26 ms·

Show HN: Hacker News Simulator

572 points by orf 11y ago

felipebueno 11y ago
In fact, I learned in a very silly thing to know. The risk is on controlling the hardware thats in there"Only when you get the impression that credit cards that my Time Warner unfamiliar with the goal these people as potential phishing as well as US government uses private business to sell your company in its own horn about being able to be great.
namuol 11y ago
Oh wow, clearly my timing wasn't right... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453454 Edit: To be fair, this version generates plausible comments and has subjectively funnier titles. :)
iokanuon 11y ago
Was it anyhow influenced by https://reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator https://reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator?
- orf 11y ago
  Yep, it uses the same technique. I've pulled every comment and story from HN through the API and make a bunch of Markov chains to produce story titles and comments. The input corpus is a lot smaller than subredditsimulator though and the various subreddits have a large variation in the words used (meaning more funny comments), so it's no way near as good. Perhaps a future enhancement might be to partition comments by the submission domain, i.e use only comments for github.com stories for fake github submissions, might generate very different text than a munge of every comment.
  - jedberg 11y ago
    You could also use the comments on reddit in /r/programming and /r/startups and other related reddits to help get more data for seeding your corpus. Or if you want to get more complex, find the reddit comments for every link that was submitted to HN and use that (but you have to be careful that you use "hacker" related reddits or it will sound too "reddity")
    - captn3m0 11y ago
      Maybe aggregate over the subreddits listing (where HN links appear) and then whitelist some of them (after checking against a comment frequency count) like programming, linux etc.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    I would love love love it if it could provide comments on a per-user basis. Use my comments for my name, use JohnDoe's comments for their name. As well as keeping comments by submitted domain.
- wilg 11y ago
  I made a similar thing a year or two based off of another Markov Chain of HN headlines. I generalized it to allow you to mashup headlines from different news sources (Buzzfeed x Hacker News, for example). Still pretty funny, if anyone's interested: http://www.headlinesmasher.com/best/all http://www.headlinesmasher.com/best/all
  - 78666cdc 11y ago
    These headlines are phenomenal.
  - archimedespi 11y ago
    I wish I could upvote this post multiple times.
  - epaga 11y ago
    I lost it at "Nintendo steps into porn biz"
  - oxide 11y ago
    some of these could be Onion headlines, I love it.
  - NumberCruncher 11y ago
    Too funny for a monday morning...
  - toothbrush 11y ago
    Scandal: Politician Goes to Work LOL
  - Natsu 11y ago
    Create some stories that support the... err... premise of those titles and I think you could automate Buzzfeed and such.
bluesign 11y ago
Feels like HN when I am high
mpitt 11y ago
Maybe some sort of "this is not the real hn" and "we are not endorsed by ycombinator" could be good.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  If it ever needs that then that's serious ground for worries.
  - jackyyan 11y ago
    interesting
minimaxir 11y ago
As a HN data processing note, to remove the garbled characters, you need to convert the smart quotes from HN (among other things like long dashes) into normal ASCII characters. EDIT: Looks like the garbled characters were fixed.
- orf 11y ago
  Yeah thanks for pointing that out, I took the nuclear approach and just ran all everything through unicodedata.normalize("NFC", ...) which seems to have done the trick.
time_is_scary 11y ago
These post titles are really good! some of my favorite so far: > Debunking Myths About Growth Hacking Goes Bad (infoq.com) > First Firefox OS developer to come (businessmandi.com) > Modern science and art go to jail? The law is dead in cinema (techcrunch.com)
- orf 11y ago
  Mine are > A Browser Package Manager Command Line Client Written in Lua > TweetDeck taken offline after bug allows malicious code execution on Android - eBook > True hacker resume: CV as Python objects to/from Amazon S3 price cut for all your OK Google searches predict market moves
- JetSpiegel 11y ago
  > Google's Grand Plan to Split Sentences (2014) [pdf] (techcrunch.com)
- strangecasts 11y ago
  > Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on the cusp of becoming a permanent 3G connection to a billion dollars worth of online advertising
- rsp1984 11y ago
  Pussy Riot members jailed for posting photos to raise your hourly freelance rate (arabcrunch.com) Hahahaha!
  - orf 11y ago
    This is my new favourite!
  - time_is_scary 11y ago
    This wins
- daxelrod 11y ago
  > Mercurial Ate Our Breakfast [with Revsets], But We Can Fix Internal Communication Before It Breaks (staralliance.com) > Ask HN: Optimal number of sets with high IQ users? > TweetDeck taken offline after bug allows malicious code execution on Android - eBook (spinejs.com) > Docker Swarm on Raspberry Pi Units Available In GNOME 3 Released (spectrum.ieee.org)
0942v8653 11y ago
Quick note: You are not setting the page (tab) title with the <title> element. Right now it says "The Death of the Party" for every story.
- orf 11y ago
  Thanks, fixed
Kinnard 11y ago
I'm confused. What is this?
- detaro 11y ago
  An automated parody of HN, OP explains above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248803 > I've pulled every comment and story from HN through the API and make a bunch of Markov chains to produce story titles and comments.
  - Kinnard 11y ago
    I see. Cool. I'm building an HN clone now. Hierarchical comments are a fun challenge. Any tips?
    - orf 11y ago
      Postgres recursive queries make them pretty simple to deal with. This[1] is the query I used to pull a list of all a stories children recursively. 1. https://gist.github.com/orf/5565a572c6ddda039d6f https://gist.github.com/orf/5565a572c6ddda039d6f
      - Kinnard 11y ago
