The original goal of Show HN was for people to show off their work in a way that other people could participate in, sharing code and experience to satisfy intellectual curiosity. It's become nothing more than a funnel for landing pages and vibe-coded slop.

All of the fun has been sucked out of it.

We’re trying to push things back towards the original goal. Something I’m now telling people who ask for help or SCP inclusion is that Show HN isn’t Product Hunt; it’s not for launching your product and capturing signups, it’s for showcasing interesting/deep innovation that others can learn from. Of course we can’t stop anything being submitted but we can avoid promoting projects that lack substance and we can downrank posts that are not worthy of the front page or a high place on the Show page.

If your home pages looks like this (https://www.ycombinator.com), you can expect people to try want to "launch" their startups on your forum. There seems to be a large contingent of HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned! Obviously this can be the case, but its pretty evident that the technology is going nowhere and anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back. The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion. For people who are interested in creative web projects, we live in very exciting times, regardless of the negative noise.

I think I agree with you & I follow a similar trend but the creative part is doing a lot of heavy work.

Like, If we are using AI to build yet another next.js App, then perhaps its me but I personally find it doesn't satisfy my curiosity.

I want to see projects be written in niche languages and new languages and AI can be perfect for that. See which language you like the most and each language/idea has their own tradeoffs but just follow what you want and now you are less likely to be stuck.

Of course though sometimes I create a python script first (I recently made a code where your png's/jpg's can automatically be updated in a slideshow like thing which I built with a custom youtube screenshot and I watched some lectures, pressed shift A and it can now have slides and I compile them to pdf and built another where I can have a pdf and then I can have a laser tool on pdf's because I love to study with notes where I can draw random things on page like whiteboard and erase them without hurting the text below for understanding._

I think converted that python tkinkter gui to fyne golang out of curiosity yesterday and I feel both tools are great fwiw

I think my point here is I'd much rather be willing to see some niche projects for ourselves and have it first meaningfully improve our lives & just experiment. I don't know not much for monetary gains but out of curiosity and seeing how far you can and cannot go.

Just build things you like/want to exist in any way that you like till AI's so damn subsidized (I don't use any agents, just claude web's free version or aistudio for free, my projects are usually around 600-700locs so I can ask it to regenerate it completely and I am fine with much of it, Perhaps I just follow KISS to its core)

You would find it funny but the problem's not in code generation but dependency management etc. atleast to me which is why I love uv scripts a lot but sometimes especially chatgpt doesn't know about uv script feature or hallucinates it hard on their web version so If I am building python applets I would paste uv script's complete docs to the LLM website I would be using.

> HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned!

Honestly, I used to be one of them. I recently saw a great library (atcute) that changed my opinion. I think most AI sceptics haven't had this experience. They saw AI slops and set their opinion: AI-generated codes are bad. I can't really blame them, though, because there are so many of AI slops.

> anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back.

It's true. However, I think people who create AI slops are worse than those who don't use it. They are diligently making this world a worse place.

> Obviously this can be the case

More often than not that is the case.

It isn't just the case that AI generated content tends to be slop, it's that it's intellectually uninteresting and provides little worth discussing on a forum whose entire purpose is intellectually curious conversation.

Imagine this was a birdwatching forum and you were arguing that posting LLM generated images of birds allows birdwatchers to work on "watching" birds that they would not have had the time to watch previously, and that this should be celebrated. It's missing the entire point.

>The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion.

They have the time, they just don't want to put in the effort. Resources and education have never been more widely or freely available. One of the biggest lies people tell about LLMs is that they "democratize creativity." They don't - they commoditize it. You aren't developing the app. You aren't writing the script. You aren't making the art. The billion dollar proprietary black box service you loaded a prompt into shat out an approximation of a product and maybe at best you tweaked some code (more likely just fed it back in to another LLM.)

Yes, you wound up with a finished product of dubious quality that you probably don't even understand and can't discuss in any depth. bravo. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that people here - who actually care about the journey and the process rather than simply getting to an MVP as quickly as possible - for the most part aren't going to be impressed and aren't going to care much about it.

I do feel like its much more so the art of cooking than birdwatching (atleast imo)

Some people do want their food to be made by a chef sometimes even in front of them explaining them everything and the journey to them makes it worth it

For some people, it can be that the food that they buy from a shop nearby in front of them is good

For some, they want the cooking to be done out of their visible range and just want the food served

And the last categories probably the ones who will go to supermarkets to get some chips with 3 months expiry date created in a large factory

Hackernews to me feels like its 1 & 2 for me. What you describe as birdwatching is much rather only 1st category to me.

