onetimeusename 2026-02-1717:115 reply

      I think that's a fear I have about AI for programming (and I use them). So let's say we have a generation of people who use AI tools to code and no one really thinks hard about solving problems in niche spaces. Though we can build commercial products quickly and easily, no one really writes code for difficult problem spaces so no one builds up expertise in important subdomains for a generation. 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? How will AI be able to do new things well if it was trained on what people wrote previously and no one writes novel code themselves? It seems to me like AI is pretty dependent on having a corpus of human made code so, for example, I am not sure if it will be able to learn how to write very highly optimized code for some ISA in the future.

      • By wreath 2026-02-1717:524 reply

        > 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?

        • By righthand 2026-02-1717:57

          The general answer is what they’re already doing: ignoring the facts and riding the wave.

        • By lowbloodsugar 2026-02-1718:231 reply

          Is it hard to imagine that things will just stay the same for 20-30 years or longer? Here is an example of the B programming language from 1969, over 50 years ago:

            printn(n,b) {
   extrn putchar;
   auto a;

   if(a=n/b) /* assignment, not test for equality */
      printn(a, b); /* recursive */
   putchar(n%b + '0');
  }
          You'd think we'd have a much better way of expressing the details of software, 50 years later? But here we are, still using ASCII text, separated by curly braces.

          • By SoftTalker 2026-02-1719:56

            I observed this myself at least 10 years ago. I was reflecting on what I had done in the approximately 30 years I had been programming at that time, and how little had fundamentally changed. We still programmed by sitting at a keyboard, entering text on a screen, running a compiler, etc. Some languages and methodologies had their moments in the sun and then faded, the internet made sharing code and accessing documentation and examples much easier, but the experience of programming had changed little since the 1980s.

        • By sockaddr 2026-02-183:401 reply

          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.

          • By c22 2026-02-189:462 reply

            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?

            • By plopz 2026-02-1815:261 reply

              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.

              • By c22 2026-02-1819:04

                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.

            • By Jean-Papoulos 2026-02-1811:251 reply

              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

              • By c22 2026-02-1815:06

                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?

        • By Eisenstein 2026-02-185:36

          I don't think that more code makes LLMs better at writing code past a certain point.

      • By fastasucan 2026-02-1721:24

        >So let's say we have a generation of people who use AI tools to code and no one really thinks hard about solving problems in niche spaces.

        I don't think we need to wait a generation either. This probably was a part of their personality already, but a group of people developers on my job seems to have just given up on thinking hard/thinking through difficult problems, its insane to witness.

      • By atomic128 2026-02-1719:083 reply

        Exactly. Prose, code, visual arts, etc. AI material drowns out human material. AI tools disincentivize understanding and skill development and novelty ("outside the training distribution"). Intellectual property is no longer protected: what you publish becomes de facto anonymous common property.

        Long-term, this is will do enormous damage to society and our species.

        The solution is that you declare war and attack the enemy with a stream of slop training data ("poison"). You inject vast quantities of high-quality poison (inexpensive to generate but expensive to detect) into the intakes of the enemy engine.

        LLMs are highly susceptible to poisoning attacks. This is their "Achilles' heel". See: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

        We create poisoned git repos on every hosting platform. Every day we feed two gigabytes of poison to web crawlers via dozens of proxy sites. Our goal is a terabyte per day by the end of this year. We fill the corners of social media with poison snippets.

        There is strong, widespread support for this hostile posture toward AI. For example, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...

        Join us. The war has begun.

        • By nz 2026-02-1915:11

          Originally posted this comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073581), but relevant to this subthread too.

          The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if property theft is perfectly acceptable, and if they own most of the property (intellectual or otherwise), then there can only be _upside_ for less fortunate people like us.

          The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.

          (There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).

        • By tormeh 2026-02-1720:451 reply

          This will happen regardless. LLMs are already ingesting their own output. At the point where AI output becomes the majority of internet content, interesting things will happen. Presumably the AI companies will put lots of effort into finding good training data, and ironically that will probably be easier for code than anything else, since there are compilers and linters to lean on.

          • By WD-42 2026-02-1722:20

            I've thought about this and wondered if this current moment is actually peak AI usefulness: the snr is high but once training data becomes polluted with it's own slop things could start getting worse, not better.

        • By plagiarist 2026-02-1721:461 reply

          I was wondering if anyone was doing this after reading about LLMs scraping every single commit on git repos.

          Nice. I hope you are generating realistic commits and they truly cannot distinguish poison from food.

          • By atomic128 2026-02-1721:59

            Refresh this link 20 times to examine the poison: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/

            The cost of detecting/filtering the poison is many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of generating it.

      • By plagiarist 2026-02-1721:42

        AI will be trained on the code it wrote, our feedback on that code, and the final clean architecture(?) working(?) result after that feedback.

      • By 8note 2026-02-182:54

        i dont think we'll see that, because the niche spaces are people from other disciplines who do some code but dont consider coding important.

        theyve already thought about it before reaching for code as a solution

    • By foxmoss 2026-02-1717:205 reply

      As someone who posts blogs and projects out of my own enjoyment, no AI for code generation, handed edited blog, I still have no idea how to signal to people that I actually know what I’m talking about. Every step of the process could’ve been done by an LLM, albeit worse, so I don’t have a way of signifying my projects as something different. Considering putting a “No LLMs used in this project” tag at the start but that feels a little tacky.

      • By veggiepirate 2026-02-1718:171 reply

        "This repository contains only [Organic] and [Hand-Made] ingredients."

        It seems silly, but I know I'm more likely to review an implementation if can learn more about the author's state of mind by their style.

