Great. Do you have any details on how you produced this? The "reproducible code" isn't really reproducible. The "hierarchical topic model" that you mentioned - which model was used?
I found the development of my Triclock[1] interesting. Stayed in Show HN for 3 days, never reached the frontpage, 65 upvotes. So a popular 3 day evergreen. All other of my Show HN were Crash & Burn or Burn & Shine
My project[1] got some love on HN though never made it to frontage about a year ago. It also got unexpectedly popular on twitter. Its simple project and not particularly great ui either but somehow it clicked. My other projects which i thought were more useful never got any traction.
It seems novel idea was what caught people's attention.
one year later though it hardly gets any traffic. Also with improved LLM's it has become trivial to replicate them.
The other was more interesting. It was a "rise from the dead" post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466027), meaning I posted it on Jan 2 (Friday), and then on Jan 5 (Monday) I started to get emails from readers giving me feedback about the post. I had not expected that level of response...
From this experience, I learned nothing about how either the algorithm works or when the best time post is. IMO just being part of the community and showing your work frequently is the best strategy here.
Launch early, launch often - or something like that.
The advent of coding agents killed Hacker News to some degree for me. Before I could always come here to get a pause from the hype, scandal and bait. Top comments were usually insightful; I really had this feeling to learn while browsing the feed. Today every brainfart about AI makes it to the frontpage. I know this sounds very dismissive, but most pieces really have no substance at all.
The good content is still there buts it drowns in noise and I'm not very good at filtering it out. I even suspect Hacker News is one of the prime advertisement targets of coding agent companies.
I would love to see if this is just my perception or if it can be found in the data.
the signal-to-noise ratio has definitely gotten worse. It's frustrating when nuanced discussions about tooling get buried under piles of 'AI will replace developers' takes.
I am not a blind AI fanboy but I am more bullish than some people here, for two reasons:
1. We might be drowning under the "top of the iceberg" at the moment (quickly generated AI slop) but there's a silent crowd of builders doing long-term work (still with the help of AI) that will only surface after months of work. I expect more of the bottom of the iceberg to show up over time.
2. A lot of the most interesting work in science was done out of sheer curiosity, not given a specific problem to solve. The current generation of AI is good -- and getting better -- at the latter, but genuinely incapable of doing the former in a remotely meaningful way.
In other words, I'm long on truly human-driven innovation.
14 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 38.3 ms ] threadDo you have any insights into the Clawd spam ravaging /new and /show?
I'm in there, being part of a (down) "voting ring" (not coordinated)
2016-era HN had its share of negativism, but it also had a lot less people - the light green from those charts is misleading.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46975399
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42207002
The other was more interesting. It was a "rise from the dead" post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466027), meaning I posted it on Jan 2 (Friday), and then on Jan 5 (Monday) I started to get emails from readers giving me feedback about the post. I had not expected that level of response...
From this experience, I learned nothing about how either the algorithm works or when the best time post is. IMO just being part of the community and showing your work frequently is the best strategy here.
Launch early, launch often - or something like that.
The good content is still there buts it drowns in noise and I'm not very good at filtering it out. I even suspect Hacker News is one of the prime advertisement targets of coding agent companies.
I would love to see if this is just my perception or if it can be found in the data.
1. We might be drowning under the "top of the iceberg" at the moment (quickly generated AI slop) but there's a silent crowd of builders doing long-term work (still with the help of AI) that will only surface after months of work. I expect more of the bottom of the iceberg to show up over time.
2. A lot of the most interesting work in science was done out of sheer curiosity, not given a specific problem to solve. The current generation of AI is good -- and getting better -- at the latter, but genuinely incapable of doing the former in a remotely meaningful way.
In other words, I'm long on truly human-driven innovation.