At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore :)
These things tend to improve/get worse by themselves over time, if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on. Right now, seems we're still "discovering" new things around AI, so the submissions will surely continue, and interested parties will continue to upvote.
But AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely, where eventually you hardly see any frontpage submissions about it ever.
He's not wrong. It would still be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang, than the daily press releases or manufactured Twitter drama by OpenAI and Anthropic to generate hype for their IPO. We will just have to close an eye for the weekly point release of major AI models get 10 posts + associated reactions by thought leaders
He's annoying right with the "You guys are like the crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome overliteral genies" part too, which accurately represents LLMs as well... Wait, are LLMs training on us perhaps? (It's a joke, of course they are)
Yeah, Haskell, Erlang and also the whole functional programming wave was fun and is missed dearly. Also Clojure used to be featured on the frontpage a lot more, would be a fun exercise to write some small script to see what specific day had to most Clojure-stories at the same time, I remember one day we had two of them at least!
The difference between ruby, rust or react or whatever hyped technology was ruling the frontpage in the past, none of them transformed programming the way AI did and still does.
Whether I programmed in this or that framework did not matter so much, as I was still typing.
Now I (allmost) don't code anymore. That is a pretty big change and I still try to cope with it and I suspect many who hate AI, just don't want to face this new reality.
But it really is not just another technology where the hype will fade out and it becomes forgotten. It becomes part of the standard and we are still figuring out how. So more diverse submission on the front page would be nice, but AI just is what keeps most programmer busy these days, whether they like it or not. So naturally there is interest. It became existential.
That's a hot take. AI has fundamentally shifted things. Start-ups can start up 10x faster, and HN is start-up flavored.
If people quit talking about AI, it'll be because it's become foundational infrastructure, so it's not the primary focus of the articles, but just the atmosphere they all exist within, like the computer, or the internet.
But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.
Don't get me wrong, I leverage these AI tools as well to be more productive, I'm not against using it or anything else. But I'm also old enough to know that eventually AI will be "old news" when the next hot topic comes around.
> But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.
I really don't understand anyone who can say something like this with a straight face. Comparing AI to Bootstrap? I...
Only if you're actively inside of the hype-machine and don't see it from the outside with the experience of previously having been inside of the hype-machine.
The logic was/is "other topics been popular on the HN frontpage in the past and their advocates have made bunch of claims about their topics, and eventually it'll die down too, like the others did", that's hardly under attack here as you're on some wild tangent right now.
I'm pretty confident that, presently, with AI, I get more done than I could with 5x hours, but less than I could with 20x hours, and 10's a nice round number.
Nah. I've committed over a million LOC in the past 4 months, discounting personal projects. LOC is a fuzzy measure that doesn't tell much, but, it's easier to mention that than to describe the details of my work.
HN has a lot of Ruby posts because it was, and still is, a really good language and ecosystem for making web applications, and most of the companies at the time were web startups. It's a solid language, still one of the better ones for making real, practical web apps.
If you don't want to see Ruby posts and AI posts, why are you here? Do you realize that you have control over what media you consume? A lot of HN readers like Ruby and we like AI and we would like to have one place to do that without all the negativity, hatred, and low quality comments coming from people that don't care about the things we care about.
> If you don't want to see ruby posts and AI posts, why are you even here?
I don't know what feeling you got of me from my comment, but it's wrong. I don't mind either Ruby posts or AI posts, and I'd personally probably put Ruby somewhere along 1-3 top programming languages I like to work with professionally, so not sure why you feel like you have to defend something here.
> HN has a lot of Ruby posts because it was, and still is, a really good language
Agreed, but I was talking about specifically frontpage submissions, it used to be filled with them, almost every day, and now there is hardly any anymore. I think most of us long-term users can clearly see the trends over time, or at least feel them.
They have no interest in that, they came from god knows where and want to mangle HN and turn it into some kind of weird neo-luddite doomer forum.
HN is a forum made by angel investors for entrepreneurs, startups and hackers. We like technology, we like Ruby and we like AI because it's useful for what we want to do, and we would like to continue talking about it like we've talked about every other emergent technology before it (including other "controversial" things like Bitcoin).
Instead of trying to torture HN into something it was never designed for, why not go to lobste.rs and unselect the AI button and you won't see AI? Or make your own version of HN that bans AI discussion? You can even be really ironic and use Claude Code to make the forum for you so you can do even less work on that then you do on posting about how much you hate AI here in a forum designed for and by people that understand it and want to discuss it. I ask, once again, why are you here?
> They have no interest in that, they came from god knows where and want to mangle HN and turn it into some kind of weird neo-luddite doomer forum.
What on earth are you talking about?
> I ask, once again, why are you here?
Who are you asking? The person you're responding to, or "they" who I assume to be me, who you think somehow want to get rid of RoR/Ruby/AI submissions?
I'm sorry, but did the reading comprehension just fall off a cliff today among HN users, or what's going on?
I mean I come here to read AI stuff myself, so its kind of a reverse preaching to the choir to me.
For the most part the worst AI garbage gets filtered out in new, so ya downvotes are needed to keep out the crap, but it's up to the community to decide what is crap. The person who made this post wants to tip their finger on the scale to get their way.
With this said fanboyism does suck and we end up seeing the following pattern quite often.
AI haters repeat every anti-ai dumb thing they see regardless of how dumb it is because they hate AI.
AI lovers repeat every pro-ai dumb thing they see regardless of if how dumb it is.
Team sports and team politics are annoying and that's what a huge amount of the conversations fall into.
Completely agree with you. It's stopped being a calm discussion of the pros, cons, neither, and implications of emerging technology, and started being "us vs them" football team fans shouting at each other, but it really feels like the anti AI people are the home team right now, and every other position is the away team.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because I seem like the AI booster in these conversations but in reality I'm fairly middle of the road, and have plenty of concerns about the technology. But we can't even get to that discussion until we can move the overton window from "AI is bad, how can we ban it from HN", and "AI is cigarettes, it will kill half of its users".
The proverbial AI piss is in the pool, it's not going away, I don't know what to tell anybody that doesn't believe that or doesn't want that. It's time to start integrating this into your psyche as something that will be a part of the rest of our lives in a big way.
> if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on
True, but I think the point I am trying to make is that amybe YC could start curating this content somehow to give those easily-drowned-out articles a visibility bump.
They already do this. It's called the "second chance" pile. You will get an email saying that your submission didn't get the love they felt it should, and will add it to a list of submissions that get submitted to the front page, to see if the community agrees.
Not in my experience. Multiple submissions (non Show HN) of mine have been second chanced. I can't be certain, but I don't think any of my Shows have been... I guess that says more about the content I create than the content I share.
Nope. If you email hn@ycombinator.com with the subject "second chance pool" and it is not your submission, there is a very high chance one of the lovely mods will take the submission and second-chance it.
Often enough, they even email the original authors and submissions about it if it is a really good submission!
These things tend to improve/get worse by themselves over time, if it's not AI, it'll be something else, until the industry moves on. Right now, seems we're still "discovering" new things around AI, so the submissions will surely continue, and interested parties will continue to upvote.
But AI will have its eventually Ruby/RoR moment in the future too surely, where eventually you hardly see any frontpage submissions about it ever.