        • By iugtmkbdfil834 2026-02-1719:48

          I had a similar thought way back when. It goes back to what is important to the person reviewing it be it the style, form or just whether it works for their use case. In the case of organic food, I did not even know I was living living a healthy lifestyle until I came to US. But now organic is just another label, played by marketing people just like anything else.

          As I may have noted before, humans are the problem.

      • By PaulHoule 2026-02-1717:40

        Communicating that you know what you are talking about and that you're different is a lot of work. I think being visibly "anti-AI" makes you look as much of an NPC as someone who "vibe coded XYZ." It takes care, consistency and most of all showing people something they've never seen before. It also helps to get in the habit of doing in person demos, if you want to win hackathons it really helps to be good at (1) giving demos on stage and (2) have a sense of what it takes to make something that is good to demo.

        I have two projects right now on the threshold of "Show HN" that I used AI for but could have completed without AI. I'm never going to say "I did this with AI". For instance there is this HR monitor demo

        https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/

        which needs tuning up for mobile (so I can do an in-person demo to people who work on HRV) but most all being able to run with pre-recorded data so that people who don't have a BTLE HR monitor can see how cool it is.

        Another thing I am tuning up for "never saw anything like this" impact is a system of tokens that I give people when I go out as-a-foxographer

        https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840

        I am used to marketing funnels having 5% effectiveness and it blows my mind that at least 75% of the tokens I give out get scanned and that is with the old conventional cards that have the same back side. The number + suit tokens are particularly good as a "self-working demo" because it is easy to talk about them, when somebody flags me down because they noticed my hood I can show them a few cards that are all different and let them choose one or say "Look, you got the 9 of Bees!"

      • By righthand 2026-02-1717:56

        You’re not actually at risk of being labeled as LLM user until someone comes and make that claim about your work. So my advice is to not try to fight a preemptive battle on your tone and adjust when/if that day comes.

        Side note: I’d think installing Anubis over your work would go a long way to signaling that but ymmv.

      • By anthonypasq 2026-02-1719:441 reply

        > I still have no idea how to signal to people that I actually know what I’m talking about.

        presumably if this is true, it should be obvious by the quality of your product. If it isnt, then maybe you need to need to rethink the value of your artisanal hand written code.

        • By IsTom 2026-02-1720:15

          I think that the problem is that LLMs are good at making plausible-looking text and discerning if a random post is good or bad requires effort. And it's really bad when signal-to-noise ratio is low, due to slop being easier to make.

      • By tverbeure 2026-02-1719:07

        I added the following at the top of the blog post that I wrote yesterday: "All words in this blog post were written by a human being."

        I don't particularly care if people question that, but the source repo is on GitHub: they can see all the edits that were made along the way. Most LLMs wouldn't deliberately add a million spelling or grammar mistakes to fake a human being... yet.

        As for knowing what I'm talking about. Many of my blog posts are about stuff that I just learned, so I have many disclaimers that the reader should take everything with a grain of salt. :-) That said: I put a ridiculous amount of time in these things to make sure it's correct. Knowing that your stuff will be out there for others to criticize if a great motivator to do your homework.

    • By jebarker 2026-02-1717:59

      > a tool is a tool

      > author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space

      I’ve stopped saying that “AI is just a tool” to justify/defend its use precisely because of this loss of thought you highlight. I now believe the appropriate analogy is “AI is delegation”.

      So talking to the vibe coder that’s used AI is like talking to a high level manager rather than the engineer for human written code

    • By rubslopes 2026-02-1713:081 reply

      I predict that now that coding has become a commodity, smart young people drawn to technical problem-solving will start choosing other career paths over programming. I just don't know which ones, since AI seems to be commoditizing every form of engineering work.

      • By argee 2026-02-1714:20

        When I was growing up (millennial) it seemed to me that the default for smart young people drawn to technical problem solving was something like aerospace, software or hardware was more or less a fun hobby, like it was for Steve Wozniak. Nobody cared whether or which of these were a commodity, which is what happens when you actually enjoy something.

        These days I do see a lot of people choosing software for the money. Notably, many of them are bootcamp graduates and arguably made a pivot later in life, as opposed to other careers (such as medicine) which get chosen early. Nothing wrong with that (for many it has a good ROI), but I don’t think this changed anything about people with technical hobbies.

        When you’re young, you tend not to choose the path the rest of your life will take based on income. What your parents want for you is a different matter…

    • By koakuma-chan 2026-02-1711:011 reply

      One thing about vibe coding is that unless you are an expert in what you have vibe coded, you have no idea if it actually works properly, and it probably doesn't.

      • By numpad0 2026-02-1712:051 reply

        Worse yet, if you're not an expert(with autodidacts potentially qualifying), your ideas won't be original anyway.

        You'll be inventing a lot of novel cicular apparatus with a pivot and circumferencrial rubber absorbers for transportation and it'll take people serious efforts to convince you it's just a wheel.

        • By marginalia_nu 2026-02-1712:491 reply

          In most domains, working on a project for a few years will make you an expert.

          • By koakuma-chan 2026-02-1712:501 reply

            Working? Maybe. Prompting? Unlikely.

            • By fuzzfactor 2026-02-1717:52

              And in some other domains it takes a few decades to get to the top technically, not just a few years.

    • By LoveMortuus 2026-02-1810:11

      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.

    • By parpfish 2026-02-1718:53

      i think that there are a few distinct usecases for ShowHN that lead to conflicting visions:

      * some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a business they're trying to start and they want to get marketing

      * some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's involves some cool tech under the hood and they want to talk shop

      * some people want to show off a fun project/toy/product that they built because it's a fun thing and they just want some people to have fun

    • By barrell 2026-02-184:31

      I feel like my experience with Show HN has been pretty confusing.

      Two years ago, I started work on https://phrasing.app. Extreme MVP, and a few people using the buggiest software I’ve ever seen. The Show HN took off and I collected thousands of emails.