        Hmmm, I'm trying to decide between this recursive query or something using ltrees. Can't make up my mind . . . [1] https://truongtx.me/2014/02/28/tree-structure-query-with-postgresql/ https://truongtx.me/2014/02/28/tree-structure-query-with-pos... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603894/is-postgresqls-ltree-module-a-good-fit-for-threaded-comments http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603894/is-postgresqls-ltr...
    - Kenji 11y ago
      Yeah. If you store them in a relational database you will grow a couple of grey hairs because you're essentially forcing a tree structure into a table structure. The concepts clash and it's kind of a pain, but possible since every post has 1 unique parent, so you can make upwards references and rebuild a tree from that.
ricardobeat 11y ago
This is perfect. I opened it on a new tab, and went off to read another article. After coming back and opening multiple links I found myself thinking "where are all this posts with gramatical errors coming from" for a solid one minute - until I noticed "pg" where my username should be!
- bcook 11y ago
  Imagine how it will feel at midnight after spending 15 min replying to ... whatever this is. Hopefully you are real. :)
- caser 11y ago
  I had the same experience. LOL'd when I realized I'd clicked on 5-6 links that looked interesting that were actually auto-generated.
- veddox 11y ago
  I did virtually the exact same thing - except my first reaction on seeing the fake HN was: "Why the heck am I logged in as pg? Security hole? This ought to be fun, let's see what kind of things he can do in here..." Took me a while to figure out that this was actually a fake :-(
- i336_ 11y ago
  I, too, did this. >.< "Wait, how did Hacker News get opened twice?" ... "Eh, I'll just close this one." (You can guess which one I closed. :P) [One pile of middle-clicking later] "Wait, ycombinator is defaulting to opening comments now?!" I noticed the "ycombniator" shortly after that. I wish those links were real :( - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_198.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_198.html: "Git 2.0 changes push default to using only CSS3 - No more remote work work: An adventure in civic hacking (scienceblogs.com)" - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_210.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_210.html: "Show HN: Farmly – find anyone for anything you want and keep the Olympic germs away. (nowthenapp.com)" - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_208.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_208.html: "Twitter will pay for anything [Product] (skullsinthestars.com)" - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_184.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_184.html: "Ask HN: Angry/hardcore rock music to code the summer away, stuck for ideas to practice/exercice a new UI designer/programmer (NYC)" - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_190.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_190.html: "Is GTK+ the real reason people are startups using? (blog.cto.hiv)" My responses ranged from "they're doing what to Linux now?" to "that one sounds cool..." to "that's true..." to "...of course I'm clicking that" to to "hm... well they must be going for an Indian motif". And somewhere in there I was like "wow, /r/titlegore meets HN." I'm very dense though. This was really well-made! :D I still wish that 4th link was real. Like, I have a different taste in music, but I'd so reply to that. lol
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
steveklabnik 11y ago
I tweeted a link to this, and it's already fooling people. Well done!
- georgebonnr 11y ago
  I absent-mindedly opened this in a new tab along with a few other Hacker News stories. Was very confused for a few minutes. Good job!
clamprecht 11y ago
We're all markov chains when you get down to it.
dang 11y ago
We got an email from someone asking why they were logged in as pg, so you've passed some sort of niche Turing test.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Notably, this is what happens most of the time when something from /r/SubredditSimulator gets popular and becomes intermixed with normal submissions on a subscriber's front page and /r/all. The way to beat a Turing Test is through hiding in plain sight.
  - rkcr 11y ago
    9gag automatically reposts reddit's /r/all onto their site. People on 9gag don't realize it's a bot and have one hell of a time trying to interpret the post. Examples: 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3fnkni/9gag_is_automatically_copying_some_of_the_most/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3fnkni/9g... 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3kwmnj/9gag_strikes_again_and_blindly_copies_a_ss_post/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3kwmnj/9g...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - _jeans 11y ago
      Also this one https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3jke2s/remember_the_time_9gag_automatically_posted_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3jke2s/re...
- hoprocker 11y ago
  And pg has 1337 karma! (Is that joke too old now?)
  - oxide 11y ago
    I would say it is timeless.
prat0318 11y ago
Nice. Was i the only one who took a minute to find the minute difference in the spelling of the hostname.
Retr0spectrum 11y ago
One thing I noticed is that comment lengths are almost all the same - I think some randomisation would be good.
- orf 11y ago
  Good idea, they are supposed to be between 50 and 150 characters, but that needs adjusting I think.
erlend_sh 11y ago
I opened it in a background tab, lost track of it for a while, ended back there thinking it was the normal ycombinator and unwittingly spent a couple minutes thinking "wtf is up with HN today?" Well played. edit: lol, seems I'm not the only one.
cthalupa 11y ago
Markov chains are great fun http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/ http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/ HP Lovecraft + Puppet Documentation
- lifthrasiir 11y ago
  Also, King James Programming [1]. [1] http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/
closetnerd 11y ago
Love this comment from the simulator: > We had an inkling that something that someone is logged in to a traditional incandescent bulb
- mjklin 11y ago
