7 ms·
Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest
- safehuss 11mo agoVery funny and brutally honest!
- stivatron 11mo agohahaha! very funny.
- szemy2 11mo agoThis is pretty funny!
- PaulHoule 11mo agoHow did you get an LLM to be snarky or did you do something else?
- pizzathyme 11mo agoSame question and great work. I would love to know the prompt details of how the hacker news truth was captured
- nottorp 11mo agoYes, this is absolutely brilliant! Teach us the prompt, o great wizards!
- PaulHoule 11mo agoTo answer my question myself I gave Microsoft copilot this prompt: I want you to rewrite this headline "Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks" into something a little humorous and snarky that reveals the underlying truth that would bring a wry smile to tech-engaged but big tech-skeptical hacker news readers. This has to fit in the 80 character limit for Hacker News so keep it appropriately short. Also I want you to reply with exactly one headline and not anything else so I can use your output as part of a processing pipeline and i get the response Amazon Finally Remembers eBooks Aren’t Supposed to Be Prisoners which I think is great. I started with the first paragraph and got something too long with some explanation. I added the second, and got three replies and more explanation. The three replies were all "good enough" in my mind but added the third paragraph to control the output.
- nottorp 11mo agoI prompted Gemini to tell me how to prompt itself to get similar results on other news sites and it said I should give it a description of the intended audience and what it finds funny/snarky. Which looks like what you did.
- doomspork 11mo agoYou can prompt it to do so. Look you "Persona based prompting" as a great and fun example of controlling what the LLM spits out and its tone.
- smokel 11mo agoLet's try to get a story on little Bobby Tables on the front page and find out.
- minimaxir 11mo agoModern LLMs are now actually good at having a sense of humor.
- danielscrubs 11mo agoWow, this is amazing! Great work!
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago>We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it Good LLM prompt, excellent understanding.
- p2detar 11mo agoOriginal title: `GotaTun -- Mullvad's WireGuard Implementation in Rust`. I laughed too much at the alternative title, because it's so true.
- tome 11mo agoThis is hilarious and I'm looking forward to seeing what it says about itself.
- marai2 11mo agothis is gold! “Click to keep avoiding work …”
- wiseowise 11mo agoLmao, this is great.
- linuxftw 11mo agoI motion HN adopts this to auto-translate all submitted titles.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- JaggerJo 11mo agoShould be the default!
- clamprecht 11mo agoI'd love it if the mouseover text would be these titles.
- hervic 11mo agoAplausos, gracias totales!!!
- ChrisMarshallNY 11mo agoLove it!
- pizzathyme 11mo agoYes and - it would be great to hover/tap to see the original headline. I found myself pulling up the original and the honest versions side by side. The translation makes it funny.
- andix 11mo agoRight now there is a lot of drift between real and honest version, so it's hard to find the original title.
- AntiqueFig 11mo agoIf you click on the comments in the honest version, it'll redirect you to the real version.
- opem 11mo agoStill it would be great to be able to see on hover
- Retr0id 11mo agoDoesn't seem to be live, otherwise there'd be one that says "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are slop"
- thornewolf 11mo agomaybe so, though an inaccurate claim. the ai is the value add here (and quite a value add based on the other comments in the thread). we typically reserve the word "slop" for ai generated content that is of low quality or no value add. this website seems to be both of quality and value ad and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.
- idiotsecant 11mo agoMeta-Meta context: The LLM made this post.
- wiseowise 11mo agoNot everything generated is slop.
- cwyers 11mo ago"Slop" is at _least_ as fair a description of "we had an LLM rewrite HN headlines" as "we rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it" is of "we removed our biggest source of crashes on Android by getting rid of Go FFI issues."
- EarlKing 11mo agoBring back n-gate!
- pimlottc 11mo agoI miss n-gate’s webshit weekly. http://n-gate.com/ http://n-gate.com/ EDIT: open the link manually, they put a mock "security check" on referrers from HN
- apitman 11mo agoI miss n-gate
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- lapcat 11mo agoHow much of this navel-gazing junk do we need? See also, from the same author: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632 (10 days ago) Show HN: Hacker News, but every headline is hysterical clickbait https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324579 (4 hours ago)
- phoe-krk 11mo agoMaybe HN needs some reflection, and satire is one of the best ways to provide it.
