Bullshit.js | Hacker News Reader

Bullshit.js

mourner.github.io

688 pointssandebert123 comments

Author here — really happy that a joke project I did 7.5 years ago (while working at a typical outsourcing company) finally got a spotlight on HN!

Please feel free to contribute! I cleaned up and modernized the repo a little recently, but didn't revise the terms list properly in a very long time (except a few obvious additions like "autonomous" and "AI"), so it's a little outdated. There's so much new bullshit to add!

I ran it on my employer's website, and some words it didn't catch were: "passion", "diversity", "proven", "mission", "high performance" and "high availability"

Looks like you got a few PR's out of it mine included (serverless - all in good fun):

https://github.com/mourner/bullshit.js/pulls

Oh yes, merged 22 PRs since the post so far :)

Reminds me of [this](https://twitter.com/BullshitQuantum) bot on Twitter.

> Oracle Bullshits Products: Oracle Bullshits Server

> Brings all industry-bullshitting bullshits of the Oracle Bullshits Bullshit bullshit to organizations requiring bullshits deployment options. Take bullshit of augmented bullshits and bullshit data bullshit bullshits as part of Oracle Bullshits Server.

https://www.oracle.com/solutions/business-analytics/products...

Original:

> Brings all industry-leading capabilities of the Oracle Analytics Cloud platform to organizations requiring on-premises deployment options. Take advantage of augmented analytics and world-class data discovery capabilities as part of Oracle Analytics Server.

This is truly brilliant.

Ha, looks like we missed the word "augmented" here :) Wow, that page is a treasure trove of meaningless buzzwords.

There seems to be some kind of error: I ran this on my forthcoming study of cow manure and it translated the whole thing into business speak.

It would actually be a great feature to also convert the word "bullshit" into a random keyword from the dictionary. This way you can run it twice and then generate brand new summary of the service.

The cool thing with this would be that after n iterations, where n % 2 == 0, you'd still get the same bullahit as output. Send this along with a hash/number indicating the position of each converted word in the dictionary, and you have a simple cipher thing.

You can just say, "where n is even".

Bullshit.

So I take it you've turned it into a VR cryptocurrency startup and are closing a $140 million series B round by now?

I guess only if the VR is AI based

If and _only if_ that is the case!

The dictionary it uses is even more entertaining: https://github.com/mourner/bullshit.js/blob/master/src/terms...

Honorable mentions are “blockchain” and “internet of things” :)

I see "bespoke" and am immediately satisfied.

It’s funny that this dictionary could serve a competing purpose; it’s a goldmine for someone looking for buzzwords.

This is the first thing I went looking for after clicking the button.

I can't believe uptime isn't in there.

Should also add things like "five nines."

This is actually really useful. I just ran this as a sanity check on a long document I wrote, and it pointed out a bunch of lousy writing. Even better, it seems you can use it with the Hemingway App (http://www.hemingwayapp.com/) as you're writing...

You mean, you pass the dictionary over your document and see how the document is too long-winded in a sense?

Yes, exactly. It points out phrases like "frequent and productive collaboration with," which would be better as "worked with," or "highly efficient execution," which could be simplified to "fast."

a more general such tool: http://proselint.com/

Thanks this looks very useful. It explicitly strives to minimize false positives.

It comes with a bullshit module, too :)

https://github.com/amperser/proselint/blob/master/proselint/...

Thanks, looks great. I need to get this hooked into Emacs!

This may help :-)

  (flycheck-define-checker proselint
      "A linter for prose."
      :command ("proselint" source-inplace)
      :error-patterns
      ((warning line-start (file-name) ":" line ":" column ": "
                (id (one-or-more (not (any " "))))
                (message (one-or-more not-newline)
                         (zero-or-more "\n" (any " ") (one-or-more not-newline)))
              line-end))
      :modes (text-mode markdown-mode gfm-mode org-mode))

(More details in my config at https://jamiecollinson.com/blog/my-emacs-config/#syntax-chec...)