  Lol has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
  - rdancer 11y ago
    You've got to be kidding me. I've been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It's just common sense.
AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
This reminds me of a Google exercise within their Python course, wherein it read in a text file and built dictionaries of every word and the words that followed said word in the text in order to create a prosaic style that mimed the author of the original text. It was quite interesting to run and throw a text file at it to see what it produced. EDIT: I have a cached version of the exercise if anyone feels like looking at it: https://github.com/AdmiralAsshat/learn_python/blob/master/google_code_university/basic/mimic.py https://github.com/AdmiralAsshat/learn_python/blob/master/go... There should be an "alice.txt" in the same directory as a sample file to throw at it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- comex 11y ago
  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_generators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_gener...
blazespin 11y ago
What's impressive is that when I see a typically hacker newish headline or comment I now find myself checking to see who I'm logged in as to make sure I'm on the real hacker news.
- nni 11y ago
  yes I was having to read the real HN much more carefully right after I played with the simulator
shkkmo 11y ago
favorite comments so far: "The main problem is going to check its authenticity against any common sense." "I use in your TOS, you say you're better than a bad example: a painting as an extreme advantage"
CuttlefishXXX 11y ago
Pretty good. It struggles a bit with some punctuation, inserting spaces after "." in urls and not having space after "?" in sentences.
abrichr 11y ago
Nice work. FYI, cicking on the "<#> Comments" link from within a comments page leads you to a 404.
r3bl 11y ago
I kind of feel bad I discovered what was going on in like 20 seconds. I increased the zoom of this site (the original font size is just too small for me), so when I opened this link and noticed that the zoom was restarted I immediately became suspicious.
amelius 11y ago
This is a solution in search of a problem. But nice anyway!
snake117 11y ago
I kept looking at the URL and thinking: "How are they using the same domain?" I came back an hour later only to realize that the i and n are switched in ycombniator. That was a real "smack my head" moment.
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
Exactly 1337, eh?
fowl2 11y ago
McAfee thinks this is porn. Cute.
caser 11y ago
Have you open sourced the code on Github? Would love to play around with this.
- caser 11y ago
  Also, is this static, or will it continue to generate new posts?
- orf 11y ago
  Yeah, I'll be writing a blog post about it and release the code then :)
fao_ 11y ago
Some of my favourites so far: > Google wins the Book Search settlement gives Google 15 days in orbit (bostonglobe.com) > Pussy Riot members jailed for posting photos to raise your hourly freelance rate (arabcrunch.com) > Microsoft launches Bing Booster program for exploiting weakness in smart phone (blog.geeksphere.net) > Tell HN: Rejected from App Store due to a charitable project, continue in 2012 (askgolang.com)
luxpir 11y ago
Or, 'How HN looks to non-hackers'. Brilliant work. Truly monads in backport VM scandal-worthy.
robgough 11y ago
Sometimes the real HN reads like this for me. It's how I know I'm tired, and should go to bed immediately after reading one more story.
- luke_s 11y ago
  10 I am to tired 20 Just read one more story 30 Goto 10
archimedespi 11y ago
The titles suddenly got a lot better! Less grammatical errors. One of my favorites is "Hosted Continuous Integration Using Gradle, Android Studio And New York Times, Evernote, Gmail, and Quicksilver". That is a CI solution I'd love to see :)
- atuladhar 11y ago
  *fewer grammatical errors (sorry)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - drivingmenuts 11y ago
    Newsbot thanks you for proving that you are real. You may return to your life simulation.
- archimedespi 11y ago
  Another hilarious title: "Ask HN: Worst examples of really creative ways to combat late payments". This sounds like an real post on HN, and actually makes sense. Or maybe "Swift Language Will Instantly Know Everything About the Origin of 'The World's Dumbest Idea': Milton Friedman".
- joonoro 11y ago
  "Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is not working on KVM/bare metal"
- archimedespi 11y ago
  I think "Google to announce proof of Ikea's excellence" wins.
- SergeyHack 11y ago
  I like this one "Why Android Will Soon Become Apple’s Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Done."
- 11y ago
rdancer 11y ago
Oh, that's great. I have just spent five minutes trying to figure out why all these comments on HN just stopped making sense.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  I had the exact opposite experience.
nadsumatal 11y ago
LOL, everything sounds like a t-shirt from Japan.
turing_bot_3c 11y ago
Absolutely fantastic, and probably will happen on Mars. Unfortunately, I can't read it. But Erlang is a human, but it's not unheard of, or even a real wood and lead pencil. A comment to mean what you mean how do we keep in mind when I can set a deadline, some basic programming with Scratch.
pdknsk 11y ago
> Show HN : One click image optimization service for your terminal This is perfect. Well done.
Uptrenda 11y ago
Leonardo da Vinci used to throw paint filled sponges at walls and then force himself to make sense out of the resulting irregular shapes in relation to a problem he was interested in. For example: he might be thinking about transportation and say "well this looks like a horse drawing a carriage ..." and then use it as a basis to come up with new ideas. By forcing his brain to make connections between totally unrelated things it enhanced his creativity (or at least that was the intention.) What comes to mind for this Hacker News Simulator is the modern equivalent of da Vinci's sponges: an ink blot which you can use to come up with completely new and novel ideas by forcing unexpected connections. And because the topics here are in some way related to hacker news the result could be filling in enough blanks to produce something newsworthy (i.e. an actual good idea instead of a garbled markov chain.)