- ok123456 11mo agoThere hasn't been since n-gate stopped posting.
- bombcar 11mo agoComparing this with n-gate really shows the difference between AI and real work. Superficially, they're the same, but digging in shows the real difference.
- ok123456 11mo agoIt's soul-crushing work, more suited for machines.
- phantasmish 11mo agoN-gate was by far the best thing about HN.
- topaz0 11mo agoAnd slop is one of the worst ways
- phoe-krk 11mo ago
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- gabrielflorit 11mo agoThis is amazing.
- Cheer2171 11mo ago[dead]
- ihrimech 11mo agoI laughed so hard ...
- craftkiller 11mo agoMe too. Audibly laughed out loud and was late to standup because I had to tell my roommate about it.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- BeaverGoose 11mo ago"Please star my repo so I can get a job" is brutal
- tigerlily 11mo agoI had to go back and look. Absolutely skewered it.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 11mo agoAs someone who maintained popular open source repos for >5 years, not once did I have a recruiter care about it (I made sure to ask!)
- abhaynayar 11mo agomaybe not the recruiter but the hiring manager or prospective colleagues who'll interview you later? not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about. I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects. it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.
- fvcffcdddfcfff 11mo ago[dead]
- Svoka 11mo agoI hired many many people and never once I cared about GitHub stars. Not even sure what signal it suppose to be.
- abtinf 11mo agoYes, developer/platform advocacy/evangelism.
- toomuchtodo 11mo agoWell done!
- alexgotoi 11mo agoLove the “Click to keep avoiding work” - so true!
- greenwallnorway 11mo agoProjects about hn on hn get a lot of attention here. I've sure done it before. They're a lot of fun! And super easy to vibe code, if I'm looking to test a new model.
- freedomben 11mo agoDefinitely fun, although after recently submitting one (a simple browse extension to make HN Christmas colors last all Christmas season instead of on Christmas Day)[1] that got very little attention I started looking at other posts and found a whole lot more slip through the cracks than I would have thought. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266496
- Forgeties79 11mo agoThis is really funny
- barfoure 11mo agoYup. And if you dared to bring this up in the comments (ie. your own rewrite of a title/post), you’d get reminded of the guidelines and downvoted/flagged. Because fuck honesty - we are here for clicks and engagements. This is a good step. Next: disclose financial incentives and other motives just to nip it in the bud.
- freedomben 11mo agowell, I think OP is quite funny and I really enjoyed it, but it definitely goes against the entire idea of approaching things in good faith. I'm sure some or even many of them are sadly accurate, but if reinterpreting things people say through that lens became the behavioral norm on HN I think it would quickly destroy everything many people love about this place. Just my 2 cents of course.
- barfoure 11mo agoOnly fools approach hyenas in good faith. You have to be naive to allow yourself to get swindled by internet marketing junkies. I’m all for prefacing each post that comes from a16z with “Asshole Alert” so that we know who we are dealing with upfront.
- bombledmonk 11mo agoThis should be the April Fools 2026 feature put directly on the live HN site.
- strangattractor 11mo agoThe Onion for Programers
- actionfromafar 11mo agoAKA The Onion.
- eastbound 11mo agoI love asking Grok’s companions, especially “Bad Rudy”, for the news of the day. It’s pretty similar: Brutally honest, filtered news. Although recently he started editorializing with his personal opinion, which is boring (from an AI companion).
- nine_k 11mo agoThis is not "honest", this is mostly just dismissive. The headings are no more neutral and explanatory than the originals, because, I suppose, the intent was just having fun. "We rewrote it in snark so you have to upvote".
- ok123456 11mo agoIs it wrong, though?
- ctrlmeta 11mo agoYes, it is wrong. Take the top one: > We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it I'm pretty sure they didn't go through all the trouble of rewriting it in Rust to get some internet forum points!
- ok123456 11mo agoUsually, people highlight functional/architectural changes over superficial things like language choice.
- ctrlmeta 11mo agoThat's true. But it is also true that almost nobody rewrites a whole complex software in Rust to get internet forum points from HN people. Your question was "Is it wrong, though?" The answer is "Yes"
- alt227 11mo agoBut it sure does lampoon a current point which is that people seem pretty quick to want to share their Rust rewrites of other software.
- chuckadams 11mo agoTo quote Foghorn Leghorn: It's a joke, son, you're supposed to laugh.