Bullshitter, bullshit thyself:

Bullshit.js is a bullshit, bullshit bullshit JavaScript bookmarklet that will bullshit you to evaluate the bullshit of bullshit text on any Web resource, cultivating bullshit bullshit and bullshit thinking.

I love the expression, "cultivating bullshit bullshit and bullshit thinking". Ironically, it really cuts through the bullshit of "cultivating process-centric innovation and out-of-the-box thinking".

Brings to mind the good old Dada Engine, which was a great practical introduction to Markov chains:

http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/

One of my favorite reads that has helped me navigate this post fact society is the short essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

It truly nails down the argument that bullshitting is far more dangerous than lying. With the current political climate it helps make a lot more sense of the craziness.

Non-mobile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

Thanks for posting the non-mobile link. :)

A PDF of the same can be found here: https://uca.edu/honors/files/2018/10/frankfurt_on-bullshit.p...

Ah wonderful. I also recommend the cute little book if you like physical versions.

Yeah. Bullshit is the Chaotic Evil of epistemology.

(Key quote from the linked Wiki summary: "Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded.")

Our president bullshits. WeWork bullshit.

Frank was right on the mark 30 years ago!

Desperately need this in academia. The academic literature is full of hyped-up phrasing. Probably safe to say the more hyped-up something is presented, the less novel it actually is.

I used to think I wasn't smart enough to read academic articles. Then I realized that most of the authors are just terrible writers or deliberately make their papers as difficult to read as possible to obscure or exaggerate their findings.

This always irks me, not just with academic articles but also with other "high-brow"/"intellectual" writing (including everything from literature and philosophy to tech writing). There's a lot of intentional or accidental obfucasting or complicating of things that when you call them out will just get you accused of being too stupid to understand it.

Its better today than it used to be. Go read some renaissance alchemical or natural philosophy texts. These are often called occult. The word "occult" means "hidden" as in "concealed behind a wall of unbelievably long winded flowery bullshit."

Today's academic writing is a paragon of brevity and clarity.

I've known a couple academics who argued to me that this problem is systemic, rather than something that can be blamed on indiviual authors. A friend of a friend submitted a biology paper that she tried to make as jargon-free as possible, and it was rejected on the grounds that she hadn't shown a familiarity with the field. She edited it to include the dense jargon she had originally avoided, and the article was accepted (though I'm not sure if the acceptance was from the original journal or a different one).

It definitely seems systemic. Scientific papers have a pretty distinct style. "Familiarity with the field" is something rather hard to check when reviewing the paper, but one of the easiest proxy for it is whether your paper sounds like every other paper. The expected side effect of immersing yourself in a field is that you pick up its style.

It's often said that if the writing is dense, the writer probably doesn't understand what they are saying. Being in academia for 20 years now this seems spot-on.

The following is one of the most well written PhD dissertation I've read. Its all written in simple clear to understand words.

Bulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architectures by John R. Ellis http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdf

A huge amount of them can be summarized as "if your X fits these highly unlikely criteria, a highly specialized Y can give you 1% better results than a long-standing general algorithm that already works and you can probably use within 5 minutes".

No. Really? shutupandtakemymoney.gif

Also, in physics at least, it seems like at some point in the 80s, the writing in academic papers became much worse than before.

When I had to (had the pleasure to) read some older papers, it was like they were from a different genre. They were clear and pleasant to read. Maybe it was before academics were measured by "hard numbers" (the academic version of PageRank - resulting in link farms) that some lazy fools made up.

My former field, in the humanities, prizes clear, direct writing and doesn't suffer bullshit or needless density. It's one of my favorite aspects of the discipline and its culture.

I haven't noticed that with computer vision papers, maybe it depends on the field? There is sometimes difficult to understand jargon but it's generally not gratuitous.

Not wkth bullshit.js takes less than ever to understand and benefit from

This made my day. On my startup ideas TODO list there is one PredictiveBullshitMeter that one day will warn you before clicking on a link if the target is full of bullshit. My motivation was terrible news article that appear regularly on Indian newspaper websites where they rehash the same pile of junk again and again to make it look like a full page length article/report. I was hoping for a quick number like a ratio of facts vs garbage but even before clicking on a link. I wanted my computer to do the job of prefetching the content and parsing it for facts. Anyways thanks for making this thing. Feels nice to know there are other people who suffer from the same pain :-) but thankfully are more proactive to do something about it.

