Dearth of original ideas, lots of pointless retro stuff like "I did x on mac os classic" lots of reinventing the wheel with LLMs and LLM cargo culting. What is the perpetual growth myth to do once physics is known and energy is constraining?
I don't know of any good way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the past, which is why "things have always been getting worse" is such a great line. How people perceive these things is strongly conditioned by how they're feeling about the things in general.
One way to think about it is that for a new idea/site/community/business/government/etc to gain adoption, it must be significantly better than what came before. It comes in far above the mean, because every new idea etc that doesn't come in way above the mean dies out and never gains adoption. The rest of its life is just long, slow regression to the mean. For the most part, it continually gets worse, simply because statistically, when you are much better than average the only way to go is down. Eventually, it drops below the mean and some other better replacement takes over from it.
So people can absolutely be right when they say that everything is always getting worse! The fact of existence in the first place means that they started off much better than average - after all, the vast majority of potential configurations of atoms/molecules/cells/DNA/ideas/firms/people do not exist, and we happen to have the particular arrangement that was selected for. And then constituent parts move around in random motion, entropy takes its toll, and we read this as things decaying. Somewhat literally, this is what it means to decay.
The way to avoid this is to be constantly swapping out subsystems that aren't working for you with subsystems that are.
I agree about the bias to believe the past was better than it actually was. I think it's called rosy retrospection, like when people are nostalgic for their high school days even though they were bullied and had no friends. Maybe HN isn't getting worse, it's just that the negative parts are more recent and noticeable.
HN is a mirror on the tech world -- which is dead. There is dearth of original ideas, generally. There are no cool startups, no investment, nothing happening.
I agree there. Back in 2009 I used to be excited by each new YC batch. There were fresh new ideas like Dropbox, AirBnB, Instacart. I feel like there were cool stories around those startups, like Drew losing a thumbdrive and coming up with the idea for DropBox, or the AirBnB marketing hack with the cereal, or Instacart's founder having beer delivered during the YC interview. I can't think of any recent YC startups that I've cared about. Maybe it just became saturated or maybe I just moved on to other things. I will say this, that the ideas I had 15 years ago needed a startup and investment. Now I'm able to build a lot of those ideas using the cloud and AI. It seems inevitable that some solo founder will soon be able to build a unicorn with no investment and no employees.
Exactly, and the formula in the past was less "[hot new tech] for [some industry]" back in the day, and more "[problem solved] for [target audience]". Maybe it is just the wording that I object to, and not the substance of the startup's solution to the problem?
I guess I don't care about today's "AI agent for the agricultural industry" as much as I cared about yesterday's "Tool to help farmers plan crop rotation".
As someone who has been coming here for the past 8 years, I can't comment on "10-15 years" ago, but my experience hasn't changed a bit. This is and has been the only place where I visit almost daily (new account if you are looking at my profile) - and this is during vacation, during work, during weekends, etc. There is ALWAYS, literally, always an interesting discussion happening on topics that I would never be part of, if it wasn't for someone starting the discussion here. Yeh, today there is a bunch of AI, bla, bla, bla... so what will be next?! Not sure, but I know it will be here.
The vast majority of programs submitted to HN are rip-offs of existing programs that are being re-written by LLM's and not even changing the name in most cases. Each day I am flagging more submissions than I used to in a month or two. People are absolutely crapping up this site with LLM plagiarized ideas and rewrites of existing code converted to other languages instead of doing pull requests of existing programs and enhancing them assuming LLM's can do such a thing. The voting ring detector probably needs some tuning as well. I can't tell if the goal is to poison the search engines and AI platforms so nobody can find the original open source programs or what else may be going on. Robert Hanlon said, never attribute to malice..., well I do.
It's a transitional situation and will be that way for quite a while. We're doing what we can. For example, the measures described here have stemmed the runaway growth in low-quality Show HNs:
There's still a quality problem, but (a) that's always the case, (b) at least we aren't drowning, and (c) the community needs growth, just not runaway growth.