      I then spent two years grinding. I put in over 10k hours into the project. I ended up turning that crappy mvp into a product I’m genuinely proud of. I know have actual users I don’t know who pay me money and LOVE the product. I myself am using it to learn several languages, most of which I was unable to learn before due to a lack of resources.

      I then posted multiple times in Show HN. Crickets.

      Yet in the past few months, I’ve seen multiple vibe-coded fraudulent Show HN posts in the language learning space take off. They were eventually flagged but still, it’s just weird to see low effort projects get such massive interest.

      I’m sure it’s a skill issue, but my experience is kind of painting show hn in the opposite light you do.

      Hope this didn’t come across jaded, it’s just been on my mind (and confusing me) for a while now and felt quite relevant to share here.

    • By airstrike 2026-02-1711:305 reply

      we need a Vibe HN

      • By elcapitan 2026-02-1712:121 reply

        Prompter News

      • By encom 2026-02-1721:091 reply

        This, but unironically. Every submission should have an "AI?" checkbox, to indicate if the content submitted is about AI or made by AI, because I'm just absolutely fed up with 2/3 of HN front page being slop or meta-slop.

        I'm not an anti-AI luddite, but for gods sake talk about (ie. submit) something else!

        • By teo_zero 2026-02-186:28

          Yes please! I don't know what's worse: reading an AI-generated post or several comments that go like "I've spotted an em-dash, it must be AI generated".

      • By fuzzfactor 2026-02-1711:501 reply

        That may be something.

        Having too may subs could get out of hand, but sometimes you end up with so much paperwork generated so fast that it needs its own dedicated whole drawer in your filing cabinet ;)

        • By fuzzfactor 2026-02-1717:331 reply

          Sorry about that, didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings :(

          It's still early and easy to underestimate the number of visitors who would absolutely love to have the main page more covered in absolute pure vibe than it is recently.

          I would like to hear opinions as to why the non-human touch is preferred, that could add something that not many are putting into words.

          Hopefully it's not a case of the lights being on but nobody's home :(

          • By airstrike 2026-02-1721:09

            Sorry you got downvoted. People downvote for the most inane reasons here. Don't take it personally!

      • By reconnecting 2026-02-1711:47

        listen_to_what_the_man_said.stm

      • By co_king_5 2026-02-1718:00

        [dead]

    • By BananaPelican 2026-02-1722:351 reply

      I have a project that I'm hoping to launch on show HN in the next few days which was built entirely with the help of AI agents.

      It's taken me about month; currently at ~500 commits. I've been obsessed with this problem for ~6 weeks and have made an enormous amount of progress, but admittedly I'm not an expert in the domain.

      Being intentionally vague, because I don't want to tip my hand until it's ready. The problem is related to an existing open source tool in a particular scientific niche which flatly does not work on an important modern platform. My project, an open source repo, brings this important legacy tool to this modern platform and also offers a highly engaging visual demo that is of general interest, even to a layperson not interested in programming or this particular scientific niche.

      I genuinely believe I have something valuable to offer to this niche scientific community, but also as a general interest and curiosity to HN for the programming aspects (I put a lot of thought into the architecture) as well as the visual aspects (I put a lot of thought into the design and aesthetics).

      Do you have any advice on how to present this work in a compelling way to people who understandably feels as burned out on AI slop as you do?

      • By Otterly99 2026-02-1910:48

        Just my opinion, but if you present it in a way that first explains the problematic, then explain what other similar tool fail to solve, and have a genuine understanding of the tool in the sense that you can understand and answer questions to generate a discussion, it doesn't matter much how it was coded. The "slop" part of the AI really comes down to having a vague idea for a tools, barely doing any research if the problem has been solved and generating a tool that nobody asked for and that you barely know, there is not much room for an interesting discussion.

    • By ModernMech 2026-02-1722:241 reply

      > I think the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring.

      Agreed. r/ProgrammingLanguages had to deal with this recently in the same way HN has to; people were submitting these obviously vibecoded languages there that barely did anything, just a deluge of "make me a language that does X", where it doesn't actually do X or embody any of the properties that were prompted.

      One thing that was pointed out was "More often than not the author also doesn't engage with the community at all, instead they just share their project across a wide range of subreddits." I think HN is another destination for those kinds of AI slop projects -- I'm sure you could find every banned language posted on that forum posted here.

      Their solution was to write a new rule and just ban them outright. Things have been going much better since.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1pf9j...

      • By kranner 2026-02-182:21

        r/macapps is also putting new requirements in place [1], requiring among other things a statement of what your app solves, how it's better than existing solutions and even a changelog/roadmap.

        I would bet just the first two text fields would be enough to catch out vibecoders.

        [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1r6d06r/new_post_r...

    • By Gigacore 2026-02-1714:092 reply

      I shared a well-thought vibecoded app on ShowHN last month. It took a few hours to get POC and two weeks to fully develop a product to meet my requirements. Nobody cared.

      • By ohyoutravel 2026-02-1717:102 reply

        You’re part of the problem.

        • By CuriouslyC 2026-02-1719:02

          The problem is we're all stuck in a cut throat game of musical chairs in an eroding industry, with almost all organic platforms locked down and billion dollar orgs trying their damnedest to funnel you into pay2play.

        • By Gigacore 2026-02-185:04

          How do you solve it?

      • By marginalia_nu 2026-02-1718:051 reply

        Sqfty?

        I mean it's a real problem, but it's also a solved problem, and also not a problem that comes up a lot unless you're doing the sort of engineering where you're using a CAD tool already.

        I don't doubt it's useful, and seems pretty well crafted what little I tried it, but it doesn't really invite much discussion.

        • By kranner 2026-02-182:161 reply

          Also, just a URL with no explanation and no supporting text in the post.