I'd pay for this.

How much? We offer support.

In the same vein as the surprisingly funny classic Cloud-to-Butt extension, which I am surprised to find is over 5 years old now: https://theawesomer.com/cloud-to-butt/276065/

That caused me problems when I edited a wiki page that was subscribed to by about 200 colleagues at Amazon. I changed around 20 mentions of the word cloud on the page to the word butt and hit save without realising.

A Butt-to-Butt extension? What's the point of that?

))<>(( (back and forth, forever)

Cloud-to-Butt failed me when I clicked on a link for cloudflare, which had been rewritten for buttflare.com while I was at work.

Does that domain actually exist, and what does it host? (I don't want to check right now for obvious reasons).

It says: Putting things in your cloud butt since 2014.

If you're looking for that other site, stuff redirects there other than this page

(Cloud is striked through)

It is much different than last time!

I still use it with one of my browsers, but I never remember which one - which leads to occasional surprises on HN :).

Reminds me of http://www.sansbullshitsans.com

This worked very well for the Tailwind CSS docs!

"Bullshit CSS is a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bullshit designs without any annoying opinionated styles you have to fight to override."

As always with these bookmarklets that load additional JS from a remote source: Be sure you understand the possible security implications. You're essentially XSS attacking yourself if that JS source is turning hostile for any reason. One possible solution is to use SRI to ensure the linked JS doesn't load if it changes for any reason, but doesn't work in that case as the CDN (unpkg.com) doesn't add a CORS header.

It’d be better if they just embedded the whole script in the bookmarklet

I made a buzzword-prose generator a few years ago in which we tried to create readable sentences (readable being a relative term of course). For example we had [verb], [noun], [adjective] placeholders and tried to conjugate the verbs correctly.

I fear it is no longer up to date with the most recent buzzword trends though.

http://buzzwordipsum.com https://github.com/inversion/buzzword-ipsum

> The performance benefits and security guarantees offered by AMPHTML ads, which are display ads created using the AMP framework, translate to better advertiser Bullshit, publisher bullshit and overall better bullshit.

https://blog.amp.dev/2019/02/20/using-amp-to-make-display-ad...

This is amazing. My training is in languages, and I would love to contribute to this. Holy shit, they even have "going forward." I love, love, love this.

Single serving site by Brad Frost on bullshit in terms of web design: http://www.deathtobullshit.com (Dug it up from my bookmarks)

> Design-ready bullshits are based on the bullshit (Bullshit)-bullshitted, bullshit-ready Fusion Design Bullshit™ from Synopsys, along with Arm Artisan® Physical IP and POP™ IP for Samsung Foundry's advanced 5LPE process.

LMAO on this one. A worthy successor to "kurwoskrypt" which inserted "kurwa" in random places. ;)

A side note, browsers are making bookmarklets harder to use in the name of security. Making it possible for web sites to block bookmarklets via Content-Security-Policy.

I hate this. I rely on bookmarklets heavily in my workflow, and this really bothers me.

You _might_ be able to do something about this with a userscript that runs on every page (add a function to the window object that runs in the extension's context, thus bypassing csp.

Let it go. The new standard is bookmarkletless

Choice bits from sap.com:

> SAP sets course for the future with bullshit bullshit

> HR and People bullshit

> Bullshit announcement

> Bullshit and digital core

> Future of bullshit has feelings

And finally:

> Intelligent Bullshit

A bespoke, cutting edge augmented reality solution that truly changes users' experiences using big data and artificial intelligence. 10/10

I love this. Can you make one for political bullshit, too?

You can clone the repo and replace https://github.com/mourner/bullshit.js/blob/master/src/terms... with export default ['.*']

That would just close the browser window.

I'm going to circle-back after I touch base with leadership about integrating this multi-faceted solution to streamline our communication strategy with our partners.