Like, in the 1st category people want to eat the special dish created by the trials of countless nights and passion

On the 2nd category, you are still witnessing a person but they are probably following a much more experience and in the start by say following tutorials or watching recipes. But they are much more democratized

I don't know, I don't go in hotels that much so I don't know the 1st part and how possible it is but I do go to 2nd category and I go around my local shops and see people make french fries and chat with them and ask how long have they been here and making french fries etc., they are willing to tell you everything.

I do feel like "AI slop" is kind of the 2nd category because like I am not only just interested in whether or not this recipe's entirely unique but I am rather interested in everything around it, what infrastructure choices they make and what coding tech stack they used & are they passionate about the project or what did they end up creating the prototype for.

the 3rd part is what I despise where think burger king or mcdonald etc. where the recipes come from franchise and everything comes and the person just serves you. All decisions are bland (think yet another nextjs app).

I don't think much of us want HN to be a supermarket or another macD but do we want this to be a cooking show where chefs build the whole recipes to serve us or do we want it to be a lot of neighbourly shops who have friendly people working who will chat with us and we can eat the french fries they make :)

(I love the french fries my neighbourhood makes, they are really spicy combine them with spring rolls and some drink or a good yogurt and it feels soo good lol, plus all of this costs less a 1$ or 2$ at most 3$ where I live, I can go and eat without worrying at all about the cost of eating outside usually if picked from the right shops)

Although I have never had the opportunity of seeing a chef cook his own dish in such sense but I can imagine that its great & I would like them as well but to me hackiness includes both, them hacking around with recipes to build something nice and the other hacking around with infrastructure like what logo and how close they are to me and even things like pricing imo.

I consider the latter to be like much more reachable than the former and to me I don't know how to explain but the idea of hackiness isn't just some clean final product, its also like just building something and gluing things and its messy too. And I love both of them both clean and messy hacking, I just want to know how much an human has been in the loop, where'd they get the idea and what they implemented in etc.

I don't know I live in a small city connected to a large city and I feel like I enjoy much more the messy aspects whereas people from large cities are much more likely to want to go to a large hotel for a dine or have a more artisanal taste.

So I have seen my fair share of people who want both.

Right now, I feel like it honestly depends on how large or small community you feel HN is.

If you consider HN to be too large aka you find it less likely to trust projects who get to here in the first place, you would want an artisanal person to build things for hand for you to enjoy

But if you consider HN to be small and there is just this idea of treating each person more individually and just this unwritten rule of law which generates more trust and faith in trying out new options even if they are hacky as long as I can sort of trust them decently and they are still involved in the loop and not completely 100% detached unlike say a large conglomerate franchise imo

Honestly I want HN to be a small place and not a large place but I feel like even HN is a large place for me but the problem with completely small places or building one's own is that you don't get visitors at all. We probably need something in between HN and no social media promotions (only via word of mouth) imo.

I have been trying to replace HN for quite a while now for something more nicher but still well connected place as well. Honestly have thought multiple times to create an HN alternative with the same UI and everything and same rules but just smaller and probably federated (ironically Gonna have it be vibe coded in single main.go golang :) hosting on a cheap recurring deal netcup server I got) but moderation of >0 people is hard and getting >0 people interested in a new website is hard as well which is precisely what the main post is about.

The point is the following:

If you want a chef to explain and show his recipe and then you find out he asked chat gpt or got it from a recipe website, would you still be interested in hearing about the 'journey' he took?

If that chef then also ordered the food from a catering service by forwarding that recipe to them, does it make sense to interview him about his craft and listen to him?

It's the same with creative things. Sure, you can ask a musician or a painter about their inspiration/process etc., because they went through the process and made something. You could learn something from them, other than 'here's how i asked someone else to make this'.

So, going to an art forum and displaying your AI generated art there, ready to answer questions about the process is pretty much completely pointless and also cheapens every actual artist that came there to display and talk about something they actually made.

It also has a psychological effect on the people that use it. I know some people that get immense feelings of accomplishment out of using AI to generate art and music. They feel like they made something and are proud about it. For a lot of people like that, any incentive to learn about things is gone, because they get the exact same feeling by using AI to make it.

