23 karma · joined March 10, 2026
Chatgpt moment just like google back in the early days truly felt asking an oracle a question.
''On HN, the idea is for people to submit stories that they ran across and personally found intellectually interesting, not because they have something to promote. It's fine to post your own work, as long as it's interspersed with interesting posts from unrelated sources. But when an account submits promotionally, it feels like they're not participating as a community member, and HN users notice this and flag the posts.
It's best to build up a track record of interesting submissions from unrelated sources, and to intersperse your own articles with those. The software considers submission histories adaptively, so if you do that, your own-posts will eventually stop getting filtered.
If you dig up interesting things from a variety of places, things people haven't run into before, then you'll be perceived as a community contributor rather than someone trying to market something. Particularly good are stories on out-of-the-way topics that rarely or never get attention. The best submissions are the ones that can't be predicted from any existing sequence.
(Note: avoid posting major sites like youtube, twitter, medium, etc., for this purpose, because the software classifies them alongside the promotional posts so they won't help 'dig you out'. Ditto for Show HNs and Ask HNs (text posts) - avoid those until you're in the clear.)''
The problem isn't tone. It's that your writing voice is made of dozens of interwoven patterns: sentence rhythm, punctuation habits, where your analogies come from, how you build and close an argument. A system prompt captures maybe 10% of that. The model smooths out the rest.
On the job front, it has never been harder. But keep applying, don't give up or get discouraged.
I don’t think writing with AI makes a creation "worse." If anything, it makes it better, if you bring genuine idea and imagination to it first.
The stigma comes from people being lazy and letting the AI do the heavy lifting of thinking. That’s where the "social contract" breaks. But using AI as a multiplier for your own voice and ideas isn’t "subpar"—it’s efficient.
If we start playing "whack-a-mole" with punctuation to find AI, we’re missing the point. The question isn’t what tool was used, but how much of the human's "creation" is actually in there.