Ask HN: Can we discourage Show HNs that "ship the first draft"

  • Posted 2 hours ago by cadamsdotcom
  • 3 points
Agents are here to stay - so slop is too. Unfortunately it's easy to vibe a plausible thing for A Show HN, so (some, not all) Show HNs demonstrate only the creator's ability to ask agents for a thing. Shipping a first draft (instead of refining it into something only you could've done) forces others to inspect the mess and decide if there's any "there" there. It offloads the work of deciding if the work is worthwhile.

Badly written README; landing page full of LLMisms; a buggy mess that only works on my box.. all signs of lack of the love and craft to which the hacker ethos aspires..

Can we raise the bar?

The Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) cover most of this so maybe people just need to be gently redirected / more enforcement is needed ...

What if Show HN submissions require "proof-of-work", ie. here's how this goes beyond just prompting; a behind-the-scenes, if you will. Something a person has to hand-write that proves their thing is worth checking out.

Or something else? But it'd be great to lift the quality of Show HNs.

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