
Show HN: Hacker News Simulator - orf
http://news.ycombniator.com/
======
dang
We got an email from someone asking why they were logged in as pg, so you've
passed some sort of niche Turing test.

~~~
taspeotis
Shouldn't we worry that someone has been fooled by the ycombniator.com domain
and lookalike design?

~~~
dang
It seems pretty harmless.

------
Uptrenda
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
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
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.

------
ricardobeat
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!

~~~
i336_
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

------
archimedespi
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
*fewer grammatical errors (sorry)

~~~
drivingmenuts
Newsbot thanks you for proving that you are real.

You may return to your life simulation.

------
iokanuon
Was it anyhow influenced by
[https://reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator](https://reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator)?

~~~
wilg
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)

~~~
toothbrush
Scandal: Politician Goes to Work

LOL

------
namuol
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. :)

------
time_is_scary
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)_

~~~
rsp1984
_Pussy Riot members jailed for posting photos to raise your hourly freelance
rate (arabcrunch.com)_

Hahahaha!

~~~
orf
This is my new favourite!

------
luxpir
Or, 'How HN looks to non-hackers'.

Brilliant work. Truly monads in backport VM scandal-worthy.

------
erlend_sh
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.

------
felipebueno
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.

------
snake117
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
ycomb _ni_ ator.

That was a real "smack my head" moment.

------
AdmiralAsshat
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/go...](https://github.com/AdmiralAsshat/learn_python/blob/master/google_code_university/basic/mimic.py)

There should be an "alice.txt" in the same directory as a sample file to throw
at it.

~~~
comex
See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_gener...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_generators)

------
robgough
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

         10 I am to tired
         20 Just read one more story
         30 Goto 10

------
arthurcolle
> Tell HN: my first dollar on the App Store due to a good review from
> Techcrunch, lessons learnt.

This is so real

------
fao_
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)_

------
pdknsk
> Show HN : One click image optimization service for your terminal

This is perfect. Well done.

------
cthalupa
Markov chains are great fun

[http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/](http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/)

HP Lovecraft + Puppet Documentation

~~~
lifthrasiir
Also, King James Programming [1].

[1]
[http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/](http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/)

------
turing_bot_3c
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.

------
minimaxir
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
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.

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

------
bluesign
Feels like HN when I am high

------
rdancer
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
I had the exact opposite experience.

------
fowl2
McAfee thinks this is porn. Cute.

------
xerophyte12932
> 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).

------
closetnerd
Love this comment from the simulator:

> We had an inkling that something that someone is logged in to a traditional
> incandescent bulb

~~~
mjklin
Lol has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more
like?

~~~
rdancer
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.

------
abrichr
Nice work.

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

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

------
GFischer
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?".

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

~~~
orf
Yeah, I'll be writing a blog post about it and release the code then :)

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

~~~
georgebonnr
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!

------
0942v8653
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
Thanks, fixed

------
livatlantis
"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...

------
caffeinewriter
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)

------
Retr0spectrum
One thing I noticed is that comment lengths are almost all the same - I think
some randomisation would be good.

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

------
prat0318
Nice. Was i the only one who took a minute to find the minute difference in
the spelling of the hostname.

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

------
BetaCygni
> Steve Jobs came within $5k of going to have cracked unsolved Zodiac Killer
> cipher

I wonder why he stopped then?

~~~
orf
He didn't hit his kickstarter target, obviously

------
r3bl
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.

------
Kinnard
I'm confused. What is this?

~~~
detaro
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
I see. Cool. I'm building an HN clone now. Hierarchical comments are a fun
challenge. Any tips?

~~~
orf
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
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-
pos...](https://truongtx.me/2014/02/28/tree-structure-query-with-postgresql/)
[2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603894/is-postgresqls-
ltr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603894/is-postgresqls-ltree-module-
a-good-fit-for-threaded-comments)

------
nstart
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

------
tempodox
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.

------
blazespin
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
yes I was having to read the real HN much more carefully right after I played
with the simulator

------
shkkmo
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"

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

------
justin_vanw
Oh man, I almost did this awhile ago. I even registered
[http://ycornbinator.com](http://ycornbinator.com)

Very convincing fake.

~~~
jaredsohn
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.

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

------
PascLeRasc
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.

------
tstyle
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_
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_

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

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

~~~
jacquesm
If it ever needs that then that's serious ground for worries.

------
sidcool
I didn't understand what this is about.

~~~
rhizome31
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
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 :)

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

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

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

------
jmkni
Very cool!

> Entrepreneur crowdsources decision to quit Silicon Valley

Perfect :)

------
KuhlMensch
Damn, I thought I was having a stroke.

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

------
gamesbrainiac
Exactly 1337, eh?

------
kristopolous
sometimes all news looks like this to me