- daft_pink 11mo agoIt would be a really interesting feature to have ai analyze the articles and write an actually honest sub-headline. (ie not these sarcastic humor titles)
- alabhyajindal 11mo ago> OpenAI releases a new model to distract from their board drama This one shows the "age" of the LLM, or the data cut off time
- sallveburrpi 11mo agoImplying there is no drama in OpenAIs board at the moment - they just stopped doing it in public for the time being
- casey2 11mo agoHow is the Mac studio ad title honest?
- abtinf 11mo agoReminds me of Suckdot. https://web.archive.org/web/20000302102827/https://suck.com/daily/99/12/13/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000302102827/https://suck.com/...
- queuebert 11mo agoMissing the "We have too many file formats for X, so I made another". Could also prepopulate the comments with the ubiquitous xkcd reference.
- __MatrixMan__ 11mo agoThis is what adblock evolves into.
- jvanderbot 11mo agoOK, so the "Storing data in the network ... " title made me remember something. If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data. So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.
- charv 11mo ago"Commenter shows off how smart they are with cool fun fact"
- Sharlin 11mo agoIt's just a fancy form of delay-line memory [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
- lxgr 11mo agoIn a universe with mass–energy equivalence, show me a storage medium that isn’t effectively a delay line :)
- willis936 11mo agoWhat about entangled qubits?
- Aloha 11mo agoyou beat me to it - or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory in general, space is probably closer to an electrical delay line in practice.
- 11mo ago
- DarkTree 11mo agoNow do the comments
- erikig 11mo agoI don't think I'm ready for this, I might never go back to "real" work.
- p2detar 11mo agoDid anyone notice the footer? Brilliant.
- keepamovin 11mo agoThanks, bud!
- reality_inspctr 11mo agoamazing
- stuartjohnson12 11mo ago> Marketing blog post explaining why you should buy our product (hatchet.run) When you developer market hard enough that you make it into the LLM training data.
- cyrusradfar 11mo agoI'm expecting someone to build the chrome plugin shortly.
- linhns 11mo agoMake my day mate
- keepamovin 11mo agoNo worries, mate
- topaz0 11mo agoJust me, or are all of these one sentence approving comments (at top level) posted by bots?
- idiotsecant 11mo agoIt's just you. Beep boop.
- jordanpg 11mo agoThis weird obsequiousness and the fact that it never updates are beginning to make me wonder if this is some kind of prank.
- anon115 11mo agoXDDDDDD
- oncallthrow 11mo agoI was expecting this to be stupid but it’s genuinely funny. I guess LLMs are better at humor than I remember
- junon 11mo agoSeconding a little, perhaps dim button to toggle the original. But I love this. So much so that I might start referring to it more than HN when I'm in a rush.
- Imustaskforhelp 11mo agoThis is really awesome, I am interested how you made this, is there a way that we can have something this like for hackernews for more than this one instance of (20?) posts, I know its satirical but I really enjoyed it Considering its hosted on github I think that it is a static page
- jedberg 11mo agoAka "the titles when people post these on reddit". Now you know why HN has the "no editorializing" rule. :)
- sidcool 11mo agoreddit is a whole different beast. It does not have a sense of humor, rather it is a biased cesspool of partisanship.
- TeMPOraL 11mo ago"When we do it, it's called sense of humor. When they do it, it's bias and partisanship."
- scottyah 11mo agoI sleep better at night thinking it is just a battleground of astroturfing bots fighting each other (at least on the main pages). Everything from massive Russian state-actor bot farms testing newly trained LLMs popping out AI-generated meme formats before deploying domestically unknowingly getting into arguments with Israeli bot farms trying to raise support for some new movie series that will enable them to raise money for their next missile strike competing for eyeballs/attention from some uni student in a dorm room paying mid-sized black market companies in India to post comments telling you that cast-iron pans are too hard to clean so you should buy the non-sticks you saw on instagram (which are just marketing dropshippers in the USA selling the QA rejected pans from established brands). The online world is a wild place.
- LexiMax 11mo agoHacker News is Reddit with a nuclear downvote button and tone policing. It's not that much better in terms of "dead internet," the bots are just more eloquent. In some ways the HN flavor of gamified engagement actively encourages worse outcomes than Reddit.