Major new tools like LLMs are inevitably going to get widely used, as they should. Figuring out what the best uses are will take time. Figuring out how to share what one is doing with them is an unsolved problem.
I see others also mentioned the voting ring detector. I think they're correct that something needs adjustment, but I don't know how it works exactly so it's hard to suggest thresholds. The patterns I am observing is that the LLM generated clones will get instantly upvoted multiple times I assume by other warmed up LLM accounts. Back in the days of running phpBB I would mitigate some of that with ranks and I assume there must be some parallels to that with account age and comments. Perhaps some math to lower the weight of upvotes by newer accounts, or the newer account being the upvote target so they can still gain some traction but slower. Perhaps one of the factors could be if the submission is for one of the public git repo sites AND it's a newer account it could have a divisor in the voting formula if it is not already.
The risk I see is that if the goal is growth but the low quality submissions are drowning out other submissions that could negate growth as some of the newer accounts that legit try to be part of a community would just drift away as they are in the poisoned well. I too struggle to think of a way to separate them out of the noise without creating a system that would just be gamed by the LLM's. On one hand if the system requires the regulars to "vouch" so to speak it will create little elitist bubbles whereas too much tweaking to algorithms will just be detected and gamed by LLM's.
Out of curiosity, are the LLM posts coming from residential and mobile addresses or from AI data-centers themselves? If it's not already that could be yet another weighting factor. And/or AI user-agents as a weight. There are many bot signals that could be weighting or division factors. Bots are easy to spot from the server.
recently, you were rambling on-and-on about how netbsd was not a good desktop setup, even though netbsd primary usecase is embedded systems. nobody owes you anything; so just read threads that are interesting and ignore the rest; if that is not acceptable, why don't you be the change you wish to see in the world?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213869 (Aug 2016)
Examples are legion. Here are a couple others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229249 (July 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020)
I don't know of any good way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the past, which is why "things have always been getting worse" is such a great line. How people perceive these things is strongly conditioned by how they're feeling about the things in general.
One way to think about it is that for a new idea/site/community/business/government/etc to gain adoption, it must be significantly better than what came before. It comes in far above the mean, because every new idea etc that doesn't come in way above the mean dies out and never gains adoption. The rest of its life is just long, slow regression to the mean. For the most part, it continually gets worse, simply because statistically, when you are much better than average the only way to go is down. Eventually, it drops below the mean and some other better replacement takes over from it.
So people can absolutely be right when they say that everything is always getting worse! The fact of existence in the first place means that they started off much better than average - after all, the vast majority of potential configurations of atoms/molecules/cells/DNA/ideas/firms/people do not exist, and we happen to have the particular arrangement that was selected for. And then constituent parts move around in random motion, entropy takes its toll, and we read this as things decaying. Somewhat literally, this is what it means to decay.
The way to avoid this is to be constantly swapping out subsystems that aren't working for you with subsystems that are.
I guess I don't care about today's "AI agent for the agricultural industry" as much as I cared about yesterday's "Tool to help farmers plan crop rotation".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346516 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300772 (March 2026)
There's still a quality problem, but (a) that's always the case, (b) at least we aren't drowning, and (c) the community needs growth, just not runaway growth.
Major new tools like LLMs are inevitably going to get widely used, as they should. Figuring out what the best uses are will take time. Figuring out how to share what one is doing with them is an unsolved problem.
The risk I see is that if the goal is growth but the low quality submissions are drowning out other submissions that could negate growth as some of the newer accounts that legit try to be part of a community would just drift away as they are in the poisoned well. I too struggle to think of a way to separate them out of the noise without creating a system that would just be gamed by the LLM's. On one hand if the system requires the regulars to "vouch" so to speak it will create little elitist bubbles whereas too much tweaking to algorithms will just be detected and gamed by LLM's.
Out of curiosity, are the LLM posts coming from residential and mobile addresses or from AI data-centers themselves? If it's not already that could be yet another weighting factor. And/or AI user-agents as a weight. There are many bot signals that could be weighting or division factors. Bots are easy to spot from the server.