On the other hand: If you are an artist making things and there are a million people generating things every 5 minutes and showing it around everywhere, it dilutes recognition of what you made. You show it to your friends and they're like: Oh yeah, i made like 5 of those yesterday.

True: AI-art wont have a "storyline" (-:

Yes I agree with what you are saying. And this is why I am saying that if this place is a place for chef's then I agree that even a minor use of AI can be disheartening.

Once again if HN is solely for the 1st sector of chefs 100%, then AI use should be completely restricted against

But if HN falls into what I call the 2nd category too then does it really matter if the local chef's using a recipe built by chatgpt?

I completely understand what you are saying man and the psychological effects are real.

And this is why I feel like if Hackernews is targetted for people in the 1st category or the 2nd

Because if there is a forum where both local shops who say makes fries which are built in less time and there is also the chef which takes hours building teh perfect food and both of them are on the same forum & they probably get the same space in it then a conflict between them is sort of meant to occur with all the effects which you mention and feels to me like a prisoners dilemma because if artisanal chefs are impacted by local normal cooks lets say then just being a local cook would get stigmatized in a forum. Overall its a net negative for both.

But it honestly depends on how negative if the eyeballs come on both, sure they can split and create different forums but neither wants to leave the large one and the large forum owner has had incentives in both artisanal and local cooks (YC funding AI companies and hackernews once being so damn creative that I hear stories about when one day the moderator decided to have the front page be all about erlang/elixir from a story I remember from a HN "veteran")

I mean I love em both. It's not an or condition but honestly what I hear in HN is the path of least resistance ie. if you don't like moderation, then make your own place but I do feel like the moderation's atleast a bit confused about their interests too.

Probably another reason why I am interested in fediverse because I want it to be like a street where we can have both artisanal chef clubs and the local shops fair while on the same road but a bit of problem with fediverse atleast in this context of HN alike is that lemmy's c/technology can probably replace HN in some contexts but the streets of lemmy are empty because everybody's still here on HN.

I don't disagree with what you are expressing but I think you are overgeneralising.

Sometimes the idea itself can be interesting. If AI is used to manifest the idea then so be it!

Secondly, I think it is almost unavoidable to use some ai generated content (code, design etc) when developing these days. Its just a tool and it can be used well or used poorly.

Lastly, I agree that there does exist a lot of what can truly be labelled "AI slop" where it is just lazy regurgitated content, and that is annoying.

I think there are a few people out there with great ideas, that might benefit from having access to tools to make these real. I'm all for those and would love to see them.

But i also think the majority of these cases will be bad ideas that don't need to be made at all. Or even ideas that are AI generated by asking a LLM for ideas. I don't care if they are made or not, but i would rather not have those on the internet and especially on 'show and tell' places like ShowHN etc.

I'm also not opposed to using AI as a tool in development or similar. But there are more and more examples of purely vibe-coded or generated things and those fall in a different category in my opinion.

I completely agree man, this is my sentiment too.

I am much more interested in infrastructure related things and price optimizing. I've spent hours and days looking at all the options compiling resources and building scrapers to scrape information of servers and having them be made via LLM :) just to get the idea of context.

I don't know but like what i possess isn't a deep knowledge within the domain itself (one of the reasons why I love golang is that all the tradeoffs of it are okay with me and it's complexity just feels linear to me and I would have this simplicity in code where if I ever wanted to, I just feel so much more confident about tweaking LLM generated golang code than say rust)

A lot of what I love is the hacking around the project. Ooh so you used golang to make it cross compatible easier? Are you using the modernc driver? What servers are you gonna use? (hetzner,ovh,netcup etc.) while the code being completely open source and I will be transparent about how much the servers cost and how much I make in the middle and just some sustainable ideals so that it can be day one profitable but without ripping anyone off.

Y'know mixing and matching different services. I think I am really frugal so like this is like the deepest intersection of like all of my hobbies combined.

I face any problem -> use free llm from web -> python/golang code -> deploy it on my web server -> use cloudflare tunnels and custom scripts + zed/others and micro to deploy servers great (I prefer using tmux as well with zed terminal)

But even with all of this, I wouldn't say that the code isn't slop but I do feel like its pretty much reasonable and I have been vocal about how if I ever create something and a community actually occurs out of it & they want me to recreate it from scratch without any LLM assistance, I actually would even if that means reading documentations of all the libraries used in such golang project etc.