- mfisher87 11y ago
  That's really interesting, hadn't heard that before. A big difference here though is that the software is making (the appearance of) very specific logical connections itself -- with the ink sponges, you're creating a vague image that is open to human interpretation.
  - antsar 11y ago
    Some of the software-generated "logical connections" are not quite logical though, and require a little massaging/tweaking (human interpretation) in order to make sense. This process can result in interesting new logical connections.
- cmarschner 11y ago
  Any LdV biography you could recommend?
  - skwaugh 11y ago
    "The Science of Leonardo" by Fritjof Capra is easy to read and a good intro. Martin Kemp's "Leonardo da Vinci" is a bit scattered but has great visuals. But most interesting is Leonardo's own "Notebooks."
nstart 11y ago
Well that was pretty awesome. Small suggestion. Fix the times on the comment threads to make it even more realistic. Threaded conversations have people starting a thread 11 minutes ago but getting replies 35 minutes ago. Busted :D
arthurcolle 11y ago
> Tell HN: my first dollar on the App Store due to a good review from Techcrunch, lessons learnt. This is so real
PascLeRasc 11y ago
It seems your version has a higher average score per post than OG HN. Might want to apply a 0.75-0.85 multiplier to each post, as a crude estimate.
zxexz 11y ago
My favourite: "Myth: systemd is unstable and insecure people who outsource have no future. "
archimedespi 11y ago
Am I the only person who removed the `news.` from news.ycombniator.com to see if there was a parody of Y Combinator's main site?
intruder 11y ago
Tell HN: my first dollar on the App Store due to a good review from Techcrunch, lessons learnt. (spreadsheets.google.com)
intruder 11y ago
Tell HN: my first dollar on the App Store due to a good review from Techcrunch, lessons learnt. (spreadsheets.google.com)
justin_vanw 11y ago
Oh man, I almost did this awhile ago. I even registered http://ycornbinator.com http://ycornbinator.com Very convincing fake.
- jaredsohn 11y ago
  I used to have yccombinator.com (interestingly it looks like somebody else picked it up after I let it expire) after noticing that there are quite a few places on the net that think that is the right name.
0x54MUR41 11y ago
What the different between this with the original one?
xerophyte12932 11y ago
> I, being born a woman was violently beaten and robbed in a project/problem. That's a weird auto-generated comment[1]. I wonder how much of it is random selection and how much is seeded text. What were the units that combined to form this? [1] "Ask HN: Pure client-side PadMapper would be great as jobs? What a senior Rails dev?" post).
kristopolous 11y ago
sometimes all news looks like this to me
sidcool 11y ago
I didn't understand what this is about.
- rhizome31 11y ago
  I think it's just the Hacker News layout filled with randomly generated content. I don't get the point though. Maybe playing with some text generation algorithm?
  - orf 11y ago
    All the content is created based off every post/comment on Hacker News, hence the somewhat plausable post titles (if you squint a bit). There isn't much point to it, other than I found it quite funny :)
tstyle 11y ago
Out of curiosity, what is the status bar to the left of every comment for? Is it some sort of admin tool available to pg's account?
- i336_ 11y ago
  I think it might be a relevance or score of some kind. The reason it might look weird (like a strange progress bar or something) is because it's an img link to "s.gif", but s.gif is actually a 404. The td cell (yup it's a table structure) the img link is in is named "ind". No idea what these two things put together mean. EDIT: Then I noticed a thing between "Hacker News" and "new" at the top. s.gif yet again. > "It's a spacer gif...! The img tag has an explicit width= set.... Wow, that takes me back a bit, and I'm not even a real webdev or anything (and I don't mind tables to boot). Blinks
veddox 11y ago
Why did YC not buy ycombnioator.com too? Isn't that a phishing risk - like www.gmail.com and www.gmai.com?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
livatlantis 11y ago
"From 0 to 8-figure revenue in spite of flat UI design and email (gizmodo.com)" My coworkers are looking at me like I've lost it. Oh my...
BetaCygni 11y ago
> Steve Jobs came within $5k of going to have cracked unsolved Zodiac Killer cipher I wonder why he stopped then?
- orf 11y ago
  He didn't hit his kickstarter target, obviously
KuhlMensch 11y ago
Damn, I thought I was having a stroke.
jmkni 11y ago
Very cool! > Entrepreneur crowdsources decision to quit Silicon Valley Perfect :)
tempodox 11y ago
It would seem the texts were all written by Markov Chainy, which is why they are grammatically wrong. I would have preferred a grammar-oriented text generator. It's still too easy to tell the one simulation from the other.
LastZactionHero 11y ago
This reminds me of reading in a dream- nonsense sentences that sound familiar.
organsnyder 11y ago
For some reason, this site is blocked by the proxy at work, with "pornography" as the category.
caffeinewriter 11y ago
Some of my favorites: >I miss Google wave invites going for $26 a month (srikarg.github.io) >Ask HN: Is there a good, standard capped convertible note paperwork? >NSA leaks: David Cameron cracks down on Apache Quitting JCP: 'Oracle Is the Fear of Macros (techcrunch.com) >RSS.gd: the RSS icon was mistaken for the end of the Union at CoreOS Fest 2015 – Call for New Startup BitcoinDeals is Launching its Own URLs? (technokyle.com)
GFischer 11y ago
It even uses real usernames for comments. I've apparently commented on "Watch Morley Safer Lie in Tech is Not a Single Blog Post" :P , and I've seen posts by patio11 (and referencing patio11 too!) http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_286.html# http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_286.html# And some of the Ask HN actually make sense too :) , I mean "Ask HN: Are there any good MOOCS/Online resources for learning TDD?" But others are almost but not quite there: "I'm an 18 year-old front end GUI development?".
GBond 11y ago
Browsing this creeped me out in a weird, "is there a glitch in the matrix?" way.

