Here’s a dumb idea:
Give people the ability to submit a “Show HN” one year in advance. Specifically, the user specifies the title and a short summary, then has to wait at least year until they can write the remaining description and submit the post. The user can wait more than a year or not submit at all; the delay (and specifying the title/summary beforehand) is so that only projects that have been worked on for over a year are submit-able.
Alternatively, this can be a special category of “Show HN” instead of replacing the main thing.
Makes me think about Taleb's lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
It's like books. Old but still relevant books are the best books to read.
This tech industry is changing so fast though. Maybe a year is too much?
I'd push back on this and say that the #1 problem with the discourse about AI now (e.g. why I'd almost never upvote a blog post about AI coding) is that it is too focused on 2026-02-17. That is, I could care less about optimizing to pick the best model or agentic workflow because it's all going to be obsolete in a year.
I am wary of blogs by celebrity software managers such as DHH, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and Paul Graham because they talk as if there was something about their experience in software development and marketing except... there isn't.
The same is true for the slop posts about "How I vibe coded X", "How I deal with my anxiety about Y" and "Should I develop my own agentic workflow to do Z?" These aren't really interesting because there isn't anything I can take away from them -- doomscrolling X you might do better because little aphorisms like "Once your agent starts going in circles and you find yourself arguing it you should start a new conversation" is much more valuable than "evaluations" of agents where you didn't run enough prompts to keep statistics or a log of a very path-dependent experience you had. At least those celebrity managers developed a product that worked and managed to sell it, the average vibe coder thinks it is sufficient that it almost worked.