Hacker News Reader

Thanks for doing that!

For more context on these numbers: when I started posting these, first, I wasn't consistent, and second, I was doing something that, to the algorithm, looked suspicious, so I think the posts had a negative weight.

In 2024, HN reached out and it got more of an official blessing for me to run these, and we set an official day of the month (the second Sunday), which in turn made me more consistent.

What's interesting (and kind of sad) here is that while AI drastically increased product count, more than 50% are now composed of dev tools and AI

Some kind of golden shovels situation. I wish there were more games, personal apps, and open hardware – more fun stuff that became affordable due to AI

It's the same as before, dev tools ranking higher up. For better or worse, developers like to spend time on meta-development.

But there ARE more games, personal apps and open hardware! Games went from 38 in 2023 to 609 so far this year. A golden age for taking whatever sounds fun and making it happen. Yes, 50% of HNers appear to think AI metaprogramming is fun/important, but I'm excited that I can faff about with making little games and music apps and whatever else I can dream.

If you'd like to enhance your music apps, Monic Theory can help you with that :)

No AI, just art intelligence here :)

https://monictheory.com/developer-api

If you think about and use AI all the time, you’ll inevitably think of AI projects. Like that website indiehackers is mostly filled with ideas that market to other indiehackers

Awesome dataset. Things are changing. In Chinese-learning community I found that surprising amount of people are creating their own tools without any intent to publish them, it just became easier to create your own thing that to dig out the good stuff from tons of tools already available.

It would be interesting to know if # daily users increased. Anyway there are so many projects, it is hard to decide what to projects read about, it is mostly already known figures who get the attention on their projects. Also we should force ourselves to give enough attention and time to projects we are interested in, without jumping to the next thing every 5 minutes.

Could we compare this to HN growth?

  year  projects  avg/month  HN posts/day  projects per 100k HN posts
  ----  --------  ---------  ------------  --------------------------
  2008       123       10.2           880                        38.2
  2009       104        8.7         1,669                        17.1
  2010       666       55.5         2,826                        64.6
  2011        86        7.2         3,713                         6.3
  2012        46        3.8         4,315                         2.9
  2013       389       32.4         5,485                        19.4
  2014       146       12.2         5,009                         8.0
  2015       104        8.7         5,476                         5.2
  2016       471       39.2         6,758                        19.0
  2017       456       38.0         7,534                        16.6
  2018       242       20.2         7,546                         8.8
  2019       246       20.5         8,569                         7.9
  2020       882       73.5        10,036                        24.0
  2021       837       69.8        11,384                        20.1
  2022       363       30.2        12,187                         8.2
  2023       425       35.4        12,675                         9.2
  2024      2122      176.8        10,203                        56.8
  2025      6220      518.3        10,649                       160.0
  2026      6093      677.0        12,641                       187.5  (Jan-Sep)

Wow, thank you for sharing! It's not quite clear to me why number of projects seem to be oscillating every few years.

2010 looks like a result of everyone flooding into the App Store.

what happened in 2013 and in 2016/2017. 2020 and 2021 were covid obviously. I mean I would like to see them distributed throughout each individual month. That makes it interesting to me at least. Also what is cool is that you can see the covid impact on posts as well.

Apart from the AI chain, who is benefiting from the explosion of vibecoded slop project?

I can think of domain registrars and entry-level VPS hosters (non-Hyperscaler)

Who else? Asking from a investment perspective.

If you use open source projects with any regularity, I'm certain you rely on AI-generated code, from projects who's primary contributors are AI

nowadays, with LLMs, everybody is calling themselves a developer doing any kind of project. Welcome to the future!

As a developer myself i hear this so often. Yes, it's (probably) your job on the line as well, BUT everybody nowadays can be a developer. Maybe, don't call it developer. Everybody nowadays can built some software that fulfills some need (or just for fun). It's actually something good, isn't it?

Would you mind, if you could suddenly, over night, be a carpenter, a watch maker or glassblower?

I care a lot more about my gainful employment compared to the everyman being able to create their own... something.[1] That’s very selfish of me, AI Industry, and I’m sorry.

> Would you mind, if you could suddenly, over night, be a carpenter, a watch maker or glassblower?

Yes. If that came with the little-bitty stipulation of being tied to the “compute” property of these AI behemoths.

Of course going beyond that it gets less problematic. Some carpenter-skilled exoskeleton is a lot less problematic than disembodied intelligences spamming our minds and each other.

[1] What exactly? My mind is so saturated with AI tools being literally devtools. On top of devtools on top of devtools.

Well we can finally get back to a semblance of the status quo ante Internetum with something like businesses being able to list all of their contact information on their own websites instead of “see our FB page”.

My view is if you joined two boards together: congrats, you're now a woodworker!

Gating things by the level or complexity of what is accomplished isn't super helpful. I saw a lot of that with things like people that wrote HTML weren't "real coders".

Glassblowing and watch making require specialized equipment I suppose so if you can get your hands on the gear and try it out, I feel like you can call yourself that. Maybe throw a "hobbyist" tag on it if you feel inclined.

I like this mindset and I’m going to steal this quote. Everyone is figuring things on their own skill journey with their hobbies and careers. Wherever you are, you can learn more and help people to come with you.

how did you get this data ? do you work at HN ?

HN has an officially sanctioned API - https://github.com/hackernews/api - which makes all of this data available

Holy shit.