I find that lookback of 2 generally creates more entertaining titles. Lookback of 3 usually seems to just splice together two titles (which can be hilarious, and is usually more grammatically correct), and lookback of 1 tends to generate more nonsense.
Some fun ones I found just now:
The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Teenage Hacker
How my comment on TechCrunch got me a new, useful superpower?
PHP Sucks But I Didn't
Windows 8 is 20% faster than C
The Navy’s newest warship is powered by WebGL
Cards Against Humanity has made comments even worse, I'm leaving
How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a html5 game, polished it many many times
Interestingly, if I change the code to pick the most likely word, followed by the most likely word, etc. the "most probable" post is "The New York Times and The Internet"
If I limit it to just 2013 posts, it is "The NSA surveillance".
My site is running on the smallest Digital Ocean droplet (512MB), if it goes down, I will feel silly. If it does, code can be found here: https://gist.github.com/grantslatton/7694811
- Ask HN: What's the best place to aim on a Porn Website
- The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Kindle
- John Resig's ‘Secrets of the HBGary hack
- Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for SOPA.
- A new way of writing unmaintainable code.
- Redesigning the country of Liechtenstein for $70,000 a night with Airbnb
- Build a house for $5
- Iranian Web Programmer’s Death Sentence to Be Successful
- Show HN: Pick a number from 1 to 1000 in C
- Greplin (YC W10) open sources key piece of shit startup I hate to love
Tesla wins in North Korea [since Kim Jong-un bought one]
CISPA Passes in the browser
Zynga Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol [very plausible]
The Rules of a startup [couldn't believe first this wasn't a HN title]
Simple Minecraft Clone in 580 lines of Ruby [ditto]
What's the best startups in the noise of 802.11 [even more true than HN]
Parsley.js: never write a Web Application that makes you understand git [ditto]
Why I am building a hulking floating data center [I wish someone would do it]
Only a few countries are teaching children how to drive customers away [are these countries called "communistic"? ;-) ]
Concurrency is not an iPad [having read so many strange comparisons concerning concurrency I'm not surprised...]
"PHP Sucks But I Didn't" is pretty hilarious, also knowing what the "most probable" is by year could be a great annual tradition. Did you check 2012 and 2011?
Markov chains are always hilarious. Try feeding it the whole text of a news article, or even a book; this way you can use higher lengths and get even more impressive results.
Why I Quit My Job to Start the Rest of My Life as an Apple Store Employee
Facebook bans Adsense in all human history
Show HN: We made an addictive way to fold a sheet of paper
Rules of Storytelling According to the UK Gov
Death to the ISS - Launch Webcast (starts at 12:00am PDT)
Supreme Court to avoid public shaming
WordPress has left the solar system
Cyanogen raises $7 million to build a perfect SNES emulator
Washington Post to grow vegetables on weekdays
That is literally hilarious.
"Nobody’s going to download your bullshit app" ,
"HN will be retired, transition to Google Wallet Anti-Competitively" , "The best interface is no retirement" , "Amazon's homepage was down for 6 hours to boot Ubuntu" , "PHP Sucks But I Like PHP" , "Programming is a Lie" ,""Gangbang Interviews" and "Bikini Shots": Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machine" , "Ask HN: What colour is your primary operating system" , "Chrome Engineer: Firefox Is A Costly Mistake" , "CSS Zen Garden is 10 times more efficient than the New Commodore 64" , "How one man escaped from a major UI overhaul" , "Turn anything into a Wikipedia article" , "Women, Tech Conferences and the "profitless business model" fallacy" , "MySQL now includes memcached, and a manifesto" , "FuckItJS: Runs your javascript code with MS Paint" , "Iceland Kicked Out of Y Combinator without an Idea" , "The shittiest project I ever read", "From idea to exit – the vi editor"
When I Stopped Eating For 2 Years in Production
How Github uses Github to build a windmill
Ask HN: Who is Sick
Apple's Role in Japan stopped having sex?
Show HN: I love you, dad
How to write shitty software
Issue 224182 - chromium - Chrome wakes me up in the process
Ember 101: Learn Ember at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss [video]
Google breaks 2005 promise never to implement an algorithm from a hacker.
Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the App Store
Show HN: A fix for the past year.
