Hacker News or Satire? | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News or Satire?

hackernewssatire.com

29 pointsjarrenae22 comments

The Onion had a story up about Gorbachev when he died recently: “Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet Leader Who Took Down Iron Curtain, Dead At 91”

Nothing satirical about it (as far as I can tell), and there were plenty of other stories about this shared on Hacker News, but this one still counts as satire in the game because it was on the Onion.

That piece ( https://www.theonion.com/mikhael-gorbachev-last-soviet-leade... ) is definitely satire. It's one of their fake reactions/public comments pieces, where fictitious people give funny reactions to real events.

The first one in the piece is a gag about Gorbachev's infamous Pizza Hut commercial.

The Onion does those regularly, and their format doesn't really work for the OP since their headlines are straight and factual.

Satire seems to be from the Babylon Bee (https://babylonbee.com/) and The Onion (https://www.theonion.com/)

Either I spend too much time on HN or those were really easy.

I'll be honest, some of the satire posts are very easy to call out because they "sell" the fact that they're satire directly in the title.

I did ~22 prompts. All of them I correctly identified as satire. I don't know how they are generated. Feeding titles into a language model? Very likely, because the resulting titles are very easily distinguishable as satire given the context.

I had like a 1:5 ratio of satire to news

SPOILER

The first 31 were satire, the next 31 all HN.

With Hacker News containing mostly user submitted links, and those having target-provided descriptions, the web site is really a "real web site title or satire" quiz.

IOW, nothing particular about HackerNews, even if it uses HackerNews to aggregate the non-satire headings.

It’s headlines posted to HN that follow HN rules that the HN user thought would be of interest to the HN community.

Right: the "HN rules" are for submissions to have unedited title from the original page. So, you know, "real web site titles".

HN sees a lot of non-techy submissions, and only some of them get downvoted out (most are simply ignored).

So while this results in a ratio of technical to non-technical "headlines" that's not representative of the Internet as a whole, it's still pretty much not very HackerNews-specific. If it included a reasonable minimum upvotes requirement (100?), then it might be.

Uh, something is broken because I was given all the satire headlines before the HN headlines.

Also I didn't see any credit given to the Babylon Bee where all the headlines are from, although maybe it just wasn't prominent credit.

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out what the issue is there. Seems like ironically it is "randomly" not randomizing.

We definitely made sure to credit - each story is hyperlinked below as you swipe through each one.

The site doesn’t scale nicely to non-plus/max iPhone screens.

It seems that when one of the words starts lowercased it’s always real/hacker news. All satire strings seem to be created with uppercased words only.

I had only Hacker News titles. I thought it was the joke and found it really good but apparently it was just randomness.

The first 15 we’re satire, then next 10 were HN… weird.

the first 9 were satire, then i did about 6 more and they were about 50% satire

It's built to be completely random, which means upon refresh it would likely still load differently but there's no check to prevent something like that from happening.

Sort of a fun example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness at play.

Nah, something is definitely wrong with the randomness occassionally. See this demo[0] of me reliably getting 30 satire results in a row >75% of the time. The chances of that happening are astronomically low.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/XTQsyNH

Well that's pretty conclusive. Thanks for the video, I'll have to take a look and see what's wrong.

Piggybacking to confirm I saw similar behavior, and someone upthread had 22 satire titles in a row.

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