Programming has been democratized in terms of “time invested in programming” by AI, which has resulted in exactly what happens to any high-investment community when a tool-assisted method of avoiding that investment is developed. You could ask any newspaper or movie script submissions reviewer before AI what percent of what they receive as uninvited-submissions is even slightly worth their time and they’ll look at you with the deadest eyes in the world and say “zero percent”. What invention led to their industries being buried in meaningless (relative to pre-invention) submissions that took a thousandth of the effort to produce than they did prior to it, without the editorial staff being scaled accordingly? The typewriter.
The obvious counterpoint is that AO3 is brilliant, which it is: give people a way to ontologize themselves and the result is amazing. Sure, AO3 has some sort of make-integer-go-up system, but it reveals the critical defect in “Show HN”: one pool for all submissions means the few that would before have been pulled out by us lifeguards are more likely to drown, unnoticed, amidst the throngs. HN’s submissions model only scales so far without AO3’s del.icio.us-inherited tagging model. Without it, tool-assisted creative output will increasingly overwhelm the few people willing to slog through an untagged Show HN pool. Certainly I’m one of them; at 20% by weight AI submissions per 12 hours in the new feed alone, heavily weighted in favor of show posts, my own eyes and this post’s graphs confirm that I am right to have stopped reading Show HN. I only have so much time in my day, sorry.
My interest in an HN post, whether in new or show or front page, is directly proportional to how much effort the submitter invested in it. “Clippy, write me a program” is no more interesting than a standard HN generic rabble-rousing link to a GotHub issue or a fifty-page essay about some economics point that could have been concisely conveyed in one. If the submitter has invested zero personal effort into whatever degree of expression of designcraft, wordcraft, and code craft that their submission contains, then they have nothing to Show HN.
In the rare cases when I interact with a show post these days, I’ve found the submissions to be functionally equivalent to an AI prompt: “here’s my idea, here’s my solution, here’s my app” but lacking any of the passion that drives people to overcome obstacles at all. That’s an intended outcome of democratization, and it’s also why craft fairs and Saturday markets exercise editorial judgment over who gets a booth or not. It’s a bad look for the market to be filled with sellers who have a list of AI-generated memes and a button press, whose eyes only shine when you take out your wallet. Sure, some of the buttons might be cool, but that market sucks to visit.
Thus, the decline of Show HN. Not because of democratization of knowledge, but because lowering the minimum effort threshold to create and post something to HN reveals a flaw-at-scale of community-voting editorial model: it only works when the editorial community scales as rapidly as submissions, which it obviously has not been.
Full-text search tried to deprecate centralized editorial effort in favor of language modeling, and turned out to be a disastrous failure after a couple decades due to the inability of a computer to distinguish mediocre (or worse) from competent (or better). HN tried to deprecate centralized editorial effort and it has survived well enough for quite some time, but gestures at Show HN trends graphs it isn’t looking good either. Ironically, Reddit tried to implement centralized moderation on a per-community basis — and that worked extremely well for many years, until Reddit rediscovered why corporations of the 90s worked so hard to deprecate editorial staff, when their editors engaged in collective action against management (something any academic journal publisher is intimately familiar with!).
In that light, HN’s core principle is democratizing editorial review — but now that our high-skill niche is no longer high-skill, the submissions are flooding in and the reviewers are not. Without violating the site’s core precepts of submission egality and editorial democracy, I see no way that HN can reverse the trend shown by OP’s data. The AO3 tagging model isn’t acceptable as it creates unequal distinctions between submissions and site complexity that clashes with long-standing operator hostility towards ontologies. The Reddit and acsdemic journal editorial models aren’t acceptable as it creates unequal distinction between users and editors that clashes with long-standing operator hostility towards exercising editorial authority over the importance of submissions. And HN can’t even limit Show HN submissions to long-standing or often-participating users because that would prevent the exact discoveries of gems in the rough that show used to be known for.
The best idea I’ve got is, like, “to post to Show HN, you must make several thoughtful comments on other Show HN posts”, which puts the burden of editorial review into the mod team’s existing bailiwick and training, but requires some extra backend code that adds anti-spam logic, for example “some of your comments must have been upvoted by users who have no preexisting interactions with your comments and continued participating on the site elsewhere after they upvoted you” to exclude the obvious attack vectors.
I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. A visionary founded left them a site whose continuing health turn out to hinge upon creating things being difficult, and then they got steamrolled by their own industry’s advancements. Phew. Good luck, HN.
This is why you just remove beloved features when there’s no champion left for them, rather than dragging people along with half-hearted patches. Now not only is everyone who cares upset with Apple, they’re going to be more infuriated when the obviously pending cull of an unattended feature occurs. I imagine it has roots all the way back to NeXT? and so it presumably has some weird emotional hangups involved for staff.
Pathfinder is one third-party tool that implements Miller columns. Reverse sherlock it and move on, Apple; shoddy work is a bad look.
If it’s anything like the code in passenger vehicles or airplanes, it is:
- spaghetti code that’s difficult or impossible to formally exercise fully in unit, comprehensive, or proof-centric testing
- delivered as compiled binaries for industrial-chip architectures by e.g. Renesas that have extremely hardened hardware and resilience
- annoying but feasible to reverse engineer in Ghidra
- designed to prioritize repairability over firmware signature enforcement
- has an undocumented but wire-sniffable protocol for firmware updates
So I am of a mind to take their statement at face value, because it’s vanishingly unlikely that the U.S. disallows field patching of a warplane due to lacking a crypto private key, much less bothers to spend money on crypto-attestation style locks. This is USgov military-industrial, not Bay Area marketer tech à la Google; competent security practices in deployed hardware are not likely to be the norm, especially not when every plane includes armed guards free of charge to the contract.