          If the poster can't be bothered to talk about why they made it... actually it's not even that. Just say hello, at least a hello. Show your audience you're a person. Humans like to talk to other humans.

          • By Gigacore 2026-02-185:08

            I will take note of that. Thanks for pointing.

    • By ungreased0675 2026-02-1718:18

      I had a light bulb come on reading your comment. Yes! When I read Show HN posts that are clearly missing key information, it makes me care less because the author didn’t care to learn the space they’d like to play in.

    • By righthand 2026-02-180:40

      > the author (pilot?)

      Viber

    • By verdverm 2026-02-1711:42

      > the vibe coded show HN projects are overall pretty boring

      concur, perhaps a dedicated or alternative, itch.io like area named "Slop HN:..."

    • By fdefitte 2026-02-180:271 reply

      The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise.

      • By lelanthran 2026-02-185:06

        > The filter used to be effort. You had to care enough to spend weeks on something, which meant you probably understood the problem deeply. Now that filter is gone and we get a flood of "I prompted this in 20 minutes" posts where the author can't answer a single follow-up about their own code. The interesting Show HNs still exist, they're just buried under noise.

        More's the pity. I'm prepping for a ShowHN with a completely hand-coded project I started in December. It will be finished around end-march. I vibe-coded all the docs, because I spent all the time on the code.

        I have no idea if the ShowHN is going to be at all useful, but I pivoted multiple times on various implementation things. Had it been coded by an AI, I don't think there would be any pivot.

        The value is precisely from the pivots. An AI would have plodded on ahead anyway with a broken model for the problem-space.

    • By HugoDz 2026-02-1713:00

      [dead]

  • By phaser 2026-02-1711:245 reply

    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, creative and energetic anymore. The outlook of competing with 20 year old sloptimists in the job market made me really anxious.

    Upon seeing people enjoying my little game, even if it's just a few HNers, I found an "I still got it" feeling that pushed me to release on Steam, to good reviews.

    It was never about the money, it was about recovering my self confidence. Thank you HN, I will return the favour and be the guy checking the new products you launch. If Show HN is drowning, i will drown with it.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137953

    • By vdupras 2026-02-1711:412 reply 

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

    • By rijavecb 2026-02-1721:09

      I missed your Show HN, but I got the game now. Looks fun, and the fact that each citizen is simulated reminds me of Banished, which I enjoyed playing! Was happy to spend some wallet money I got from CSGO cases.

      Thank you for making it, and don't give up. Passion and vision > vibe coding sloptimists.

    • By carabiner 2026-02-1717:592 reply

      Your site https://microlandia.city and OP blog https://www.arthurcnops.blog/death-of-show-hn/ as well as most personal sites posted on HN are almost always inaccessible via my corporate job's firewall. Does anyone know why this is? Something with security certificate? They're not explicitly blocked, because you get a "this is blocked" page in that case. With these sites they just show a "can't connect" error.

      • By tempaccount5050 2026-02-1718:061 reply

        They probably have a newly registered domain rule.

        • By netrap 2026-02-1718:32

          Seems like .blog .city etc are just banned via cisco umbrella policies...

      • By BrokenCogs 2026-02-1720:38

        You shouldn't be browsing games while working, that's why

    • By DetroitThrow 2026-02-1723:05

      Wow so cool! I think a big part of the Show HN slop are GitHub links or libraries that haven't even been read or used by their authors outside of the test suite on their local machine.

      I'm sure a happy medium is shutting off links to vibe coded source code, and only letting vibed hosted applications or websites. For us who want to read code, source code that means nothing to anyone is pretty disappointing for a Show HN.

    • By sph 2026-02-1711:302 reply

      [flagged]

      • By htnthrow11220 2026-02-1712:541 reply

        It’s good to keep your skepticism but at some point you have to be able to recognize normal human usage of these conventions.

        And as we all read more AI content and talk to chatbots, that will influence how we do our own writing as well, humans will start to sound more like LLMs.

        • By phaser 2026-02-1713:13

          yeah! I love the em-dash — they really took it away from us :(

      • By phaser 2026-02-1712:46

        I get that a lot. I’ve wondered why. It’s a bit sad and funny at the same time. I’m not a native english speaker which makes it even more confusing…

  • By dang 2026-02-1717:4327 reply

    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.

    • By password4321 2026-02-1717:566 reply

      I recommend making "What are you working on [this weekend/weekly]" official like whoishiring and encouraging pre-Show HN comments there. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041973#47043174 "what's the right venue for sharing [LLM-built side projects]")

      Also requiring disclosure of the use of AI in repos and especially (or perhaps specifically discouraging its use) when responding with comments to HN feedback.

      I'll take this opportunity to strongly encourage sharing prompts (the newest tier of software source code) as the logical progression of OSS adding additional value to Show HN.

      • By bostik 2026-02-1718:46

        Combining the two approaches might work. A "pre-moderation queue" for submissions that are are solid enough to pass the "Show" bar, and then the monthly "what are you working on" threads as a more free-form creative outlet.

        And yes, disclosing the use of AI should be par for the course.

      • By itake 2026-02-183:06

        My issues with the super posts is its really hard to grep for relevant information.

        I've tried asking ChatGPT to recommend projects based on my interests, but ChatGPT heavily hallucinated or projected my interests onto irrelevant projects (for example, a project might be about developing a new programming language and chatgpt was like, "you could use this in your soap making hobby!").

        The Who's Hiring posts have community sponsored indexers and its easy for me to query job titles relevant to me, but keyword search is not as useful here.

      • By nickpsecurity 2026-02-184:19

        Bruce Schneier had the Friday Squid Blogging posts that he allowed random stuff on. Most of the noise was contained in the Friday threads.

