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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I agree that it's rude to show AI output to people... in most cases (and 100% if you don't disclose it.)

My simonw/research GitHub repo is deliberately separate from everything else I do because it's entirely AI-generated. I wrote about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/async-code-research/#th...

This particular case is a very solid use-case for that approach though. There are a ton of important questions to answer: can it run in WebAssembly? What's the difference to regular JavaScript? Is it safe to use as a sandbox against attacks like the regex thing?

Those questions can be answered by having Claude Code crunch along, produce and execute a couple of dozen files of code and report back on the results.

I think the knee-jerk reaction pushing back against this is understandable. I'd encourage people not to miss out on the substance.

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And again you're linking to your site. Maybe try pasting the few relevant sentences instead of constantly pushing your content in almost every comment. That's what people find annoying. Maybe link to other people's stuff more, or just write what you think here on HN.

If someone wants to read your blog, they will, they know it exists, and some people even submit your new articles here. There's no need to do what you're doing. Every day you're irritating more people with this behavior, and eventually the substance won't matter to them anymore, so you're acting against your own interests.

Unless you want people to develop the same kind of ad blindness mechanism, where they automatically skip anything that looks like self promotion. Some people will just see a comment by simonw and do the same.

A lot of people have told you this in many threads, but it seems you still don’t get it.

I'm determined to normalize linking to one's own writing, provided it's relevant to the conversation.

I think you're misreading what the "normalization" problem actually is and why my comment got a lot of upvotes.

You're not pushing against an arbitrary taboo where people dislike self links in principle. People already accept self links on HN when they're occasional and clearly relevant. What people are reacting to is the pattern when "my answer is a link to my site" becomes your default state, it stops reading like helpful reference and starts reading like your distribution strategy.

And that's why "I'm determined to normalize it" probably won't work because you can't normalize your way out of other people's experience of friction. If your behavior reliably adds a speed bump to reading threads forcing people to context switch/click out and wonder if they're being marketed to then the community will develop a shortcut I mentioned in my previous comment which basically is : this is self promo so just ignore.

If your goal is genuinely to share useful ideas, you're better off meeting people where they are: put the relevant 2-6 sentences directly in the comment, and then add something like "I wrote more about it on my blog" or whatever and if anyone is interested they will scroll through your blog (you have it in your profile so anyone can find it with one click) or ask for a link.

Otherwise you're not "normalizing" anything, you're training readers to stop paying attention to you. And I assure you once that happens, it's hard to undo, because people won't relitigate your intent every time. They'll just scroll. It's a process that's already started, but you can still reverse it.

No, I'm determined to normalize it. I would like a LOT more people to have personal websites where they write at length about things, and then share links to what they have already written where it is relevant to the conversation.

I'm actively pushing back against the "don't promote your site, don't link to it, restate your content in the comments instead" thing.

I am willing to take on risk to my personal reputation and credibility in support of my goal here.

There might be a bit of growth-hacking resistance here, and maybe some StackOverflow culture as well. Neither should be leveled at you, IMHO. I've followed and admired your work since Datasette launched, and I think you're exhibiting remarkably good judgment in how you discuss topics with links to deeper discussion, and it's in keeping with a long tradition of good practices for the web. Thanks for working to normalize the practice.

Well, that's your choice. You can do whatever you want with your reputation, but you can't change human nature and that's essentially what you're trying to do. People don't want HN to turn into another LinkedIn style feed full of AI slop, spam and self promotion. That's exactly what your attempt to "normalize" this behavior would encourage (and I'm confident it won't catch on, sorry).

If everyone starts dropping their "relevant content" in the comments, most of it won't be relevant, and a lot of it will be spam. People don't have time to sift through hundreds of links in the comments and tens of thousands of words when the whole point of HN is that discussion and curation work in the opposite direction.

If your content is good, someone else will submit it as a story. Your blog is probably already read by thousands of people from HN, if they think a particular post belongs in the discussion in some comment, they'll link it. That's why other popular HN users who blog don't constantly promote or link their own content here, unlike you. They know that you don't need to do it yourself, and doing it repeatedly sends the wrong signal (which is obvious and plenty of socially aware people have already pointed out to you in multiple threads).

Trying to normalize that kind of self promoting is like normalizing an annoying mosquito buzz, most people simply don't want it and no amount of "normalizing" will change that.

This is simonw though. I look forward to his thoughts on a topic and would find it annoying if he was forced to summarize his research in a HN thread and then not link to it.

The difference between LinkedIn slop and good content is not the presence or absence of a link to one’s own writing, but the substance and quality of the writing.

If simonw followed these rules you want him to follow, he would be forced to make obscure references to a blog post that I would then need to Google or hope that his blog post surfaces on HN in the next few days. It seems terribly inefficient.

I agree with you that self-promotion is off-putting, and when people post their competing project on a Show HN post, I don’t click those links. But it’s not because they are linking to something they wrote. It’s because they are engaged in “self-promotion”, usually in an attempt to ride someone else’s coattails or directly compete.

If simonw plugged datasette every chance he got, I’d be rolling my eyes too, but linking to his related experiments and demos isn’t that.

Counterpoint to the sibling comment: posting your own site is fine. Your contributions are substantial, and your site is a well-organized repository of your work. Not everything fits (or belongs) in a comment.

I'd chalk up the -4 to generic LLM hate, but I find examples of where LLMs do well to be useful, so I appreciated your post. It displays curiosity, and is especially defensible given your site has no ads, loads blazingly fast, and is filled with HN-relevant content, and doesn't even attempt to sell anything.

> can it run in WebAssembly?

You can safely assume so. Bellard is the creator of jslinux. The news here would be if it _didn't_.

> What's the difference to regular JavaScript?

It's in the project's README!

> Is it safe to use as a sandbox against attacks like the regex thing?

This is not a sandbox design. It's a resource-constrained design like cesanta/mjs.

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If you vibe coded a microcontroller emulation demo, perhaps there would be less pushback.

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