hackernews client

Show HN posts p/month more than doubled in the last year

29 pointsposted 5 hours ago

by theraven

(petegoldsmith.com)

48 Comments

jacquesm

5 hours ago

One of the reasons is that there are a lot of adverts masquerading as Show HN.

hsuduebc2

4 hours ago

Some subreddits became polluted the same way. Pretty annoying.

There's a subreddit for software people with adhd and it's terrible, every second post is about a New and Exciting Tool to manage adhd. Most of them are vibe coded, all of them come from randos I wouldn't trust with what I had for breakfast, let alone a whole life management system.

I check in every few weeks and I don't understand how anyone can use that subreddit more frequently.

y0eswddl

3 hours ago

that's eventually what drove me away from adhd_programmers as well, tho I'm sorry they even still allow AI apps anymore cuz it was bad before llms blew up

hsuduebc2

2 hours ago

Yea, pretty much. I actually always thought that these were some bots.

captn3m0

5 hours ago

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

This is an interesting post, but not a Show HN.

theraven

5 hours ago

I didn’t submit it that way, it got auto massaged into that format because of the ‘Show HN’ prefix I believe

rco8786

4 hours ago

The Show HN prefix is submitting it that way.

> To post [to Show HN], submit a story whose title begins with "Show HN".

wumms

4 hours ago

Related: "Data on AI-related Show HN posts"

Original title: "Data on AI-related Show HN posts More than 1 in 5 Show HN posts are now AI-related, but get less than half the votes or comments."

6 months ago, 155 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463249

Normal_gaussian

4 hours ago

This is very similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702099 posted 4 days ago.

And there is also this https://dewmal.medium.com/hacker-news-is-a-living-time-capsu...

freehorse

4 hours ago

And link to that analysis from the linked discussion https://snubi.net/posts/Show-HN/

which also includes the average voting scores, which actually fall at the same time the quantity increases (while the average story scores remain the same), which is interesting.

galkk

4 hours ago

Laid off people have more time on their hands, while on llm-powered steroids?

etothepii

4 hours ago

Do you have any numbers on the number that get some number of upvotes? What about a chart of upvotes on Show HN?

I assume the vast, vast majority never get any upvotes.

rfarley04

4 hours ago

I have a little bit of data on that from my post last summer. It's pretty easy to query the data: ryanfarley.co/ai-show-hn-data/

wheybags

5 hours ago

Would be nice to see some qualitative analyis to know if it's just slop, or actually more interesting projects. Not sure how to do that though. I think just looking at votes wouldn't work. I would guess more posts causes lower average visibility per post which should cause upvotes to slump naturally regardless of quality.

Edit: maybe you could:

- remove outliers (anything that made the front page)

- normalise vote count by expected time in the first 20 posts of shownew, based on the posting rate at the time

Normal_gaussian

4 hours ago

a weighted sampling method is probably the best. Segment by time period and vote count or vote rate, then human evaluate. This could be done in a couple of hours and it gives a higher degree of confidence than any automated analysis.

carimura

5 hours ago

sentiment analysis of comments?

alberto-m

5 hours ago

I think I read some days ago another stat, that the average rating of “Show HN” posts is going down. So the pessimistic take is that people feel the bar to present their product in a “Show HN” is lowering.

(edit: striked) <strike>Is it deliberate that this post appears as “Show HN” itself? I hope not to be too negative, but to qualify as such I would expect much more that a page with two graphs.</strike>

theraven

4 hours ago

No, it wasn’t deliberate to be a Show HN itself, it seemed to be auto updated to that based on the prefix. I’ve tried updating it back.

alberto-m

4 hours ago

Thanks for the reply. I'd strike that part of my comment if I could. Consider it taken back.

jacquesm

4 hours ago

You can, click 'edit'. Up to one hour after posting.

alberto-m

4 hours ago

I can edit the post and delete that part, but this would make OP's reply seem out of context. But HN markup does not support striking. I put some HTML tags there anyway, the sense should be clear.

jacquesm

4 hours ago

Just mark your edit 'edit:'. I often have the same happen where I write a comment and then think 'oh, that's no good, I need to improve on it' and then in the meantime multiple people will comment and hopefully quote the original. That way at least you can see what they replied to rather than the version that I'm finally happy with. I've suggested HN increase the default size of the reply box but so far no takers on that.

peteforde

5 hours ago

I suspect that this will drive the folks who insist LLM productivity gains are the real hallucinations truly bonkers.

anonymous908213

4 hours ago

No, the fact that Show HN is spammed with LLM-generated garbage is what drives me bonkers. The Show HNs are in fact living proof of how illusory LLM productivity gains are, because we are overwhelmed with trivial proof-of-concepts that have no merit, not even the merit of a human having put effort into creating something neat, rather than actually interesting software anybody would try or discuss.

as1mov

4 hours ago

Related that r/selfhosted has banned AI built projects except on Fridays[1] to keep up with the increased deluge of garbage, which are mostly built for CV padding rather than making anything useful for the community.