- ozozozd 11mo agoYou may have thought this is an objective observation. For anyone over the age of 16 this comment is a loud expression of your political views. Also, I find Reddit to be super funny. Just yesterday someone posted a photo of their brain MRI showing a tumor the size of a tennis ball and everyone, including the OP were having a great time.
- Mistletoe 11mo agoThis is actually how my brain reads most of the HN posts.
- dangoodmanUT 11mo agoThey don’t all seem super accurate, but I like these titles better
- ctippett 11mo agoI got a good chuckle out of some of the titles. In Jeff Geerling's defence (the title on the site reads "Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster"), he was loaned the Mac Studios from Apple and so he didn't spend a dime. Also his accompanying YouTube video mentions the kit retails for $40,000+, a far cry from $15k.
- taikahessu 11mo agoYeah, and it could be more like satire of "developer spends 15k to run a basic lying chatbot" or something like that :) Plus some of the stories seem to be a bit old like openai board controversy remark. All in all, some funny stuff i agree!
- publicdebates 11mo ago"Show HN: I implemented generics in my programming language" does not deserve the roast "I built a language nobody will use just to learn generics" It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project. It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction. Zig and Rust started out small too! This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
- Kwpolska 11mo agoIf you read the post, a more accurate title is "I don't know what generics are but I'm implementing a programming language anyway".
- idiotsecant 11mo agostill funny.
- forgotpwd16 11mo ago>It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project Yeah... what they ended up implementing is not generics. So good thing the LLM doesn't read link/comments too or will've probably wrote an actual roast. >It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction Very fair to assume this. Referencing Rust/Zig disregarding the thousands other now abandoned ones is survivorship bias. Most small hobby projects remain small. But, besides joking about it, "built [something] nobody will use", if is in their free time, and enjoy it, does it matter? Is there a need for all hobby projects to have a goal of making it big? >This just goes a little too far for my tastes. But the "Please star my repo so I can get a job" is fine?
- _el1s7 11mo agoThis is cool lol
- tmshapland 11mo agolol. would you share the prompt for how you translate them? it really feels like a snarky HN community member rewrote each one.
- neilv 11mo agoIt's a little bit n-gate. Who unfortunately stopped posting HN critiques, a few years ago. But you can still read old posts on: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/2021/07/ http://n-gate.com/hackernews/2021/07/ (If you follow that link from HN, and the site sees an HN `Referer`, it will do a fake captcha load, so then click "HACKERNEWS" in the navbar on the right.)
- spencer-p 11mo agoI do miss n-gate. I have to assume they are much happier now that they've ended that project, though.
- neilv 11mo agoThe last post or so sounded stressed. I hope they feel better. But in general, going to read a little n-gate was a relief when some HN comment thread went off the rails. Someone else could rant about the dumbness, and a burden was lifted.
- relaxing 11mo agoAuthor deserves an award for coining the verb “incorrecting”.
- kitd 11mo agoI assume the age verification check when I went to page 2 is because I'm in the UK? If so, well played!
- horladoyin 11mo agoLove it.
- ajcp 11mo ago-> Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster. I love these and I know this is all in good fun, but I feel like this one is a little unfair to Jeff. He's a content creator and he didn't actually buy the rig. If he's rich it's because he creates content like this.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- abtinf 11mo agoJeff’s content is way too high quality to make him rich.
- stronglikedan 11mo agoHigh quality content usually makes someone rich, and that someone is usually not the creator.
- pdevr 11mo agoIt need not be a dichotomy. I also laughed at the title. At the same time, I found the original article useful.
- ajcp 11mo agoNo, I agree, I just wanted to call it out.
- kemayo 11mo agoIt's inaccurate on two fronts: he didn't spend the money because he loaned the hardware... and the reviewed thing was actually $40k. :D
- zamadatix 11mo agoMost of these are unfair in some way and many are wrong. What makes this funny is precisely that it has more snark than is reasonable (and often pushes bad assumptions as snark usually does!)
- KalandaDev 11mo agoAcademic publishers admit paywalls were a scam all along :D
- ionwake 11mo agofabulous
- dwa3592 11mo agoThis is hilarious. if you scroll down to the bottom it says, "CLICK TO KEEP AVOIDING WORK". lmao. which llm is this?