But like the reason why I still do things is because I do it for myself and I am pretty impatient. I build things which trouble me first and foremost to fix issues I have & that's kind of source of joy I have.

I don't know man, like I hate AI for all the psychological issues its gonna cause but I still want to build things without having to spend say days in a project when I would be facing the problem right now.

I think I have always imagined myself as some consultant who wants to give the best option out there and have the code back and manage it or similar.

It's just that writing the code part myself isn't the most exciting part to me. seeing computers go work the way I want to in the decision choices that I make and can justify is the most exciting part to me.

Like does this make sense? I am not exactly pro AI either, I have written so extensively about it here on how AI is a bubble and the psychological and social impact it has.

In a way, I don't think I fit in the two boxes of pro AI or completely anti AI. I just am in the middle and I don't know if there's a term for it but like, I don't know if someone knows a term for what I feel about AI it will be brilliant but even if there isn't a mainstream word for it. I just don't really want to change myself to fit in any box. I have my nuanced opinion and I have thought about joining either of these boxes but being honest neither fits my worldview.

Does this make sense?

There's also a very simple reality of AI vibecoded projects:

If you were able to get an LLM to vibecode a project for you, so could any of us, so why even share the project as if you are showing off? It takes very little effort for anyone else to prompt an agent and get a similar result.

That means the only thing left in a shared vibecoded project is the original idea, and well, ideas are a dime a dozen and everyone has them and idea spread has never really been a limiting factor.

So what are you really sharing at that point?

Noise.

"Look at this code I got an LLM to generate" is inherently uninteresting.

LLM generated comments aren't allowed on HN[0]. Period.

If any of the other instances whereby HN users have quoted the guidelines or tone policed each other are allowed then calling out generated content should be allowed.

It's constructive to do so because there is obvious and constant pressure to normalize the use of LLM generated content on this forum as there is everywhere else in our society. For all its faults and to its credit Hacker News is and should remain a place where human beings talk to other human beings. If we don't push back against this then HN will become nothing but bots posting and talking to other bots.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654

The problem is that people cannot prove one way or the other that things are LLM generated, so it is just a baseless witch hunt.

Things should be judged for their quality, and comments should try to contribute positively to the discussion.

"I suspect they're a witch" isn't constructive nor makes HN a better place.

It isn't a baseless witch hunt if the witches are real.

Creating a social stigma against the use of LLMs is constructive and necessary. It's no different than HN tone policing humor, because allowing humor would turn HN into Reddit.

How is randomly branding people without knowing "constructive and necessary?" Seems like it is completely self-defeating; you're going to make the accusations meaningless because if everything is "LLM" then nothing is.

I get the point you're trying to make, but it's worth pointing out that the entire point is that it's not people getting branded but nebulous online entities that may or may not be people. It's a valid criticism that the accuracy of these claims is not measurable, but I think it's equally true that we no longer are in a world where we can be be sure that no content like this is from an LLM either. It's not at all obvious to me that the assumption that everything is from a human is more accurate than the aggregate set of claims of LLMs, so describing it as "branding people" seems like it's jumping to co me conclusions in the same way.

But just imagine how bad things would be right now if Kamala got in.

We really dodged a bullet there, huh?

>But having read at least one or two books, it feels like, I dunno, folks who were actively stoked about Harris don't want -less- violence, they just want it done to folks they don't see...

The thing is you're choosing the violence of American imperialism to be done in your name either way.

And yes, the people who wanted Harris did actually want less violence, and would have gotten less violence. I know it's comforting and cathartic to demonize them and consider them more ignorant than you because it makes your decision seem more righteous. Harris voters were making the best decision they could with the choices they actually had, to not throw all of their allies (including Palestinians, mind you) under the bus and double down on accelerating fascism for the sake of a moral victory.

But hey, whatever helps you sleep at night. It's not as if it matters now, you all got what you wanted.

Hoss, if you'd written "a grilled cheese sandwich would be a better president than DT" I would have just agreed with you out of hand.

However, given the fact that a) the Democrats seemed to have done literally everything that they could do to lose what they called the "most important election of our lifetimes" and b) I have neither control over who they choose to run nor a vote in a contestable state, I am not going to feel bad for my real anger at them and the folks who support them for failing the rest of us so badly.

The "choices they actually had" are the product of the Democratic party, and I feel no end of anger for them chosing as they did and failing to win.