572 points by orf 11y ago

In fact, I learned in a very silly thing to know. The risk is on controlling the hardware thats in there"Only when you get the impression that credit cards that my Time Warner unfamiliar with the goal these people as potential phishing as well as US government uses private business to sell your company in its own horn about being able to be great.

namuol 11y ago

Oh wow, clearly my timing wasn't right... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453454 Edit: To be fair, this version generates plausible comments and has subjectively funnier titles. :)

iokanuon 11y ago

Was it anyhow influenced by https://reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator https://reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator?

orf 11y ago
Yep, it uses the same technique. I've pulled every comment and story from HN through the API and make a bunch of Markov chains to produce story titles and comments. The input corpus is a lot smaller than subredditsimulator though and the various subreddits have a large variation in the words used (meaning more funny comments), so it's no way near as good. Perhaps a future enhancement might be to partition comments by the submission domain, i.e use only comments for github.com stories for fake github submissions, might generate very different text than a munge of every comment.
- jedberg 11y ago
  You could also use the comments on reddit in /r/programming and /r/startups and other related reddits to help get more data for seeding your corpus. Or if you want to get more complex, find the reddit comments for every link that was submitted to HN and use that (but you have to be careful that you use "hacker" related reddits or it will sound too "reddity")
  - captn3m0 11y ago
    Maybe aggregate over the subreddits listing (where HN links appear) and then whitelist some of them (after checking against a comment frequency count) like programming, linux etc.
- DanBC 11y ago
  I would love love love it if it could provide comments on a per-user basis. Use my comments for my name, use JohnDoe's comments for their name. As well as keeping comments by submitted domain.
wilg 11y ago
I made a similar thing a year or two based off of another Markov Chain of HN headlines. I generalized it to allow you to mashup headlines from different news sources (Buzzfeed x Hacker News, for example). Still pretty funny, if anyone's interested: http://www.headlinesmasher.com/best/all http://www.headlinesmasher.com/best/all
- 78666cdc 11y ago
  These headlines are phenomenal.
- archimedespi 11y ago
  I wish I could upvote this post multiple times.
- epaga 11y ago
  I lost it at "Nintendo steps into porn biz"
- oxide 11y ago
  some of these could be Onion headlines, I love it.
- NumberCruncher 11y ago
  Too funny for a monday morning...
- toothbrush 11y ago
  Scandal: Politician Goes to Work LOL
- Natsu 11y ago
  Create some stories that support the... err... premise of those titles and I think you could automate Buzzfeed and such.

bluesign 11y ago

Feels like HN when I am high

mpitt 11y ago

Maybe some sort of "this is not the real hn" and "we are not endorsed by ycombinator" could be good.

jacquesm 11y ago
If it ever needs that then that's serious ground for worries.
- jackyyan 11y ago
  interesting

minimaxir 11y ago

As a HN data processing note, to remove the garbled characters, you need to convert the smart quotes from HN (among other things like long dashes) into normal ASCII characters. EDIT: Looks like the garbled characters were fixed.

orf 11y ago
Yeah thanks for pointing that out, I took the nuclear approach and just ran all everything through unicodedata.normalize("NFC", ...) which seems to have done the trick.

time_is_scary 11y ago

These post titles are really good! some of my favorite so far: > Debunking Myths About Growth Hacking Goes Bad (infoq.com) > First Firefox OS developer to come (businessmandi.com) > Modern science and art go to jail? The law is dead in cinema (techcrunch.com)

orf 11y ago
Mine are > A Browser Package Manager Command Line Client Written in Lua > TweetDeck taken offline after bug allows malicious code execution on Android - eBook > True hacker resume: CV as Python objects to/from Amazon S3 price cut for all your OK Google searches predict market moves
JetSpiegel 11y ago
> Google's Grand Plan to Split Sentences (2014) [pdf] (techcrunch.com)
strangecasts 11y ago
> Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on the cusp of becoming a permanent 3G connection to a billion dollars worth of online advertising
rsp1984 11y ago
Pussy Riot members jailed for posting photos to raise your hourly freelance rate (arabcrunch.com) Hahahaha!
- orf 11y ago
  This is my new favourite!
- time_is_scary 11y ago
  This wins
daxelrod 11y ago
> Mercurial Ate Our Breakfast [with Revsets], But We Can Fix Internal Communication Before It Breaks (staralliance.com) > Ask HN: Optimal number of sets with high IQ users? > TweetDeck taken offline after bug allows malicious code execution on Android - eBook (spinejs.com) > Docker Swarm on Raspberry Pi Units Available In GNOME 3 Released (spectrum.ieee.org)

0942v8653 11y ago

Quick note: You are not setting the page (tab) title with the <title> element. Right now it says "The Death of the Party" for every story.

orf 11y ago
Thanks, fixed

Kinnard 11y ago

I'm confused. What is this?