        Lobsters had a weekly thread by caius called, "What are you doing this week?" People would post personal projects or experiences in it. On top of interesting tech, that let us pray more specifically for and encourage some in need.

        The weekly threads might work here.

      • By jasondigitized 2026-02-1721:37

        My new favorite thing to do is grab the 'What are you working on threads' and have a LLM group them categorically with one line descriptions of each app.

      • By yuppiepuppie 2026-02-1718:473 reply

        Interesting take on the sharing of prompts. I don’t think this is a bad idea. How would this work though given different prompts occur in different context windows?

        • By trollbridge 2026-02-1719:09

          Internally, we have a standard that any AI written code simply includes a cut-and-paste of the chat prompt (if that were used), and/or the .md files (if those were used).

        • By password4321 2026-02-1720:38

          I would like to see it as extended comments in each git commit. There have been a few examples of some doing so manually but it needs to be supported by the tooling... with all the half-arsed "standards" like MCP etc. I'm surprised there isn't something already.

        • By eshaham78 2026-02-1719:06

          [dead]

      • By acnops 2026-02-1718:51

        Sharing prompts, not sure it works if your project required hundreds of prompts? It’s all in history though (.jsonl) so I’m sure the AI can condense it somehow.

    • By codingdave 2026-02-1718:422 reply

      What I see is new users who are trying to share something without having yet understood HN. I get the impression that they think of "Show HN" as no different than "Show and Tell", and that putting the label on their post is communicating the message of "Here is something I want people to see", instead of "Here is something you can try out".

      So while I understand that new features on HN are few and far between, a quick validation of "Show HN" posts that says, "I see you are trying to post a Show HN..." with some concise explanation of the guidelines might help. I want to believe that most new users mean well, they just need better explanations.

      • By embedding-shape 2026-02-1721:16

        > What I see is new users who are trying to share something without having yet understood HN.

        From their perspective, HN is another place to post and get views on their project, part of a check list for their "launch" or whatever, not everything comes from within the ecosystem.

        Some posts their projects then never reply to any of the comments, while for me (and many others I bet) half the reason of posting a Show HN is because I'm looking for participating in discussions about my thing and understanding different perspectives thinking about it too.

        > I want to believe that most new users mean well, they just need better explanations.

        Yeah, so far the only thing I know of is the "Please read the Show HN rules and tips before posting" blurb on the /show list, and the separate pages. Maybe some interstitial or similar if the title prefix-matches with "Show HN" could display the rules, guidelines and "netiquette" more prominently and get more people to be aware of it.

      • By ThrowawayR2 2026-02-181:39

        The explanation should also prominently include a "no advertising or marketing" admonition since the submitters that don't mean well often seem to think putting Show HN will let them get away with it.

    • By n_e 2026-02-1718:412 reply

      Not sure if it would work for HN / how it could be adapted to HN, but something I noticed on opensource projects, is that once they hit a hurdle, submitters of low quality AI-written PRs don't try to solve it and go elsewhere.

      For example, in one project, PRs have to be submitted to the "next" branch and not the default branch. This is written in the CONTRIBUTING.md file, which is linked in the PR template, with the mention that PRs that don't respect that will be close. Most if not all submitters of low-quality PRs don't do anything once their initial PR is closed.

      Pretty bummed about that as I just submitted a show HN I'm pretty happy about (it solves an annoying problem I had for years, which I know many people have) and I was looking forward to talk about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050872)

      • By veyh 2026-02-1719:541 reply

        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 posted by someone else before them.

        • By lelanthran 2026-02-188:271 reply

          > 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 might miss a single line in a three pages of text, but the LLM won't.

          I am starting to think that a better approach might be to move to mailing lists; this means that valuable drive-by PRs (like I did in the past) are going to be unintended victims by preventing all drive-by PRs, because the friction is too high. Submitted needs to have an email address, make sure it isn't marked as spam, sign up to the mailing list, email their PR, wait for a response, etc.

          The upside is that projects can start marking that email address as spam if it submits AI slop. The downside is that actually valuable drive-by PRs will be a thing of the past.

          • By veyh 2026-02-1819:43

            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.

      • By ToucanLoucan 2026-02-1718:45

        > For example, in one project, PRs have to be submitted to the "next" branch and not the default branch. This is written in the CONTRIBUTING.md file, which is linked in the PR template, with the mention that PRs that don't respect that will be close. Most if not all submitters of low-quality PRs don't do anything once their initial PR is closed.

        Few things in life are as reliable and trustworthy as the laziness of others.

    • By gwern 2026-03-025:091 reply

      The review queue is not going to work, unless you have millions of dollars to spare. No one is interested in providing such extremely laborious skilled labor to be thrown away on one-off tweaks of someone's self-promotion of their AI slop, forgotten within the day, and if they are, the ever-escalating flood will soon burn out their remaining altruism.

      My suggestion would be more radical: if it's AI written, the code is increasingly irrelevant. What is relevant is the prompt or spec: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47198562 'Show HN' should ban "code-only" submissions if not majority human-written, and allow only "prompt/doc/test only" 'Show HNs'.

      I am interested in a vibecoded project which was a well thought out goal or an interesting methodology or a striking prompt engineering trick (eg. the Anthropic Rust C compiler targeting the Linux kernel); I'm not interested in a obvious idea where I'm supposed to be impressed by a huge pile of rotting-code-debt of unknown quality and likely a lot of bugs, which is going to be written by a LLM in a few months anyway.

      > "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." ---Fred Brooks, _The Mythical Man Month_ (1975)

      • By dang 2026-03-0222:441 reply

        That's very much in keeping with the proposal I floated last week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096202) and again yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213630), and I'd love it if we could make it work. Basically what we want is the source code, and generated code by definition is not source.