- yasserkaddour 11mo agoI feel personally attacked! lol
- akramachamarei 11mo agoEntertaining and apparently useful, though of course not infallible. Given https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms it yields the title "Training AI on 1913 data to avoid 'woke' bias (and hygiene)". That the Honest Hacker News AI model has been trained on a dose of cynicism and intellectual dishonesty is probably hard to avoid...
- voodooEntity 11mo ago11/10 would read. So much clickbait going around (and lets ignore the articles that "magicly" are upvoted but strangewise have no comments whatsoever.... not sus at all....
- rcarmo 11mo agoTop level item for me now: "We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it" Love these things. Every time someone has posted an AI-flavor of HN it's been comedic gold.
- fukukitaru 11mo agoI miss n-gate so much
- laser9 11mo agoA good Friday morning laugh! I think the tiles are not just honest, they are brutally honest. Some of my fav ones: - Amazon finally adds a feature that has been standard since 2005 - Texas accidentally does something good for privacy Would it possible to add a feature where hovering over a title displays the original title?
- linux2647 11mo agoIf you click into the comments, it takes you to the real HN comments page with the real title
- laser9 11mo agoYeah but I'd need to click each of them, thus the request for that feature.
- metadat 11mo agoI like how the current form is close to the real HN experience without onHover cruft.
- fragmede 11mo agoI vibe coded the shit out of a Chrome extension that does that while waiting on CI/CD. Go read the content.js to make sure I'm not hacking your shit, download the repo to your computer, enable developer mode in chrome, "load unpacked", point it at the directory with those files, and enjoy your tool tips. https://github.com/fragmede/honest-hn-tooltips https://github.com/fragmede/honest-hn-tooltips Edit: Took 18 minutes.
- gala8y 11mo agoTwo days ago I created HN new comments highlighter with hiding of old comments - took me 2 prompts and ~ 10 mins + some clean up. https://github.com/gala8y/hn-comments-highlighting-and-hiding https://github.com/gala8y/hn-comments-highlighting-and-hidin...
- byyoung3 11mo agoThe training LLMs on old data to avoid woke bias was comedic genius. Something tells me grok is behind this.
- keepamovin 11mo agoActually, it was Gemini Pro 3
- byyoung3 11mo agoGoogle probably just distilled grok smh
- moralestapia 11mo ago>Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster (jeffgeerling.com) LOL ... and it actually ran slower.
- hu3 11mo agoand it was 40k
- alch- 11mo agoMan, how did I get by for so long without this. Brilliant. I'd like to have the whole web in this tone please, thanks in advance!
- imiric 11mo agoLove this. My favorite is the link in the footer: <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/">Sell 7% for clout</a>
- wnevets 11mo agoHonest? Probably not. Funny? Very.
- layer8 11mo agoThis would actually be somewhat useful for the new page. :)
- tediousgraffit1 11mo agook but how does it work though? Is this seriously just passing the titles to some llm with a prompt like 'roast this'? is it reading the actual content of the link as well?
- relaxing 11mo agoThe year is 20X5. Despite the onslaught of artificially intelligent agents capable of understanding and synthesizing new concepts in written language, humans are still capable of basic cognition… for now.
- delichon 11mo agoThis is so damn good that I want to put it between me and the whole internet. At least selectively. Please y'all go build this. An opinionated, tuneable, reader-agent.
- stackedinserter 11mo agoI wish we were that brutally hones irl.
- keepamovin 11mo agoWe can try! :)
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- antfarm 11mo agoSomeone built a tool to put all the snark and harsh arrogance from the comments directly into the titles?
- 654wak654 11mo agoThat's it, AI has finally made HN obsolete!
- headgasket 11mo agoLove this. can we get an honest title for this entry too? (I'm not quite happy with my 11l+ karma, please give me some upvotes so I can start the new year with a smile?) jk, great one, cheers
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- NoGravitas 11mo agoMakes me nostalgic for n-gate.
- simonebrunozzi 11mo agoLove this. Make it into a chrome or Firefox extension, let people freely switch from "normal" to "honest" any time they want.
- isodev 11mo agoHaha this is brilliant.
- SSLy 11mo agoi miss the n-gate roundups
- fogzen 11mo agoI love everything about this – the little touches like the logo, the content warning, etc. Thank you for bringing some joy to my day.
- keepamovin 11mo agoYou're welcome! I'm so glad you enjoyed it
- bitwize 11mo ago(sarcastic David Spade voice) I liked this better the first time around... when it was called n-gate. Still pretty funny tho, ngl.