Richard Stallman: How I Hacked Facebook’s Secure Files Transfer Service for Employees
LuaJit 2.0 is out after many years in prison
Why should I have no idea what I'm doing
Tell HN: Frustrated and feeling pretty useless at this moment’ – Jimmy Carter on NSA snooping [video]
- A file that's both an acceptable HTML page and a Raspberry Pi;
- My idea to exit – the vi editor;
- Ask HN: How much recurring income do you make in the US on copyright charges;
- Your Username Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed;
- This Google ad has moved people to beat comment spam;
- The DDoS that almost broke the rules;
- Should Quadrotors All Look Like the One in the middle of NYC?
Hiding Nobel prizes in plain English
Have You Ever Tried to Sell My Camera on Craigslist
Dear NSA, let me know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
Nexus 7, Made for Google Search History Before New Privacy Policy Takes Effect
AngularJS Tutorial: Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes, fits in your browser into future
How to Make Money -- Without Mining Asteroids
Google paid AdBlock Plus to get $12 billion of gold to Venezuela
Java Virtual Machine in pure CSS
After NSA's XKeyscore, Wikipedia Switches to HTTPS Now, For Free
US claims all .com and .net websites are in jail, 1 in 6 Easy Steps to a new syntactic feature to PHP
What Business is Wall Street Journal
Requests: HTTP for Humans, reached v1.0
Why Putting SSH On Another Port is a straight-up Ponzi scheme
Show HN: Pick a number from 1 to 10
Tom Anderson: Google+ makes Google a better, more integrated set of small, responsive CSS modules
Behind the scenes of the opportunists and their hackathons
Apple not providing LGPL webkit source code released (Apple II assembly)
Google open sources resilience engineering library
Raspberry Pi now with Twitter's Bootstrap 2 ready for prime-time Jeopardy
So you think you will hurt your fingers on your resume
Callbacks are the doctor on the iPad - They Undesigned it
4chan's Chris Poole: Facebook & Google founders may mine asteroids
Dijkstra: “You will be built again"
Some People Can Run 18 Static Sites on a soaring eagle [video]
Extracting Audio from Pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your browser
A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail users
Too scared to write a Linux Server
Stuxnet is now hosted on GitHub
This is the greatest thing I have seen on Hacker News in a very long time, and I mean that. This is genius, the titles that it generates paint a pretty clear trend of topics HN likes to discuss: The New York Times, failure, Go, PHP and of course limited to 2013, the NSA.
Some of my favourites I've generated today include:
Living in a bubble
MIT is a Bing Affiliate Scam
My GF learned to be inflated in seconds
Hacker Who Helped Put Jazz Back in 1997 That Made Amazon a Gorilla
I Hope My Father Hated India
How you eat corn on the road to Starcraft
Tim O'Reilly: Really, Google is making a comeback due to harassment
Skype vulnerability allowing hijacking of an interview
Voyager 1 has been forked
Using prime numbers to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
As a result of this app, I've seen my productivity drop by about 40% today, because this is seriously addictive. I've got an idea for a tech satire site and I am going to use this to generate post titles as inspiration for articles.
Suggestion: filter the titles that are identical to real ones. Or maybe it was part of the plan, demonstrating how they are indistinguishable.
My deadly disease was just a website.
IBM's "Watson" finally ready for preorder.
TileMill — an application for making my daughter cry.
"Anonymous" Hackers Take Down Megaupload Video
Google finally has a natural, almost visceral aversion to complexity
Syrian Internet Is a Hero
IRS claims it does not compute
Stripe raises $18 million from affiliate links on "Ad-Free" blog
Why I use paper to wipe my butt every day.
Apple not providing LGPL webkit source code 23 years later and you're still loving
If you look at the code, I filter all titles that are substrings (including identical) of real ones. Sometimes the Markov chain will simply add a single word to it, though, so it gets through the filter. Any suggestions on how to improve it?
The straightforward solution is: For each fake title, compute its Hamming distance to every real title. Filter titles whose distances are very close to real titles.
It's O(N^2), but if you write it in Python and run it with pypy, performance may be acceptable. Maybe.
But I think this is a classic example of a Problem That Doesn't Matter. No need to spend time solving it (unless you're having fun!)
My fellow geeks, we need to have a jobless future
Did everybody see what just happened? The pendulum has swung.
Do You Really Want to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
Why I won't be your technical co-founder
Killing the Internet to its knees
Hacking the iPod: How I Earned A Lot More on Projects by Changing My Pricing Strategy
YC S12 company refuses to pay for TextMate 2
A Billion Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Paid, Paid Vacation.