        The problem is that it's not clear exactly what format that takes nowadays. If it were a single one-shot prompt, you could share that. Ditto if it were a single session with Claude Code or whatever. But the iteration loops going on here are much more complex and noisy than that.

        So where I'm currently at is: we'd be willing to build something to support this, but what would we build? What would be the a v0 of this or, to use pg's old phrase, the first quantum of utility?

        • By gwern 2026-03-032:16

          People are making a big deal of the fact that there's multiple prompts or interactions, but so what? That's true of source code too! The final commit doesn't reflect every last keystroke or thing you ever said while working on it; you may have had a long conversation with your coworkers, but then you kept only the summary part that mattered. It is the final, distilled, comprehensive patch.

          So the requirement should be that there is a prompt, or set of prompts, plus documentation, which distill out everything learned or done in a single master prompt which then suffices to build a similarly capable codebase. ('Reproducibility' in the sense of replication, getting roughly the same result, not 'reproducibility' in the sense of bit-identical builds. (This is just 'compaction' on steroids, and something I generally do not have problem doing with my own LLM creative writing, no matter how many iterations or conversations it took to get to the final idea.)

          If it s not possible to create such a thing for a codebase, even with the vibecoded artifact at hand, then that raises an awful lot of questions about the quality or what went wrong, and the requirement is doing its job of keeping a Superfund site away from the rest of us.

          The v0 is just this requirement. If you find that people are lying about it (which they probably will for the same reasons that they lie about Show HNs not being vibecoded or front page slop not being slop eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47205208 ), then you can start enforcing it simply by requiring someone else to have run the prompts and found the final result to be reasonably useful and as advertised.

    • By evrenesat 2026-02-1718:275 reply

      In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator. If it's completed within a few days, it should require more thorough human review. On the other hand, if the project has been active for a while and received contributions spread throughout that timeline, I think that would indicate accumulated effort (human and/or AI) and higher quality.

      • By hgs3 2026-02-1723:57

        > In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator.

        You can’t necessarily judge by timeline. I’ve always developed my projects privately and then squashed to one initial public commit. I’ve got a private repo now with thousands of commits developed over years and I still intend to squash.

      • By tptacek 2026-02-1722:17

        Show HN has never been restricted to open source projects and it would be weird to make the criteria more restrictive for open source than closed source work.

      • By acnops 2026-02-1718:53

        I thought so too, untill I looked for 1-point Show HN posts with a repo with a long commit history. Some of these are really cool (see my article), but others were not compelling at all, at least to me.

      • By lelanthran 2026-02-188:28

        Not a good bar - I develop projects privately, and make public only when I am good and ready.

      • By accurrent 2026-02-1718:341 reply

        Eh IMO any metric like this can be gamed. My project that reached hn front page was coded in a short time (and yes some ai was used), but otoh I think it was something that showed hey you can do this really interesting thing (in my case vlm based indoor location).

        Also its not uncommon for weekend projects to be done in a shprt span with just a "first commit" message dump even pre-AI.

        • By evrenesat 2026-02-1718:452 reply

          Yes, any metric can be gamed. But I believe measuring the entropy of a repository, comparing state of the code-base over time can be done deterministically, which would make it harder to game it.

          So either we are going to completely avoid automation and create a community council to decide what deserves to be shown to rest of the community or just let best AI models to decide if a project is worth show up on front page?

          Or we can do all of the above :)

          • By saghm 2026-02-1719:37

            Isn't it possible to fabricate the timestamps on commits and then push them up all at once? If you're planning on literally checking that the commits are publicly available for a certain amount of time, that seems like it would needlessly punish projects that someone worked on offline and then happened to push up once it was completed.

          • By accurrent 2026-02-1719:21

            What about hardware projects without a code base? Those are fun too and deserve front page

            I suspect automating "code base over time" metric is tricky. Not everyone will be using git or a vcs and somethings dont need a codebase to be shared.

    • By mentalgear 2026-02-1718:08

      Unfortunately there's now a whole cotton-industry of "vibe-coding classes and marketing" (similar to "life-coaching" on socials) that probably target HN as well. I think HN needs to think a layer of abstraction "higher" and model around some collection of semantics/metrics that allow to filter out "gloss without quality" vaporware or voting ring tactics.

    • By tomxor 2026-02-1718:213 reply

      How about inverting the issue, highlight posts with an opt in label. e.g

        Show HN [NOAI]:
      Since it's too controversial to ban LLM posts, and would be too easy for submitters to omit an [LLM] label... Having an opt in [NOAI] label allows people to highlight their posts, and LLM posts would be easy to flag to disincentivise polluting the label.

      This wouldn't necessarily need to be a technical change, just an intuitive agreement that posts containing LLM or vibe coded content are not allowed to lie by using the tag, or will be flagged... Then again it could also be used to elevate their rank above other show HN content to give us humanoids some edge if deemed necessary, or a segregated [NOAI] page.

      [edit]

      The label might need more thought, although "NOAI" is short and intelligible, it might be seen as a bit ironic to have to add a tag containing "AI" into your title. [HUMAN]?

      • By embedding-shape 2026-02-1719:09

        I'm 90% sure this will end with endless squabbles who's right that the label is correct/incorrect, rather than actual conversations about what the project that the person is showing. It already happens without the labels, feels like it'd increase the frequency of that even more if this label gets enforced.

      • By easton 2026-02-1718:51

        Is the problem that the app was written with AI assistance or that it's low-effort/bad? I don't care if you used Claude to fix a bug or something if you have a cool app, but i do care if you vibe coded something I could've vibe coded in an hour. That's boring.

        Feels like effort needs to be the barrier (which unfortunately needs human review), not "AI or not". In lieu of that, 100 karma or account minimum age to post something as Show HN might be a dumb way to do it (to give you enough time to have read other people's so you understand the vibe).