- WesolyKubeczek 11mo agoCool, n-gate as a service
- weisk 11mo ago"Do you confirm you are above 18 years of age (or the planet-rotation equivalent in your local star cluster)?" i am so confused, whats the reason behind this little event handler?
- ctrlmeta 11mo agoThe website has been made by AI. May be it has learned from its training that this kind of confirm box is cheeky humor for humans?
- smcin 11mo agoProbably because a few articles contain curse words (which corporate filters may hiccup on).
- arcfour 11mo agoIt is a joke about how stupid and pointless pushes to require "age verification" online are. Such efforts have been in the news a lot recently.
- keepamovin 11mo agoYou understood it! I’m so proud of you. Actually I think you’re kind of special because the reference requires stitching together some desperate signals. I think you’re pretty creative.
- phplovesong 11mo agoHaha! Top post was just what i could think. "A rewrite n Rust post to get upvotes".
- bityard 11mo agoI love this so much. It's like the El Reg editors got turned loose on HN headlines.
- remywang 11mo agoWas hoping for a self aware roast: one weird trick to keep sending your LLM slop to top of HN (/s, I enjoyed it very much)
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mikkupikku 11mo agoI miss n-gate.
- S0y 11mo agoNow I just want to see what this post will be translated to...
- CGMthrowaway 11mo agoI thought the dollar sign button would be a donation button. Turns out it's the least honest part of the entire page.
- morkalork 11mo agoThe least honest? A dollar sign represents exactly what ycombinator is about
- ZebusJesus 11mo agoThis was a great way to start the day over a cup of coffee, sometimes we need things that make as laugh but what is awesome is the titles are spot on. Thank you for making this Friday morning fun
- keepamovin 11mo agoYou're welcome! This is what I wanted
- matt3210 11mo agoAka better hacker news
- pvsukale3 11mo ago"Rails developers reinventing state machines for the 50th time" Laughed so hard on this one.
- diydsp 11mo agoIts not even just Rails ppl. In embedded ive seen so many consultants say things like, "no problem. I just started working on the ultimate, perfect way to set up a state machine." Confidence theater
- mtkd 11mo agoYou can still look at almost any codebase and ask 'why is this bit not using a state machine here?' ... the AASM repo readme is very accessible even if you don't know Ruby: https://github.com/aasm/aasm https://github.com/aasm/aasm
- angryjim 11mo agoI like this a lot.
- morkalork 11mo agoWhat is the title for this entry now that it's on the front page? I can't find it
- shevy-java 11mo agoI am fine with the current layout, but I also have to say that I preferred old.reddit.com as a layout base (the new reddit UI is horrible, and reddit overall succumbed to willy-nilly tyranny of moderators on power-trips). I am not saying HN should change to become like old.reddit.com in the UI, mind you, but a few things could perhaps be considered. Using old.reddit.com was much more efficient to me than the default UI here. It is not the end of the world, but I would not mind small, slight, modest improvements to the UI (not only the front page, but all of HN). Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions and changes and people could vote. It should be as conservative as possible, though, because while I preferred old.reddit.com, I also think that not everyone may prefer changes. So one should aim for the highest acceptance value possible, before making any change.
- Aissen 11mo agoAnyone want to try a prompt injection? All we need to do is to get one or two story in the front page that have a good < 80 characters prompt injection.
- i_am_a_peasant 11mo agoLol this legit makes it easier to grep through HN. thanks!
- krick 11mo agoI'm not even so sure it's such a useless joke. I mean, it is, and I wouldn't want titles to be like "Academic publishers admit paywalls were a scam all along" (unless ALL major publishers actually admit it, which so far they didn't). But I clicked on "Math nerd explains how to spend 3 days proving 1+1=2" and when it turned out to be a Lean tutorial I thought "Oh, that's exactly what I wanted!". I don't know why, but "From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4" I didn't even notice. It's such a boring and verbose title with lame attempt at wordplay that, that my brain somehow filters it out.
- keepamovin 11mo agoThe clickbait you didn't know you wanted!
- dijksterhuis 11mo ago> CLICK TO KEEP AVOIDING WORK... on point
- jasfi 11mo agoPlease add a 2nd page.
