
Show HN: Headline Smasher - wilg
http://www.headlinesmasher.com
======
wilg
I should point out that this is fully inspired by the other day's top post of
procedural HN headlines
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815282)).
I thought it would be a cool addition to mash them up with other news sources
with sort of sensational headlines and add voting.

~~~
aroman
And I assume all of this has been inspired by the "What Would I Say?"[1] app
which has gone viral in since it emerged from HackPrinceton a few weeks ago?

Your website is extremely amusing and well done btw, kudos :)

[1] [http://what-would-i-say.com](http://what-would-i-say.com)

EDIT: Headline Smasher and WWIS both appear to use the same exact button color
scheme, too!

~~~
gamegoblin
I made the original HN headline generator this is based on. It wasn't inspired
by "what would I say." I do machine learning research, and I saw an HN comment
that said something like "this is the most HN title I have ever read." And I
though "hmmm I could use Markov chains to generate fake HN titles..." So I
did.

Right now my current HN-based machine learning project is to try to predict if
a post will succeed or not, given its title, who posted it, when, etc.

~~~
aroman
Ah, thank you for sharing that. It was a coincidence then. I guess I just
assumed that the seeming recent influx of Markov-chain based humorous one-line
generators were all connected, but I suppose the WWIS one was a separate
occurrence.

Unless of course you consider chaos theory... ;)

------
crazygringo
I found myself clicking on a bunch of them, genuinely wanting to read the
"article" behind them...

~~~
md224
I wonder if the impulse to click on some of the stories is related to
linguistic techniques utilized by the sourced viral content engineers (such as
Upworthy).

While we're on the topic, is it just me or has memetic engineering kicked it
up a notch lately with Upworthy, ViralNova, etc? Or was it always like this?

~~~
gertef
Upworthy seems to have started a noxious trend -- it's supposedly a successful
marketing technique, and has hence been copied. The headline style itself has
a bit of a longer history, but Upworthy was the first to combine it with
aggressive social-media promotion of re-shares (Their business model is "give
us a video, we will promote the heck out of it to force it viral"), so that it
gets forced upon people who don't want to see it (as opposed to HuffPo, for
example, which you can mostly avoid by choosing not to visit the site).

And Upworthy content is political propaganda (it's a spinoff project from the
moveon.org folks, and its services are marketed as a tool to manipulate
viewers' political viewpoints, not just sell stuff or generic ad impressions),
not just humorous clickbait; that adds an extra layer of manipulative slime to
the headlines.

~~~
austinz
There was an article on BusinessWeek a while ago (I think it was posted here,
not sure though) that discussed Upworthy's techniques and methodology:
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-01/upworthy-
goe...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-01/upworthy-goes-viral-
by-optimizing-optimism)

'Manipulative slime' is pretty spot-on. Upworthy tries to change political
viewpoints but it doesn't do it in most cases by presenting facts, by
challenging assumptions, or by trying to elevate the level of discourse.
Instead, it's all low-quality viral content, reshares, and stuff explicitly
intended to induce warm fuzzies within its viewers first and foremost. From
the linked article:

"One Upworthy post carried the headline “Watch A Preacher Attack Gay Marriage
And Totally Change His Mind On The Spot” without mentioning that the entire
speech was a hoax by the pro-gay rights preacher, who was making fun of the
other viewpoint."

------
marbemac
I don't understand why this is on the front page in the #11 spot? It has 4
points and it's 45 minutes old.. The HN rankings system continues to confuse
me.

\--

Clearly its getting overwhelmed with HN traffic. Maybe click throughs are
included in the rankings calculation? Then again, if many people are clicking
through and then not up voting it, it's not necessarily a positive thing.

I do think it's pretty cool though! Great job.

~~~
coderdude
Saturdays are probably the low-traffic day on HN. I remember pg saying once
that Wednesday was the peak day. It's possible the algo compensates for a lack
of traffic. Fewer submissions might affect the decay of popular items.

------
htf
This is funny. Voting on generated titles is a great idea. If you allowed
users to post comments, just like on HN or reddit, that would enable people to
play along. Also, I would get rid of classification (Entertainment, Games,
Opinion, Reddit, etc.) because it doesn't add much to the website and the
categories are inaccurate anyway. Just one list is fine.

~~~
gertef
In true "lean marketing" style, then generate bodies for headlines that get
clicks.