      • By tptacek 2026-02-1722:13

        A core part of the HN ethos is avoiding siloing dynamics, which is exactly what [NOAI] would be.

    • By abcd_f 2026-02-1719:391 reply

      It's a tough problem.

      Once some users have extra power to push content to the front-page, it will be abused. There will be attempts to gain that privilege in order to monetize, profit from or abuse it in some other way.

      The only option along this path would probably be to keep the list of such users very tightly controlled and each vouched for individually.

        ---
      Another approach might be to ask random users (above certain karma threshold) rank new submissions. Once in a while stick a showhn post into their front page with up and down arrows, and mark it as a community service. Given HN volume it should be easy to get an average opinion in a matter of minutes.

      • By dang 2026-02-182:25

        I feel like these review processes could be public threads like any other (just not linked directly from /show).

        I was thinking we could call them "Show Show HN" but I suppose that joke would get old

    • By peishang 2026-02-1718:103 reply

      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.

      • By dang 2026-02-182:252 reply

        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!

      • By parpfish 2026-02-1718:472 reply

        on problem here is that I don't want to share my ShowHN projects with my HN account because it'll connect my real identity to my pseudonymous HN identity.

        so, in the past, i've created throwaway HN accounts for sharing things that connect to my real ID.

        • By abcd_f 2026-02-1719:32

          The solution to this is to allow aliases ... or account groups if you will and then allow/disallow things based on combined karma.

        • By jedberg 2026-02-1723:031 reply

          I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. If you aren't proud enough of it to attach your real name, or your pseudonymous account, maybe it shouldn't be posted.

          • By anonymous908213 2026-02-183:42

            It has nothing to do with "pride". Anonymity is about being able to speak freely without having to feel the need to self-censor one's views. I don't want to feel hesitant to make a comment on a controversial subject out of fear that it will be permanently associated with my projects in a detrimental manner.

            This is doubly true with anything that involves your real name. I don't think enough people understand that there is a genuine, non-zero risk that commenting on political matters with your real name risks getting you imprisoned or killed 5, 10, 20 years later. The internet is a permanent record for your views, and history has given us many examples of dictators who have purged millions of people deemed intellectuals, enemies of the regime, etc. This is true regardless of how much you trust your current government, because governments change and authoritarianism can happen anywhere. Even the self-proclaimed bastion of free speech is currently attempting to persecute people criticising the government online[1].

            [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...

            (...that said, the LLM spam situation is so dire that even with these views on anonymity, I would be willing to create a new account where I carefully self-censor everything I say until I meet whatever proposed threshold would be necessary to submit a ShowHN, so I'm not opposed to such a limit out of necessity.)

      • By ModernMech 2026-02-1718:112 reply

        Honestly I would support only allowing Show HN for accounts that can downvote. It's really not such a high threshold.

        • By anonymous908213 2026-02-1718:161 reply

          It would filter out some people who lurk but still have interesting things to contribute, but despite the drawbacks that threshold is probably the most immediately impactful solution. Of course, it strongly incentivizes the purchase/selling of accounts, and karma farming, but that problem is perhaps less of a problem than all high-effort human content getting completely drowned out. There are already a plethora of spambots making comments getting upvoted, so it's not like that problem doesn't already exist either.

          • By saghm 2026-02-1719:39

            I'm not sure that incentive is so strong. Is it really that desirable to pay money to be able to showcase a free project?

        • By bigthymer 2026-02-1718:161 reply

          We would have to prepare for a deluge of accounts posting\commenting just for the sake of accumulating karma to be able to downvote.

          • By dylan604 2026-02-1718:31

            That's the key thing to remember here, that any ideas that are implemented will be suspect to gaming just to get around what ever is chosen.

    • By password4321 2026-02-1819:49

      (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.

    • By microflash 2026-02-1717:541 reply

      To my dismay, the trajectory of Show HN posts looks eerily familiar. ProductHunt followed a similar course (albeit with much more acceleration) and now is just a feed of slop. The signal to noise ratio became so meaningless that I lost all interest. I fear this happening to HN. Any attempt to slow this down is welcome.

      I wonder how will this review system work. Perhaps, a Show HN is hidden by default and visible to only experienced HN users who provide enough positive reviews for it to become visible to everyone else. Although, this does sound like gatekeeping to me and may starve many deserving Show HN before they get enough attention.

      • By PaulHoule 2026-02-1718:08

        Funny a year ago I used to hear from so many people who thought a Product Hunt launch was the same as a marketing plan but it's been a while since I've heard about Product Hunt...

    • By Retr0id 2026-02-1718:17

      I wonder if some kind of voluntary tagging system could help?

      e.g. [20h/2d/$10] could indicate "I spent 20 human-hours over 2 days and burned $10 worth of tokens" (it's hard to put a single-dimensional number on LLM usage and not everyone keeps track, but dollars seem like a reasonable approximation)

    • By DetroitThrow 2026-02-1723:01

      I just have no interest in seeing code that hasn't even been read by the author. At that point, just show us what it does, don't show us the GitHub link.

      On the front page, someone made a cool isometric NYC map via vibe coding - another front pager was someone who also claimed to make an ultra fast PDF parser that failed on very common PDFs and gamed the speed metric by (useless) out of order parsing.

      Guess which one I installed and spent more time using? These vibe coded projects aren't interesting for their code and almost always not intended to be used by anyone if they're libraries/frameworks, but the applications made with vibe coding are often very cool.

      An easy win is turning off the firehouse of vibe coded GitHub portfolio projects and just ask for a link to a hosted application. Easy.