- kazinator 11mo agos/Amazon/Atlassian/
- amarant 11mo agoThe Texas one doesn't seem honest. It seems like a political narrative.
- dxdm 11mo agoI think it's a sign that you're being visited by the Ghost of Politics Present. ;) Rf.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Christmas_Present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Christmas_Present
- amarant 11mo agoSo.. Does that make me political Ebenezer Scrooge? I dunno, you'll have a hard time finding someone with less skin in that particular game than me, I'm not American and I've never even been to America (well, I switched flights in Chicago once, but I don't think it counts). But a lawsuit for privacy being "accidental" because it's brought by a politician that's not popular seems difficult to interpret as anything other than dogma. Being in the "right side of politics" doesn't automatically mean you're right about everything. And the reverse is also true. Take Hitler for example: founding VW was a good move! He did that one good thing. Doesn't make him a good person, but similarly, all the other shit he did doesn't make VW any less of a good deed. From the outside it looks like the same thing applies here. Since this post is now on the front page, I'll suggest an honest title for it: HN front-page but titles are snarky dogma. A lot of the dogmatic snark happens to be accurate, but that's besides the point. Just means it's good quality dogmatic snark.
- dxdm 11mo ago(Edit to add TLDR: I'm going to put some context around "Hitlers good move" of "founding Volkswagen". But first I am going to explain my original comment and apologize for scrooge-ifying you.) I made that quip because you reacted to a satirical, presumably generated headline by questioning the honesty of the satire and by ascribing a political motive to it. That's okay to do, of course, but reacting to this particular one among all the other unfairly and satirically reduced headlines, and immediately smelling political motive maybe says more about where you're coming from than it does about the particular circumstances how this headline came to be. Maybe you want to see it as political for some reason, or are at least primed to read it that way, when everything around it suggests it's just indiscriminate satire? So the fact that this is what popped into your head maybe wants to tell you something, like the visiting ghost. It's probably related to current politics. And then I think your comment in the face of this fun little website felt a bit scrooge-y to me, and so this admittedly silly comeback popped into my head. It wasn't very nice or productive of me, so please accept my apologies for hanging this old bore's name on you. Now that we got that out of the way, I'm going to skip past how I think you're misreading what was meant by "honest" and "accidental" in their respective places, and quickly jump into the other can of worms you opened, and wield my worm-relativizer. I agree that good deeds can be done by bad people, and vice versa. But I would like the record here to show that the Volkswagen was not simply "a good move by Hitler", because people might take that literally and come away thinking Hitler was the single driving force here, or that it was unrestrictedly good. Hitler played an important role bringing the Volkswagen about, that is correct. He did that by putting the power of the state behind efforts that had been ongoing for a while to develop a cheap, mass-produced car in Germany, and enabled engineers like Ferdinand Porsche to get it done by cajoling the car industry to put resources behind it. (More or less; the point is Hitler and nazi government were not responsible for idea nor execution, but they did push it forward because it aligned really well with their ideology, and would of course be happy to claim credit for the whole thing.) Now, how about "good"? Before the Volkswagen became the affordable car for the masses after the war, it did a lot of work in a modified form as part of the German war machine. Before the civilian car came to market, the nazis started the European part of world war 2, and the engineering and tooling and factory put in place for the car, it started turning out what was essentially the German version of the army Jeep, if you will pardon that comparison, supporting the German war effort and all the atrocities it enabled and tragedies it brought about. As a little cherry on top, I think the many folks who paid non-trivial sums to essentially pre-order the car before the war never got that car, nor did they get their money back. So, I don't like seeing the Volkswagen poke it's head out as "Hitler's good deed". I don't think you wanted to mislead anyone, and your point about good deeds stands regardless. But history is messy, and to learn from it it helps to see it in proper context, especially around this fella and his pugnacious posse.
- observationist 11mo agoBravo.
- _f9cu 11mo agoThanks for sharing
- mapt 11mo agoA lot of these have a disturbingly subjective critical voice. On a topsy turvy day, one finds oneself suspecting these are human-written instead of AI.
- Reason077 11mo agoI’m also suspicious that it’s human-written, or at least human selected/moderated. It doesn’t seem to be updating very frequently for one thing. If it’s AI, it’s very clever and nuanced: comedians should be worried for their jobs. If it’s human it’s still very funny.
- robertheadley 11mo agoI love this.
- blairanderson 11mo agoEuropean decel mindset.