If I were a competent defense partner with the USgov, I would have already commissioned and complete a full decompilation, because duh. That the Dutch are saying this openly is charming but not particularly surprising. Presumably there’s a US backdoor in the IFF module, for instance, and while it’s fine to leave it in place, it’s better than fine to patch a warning alert in so that you know when it’s exercised. This is basic defense programming 101 stuff here, right? .. right?
I ended up having to "delete messages from icloud" on all devices, escalate to support after they weren't deleted 45 days later (the UI shows -15 days in that scenario), reenable sync and then see it still failing to complete a Sync Now, redisable sync and re-delete messages in cloud, wait another 45 days, and then ask them to escalate to the iCloud backend team to run a purge on their end of just my messages in icloud records. It worked, but I don't know if they've had enough time for whatever corruption they found to be patched into their automated ops-repair/cleanup processes (and they wouldn't tell me if I asked), it's only been a couple months.
26.4 is likely to have 9 new emoji, as usual for a late-cycle OS release. That may not particularly appeal to the "7bit ASCII for life" subset here, of course, but it's definitely a driver.
They've been delivering empty-noop test updates through that new pipeline in the past couple weeks to beta users, which suggests that they considered it.
Impressive visualization. Can you roll each 2d axis into a circle so that the back half of the axis curves around the back? The raytrace should still function but it’ll look less snapped-off at the boundaries, even if you flatten the 2d depth to nothing and run the axis ticks backwards.
For anyone else wondering, the weird flashing at startup is an attract mode for the invisible mode switch text at top.
The obvious counterpoint is that AO3 is brilliant, which it is: give people a way to ontologize themselves and the result is amazing. Sure, AO3 has some sort of make-integer-go-up system, but it reveals the critical defect in “Show HN”: one pool for all submissions means the few that would before have been pulled out by us lifeguards are more likely to drown, unnoticed, amidst the throngs. HN’s submissions model only scales so far without AO3’s del.icio.us-inherited tagging model. Without it, tool-assisted creative output will increasingly overwhelm the few people willing to slog through an untagged Show HN pool. Certainly I’m one of them; at 20% by weight AI submissions per 12 hours in the new feed alone, heavily weighted in favor of show posts, my own eyes and this post’s graphs confirm that I am right to have stopped reading Show HN. I only have so much time in my day, sorry.
My interest in an HN post, whether in new or show or front page, is directly proportional to how much effort the submitter invested in it. “Clippy, write me a program” is no more interesting than a standard HN generic rabble-rousing link to a GotHub issue or a fifty-page essay about some economics point that could have been concisely conveyed in one. If the submitter has invested zero personal effort into whatever degree of expression of designcraft, wordcraft, and code craft that their submission contains, then they have nothing to Show HN.
In the rare cases when I interact with a show post these days, I’ve found the submissions to be functionally equivalent to an AI prompt: “here’s my idea, here’s my solution, here’s my app” but lacking any of the passion that drives people to overcome obstacles at all. That’s an intended outcome of democratization, and it’s also why craft fairs and Saturday markets exercise editorial judgment over who gets a booth or not. It’s a bad look for the market to be filled with sellers who have a list of AI-generated memes and a button press, whose eyes only shine when you take out your wallet. Sure, some of the buttons might be cool, but that market sucks to visit.
Thus, the decline of Show HN. Not because of democratization of knowledge, but because lowering the minimum effort threshold to create and post something to HN reveals a flaw-at-scale of community-voting editorial model: it only works when the editorial community scales as rapidly as submissions, which it obviously has not been.
Full-text search tried to deprecate centralized editorial effort in favor of language modeling, and turned out to be a disastrous failure after a couple decades due to the inability of a computer to distinguish mediocre (or worse) from competent (or better). HN tried to deprecate centralized editorial effort and it has survived well enough for quite some time, but gestures at Show HN trends graphs it isn’t looking good either. Ironically, Reddit tried to implement centralized moderation on a per-community basis — and that worked extremely well for many years, until Reddit rediscovered why corporations of the 90s worked so hard to deprecate editorial staff, when their editors engaged in collective action against management (something any academic journal publisher is intimately familiar with!).
In that light, HN’s core principle is democratizing editorial review — but now that our high-skill niche is no longer high-skill, the submissions are flooding in and the reviewers are not. Without violating the site’s core precepts of submission egality and editorial democracy, I see no way that HN can reverse the trend shown by OP’s data. The AO3 tagging model isn’t acceptable as it creates unequal distinctions between submissions and site complexity that clashes with long-standing operator hostility towards ontologies. The Reddit and acsdemic journal editorial models aren’t acceptable as it creates unequal distinction between users and editors that clashes with long-standing operator hostility towards exercising editorial authority over the importance of submissions. And HN can’t even limit Show HN submissions to long-standing or often-participating users because that would prevent the exact discoveries of gems in the rough that show used to be known for.
The best idea I’ve got is, like, “to post to Show HN, you must make several thoughtful comments on other Show HN posts”, which puts the burden of editorial review into the mod team’s existing bailiwick and training, but requires some extra backend code that adds anti-spam logic, for example “some of your comments must have been upvoted by users who have no preexisting interactions with your comments and continued participating on the site elsewhere after they upvoted you” to exclude the obvious attack vectors.
I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. A visionary founded left them a site whose continuing health turn out to hinge upon creating things being difficult, and then they got steamrolled by their own industry’s advancements. Phew. Good luck, HN.
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