alt Hacker NewsWhat does substance mean in this case if I may ask?
I have tried to write my thought in another comment in here but the gist of that was suppose that I don't feel excited (comparatively, not by a long margin which is why asking the question in the first place, usually I use it just for prototyping/my own use case purpose) just writing code solely but I am interested in everything else from start to finish
Would this be considered substance or not (considering if the idea is still decent lets say)? Or is the project considered more substance if its solely written by human code
Because I feel like I remember simon's post in here about how he made an independent (I think HTML related tool) in python (iirc) using independent tests and so sort of simon's use cases are how I imagine AI use cases to be (reasonable for the very least)
Would you consider this an anamoly (given simon is simon and he's probably the most well known blogger in here) or something repeatable?
Or like, I am just curious whats substance is. Because I feel like I can build projects but they end up just being a github repo no explaination and I'd love to polish some off my old projects which are dusty with better substance and probably even share it on HN and if I don't do this, then it will still be partially better to know when I might make a project in future & I can try to keep that in my mind hopefully as well.
When we say we're looking for "substance" or "depth", we mean we're looking for projects that have had some significant thought and effort put into them. We're looking for a backstory, a real world problem that was causing real costs or difficulties for people, which set the developer on a journey of discovery and led them to an "a-ha" moment, where they figured out how the software should or could work, then built it in a way that's impressive (it needn't be polished just proven to work). That's the ideal.
At the other (low-substance) end of the spectrum is "lead generation tool" or "resume generator" that was built in 3 hours (and not much works other than a signup page and a link to Product Hunt). Not much of that kind of stuff makes the front page, but we see plenty of it submitted.
You can look down the list of most highly-ever upvoted Show HNs here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Most things getting 1000+ upvotes and hundreds of comments are high-substance, in that they have a back-story, some kind of deep work and/or ingenuity, and they make a great platform for curious conversation, which is, after all, what HN is for.