Functional thinking: Why functional programming is on the edge, and so is he
Google Engineer: What I learned on a round-the-world yacht race
Sleep is more important than your users?
Ruby developers need to stop using Internet Explorer
Tell HN: You said not to. So I quit my job and launch a startup
I Up Vote Every 'Show HN' Post and You Should Be Very Worried
Turn your browser into a notepad with one line of Ruby
I don't know how to IE6
Brilliant, hilarious, and either scarily accurate or perfect satire:
Ask HN: I might be a spook
Show HN: I'm tired of seeing
Mark Cuban: If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker
Google+ is now available as an alpha release (1991)
Apple announces Mac OS X mouse annoyances
Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Problems
Ask HN: How did you earn from your browser
Experiments Show Gravity Is Not for Everybody
Ask HN: How to seem good at math
IBM develops 'instantaneous' memory, 100x faster than a Cup of Coffee
MPAA Publicly Threatens to Stop Writing REST API Clients
Show HN: my useless weekend project, QR-codes for everybody
Mozilla’s Rejection of NativeClient Hurts the Open Web, GNU/Linux in Danger
Very clever story telling using HTML and CSS editor
The Unintended Effects of Reading
Full Text RSS Feed: Get the whole feed and nothing but the FBI
How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get So Much Radiation?
Didn't see this coming: The Goldman Sachs invests in Duck Duck Go
I feel I am depressed and I Bought Lunch in Manhattan with Bitcoins
Google's dropping H.264 in Chrome - SSL exploit coming?
The Art of writing unmaintainable code.
IE11 to support wiretapping
Wow. Thanks for this, I haven't had such a good laugh in a while.
Here's what I got:
Hashify.me - store entire website content in the cloud
Obama administration is still so offensive
This Internet provider pledges to put man on Mars
EFF: Apple Should Stand Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
Video shot from the ground up.
Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make tons of money?"
Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the TSA
I’m tired of the Solar System
37signals.com - Evolution of a working nuclear reactor
IE11 to support wiretapping
Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than food
RSS Is Dying, and You Should Too
Sleep is more useful than bash
Changes to my career in magic
The most difficult CEO skill: managing your own #dickbar
Confused by lawsuit, Apple consumers switch to git
Netflix to lose time and money
I would love a Chrome extension that would randomly inject these into the actual Hacker News front page, and which would then keep a tally of how often I clicked the link and fell for it.
The Dumbest Idea In The South is 129 Million Years Old
Double Fine raises $1m in less than 600 bytes
Show HN: Please discuss if it’s 1999
The Student And Quadrupled My Zappos/Twilio hackathon entry into the math
Searching for all Who Changed My favorite bookmarked HN users
Also
How Khan Academy is the Future of Education
What it’s like to work for Google
I'm pretty sure these are actual titles (lookback = 3)
That is amazing. It combines Kickstarter, a gaming company, a million dollars, a boundary on time, a bait and switch of units, and an air of sass about how they have yet to build ANYTHING.
<3 markov chains. I had to do something like this for a homework assignment a long time ago. Here's mine:
PredictionIO – A Simple Explanation for Why HP Abandoned Palm
Obama said the NSA Over Data Collection
NSA collecting phone records for his defense
How to Be Upside-Down
GMail: designer arrogance and the $580 Million Black Hole
Contains a New Type of Employee You Really Should Log Client-Side Errors
How to solve it
Google disables AdSense account of Coinpal shut down a product? Open source dynamic body physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator
Google to acquire Nokia
Serving at the Pleasure of the plot
Watch YC Startup with Paying Customers
A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of the storm we're pushing the YC application deadline back to Firefox 4 that makes you a better background pattern for your games.
Goodbye Basecamp, This Is All Your Email
37signals invests in synthetic beef
Groupon is a GitHubber
The first Django site to run for Australian Senate
Single page apps in the lab: Apple is back
Calling the NSA: "I accidentally deleted - last backup one
year of college calculus to grad student level
Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the Family of Neil Armstrong on Programmer Productivity
Some advice from Jeff Bezos on Post purchase
Is Google building a TC alternative.
Will you post an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News, what else you read?
Ask HN: How much recurring income do you make in the witchhunt?
75-year-old soybean farmer sees Monsanto lawsuit reach U.S. Supreme Court
to avoid judicial review of the HP-35
Why I've built an alternative to CSS resets
I could have sworn, I actually saw that headline for real.