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qfp2t0/mod_ann...

CuriouslyC

4 hours ago

Counterpoint: You won't admit anything generated with LLMs is good? I don't see any evidence of your fairness in your comment, so why should I consider you any differently than the angry dude at the bar complaining over his drinks about how things were in his day?

anonymous908213

3 hours ago

> You won't admit anything generated with LLMs is good?

Nowhere in my comment did I say this, so this is quite a non-sequitur you've based the following personal attack upon. Regardless of whether it's possible to use LLMs to generate good things, the vast majority of things generated with them are not good, and if the good things exist, they are being drowned out in a sea of spam, increasingly difficult to discover along with the good human-generated content.

I have to say, I would characterise both your comment and the original comment I replied to as being considerably more "unfair" than mine. The first comment was clearly written in such a way to get a rise out of people. Your reply is directly insinuating that I'm out-of-touch and ranting at clouds.

sepositus

4 hours ago

This is a valid observation. I wonder though if people who have been coding for decades, but choose to use AI assistance, would fall under the same AI slop category. It’s an interesting dilemma because the overwhelming amount of content getting posted just ends up breeding a ton of negative feelings towards any amount of AI usage.

jacquesm

4 hours ago

It will if you let it. The number of times the AI has come up with 'I can write you 'x', 'y' or 'z' in a heartbeat, just say the word' and I keep on having to steer it back to the track of being a repository of knowledge rather than an overeager very junior co-worker that can't help themselves to want to show off their skills.

It's very tiresome. Like an idiot/savant, they're an idiot most of the time and every 10th try you go 'oh, but that's neat and clever'.

7777777phil

4 hours ago

I feel like HN is quite divided about that actually, A couple of days I started a survey which I plan to run monthly to see how the community feels about "LLM productivity etc". Now I have ~250 answers, need a couple more to make it significant but as of now it looks like >90% report productivity gains from AI tools - happy if you participate, only takes a minute: https://agentic-coding-survey.pages.dev/

anonymous908213

4 hours ago

Note that self-reporting productivity gains is a completely unreliable and unscientific metric. One study[1], small in scope but a noteworthy data point, found that over the course of the study that LLMs reduced productivity by ~20% but even after the fact the participants felt that on average their productivity had increased by ~20%. This study is surely not the end-all be-all and you could find ways to criticise it or say it doesn't apply or they were doing it wrong or whatever reason you think the developers should have had increased productivity, but the point is that people cannot accurately judge their own productivity by vibes alone.

[1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

7777777phil

4 hours ago

If you look at the survey it's not only about productivity it's also about usage, model choice etc. But I agree with you self reported productivity gains is to be taken with a grain of salt. But then what else would you propose? The goal is to not only rely on benchmarks for model performance but develop some kind of TIOBE Index for LLMs.

direwolf20

3 hours ago

The ever-present rebuttal to all LLM failure anecdotes: you're using the wrong model, you're prompting it wrong, etc. All failures are always the user's fault. It couldn't possibly be that the tool is bad.

illegalbyte2

4 hours ago

Really like the ux of that survey - super easy to fill out, is it just a custom web form or you used a library?

7777777phil

4 hours ago

Yes exactly, it's a standalone cloudflare page with some custom html/css that writes to a D1 (Cloudflare SQL DB) for results and rate limits, thats's it. I looked at so many survey tools but none offered what I was looking for (simple single page form, no email, no signup, no tracking) so I built this (with claude) Thanks for the feedback!

Tade0

4 hours ago

They are, but in the sense of net productivity gains.

Responsible people who use their knowledge to review LLM-generated code will produce more - up to their maximum rate of taking responsibility.

Irresponsible people will just smear shit all over the codebase.

The jury is out what's the net effect and the agents' level of sophistication is a secondary factor.