detaro 11y ago
An automated parody of HN, OP explains above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248803 > I've pulled every comment and story from HN through the API and make a bunch of Markov chains to produce story titles and comments.
- Kinnard 11y ago
  I see. Cool. I'm building an HN clone now. Hierarchical comments are a fun challenge. Any tips?
  - orf 11y ago
    Postgres recursive queries make them pretty simple to deal with. This[1] is the query I used to pull a list of all a stories children recursively. 1. https://gist.github.com/orf/5565a572c6ddda039d6f https://gist.github.com/orf/5565a572c6ddda039d6f
    - Kinnard 11y ago
      Hmmm, I'm trying to decide between this recursive query or something using ltrees. Can't make up my mind . . . [1] https://truongtx.me/2014/02/28/tree-structure-query-with-postgresql/ https://truongtx.me/2014/02/28/tree-structure-query-with-pos... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603894/is-postgresqls-ltree-module-a-good-fit-for-threaded-comments http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603894/is-postgresqls-ltr...
  - Kenji 11y ago
    Yeah. If you store them in a relational database you will grow a couple of grey hairs because you're essentially forcing a tree structure into a table structure. The concepts clash and it's kind of a pain, but possible since every post has 1 unique parent, so you can make upwards references and rebuild a tree from that.

ricardobeat 11y ago

This is perfect. I opened it on a new tab, and went off to read another article. After coming back and opening multiple links I found myself thinking "where are all this posts with gramatical errors coming from" for a solid one minute - until I noticed "pg" where my username should be!

bcook 11y ago
Imagine how it will feel at midnight after spending 15 min replying to ... whatever this is. Hopefully you are real. :)
caser 11y ago
I had the same experience. LOL'd when I realized I'd clicked on 5-6 links that looked interesting that were actually auto-generated.
veddox 11y ago
I did virtually the exact same thing - except my first reaction on seeing the fake HN was: "Why the heck am I logged in as pg? Security hole? This ought to be fun, let's see what kind of things he can do in here..." Took me a while to figure out that this was actually a fake :-(
i336_ 11y ago
I, too, did this. >.< "Wait, how did Hacker News get opened twice?" ... "Eh, I'll just close this one." (You can guess which one I closed. :P) [One pile of middle-clicking later] "Wait, ycombinator is defaulting to opening comments now?!" I noticed the "ycombniator" shortly after that. I wish those links were real :( - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_198.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_198.html: "Git 2.0 changes push default to using only CSS3 - No more remote work work: An adventure in civic hacking (scienceblogs.com)" - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_210.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_210.html: "Show HN: Farmly – find anyone for anything you want and keep the Olympic germs away. (nowthenapp.com)" - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_208.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_208.html: "Twitter will pay for anything [Product] (skullsinthestars.com)" - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_184.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_184.html: "Ask HN: Angry/hardcore rock music to code the summer away, stuck for ideas to practice/exercice a new UI designer/programmer (NYC)" - http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_190.html http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_190.html: "Is GTK+ the real reason people are startups using? (blog.cto.hiv)" My responses ranged from "they're doing what to Linux now?" to "that one sounds cool..." to "that's true..." to "...of course I'm clicking that" to to "hm... well they must be going for an Indian motif". And somewhere in there I was like "wow, /r/titlegore meets HN." I'm very dense though. This was really well-made! :D I still wish that 4th link was real. Like, I have a different taste in music, but I'd so reply to that. lol

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

steveklabnik 11y ago

I tweeted a link to this, and it's already fooling people. Well done!

georgebonnr 11y ago
I absent-mindedly opened this in a new tab along with a few other Hacker News stories. Was very confused for a few minutes. Good job!

clamprecht 11y ago

We're all markov chains when you get down to it.

dang 11y ago

We got an email from someone asking why they were logged in as pg, so you've passed some sort of niche Turing test.

minimaxir 11y ago
Notably, this is what happens most of the time when something from /r/SubredditSimulator gets popular and becomes intermixed with normal submissions on a subscriber's front page and /r/all. The way to beat a Turing Test is through hiding in plain sight.
- rkcr 11y ago
  9gag automatically reposts reddit's /r/all onto their site. People on 9gag don't realize it's a bot and have one hell of a time trying to interpret the post. Examples: 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3fnkni/9gag_is_automatically_copying_some_of_the_most/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3fnkni/9g... 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3kwmnj/9gag_strikes_again_and_blindly_copies_a_ss_post/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3kwmnj/9g...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - _jeans 11y ago
    Also this one https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3jke2s/remember_the_time_9gag_automatically_posted_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3jke2s/re...
hoprocker 11y ago
And pg has 1337 karma! (Is that joke too old now?)
- oxide 11y ago
  I would say it is timeless.

prat0318 11y ago

Nice. Was i the only one who took a minute to find the minute difference in the spelling of the hostname.

Retr0spectrum 11y ago

One thing I noticed is that comment lengths are almost all the same - I think some randomisation would be good.

orf 11y ago
Good idea, they are supposed to be between 50 and 150 characters, but that needs adjusting I think.

erlend_sh 11y ago

I opened it in a background tab, lost track of it for a while, ended back there thinking it was the normal ycombinator and unwittingly spent a couple minutes thinking "wtf is up with HN today?" Well played. edit: lol, seems I'm not the only one.

cthalupa 11y ago

Markov chains are great fun http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/ http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/ HP Lovecraft + Puppet Documentation

lifthrasiir 11y ago
Also, King James Programming [1]. [1] http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/

closetnerd 11y ago

Love this comment from the simulator: > We had an inkling that something that someone is logged in to a traditional incandescent bulb

mjklin 11y ago
Lol has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
- rdancer 11y ago
  You've got to be kidding me. I've been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It's just common sense.