A lot of us just wanted to see them win, which should have been no problem. I'd much rather not be going to stand in front of an ICE detnetion facility every week.

At the same time, you can pretend that Harris was for a less violent world. She was not, she was for a world order that targeted its violence at folks you don't care about.

I sleep just fine. We have been organizing a long time and will continue.

Something something Tree of Liberty something something blood of tyrants.

We could even create a ton of new jobs in the guillotine sector.

And if it means we destroy AI, modern media and most of the web, all the better.

I'm honestly struggling to see a downside here.

"politics." Why do people keep asking questions they know the answer to?

probably because you find unflagged politics all up and down the hn feed...

why do people keep giving terrible answers to questions they must not know the answer to?

That just means the people flagging politics are biased and inconsistent, not that people don't flag politics.

We know they do. Numerous people have stated outright that they flag every thread they consider political, because they consider all political content to be off topic, and that they intend to continue doing so. And Hacker News is designed so that it only takes a few flags to apply to a thread.

But since you know seem to better, do please enlighten us all on the real answer.

A lot of people here are going to be triggered by the word "deplorable" because a mean lady said it years ago.

Pretty accurate descriptor after all this time. She was proven right by their actions.

Kamala as well.

Plenty of people are still talking about that.

There are a lot of people and they talk about lots of different things.

If the talking gets too loud, the US will liberate and free another country.

Iran is all lined up.

They don't care. No one is punishing them for not complying with releasing all of the Epstein files, and no one is going to punish them for anything in those files. Jeffrey Epstein was the first and likely last person to suffer any consequence beyond reputational harm.

There are numerous reasons why the US will probably go to war with Iran at some point (it's part of the "Axis of Evil" after all) but distracting from Epstein isn't one of them.

>Are you saying that e.g. Spice Girls or Coldplay or whatever is not slop?

Your definition of "slop" seems to be "is popular with the mainstream." That isn't the definition used when applied to AI generated music. Spice Girls and Coldplay are leagues beyond anything an AI can currently produce in terms of artistic quality. Yes, there is artistic quality to popular culture.

And to most people it matters that human beings produce it. It may not matter to you - you may only consider music or any other form of art to be nothing more than a means of producing stimuli intended to create a pleasing endorphine response, but most people don't want to process art the way a machine processes data.

>The citizens could easily vote in a new president in 2028 who defunded ICE altogether.

You think that after two more years of this regime that any such candidate would be allowed anywhere near whatever pretense of an electoral system still exists?

I need you to understand that the United States is already no longer a democratic republic in anything but name. The system of government you're assuming will fix the mess will have been entirely dismantled by then. The time to fix this within the system was in 2024.

> Your ability to be convinced by arguments, or refusal thereof, is not an objective measure of the likelihood of future events.

Okay but that just makes both of us crazy speculators.

> If anyone had described to you the timeline of this administration from 2024 to now

I would have said it was a plausible but terrible misuse of the executive branch's authority that I hoped not to see. After the first administration, I definitely would not call it ridiculous. Basically everything he has done so far is exercising power we've been delegating to the executive branch.

> declare martial law

That's easier said than done. And even using actual law, in the form of the insurrection act, would not give him the power to undermine elections. This country had elections during the civil war, and we are not quite there yet.

> But if you think everyone is just engaging in "online rhetoric" then I think you're naive.

I am trying to be charitable. A lot of the rhetoric is over-the-top spinning everything for maximum doom. What is really happening is bad enough without trashing our credibility through easily disprovable statements.

And sure, maybe I'm just naive. We should chat about it again in late January 2029.

Thank you all for detailed answers! As I see, if all goes well the problem will be solved in two years (more or less).

Again, no comments regarding if it is good to hunt "illegal aliens" and kick them away - US citizens must decide this themselves.

The thing is, to most white Americans, their childrens' freedom isn't at stake. The majority of white voters have always supported Trump, and probably support ICE, whereas most of the rest simply don't don't consider it their problem.

And unfortunately that probably won't change until ICE kills more of them and makes it their problem.

You are right that America isn’t going to fix this problem until Trump supporters feel the pain. It is coming, but I’m afraid of what we will have to go through to get there.

> The thing is, to most white Americans, their childrens' freedom isn't at stake.

It absolutely is at stake, they just haven’t realized it yet. (Insert obligatory “first they came for” quote.)