------
Houshalter
These are wonderful. I can not believe that some of these were automatically
generated.

------
aestra
Please add the headlines that were smashed to make the stupid headline.

~~~
hablahaha
Yeah, that's probably the easiest way to 'link' content when you try to click
it. I also want to know where they come from in general.

------
jgalt212
Buzzfeed will buy this.

------
austinpray
You can inject your own headlines, so that makes me suspicious that some of
the truly golden ones are manufactured. However, it is hilariously
illuminating how many of the headlines look authentic.

[http://i.imgur.com/7yFUf4q.png](http://i.imgur.com/7yFUf4q.png)

[http://www.headlinesmasher.com/headlines/6751](http://www.headlinesmasher.com/headlines/6751)

~~~
wilg
Not anymore, you can't:
[https://github.com/wilg/headlines/commit/efdf7eaa33303918cdb...](https://github.com/wilg/headlines/commit/efdf7eaa33303918cdb5993b3b2be59f02f3f5f4)

------
denzquix
It's pretty far down, but:

"Author of LuaJit Explains Why He Changed Mind on Weed"

...made me far happier than it should have.

------
daphneokeefe
Site has apparently been overwhelmed by HN traffic. Not sure that's what you
intended to "Show HN".

~~~
wilg
Yikes! Looks like I'm running up against Heroku's 20 database connection
limit.

Edit: Fixed?

~~~
denzil_correa
Still erratic

    
    
        An error occurred in the application and your page could     
        not be served. Please try again in a few moments. If you 
        are the application owner, check your logs for details.

------
borplk
"Microsoft Announces Tons of Issues"

"Microsoft tries to stop crying"

"Afghanistan in Browser"

"Fuck a woman to win this Zune"

~~~
ansimionescu
I almost woke up the baby, am literally laughing with tears right now.

------
tborenst
Can someone roughy explain how this works? I've looked through the source code
but failed to identify the part that magically makes the headlines sound
sensible.

~~~
wilg
Here's a link to headline generator:
[https://github.com/wilg/headlines/blob/master/lib/markov.py](https://github.com/wilg/headlines/blob/master/lib/markov.py)

I didn't make this, it's a slightly modified version of this:
[https://gist.github.com/grantslatton/7694811](https://gist.github.com/grantslatton/7694811)

I'm planning to rewrite this in Ruby to allow me to surface where each parts
of the headline is sourced from.

~~~
tborenst
I see, thank you!

------
untitaker_
I would add an encoding meta tag. The font icons from bootstrap look like crap
to me.

------
aantix
Is the source available?

~~~
wilg
Yep: [https://github.com/wilg/headlines](https://github.com/wilg/headlines)

------
mrbill
This is awesome, but "generater" instead of "generator" is making my OCD
twitch.

~~~
markdown
No. Fuck you and the people like you who've tried to claim OCD like it's some
cool thing to have.

Have some respect for the real sufferers of OCD who live in hell on earth and
on top of that have to see their condition belittled by all and sundry on the
internet.

~~~
jcutrell
I get the chastising, but this is out of bounds I think.

Just because someone used a commonly abused expression doesn't mean we need to
trash on them. It doesn't really teach anyone anything good.

Beat stupid people with intellectual conversation, not "fuck you"s.

~~~
markdown
You're right, my apologies to mrbill.

Apparently just about everyone on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit has OCD.
Having seen a close cousin of mine suffer horribly from OCD (to the point of
being house-bound), it's terribly frustrating to see people throw OCD around
like its a fashionable accessory.

~~~
jcutrell
I totally understand. My sister and a close friend of my wife's both have OCD,
and I have also had very mild obsessive tendencies, and it's definitely
nothing to joke about. I think it has been over generalized to people who have
a high attention to detail, almost "to a fault" \- that fault being a supposed
debilitating obsession.

A lot of people don't understand that OCD doesn't have the positive effect of
producing perfectly crafted things. Instead, severe cases cause panicked,
irrational understandings of reality. (This is for anyone reading, trying to
understand why this is offensive.) using "OCD" as a descriptor rather than
saying simply that you obsess over details is reducing the awareness of actual
OCD and other anxiety related issues.

------
derleth
Congratulations: You've automated _The Onion_.

(The best part of _The Onion_ is the headlines. The articles are funny, too,
but they too often just beat the headline's joke into the ground.)

