
Bot or Not: Hacker News - NathanWong
http://botornot.nathan.ca/
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gbl08ma
Score: 30 for 40

I did not cheat, and many of the names could be real (I swear I saw some that
were actually titles of real articles, but in fact were bot-generated) - I'm
not sure what makes me tell a real title out of a fake one in these
situations. On other situations though, it's very easy (grammar makes no
sense, there are odd amounts of quotes, etc.), but in my experience these tend
to be a minority.

Actually, I find it funny that in my experience, most titles that could be of
real, interesting hacks fitting well in the spirit of HN, are the bot
generated ones, and the most political/controversial titles (which often
you'll see discussed on many places other than HN) are the real ones.

Edit: I wish there was an easy way to record your session, so that later you
can analyze each title more carefully and do some math on which options you
"upvoted".

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gamegoblin
I am the maker of the bot generated titles and I failed miserably at this.

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notatoad
This is easy to beat. the more interesting sounding article is always the bot-
generated one.

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bru
Nice. Which loopback value did you use? Is it 3 by any chance? I'm currently
at 2/7...

Making that value settable could be nice (as well as opening the source).

~~~
loceng
I'm not doing much better at 5/10 ...

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Tomdarkness
It seems that every time I selected the correct one was because the bot-
generated title did not make sense or had some other obvious error, for
example:

> Apache releases first major new version of cancer drug

or

> "Algorithm" is not a language worth learning

Although when both titles made sense it was actually quite difficult to
successfully pick which one was the bot.

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anonymfus
Could you add links to original threads after getting answer?

Sometimes one title could be seen multiple times.

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ricardobeat
Ouch, 2 out of 10. Only managed to get up to 6/14.

In this round:

\- CoffeeScript is not a four letter word

\- Linux may have been due to bad connection

Now I'm starting to have a weird feeling, like it's all generated content,
when I look at HN's home page...

~~~
anonymfus
I had a feeling that some "generated" posts are just from the future:

[http://i.imgur.com/1Yx3mqf.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/1Yx3mqf.jpg)

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ek
1/10; I'm terrible at this.

Consider not polluting your users' browser history.

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geedy
I am guessing Markov chains? Lots of unclear choices, but some really obvious
ones, including:

"Why I stopped travelling to the US got reduced to 3 hours"

I went 13/17.

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sleepyK
Another example of no matter how much HN headlines change, they still stay the
same. :|

Scored 12/20... this bot is good!

However, a lot of the headlines sound like I've read them, even so even if the
bot is generating new titles for old stories by itself, it's using the same
keywords as the original titles, so it ends up confusing me a bit...

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Vektorweg
And now we need bot-generated articles, probably with real informations!

~~~
shabble
[http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/)

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Sniffnoy
There seems to be something wrong -- after 90 times (with 80 correct :) ), it
started just putting blank options on both of them, and not returning any
results for right or wrong.

~~~
jeorgun
Same thing's happening to me (with the same score, at that!). Is there any way
(short of clearing cookies) to reset it?

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betawolf33
I don't understand. Who upvotes content without reading it?

~~~
DanBC
It's a game. "upvote" doesn't mean "give a real upvote", it means "select".
You're given two article headlines. One is real, from HN. The other is bot
generated. You have to select the real one.

It's from this submission
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815282)

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CogDisco
I know this is just a fun game, but do you do any double-checking to make sure
the bot isn't overfitted and "generating" a fake title that is actually real?

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broodbucket
This is awesome and hilarious at the same time.

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Groxx
The bot is _too_ good D: 0/5 and counting...

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Empathenosis
Everytime I refresh the page, I get a +1.

Just wanted to let you know.

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kaugesaar
...a monkey would have scored better than me :(

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livestyle
How did you come up with this?

~~~
bru
User DanBC suggested it there:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815563)

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Vektorweg
7/10 . Thats difficult!

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pant
Just awesome !!!

