Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning

Re:Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning by evrenesat on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @01:27PM (#47051060)

In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator. If it's completed within a few days, it should require more thorough human review. On the other hand, if the project has been active for a while and received contributions spread throughout that timeline, I think that would indicate accumulated effort (human and/or AI) and higher quality.

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Re:Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning by acnops on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @01:53PM (#47051438)

I thought so too, untill I looked for 1-point Show HN posts with a repo with a long commit history. Some of these are really cool (see my article), but others were not compelling at all, at least to me.

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Re:Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning by accurrent on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @01:34PM (#47051160)

Eh IMO any metric like this can be gamed. My project that reached hn front page was coded in a short time (and yes some ai was used), but otoh I think it was something that showed hey you can do this really interesting thing (in my case vlm based indoor location).

Also its not uncommon for weekend projects to be done in a shprt span with just a "first commit" message dump even pre-AI.

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Re:Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning by evrenesat on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @01:45PM (#47051314)

Yes, any metric can be gamed. But I believe measuring the entropy of a repository, comparing state of the code-base over time can be done deterministically, which would make it harder to game it.

So either we are going to completely avoid automation and create a community council to decide what deserves to be shown to rest of the community or just let best AI models to decide if a project is worth show up on front page?

Or we can do all of the above :)

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Re:Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning by saghm on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @02:37PM (#47052052)

Isn't it possible to fabricate the timestamps on commits and then push them up all at once? If you're planning on literally checking that the commits are publicly available for a certain amount of time, that seems like it would needlessly punish projects that someone worked on offline and then happened to push up once it was completed.

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Re:Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning by accurrent on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @02:21PM (#47051808)

What about hardware projects without a code base? Those are fun too and deserve front page

I suspect automating "code base over time" metric is tricky. Not everyone will be using git or a vcs and somethings dont need a codebase to be shared.

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Re:Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning by tptacek on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:17PM (#47054201)

Show HN has never been restricted to open source projects and it would be weird to make the criteria more restrictive for open source than closed source work.

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Re:Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning by hgs3 on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @06:57PM (#47055228)

> In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator.

You can’t necessarily judge by timeline. I’ve always developed my projects privately and then squashed to one initial public commit. I’ve got a private repo now with thousands of commits developed over years and I still intend to squash.

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Re:Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning by lelanthran on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @03:28AM (#47058660)

Not a good bar - I develop projects privately, and make public only when I am good and ready.

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