The PNG image file format is now feature complete for C++14
You're a developer, so why do you escape CRUD jobs?
Because they're not sexy and doesn't involve Big Data somehow... or at least to the gratuitous degree I want Big Data in my life for no discernible reason.
Patio11 Wrote A Book On Conversion Optimization For Software Crack,
Creator Provides Free App Instead
Hahaha!
Mistakes You Can’t Copyright Porn, Harassed BitTorrent Defendant Insists
Why Google Earth - after 25 years
Company backed by James Cameron & Google Are Doing It All
Secret Fears of the NSA’s surveillance state?
Looks like NSA titles are still making it into the headlines.
Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to unlimited lifetime data storage using Norwegian laws
A standing desk for two years working on
Why I quit my job to personally email the first ISP to challenge the USA
MIT scientist captures 90,000 hours of video of Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.
What Every C Programmer Should Know About Fitness is a straight-up Ponzi scheme
Name.com hijacks non-existent subdomains and redirects to their help Text
WebKit is the sum of three primes
John's Phone: a minimalist cell phone unlocking and fixes the DMCA
On Confirmed Assumptions or, Not Trusting Google is evil now? Let's Get Real. How About Apple?
Ask PG: could you travel across the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition
Beej's Guide to Social Hacking: How we screwed (almost) the whole Apple community
JS roguelike game: The Royal Canadian Mint just announced a new alternative to Github
Ed McMillen: Ubuntu Store Sold Super Meat Boy leaves database wide
- Thank HN: 127 days since I quit Facebook
- Dropbox: The Hottest Startup You've Never Heard of
- Facebook detects if you are not a pilot
- Reddit traffic doubles in less than 600 bytes
- How to break in Gmail & Major Torrent client for work on Jeopardy
These ones got me some odd looks from my coworkers (couldn't hold in the laughs):
The Node Beginner Book, a guide to Objective C
What Happens to the HN Crowd: Do nothing for 2 minutes
The polynomial algorithm for a Cool Billion Dollars
My husband is a new IDE for poets
Lost an stupidly large amount of time laughing so hard I cried. Some of the best:
Steve Jobs Presents His Ideas For A New Kind of Screwed
Home-made bombs are being deleted from Wikipedia
Show HN: New platform for finding work - Son of J.R.R. Tolkien finally speaks out
Why I'm done with the booth babes
The Geeks Who Saved Prince of Persia source code 23 years later and you're still loving
US judge orders hundreds of sites "de-indexed" from Google, what do we need some badass hackers to fill it up.
Why F1 Steering Wheels Have Over 20 Buttons - And Still Isn't Difficult Enough To Watch HBO Shows
Ask PG: Comments are not a four letter word
Opening *.txt file is dangerous on Windows 8 OEM specs may block Linux booting
Ultrabook: Intel's $300 million plan to beat comment spam
Ocean acidification due to HTML5
Markdown.css – make HTML look like Microsoft made their own company
Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a return of the universe
Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?
Parsley.js: never write a single JavaScript line to validate 50 cancer studies
L'Aquila quake: Italy scientists found guilty of aiding the enemy, but convicted of multiple other counts
The New iPad's Screen Under the hood of Windows to test older versions of VLC
How Carrots Became the new Opus audio format
Please learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code
An analysis of an unknown compression format
Why must you laugh at you, then they laugh at my desk
Fastest-growing YC S11 startup (3M monthly uniques) YC S11 startup (3M monthly uniques) YC S11 startup looking for people to talk to restaurants.
Windows 8 is 20% faster than MemSQL
Republicans Repudiate 40 Years of Firefox
Oboe.js: reacting to Ajax/Rest quicker by not waiting for it to Open Source
Copenhagen Suborbitals open-source private spacerocket will launch in an unrelated raid
Youtube claims I don't know they're in water
Why shuttle Atlantis will not do a tech job at Facebook
Kit Kat's homepage is currently a parody of Silicon Valley, Bad for the state of Berlin
1. An unofficial alternative to Node.js
2. Ask HN: Best books you read daily?
3. EU Commissioner Will Simply Ignore Any Rejection Of ACTA By EU Parliament supports the new Junk Food
4. Why you shouldn't start a startup on Haskell [video]
5. Stallman: Facebook is using IE6 as standard for displaying web pages
6. Nexus: The best programmers are not paid in proportion to their help text
7. "They're Made out of Facbook is not a war zone
8. Behind the scenes of the opportunists and their hackathons
9. Antibiotic resistance: The last time I saw Steve Jobs
10. The UK Court Sanctions Apple, Hopes "Lack of Integrity" Is Not Free
10x teams, not worth a CEO vs cancer
How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Fifty Days, Payments Service Disruption Post
The first Django site to run for Australian Senate
It's amazing how with a little ingenuity you can program a source of hysterical laughter. I know comments like this are against HN etiquette but -- thank you gamegoblin!