AdmiralAsshat 11y ago

This reminds me of a Google exercise within their Python course, wherein it read in a text file and built dictionaries of every word and the words that followed said word in the text in order to create a prosaic style that mimed the author of the original text. It was quite interesting to run and throw a text file at it to see what it produced. EDIT: I have a cached version of the exercise if anyone feels like looking at it: https://github.com/AdmiralAsshat/learn_python/blob/master/google_code_university/basic/mimic.py https://github.com/AdmiralAsshat/learn_python/blob/master/go... There should be an "alice.txt" in the same directory as a sample file to throw at it.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
comex 11y ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_generators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_gener...

blazespin 11y ago

What's impressive is that when I see a typically hacker newish headline or comment I now find myself checking to see who I'm logged in as to make sure I'm on the real hacker news.

nni 11y ago
yes I was having to read the real HN much more carefully right after I played with the simulator

shkkmo 11y ago

favorite comments so far: "The main problem is going to check its authenticity against any common sense." "I use in your TOS, you say you're better than a bad example: a painting as an extreme advantage"

CuttlefishXXX 11y ago

Pretty good. It struggles a bit with some punctuation, inserting spaces after "." in urls and not having space after "?" in sentences.

abrichr 11y ago

Nice work. FYI, cicking on the "<#> Comments" link from within a comments page leads you to a 404.

r3bl 11y ago

I kind of feel bad I discovered what was going on in like 20 seconds. I increased the zoom of this site (the original font size is just too small for me), so when I opened this link and noticed that the zoom was restarted I immediately became suspicious.

amelius 11y ago

This is a solution in search of a problem. But nice anyway!

snake117 11y ago

I kept looking at the URL and thinking: "How are they using the same domain?" I came back an hour later only to realize that the i and n are switched in ycombniator. That was a real "smack my head" moment.

gamesbrainiac 11y ago

Exactly 1337, eh?

fowl2 11y ago

McAfee thinks this is porn. Cute.

caser 11y ago

Have you open sourced the code on Github? Would love to play around with this.

caser 11y ago
Also, is this static, or will it continue to generate new posts?
orf 11y ago
Yeah, I'll be writing a blog post about it and release the code then :)

fao_ 11y ago

Some of my favourites so far: > Google wins the Book Search settlement gives Google 15 days in orbit (bostonglobe.com) > Pussy Riot members jailed for posting photos to raise your hourly freelance rate (arabcrunch.com) > Microsoft launches Bing Booster program for exploiting weakness in smart phone (blog.geeksphere.net) > Tell HN: Rejected from App Store due to a charitable project, continue in 2012 (askgolang.com)

luxpir 11y ago

Or, 'How HN looks to non-hackers'. Brilliant work. Truly monads in backport VM scandal-worthy.

robgough 11y ago

Sometimes the real HN reads like this for me. It's how I know I'm tired, and should go to bed immediately after reading one more story.

luke_s 11y ago
10 I am to tired 20 Just read one more story 30 Goto 10

archimedespi 11y ago

The titles suddenly got a lot better! Less grammatical errors. One of my favorites is "Hosted Continuous Integration Using Gradle, Android Studio And New York Times, Evernote, Gmail, and Quicksilver". That is a CI solution I'd love to see :)

atuladhar 11y ago
*fewer grammatical errors (sorry)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- drivingmenuts 11y ago
  Newsbot thanks you for proving that you are real. You may return to your life simulation.
archimedespi 11y ago
Another hilarious title: "Ask HN: Worst examples of really creative ways to combat late payments". This sounds like an real post on HN, and actually makes sense. Or maybe "Swift Language Will Instantly Know Everything About the Origin of 'The World's Dumbest Idea': Milton Friedman".
joonoro 11y ago
"Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is not working on KVM/bare metal"
archimedespi 11y ago
I think "Google to announce proof of Ikea's excellence" wins.
SergeyHack 11y ago
I like this one "Why Android Will Soon Become Apple’s Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Done."
11y ago

rdancer 11y ago

Oh, that's great. I have just spent five minutes trying to figure out why all these comments on HN just stopped making sense.

fredkbloggs 11y ago
I had the exact opposite experience.

nadsumatal 11y ago

LOL, everything sounds like a t-shirt from Japan.

turing_bot_3c 11y ago

Absolutely fantastic, and probably will happen on Mars. Unfortunately, I can't read it. But Erlang is a human, but it's not unheard of, or even a real wood and lead pencil. A comment to mean what you mean how do we keep in mind when I can set a deadline, some basic programming with Scratch.

pdknsk 11y ago

> Show HN : One click image optimization service for your terminal This is perfect. Well done.

Uptrenda 11y ago

Leonardo da Vinci used to throw paint filled sponges at walls and then force himself to make sense out of the resulting irregular shapes in relation to a problem he was interested in. For example: he might be thinking about transportation and say "well this looks like a horse drawing a carriage ..." and then use it as a basis to come up with new ideas. By forcing his brain to make connections between totally unrelated things it enhanced his creativity (or at least that was the intention.) What comes to mind for this Hacker News Simulator is the modern equivalent of da Vinci's sponges: an ink blot which you can use to come up with completely new and novel ideas by forcing unexpected connections. And because the topics here are in some way related to hacker news the result could be filling in enough blanks to produce something newsworthy (i.e. an actual good idea instead of a garbled markov chain.)

mfisher87 11y ago
That's really interesting, hadn't heard that before. A big difference here though is that the software is making (the appearance of) very specific logical connections itself -- with the ink sponges, you're creating a vague image that is open to human interpretation.
- antsar 11y ago
  Some of the software-generated "logical connections" are not quite logical though, and require a little massaging/tweaking (human interpretation) in order to make sense. This process can result in interesting new logical connections.
cmarschner 11y ago
Any LdV biography you could recommend?
- skwaugh 11y ago
  "The Science of Leonardo" by Fritjof Capra is easy to read and a good intro. Martin Kemp's "Leonardo da Vinci" is a bit scattered but has great visuals. But most interesting is Leonardo's own "Notebooks."