    • By heresie-dabord 2026-02-184:44

      > a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts

      A separate queue is the solution. Then the moderation system (dang, tomhow, seasoned users) can apply an adjustable threshold to promote Show HN posts to the main queue.

    • By lwansbrough 2026-02-1721:021 reply

      I'm haunted by the criticism Dropbox received from HN users when they posted their project here. While I respect the views many of us have, I think this has the potential to have the StackOverflow effect where the community makes the whole process miserable and worse.

      • By tptacek 2026-02-1722:16

        Note well that the most famous example of this is a misreading that has snowballed into a kind of cultural legend. The thread in question was about Dropbox's application to YC, not the value of Dropbox itself, and the feedback was constructive and well-intentioned.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42392302

    • By ugh123 2026-02-182:411 reply

      Could also consider requiring higher account age or points

    • By joecool1029 2026-02-1719:43

      > 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.

      HN has a vouch system. Make a Show HN pool, allow accounts over some karma/age level to vouch them out to the main site. I recently had a naive colleague submit a Show HN a week or so ago that Tom killed... for good reason. I told the guy to ask me for advice before submitting a FOSS project he released and instead he shit out a long LLM comment nobody wants to read.

      The HN guidelines IMO need a (long overdue) update to describe where a Show HN submission needs to go and address LLM comments/submissions. I get that YC probably wants to let some of it be a playground since money is sloshing around for it, but enough is enough.

    • By fallinditch 2026-02-1718:521 reply

      Maybe restrict Show HN posts to 70 or 100 characters - readers can then scan many, and quickly find stuff of interest.

      The clarity and focus this discipline would enforce could have a pleasant side effect of enabling a kind of natural evolution of categorizations, and alternative discovery UIs.

    • By rglover 2026-02-1719:471 reply

      Proposal:

      - Min. 90 days account existence in order to submit

      - Cap on plain/Show/Ask HN posts per week

      Most of the spam I see in /new or /ask is from fresh accounts. This approach is simple and awards long-term engagement/users while discouraging fly-by-night spammers.

      • By DetroitThrow 2026-02-1723:021 reply

        Yep, hide new accounts except to higher karma users is an easy win.

        • By jedberg 2026-02-1723:051 reply

          But very gatekeepy. New accounts are already highlighted and get mercilessly reported and downvoted if they post spam.

          • By DetroitThrow 2026-02-1723:081 reply

            Maybe just hide them if they post GitHub links.

            I've loved some of the vibe coded apps that are hosted somewhere that have made the front page, but a lot of the links to GitHub projects intended to farm stars for throwaway portfolio padding (which often don't work).

            Egh. No silver bullet here.

            • By jedberg 2026-02-1723:171 reply

              As someone who has posted a couple of Show HNs that went to GitHub, I'd have to respectfully disagree. :) We are sharing language libraries, so GH makes the most sense. You can get the library and sample apps there.

              • By DetroitThrow 2026-02-182:22

                Oh yes, I'd be very disappointed with no GH links or new code libraries, but making GH links for new users go through stricter review/more limited visibility might be a good trade off.

                You still somewhat mute new users who want to share a useful/interesting GH link, but I'd hope higher karma users can help us out here.

    • By zh3 2026-02-1719:36

      Something based on the principles of 'New'? (not clear on the details of how Show HN works, does it automatically appear?). Just shove entries under 'New' and let the group decide what is "Show HN"-worthy.

    • By codegeek 2026-02-1719:561 reply

      May be dont show them under "Show HN" unless the post has accumulated a certain number of points/upvotes ? Just like a regular new post comes on front page.

      • By vunderba 2026-02-1719:57

        I think this already happens but the threshold might be pretty low - there's a separate shownew page and if it gets sufficient upvotes it appears in the regular "Show HN".

    • By zeras 2026-02-1720:081 reply

      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, post X comments and immediately post a submission.

      It would limit new submission posts to people who are active in the community so they would be more familiar with the policies and etiquette of HN along with gaining an idea of what interests its members.

      One thing I noticed recently while going through several of the Show HN submissions was that a lot of the accounts had been created the same day the submission was made.

      My guess is HN has become featured on a large number of "Where do I promote/submit my _____?" lists in blogs, social media, etc. to the point that HN is treated like a public bulletin board more than a place to share things with each other in the community.

      I love the Show HN section because so many interesting things get posted there but even I have cut back on checking it lately because there are simply too many things posted to check out.

      I hope they do something to improve it.

      • By lelanthran 2026-02-1810:16

        > 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.

    • By tyleo 2026-02-1721:46

      I’m in some discord servers that have both #art and #ai-art channels. This seems to work well. It’s not perfect but it’s cheap and might be good as a start.

    • By chasd00 2026-02-1719:10

      > HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.

      hah that sounds like a Show HN incubator.

    • By kshri24 2026-02-180:45

      You can cut 90-95% of the slop posts by checking the project's GitHub repository. If it has .cursor / .claude folders it should be automatically pushed into a slow queue with the queue shifting every X hours. For example, this really popular post from 27 days ago was just pure AI slop. It got on to front page of HN and stayed there for days. Should have been nuked the very first hour:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710710

    • By Azrael3000 2026-02-1718:42

      Maybe you should train an LLM to judge the content /s

      More seriously though, I think some sort of curation is unavoidable with such topics. If you get inspired by stack overflow where you have some similar mechanics at work, then I'd say that is not too bad. But of course you risk some people being angry about why their amazing vibe coded app is not being shown. Although the more I think of it, this might be a good thing.

      Edit: One more thought just came to my mind. A slight modification to the curation rule, you let everything through, just like now. However, the posts are reviewed and those with enough postive review votes get marked in some shape or form, which allows them to be filtered and/or promoted on the show page.

    • By resters 2026-02-1718:10

      Please make the home page show 60 rather than 30 stories by default.

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