This is best of breed technology to make the world a better place.

the script is glorious on this SalesForce link

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en?&utm_source=sfdc&utm_med...

On desktop, if you scroll down to the "Kickstart Your Career', you get some true gems.

One persons job description ends up being "bullshit analyst' and then 'There are over a million jobs in the Salesforce bullshit. '

Should add many more compound word terms,will suggest some on GitHub.

Well done, nice code as well.

Some days I feel like a Bullshit Analyst...

https://www.redhat.com/en/solutions/hybrid-cloud-infrastruct...

> Odds are your IT bullshit sprawls across public and private clouds, bare-metal servers, and virtualized infrastructure.

> Why hybrid bullshit? Modern IT is hybrid IT. Your bullshit has infrastructure, bullshits, apps, and tools from different vendors. Bullshit tools don’t talk to each other.

> Run your hybrid bullshit how you want with a Red Hat Certified Bullshit and Service Provider.

Sounds exactly like Weird Al's song "Mission Statement".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4

This reminds me of the Web Economy Bullshit Generator:

https://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

Any good websites to try this on?

Try this, it must be hilarious:

https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accentures-future-system...

Wow, this one was absolutely amazing - good find! :)

I knew where to look :)

LinkedIn.

Edit: for those of you who read French, I recommend the "Disruptive Humans of LinkedIn" Twitter account [1], where OP's bullshit detector would shine like a beacon.

[1] https://twitter.com/DisruptiveHoLin

https://www.pandadoc.com/

Much of kickstarter under tech is quite enjoyable!

https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/technology

www.gartner.com

forrester.com

oracle.com!

Works like a charm on https://www.palantir.com/ Good job! :)

Two important relevant links:

- https://callingbullshit.org/

- https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/12282/bullshitters-who-a...

I can finally say goodbye to buzzwords. Such an innovative, user-friendly, and sustainable service with quality results.

Glad i see in the license nobody would billshit me if I m unsatisfied with the product or idea, but how about support?

Would be cool if it suggested alternatives like Grammarly does.

Or just highlight the words and calculate a bullshit ratio or something.

>Would be cool if it suggested alternatives like Grammarly does.

sounds kind of counter-productive. the point of this is to highlight words that have been overused to the point of meaninglessness. If you're trying to use it to improve your own writing, each red "bullshit" is an opportunity to stop and think about what you really mean, not an opportunity to use a different fancy-sounding word that's been suggested by some automated tool.

Why can't its suggestions be in the style you said?

Because we don't currently have the technology for a bookmarklet to read your mind?

Sadly not able to translate "expert" into "bullshitter". Entertaining though!

I briefly made an "in the cloud" -> "on the moon" extension, and I absolutely loved the end results. Especially when I forgot that it was installed, and started reading about Amazon's new Moon.

Revealing the bullshit is really fun. Can you add a feature where it somehow tells you which word it replaced?

On desktop, if you hover over the "bullshit", it shows you what word was replaced. May not work on mobile, I guess.

Thanks, I missed that

I wonder what happens if I run this on my PhD thesis intro... :-/ :)

> Bullshit-grade commercial support

Sometimes this really makes some stuff more honest.

It'd be nice to be able to press Back and have it revert.

"Hotjar works bullshit on most popular bullshits"

Just needs the cloud-to-butt feature too, so you can have butt bullshit or bullshit grade butt storage.

Works very well with "how to answer behavioral interview questions" web pages

This is brilliant, I always have similar feelings when reading philosophy papers

This is seriously bull shit

nit: instead of doing as a bookmarklet, could someone let me just put in a URL and have it fetch and run?

I seriously want to use this on my own content, as someone when lazy I resort to buzz words.

Not sure I follow you since you can use a bookmarklet on any content, including your own.

I'd like to enter a URL or copy/paste text into a textarea and see the result.

IIRC bookmarklets are terribly insecure (I'd have to carefully examine the source code, for example, before running this on my gmail.com).

I think there is bullshit support for that

I think Firefox is adding it as a standard in the next version.

I like the concept. Text summarizers come to mind.

I miss "Software as a service" as a term

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