Comment by embedding-shape
1 month ago
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.
The Erlang front page was nice, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11
For reference, the glut of Erlang posts was due to pg posting "Why HN is slow lately": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145
> it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter
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
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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.
This is like when cryptocurrency was in full hype cycle, but even more severe as it touches every inch of the industry.
I thought the last round was the (JS) framework wars
I remember those days! And Elixir/Phoenix had to be hyped in every 5th post.
I miss these times!
(Django won.)
>> At least the frontpage is no longer filled with Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects anymore
Thank god.
Yep, HN loves/loved Ruby :)
[flagged]
HHhH is a decent book; it's probably DHH?
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...
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That seems like comparing the internet to jQuery.
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> because it's become foundational infrastructure
Which will happen in due time, like electricity and the general computer.
Why 10x? If you’re making up numbers why not 100x or 1000x?
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.
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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.
Go to new, click down vote on every AI post.
That is how we have less AI stuff on the front page.
But if other people are interested in it and there are more of them than you then you might not get your way.
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> 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.
Fair, but I think that's only for "Show HN" stuff?
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