Yep. I'm months behind where I'd like to be on the projects I've been talking about here lately. But that's because of personal issues, I'm pretty sure, not because of seeing some drudgery in the task that AI might possibly help with.

You might not be surprised to hear someone made a satire-ish site doing literally just that already.

And yes, it was posted to HN. I don't remember the name though.

That's amazing. I've been working on a tool that takes seed money and turns it directly into apps, and thats been generating a ton of complaints from users. There's an unbelievable synergy between our two products, and I believe that if we combine forces we might be able to corner the user complaint market. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine the moat.

In other news, I would like to offer the domain aimakememoney.com to the person with the funniest thing to put on it. I'll consider submissions for the next 24 hours and choose a winner.

and do what? block the entire page? block just the phrased? display the page as is, but with some sort of overlay pointing out the detected text?

that's the problem is that everyone wants to use AI, but nobody really does anything useful.

Things sort of like that already exist, e.g. https://github.com/richardharrington/disrupt-to-bullshit

I would disagree that their previous TellHN has much structurally in common with the pattern they’re describing here.

First off, since it probably wasn't clear, several turns of phrase in my parody are meant to be understood more or less verbatim.

The structure I'm trying to highlight is specifically about things like the abuse of bullet-point lists (and specifically, ones where a few sentences of puffery are labelled at the start), and about trying to get people invested in using a product (with the implication that this leads to signing up for an account somewhere and eventually paying money or watching ads).

My Tell HN isn't intended to encourage people to use my fork of the project. I don't necessarily expect that anyone on HN was using the original in the first place. If anyone does care, I also explicitly point at alternatives.

I don't say anything at all about the actual functionality of the library, because it isn't relevant; my contribution is to the packaging of the project. I'm also not trying to use buzzwords to describe what I've accomplished: I put a repository on GitHub so people can see some source code, and published a wheel on PyPI so people can install the code with the standard tools. None of this is "sexy", bleeding-edge stuff in the Python world and I don't pretend that is is, either.

In fact, my submission wasn't really about `stringcase-new` at all. It was about a) what had actually happened with Setuptools; b) promoting myself as someone who can understand and solve problems like this on the fly, and then create comprehensive write-ups with abundant sourcing; c) promoting some of my sources ([2] and [13] are important information for all Python developers, in particular, and [11] did excellent work here and deserved a shout-out for it).

Edit: forgot to mention — I also don't benefit from anyone downloading or installing the fork, unlesss you count the tiny ego boost (or not) from looking at https://pypistats.org/packages/stringcase-new (as I post this, the site seems to be down...).

> A lot of these things happen with or without AI.

Of course the AI had to learn from somewhere. In previous discussions I've been told that certain kinds of executives may naturally write like this and/or prefer for others to write like this. But now the style has become homogenized and ubiquitous, and I personally just find it extremely grating.

> This site is run by a VC.

Sure. But the VC culture here is about trying to connect VCs with people who want VC funding. It's not about marketing the resulting product.

> So what is the right way to write about projects? I've thought about writing something up that I'm building and it probably would have been similar to this structure.

Be up front about what your project does, and use only the plainest language to explain what it actually is. If you contrast with known alternatives, make sure we can directly understand your design taste/aesthetic and why you were motivated to make another one. Are you trying to provide something faster? simpler? more featureful? Or on the other hand, is it something you just re-created because you have a personal interest in things like it? It's perfectly okay to do that, and preferable to be honest about it.

If you're passionate about the underlying design, consider describing it in long-form prose.

Give a brief overview of how to use it. Not in a way that tries to convince us that it's easy to use, but in a way the directly illustrates that. Show, don't tell. Even if you have a full README already, repeat a simple example or three.

And please, don't say things that should already be obvious from the fact that you're posting it in the first place.

There are specific rules for Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and tips (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638) from the HN moderation team, a couple of which are "Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great." and "Don't have your username be that of your company or project. It creates a feeling of using HN for promotion and of not really participating as a person. You don't have to use your real name, just something to indicate that you're here as a human, not a brand." It's pretty clear that using Show HNs to deliver sales pitches is not part of its intended purpose.