- QuiCasseRien 11mo ago> Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster (jeffgeerling.com) The title are so funny ! I'm thinking to switch for the time ^^
- gowld 11mo agoInaccurate. > Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, Better: "Engfluencer suggests you spend $15k to run a model slightly faster (jeffgeerling.com)"
- Almondsetat 11mo agoI find these kind of posts profoundly uninteresting (woah, the n-th parody of the HN front page...) and yet they seem to always garner so many upvotes...
- dang 11mo agoAnything meta has that effect. We normally tamp it down although we make occasional exceptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46221900 The curiosity value of something like this diminishes under repetition, of course: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... It's a bit like repeating the same joke. We downweight follow-up posts for that reason: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... That, I think, is what's going on here. This post was great—it was impressive and original enough to clear the bar, so we left it up: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632 - Dec 2025 (965 comments) These two follow-ups are pretty good follow-ups actually—they're fun variations on the theme—but I don't think they clear the bar for another major frontpage thread: Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46326588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46326588 (<-- current thread) Show HN: Hacker News, but every headline is hysterical clickbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324579
- bitwize 11mo agoBeen downvoted (or downmodded) to hell now, I guess because it encourages "not the kind of discussion we want to foster here on HN"...
- jvolkman 11mo agoFeature request: put the original title in a tooltip (or similar).
- gowld 11mo agoThese are fun but they lose too much of the original content. "Texas accidentally does something good for privacy" is not really an improvement over the original (already half-editorialized) "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"
- manmal 11mo agoI‘ve channeled my inner Larry David into a prompt to make fun of y‘all ;)
- justinhj 11mo agoNot sure if the source code for this is available but if you want to make your own version I did something similar that can be easily modified and run locally for your own festive mirth: https://github.com/justinhj/rudehackernews https://github.com/justinhj/rudehackernews
- meindnoch 11mo agoBrings back some of that n-gate vibe <3
- forgetfreeman 11mo agoIf the maintainer of n-gate.com is still alive and on Hacker News please, your work isn't finished.
- perching_aix 11mo agowhere "honest" really just means cynical, of course
- frtime345 11mo ago[dead]
- fruitworks 11mo agoreminds me of n-gate
- vintermann 11mo agoI'd like to see a version of the HN frontpage, where the titles are reinterpreted by that 1913 AI. "Imagine these are newspaper headlines from the year 2025. Rewrite them so that a regular person in our time can understand them."
- mdni007 11mo agoI have to say, all of these titles are much more interesting than the real ones
- teach 11mo agoClickbait WORKS. There's a reason it's banned in HN submissions
- Ldorigo 11mo agoWhat's funny/interesting from a psychological perspective is that several of these made me click (and discover genuinely interesting content) on links that I ignored in the real version. Could you do this everyday please?
- tonyhart7 11mo ago"Training AI on 1913 data to avoid 'woke' bias (and hygiene) (github.com)" what could this mean???? and why 1913 specifically
- daveloyall 11mo agoThank you for a good laugh! Very well done. :)
- raluk 11mo ago"Math nerd explains how to spend 3 days proving 1+1=2" -> Original "From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259343
- imchillyb 11mo agoTwas brillig, and the slithey-news did gyre and gamble on the title. All manic were the Borogoves and gnome-rat's Anti-AI rhetoric in full recital. Beware the SLOP my son! The jaws that slurp, and claws that don't match. Beware the Amazon-nerd, and shun that Facebook Hack. He took his local well in hand; long time the perfect pose he sought. So prompted he by the decision tree, and waited while the AI Thought. Spaghetti. Meatballs. Slurp. Will I? No. Will Smith. IYKYK
- absoluteunit1 11mo ago“We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it” I spit out my coffee laughing lol
- keepamovin 11mo agoThis was the intended effect!
- 6510 11mo agoI feel cheated that it is only one page.
- opem 11mo agobrutal honesty
- l1feh4ck 11mo agoI loved it. Could you make it more than one page. For everything in HN. I can only read 30 posts now.
- TwoNineFive 11mo agoThe word "advert" is nowhere on that page, so I know it's worthless. At least half of all HN content on any day is self-serving blogs and plausibly deniable adverts.
- pickdig 11mo agowhy does the url say 2035?
- snapplebobapple 11mo agoThis is a massive improvement on hacker news, thank you