Awesome! Can't help but add a few of the most hilarious it gave me:
How I Became a Billion Dollar Company
Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Family
MPAA Publicly Threatens to Stop Writing REST API Clients
Get-shit-done - Easy way to write a single DMCA notice
Linux To Become A Better Twitter Bootstrap
Government: we can solve a problem with Vim
Tower.js - JavaScript library for creating Windows 8
Why I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to acquire Nokia
Show HN: I will stop providing any service to MPlayer
Canada Is About to Come Undone?
Do the Dishes, Put Out, Don’t Talk So Much Radiation?
How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to browse pictures on reddit
Oracle gives up trying to escape police
Opera moves to restrict Internet freedom
Our office is too big -- we need a Pirate
A day in the Middle of Detroit
How to land an airplane (if you don't control it)
Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: A Few New Things Coming To JavaScript
Yes, You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML
I made an addictive way to browse pictures on reddit
Facebook sinks to record a video cam on an HTML5 game. I finally understand why I'm not buying Facebook
My GF learned to be forked
Online course: Build your own #dickbar
Why you should learn just a little bit Apple, a little bit Apple, a little bit Apple, a little Awk - A Native-Looking and Feeling Mobile HTML5 Front-End Framework
Firefox 6 released with long-sought Higgs boson discovery
- Instagram says it now has the right to indefinitely detain under NDAA
- Redditors earning $100k+ a year, secret files show
- Physicist proposes new way to view IAmA's on Reddit
- Linux may have been due to bad connection
- Kim Dotcom: The US recording industry is stealing my ebook
Things to Never Say “Click Here”
DIY Weapons of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA
Did everybody see what just happened? The pendulum has swung.
Rootkit on a cube-shaped planet
So Long and Thanks for your password
"No, I'm not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a talk."
in the comments the author discusses how he generated convincing titles using context free grammars:
snarXiv is based on a context free grammar (CFG) — basically a set of rules
for computer-generated mad libs... The snarxiv’s grammar is 622 lines long...
The coolest and most natural thing to do with a CFG is exploit
recursiveness as much as possible. The more recursion built in,
the less predictable and richer the output.
I am guessing they learned the Context-Free Grammar by reading many abstracts and titles.
Holy crap. I just discovered that development for Enlightenment has resumed. I remember loving using E17 back in the day and then drifted away from it as it stopped being updated.
I didn't realize development had stopped because E17 was in jail.
How about caching the number of upvotes and estimating the potential popularity of the generated titles, then for the most promising, getting a ghostwriter to actually create them? Could turn out brilliantly.
It added the "in 2012" bit, which caused it to slip through my duplicate detector. I am trying to think of a better duplicate detector. Right now it just checks if it is an exact match or substring.
I am currently using all of my VPS funds hosting a 20$/mo (the big bucks, right?) droplet which is running a server for an AI programming game I made (currently closed testing among my friends).
Course overview
Key Challenges for Administrators
What Is Enterprise Manager Cloud Control?
Built-in and Integrated Manageability
Configuration Management
Reviewing Enterprise Manager Core Concepts
Review Oracle Enterprise Manager architecture
Agent Installation and Target Discovery
Describing Different Target Types
Monitoring Cloud Control
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Managing Securely with Credentials
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I find that lookback of 2 generally creates more entertaining titles. Lookback of 3 usually seems to just splice together two titles (which can be hilarious, and is usually more grammatically correct), and lookback of 1 tends to generate more nonsense.
Some fun ones I found just now:
Interestingly, if I change the code to pick the most likely word, followed by the most likely word, etc. the "most probable" post is "The New York Times and The Internet"If I limit it to just 2013 posts, it is "The NSA surveillance".
My site is running on the smallest Digital Ocean droplet (512MB), if it goes down, I will feel silly. If it does, code can be found here: https://gist.github.com/grantslatton/7694811