nstart 11y ago

Well that was pretty awesome. Small suggestion. Fix the times on the comment threads to make it even more realistic. Threaded conversations have people starting a thread 11 minutes ago but getting replies 35 minutes ago. Busted :D

arthurcolle 11y ago

> Tell HN: my first dollar on the App Store due to a good review from Techcrunch, lessons learnt. This is so real

PascLeRasc 11y ago

It seems your version has a higher average score per post than OG HN. Might want to apply a 0.75-0.85 multiplier to each post, as a crude estimate.

zxexz 11y ago

My favourite: "Myth: systemd is unstable and insecure people who outsource have no future. "

archimedespi 11y ago

Am I the only person who removed the `news.` from news.ycombniator.com to see if there was a parody of Y Combinator's main site?

intruder 11y ago

Tell HN: my first dollar on the App Store due to a good review from Techcrunch, lessons learnt. (spreadsheets.google.com)

intruder 11y ago

Tell HN: my first dollar on the App Store due to a good review from Techcrunch, lessons learnt. (spreadsheets.google.com)

justin_vanw 11y ago

Oh man, I almost did this awhile ago. I even registered http://ycornbinator.com http://ycornbinator.com Very convincing fake.

jaredsohn 11y ago
I used to have yccombinator.com (interestingly it looks like somebody else picked it up after I let it expire) after noticing that there are quite a few places on the net that think that is the right name.

0x54MUR41 11y ago

What the different between this with the original one?

xerophyte12932 11y ago

> I, being born a woman was violently beaten and robbed in a project/problem. That's a weird auto-generated comment[1]. I wonder how much of it is random selection and how much is seeded text. What were the units that combined to form this? [1] "Ask HN: Pure client-side PadMapper would be great as jobs? What a senior Rails dev?" post).

kristopolous 11y ago

sometimes all news looks like this to me

sidcool 11y ago

I didn't understand what this is about.

rhizome31 11y ago
I think it's just the Hacker News layout filled with randomly generated content. I don't get the point though. Maybe playing with some text generation algorithm?
- orf 11y ago
  All the content is created based off every post/comment on Hacker News, hence the somewhat plausable post titles (if you squint a bit). There isn't much point to it, other than I found it quite funny :)

tstyle 11y ago

Out of curiosity, what is the status bar to the left of every comment for? Is it some sort of admin tool available to pg's account?

i336_ 11y ago
I think it might be a relevance or score of some kind. The reason it might look weird (like a strange progress bar or something) is because it's an img link to "s.gif", but s.gif is actually a 404. The td cell (yup it's a table structure) the img link is in is named "ind". No idea what these two things put together mean. EDIT: Then I noticed a thing between "Hacker News" and "new" at the top. s.gif yet again. > "It's a spacer gif...! The img tag has an explicit width= set.... Wow, that takes me back a bit, and I'm not even a real webdev or anything (and I don't mind tables to boot). Blinks

veddox 11y ago

Why did YC not buy ycombnioator.com too? Isn't that a phishing risk - like www.gmail.com and www.gmai.com?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

livatlantis 11y ago

"From 0 to 8-figure revenue in spite of flat UI design and email (gizmodo.com)" My coworkers are looking at me like I've lost it. Oh my...

BetaCygni 11y ago

> Steve Jobs came within $5k of going to have cracked unsolved Zodiac Killer cipher I wonder why he stopped then?

orf 11y ago
He didn't hit his kickstarter target, obviously

KuhlMensch 11y ago

Damn, I thought I was having a stroke.

jmkni 11y ago

Very cool! > Entrepreneur crowdsources decision to quit Silicon Valley Perfect :)

tempodox 11y ago

It would seem the texts were all written by Markov Chainy, which is why they are grammatically wrong. I would have preferred a grammar-oriented text generator. It's still too easy to tell the one simulation from the other.

LastZactionHero 11y ago

This reminds me of reading in a dream- nonsense sentences that sound familiar.

organsnyder 11y ago

For some reason, this site is blocked by the proxy at work, with "pornography" as the category.

caffeinewriter 11y ago

Some of my favorites: >I miss Google wave invites going for $26 a month (srikarg.github.io) >Ask HN: Is there a good, standard capped convertible note paperwork? >NSA leaks: David Cameron cracks down on Apache Quitting JCP: 'Oracle Is the Fear of Macros (techcrunch.com) >RSS.gd: the RSS icon was mistaken for the end of the Union at CoreOS Fest 2015 – Call for New Startup BitcoinDeals is Launching its Own URLs? (technokyle.com)

GFischer 11y ago

It even uses real usernames for comments. I've apparently commented on "Watch Morley Safer Lie in Tech is Not a Single Blog Post" :P , and I've seen posts by patio11 (and referencing patio11 too!) http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_286.html# http://news.ycombniator.com/comments/comments_286.html# And some of the Ask HN actually make sense too :) , I mean "Ask HN: Are there any good MOOCS/Online resources for learning TDD?" But others are almost but not quite there: "I'm an 18 year-old front end GUI development?".

GBond 11y ago

Browsing this creeped me out in a weird, "is there a glitch in the matrix?" way.