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Whoa interesting, thanks for sharing! For more niche, esoteric topics, it's interesting to see the opposite ends of LLMs knowing too much (or at least pretendin

Whoa interesting, thanks for sharing! For more niche, esoteric topics, it's interesting to see the opposite ends of LLMs knowing too much (or at least pretending to know too much) yet too little while trying to simulate real people. Too much in that it's unlikely that this many real people would immediately grasp your post and be directly excited by it (e.g. 'This is exactly what I've been looking for!') yet too little (e.g. discerning between a disassembler and the opposite of a linker). Real HN readers would have vastly different levels of contextual knowledge and excitement, which we want to simulate with more specific agents mapping to real HN readers with different interests and areas of expertise.

boricj 3y ago
> Real HN readers would have vastly different levels of contextual knowledge and excitement, which we want to simulate with more specific agents mapping to real HN readers with different interests and areas of expertise. It would be interesting to compare Fake Hacker News with the real deal 1-to-1. Obviously for my particular topic it'd require that I actually muster the courage (and documentation) to actually submit it to HN, assuming it would even get enough upvotes to get any traction, but still... Maybe add an "I'm feeling uninspired" button that takes a real HN submission and run the LLM on it? Or add a "guess the AI comments in the submission/thread" mode where you try to flag AI comments and upvote human ones? Something that takes it beyond the cool party trick.
- jusquan 3y ago
  Those are great suggestions! I especially like having an 'I'm feeling uninspired' button to help fix the blank canvas problem + make it easy to test with real HN posts. Appreciate the feedback!
bytefactory 3y ago
This is an incredible project, thanks for making this! I realize right after saying that, my slight critique will be a bit ironic :D I really like the variety of the comments, but some of them lean a bit towards being milquetoast and lack the edge that HN posters often seem to have. While there's often helpful posters who are clearly experts and offer encouragement, most HN posts will also include sharp, unnecessarily pointed critiques. There's also those comments which seem well-informed at first glance (and again, are usually negative), but which an expert would see through the jargon to see are empty of substance. Adding a bit more of that will make the responses seem even more convincing. Again, great work!
- jusquan 3y ago
  Haha thank you! Strongly agree—a characteristic part of HN are definitely the opinionated and inevitably contrarian replies, so in the future, we want to create opinionated fakeHN agents mapping to the past comments of real individual HN users. That way, we can hopefully create higher-fidelity comments capturing their biases and technical depth to capture more of the magic of HN.

boricj 3y ago

> Real HN readers would have vastly different levels of contextual knowledge and excitement, which we want to simulate with more specific agents mapping to real HN readers with different interests and areas of expertise. It would be interesting to compare Fake Hacker News with the real deal 1-to-1. Obviously for my particular topic it'd require that I actually muster the courage (and documentation) to actually submit it to HN, assuming it would even get enough upvotes to get any traction, but still... Maybe add an "I'm feeling uninspired" button that takes a real HN submission and run the LLM on it? Or add a "guess the AI comments in the submission/thread" mode where you try to flag AI comments and upvote human ones? Something that takes it beyond the cool party trick.

jusquan 3y ago
Those are great suggestions! I especially like having an 'I'm feeling uninspired' button to help fix the blank canvas problem + make it easy to test with real HN posts. Appreciate the feedback!

bytefactory 3y ago

This is an incredible project, thanks for making this! I realize right after saying that, my slight critique will be a bit ironic :D I really like the variety of the comments, but some of them lean a bit towards being milquetoast and lack the edge that HN posters often seem to have. While there's often helpful posters who are clearly experts and offer encouragement, most HN posts will also include sharp, unnecessarily pointed critiques. There's also those comments which seem well-informed at first glance (and again, are usually negative), but which an expert would see through the jargon to see are empty of substance. Adding a bit more of that will make the responses seem even more convincing. Again, great work!

jusquan 3y ago
Haha thank you! Strongly agree—a characteristic part of HN are definitely the opinionated and inevitably contrarian replies, so in the future, we want to create opinionated fakeHN agents mapping to the past comments of real individual HN users. That way, we can hopefully create higher-fidelity comments capturing their biases and technical depth to capture more of the magic of HN.