Hacker News Parody Thread (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Parody Thread (2013)

bradconte.com

1,049 pointsAkshatJ27329 comments

Damn, I was afraid this was going to be someone stealing my genius idea. Gladly it was just tangential to that idea.

Idea: Train an ai to construct entire threads based on the input of the title and link. There should be plenty of training material, and frankly I think it would be hilariously similar to the real threads.

When new submissions are added to HN, the system will fetch the title and link, and predict the entire thread. You can view the thread on something like hnpredicted.com/?id=33680661 . When the real thread has had no new comment added for five days, it is reintegrated into the system further training the model.

Possibly, the model could be trained on the actual content of the link. But I suspect just using the short title might be better. Larger concentration on the actual material there, websites contain lots of text which is useless.

Now that I've posted the idea, feel free to steal it ofcourse. It's documented that I came up with it anyway. :)

That’s what this site is. You’ve been talking to a machine all this time. Do you really think a person would have this much time to argue day in and day out over systemd? That that many people care wherever or not Go has generics and which other languages does them best? That rust somehow is the cure for everything from game engines to the common cold? Think about all the times a “person” stated something was Turing Complete and how it made zero sense to you. It’s been machines all this time.

That's a really interesting idea. I think it would be fun to see how well it would work in practice.

https://imgur.com/4UZUPec

Who could argue for hours and praise and upvote someone getting Doom running on all their household appliances?

Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. I can probably piggy-back off a top comment, though, those comment threads aren't long yet...

Yeah, but at some point those machines would have had to have original training data, so at some point people probably did have time to engage in techno religious wars. Unless of course, all of this is made up, to keep us occupied to not discover the matrix or alike ..

Wir sind die Roboten.

> Possibly, the model could be trained on the actual content of the link. But I suspect just using the short title might be better. Larger concentration on the actual material there, websites contain lots of text which is useless.

Most people do not read the article before commenting, you do not have to train the AI to do that.

There was a reddit experiment a few years back, SubredditSimulator, that was a scaled version of what you described. It was obviously more surreal and funny than accurate. There were users trained off of popular subreddits, and they just ran with threads and comments being created purely from the data.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/

I did this quite a few years ago. If I remember correctly, it was so convincing that people emailed Dang because I set the username at the top to be “pg”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248773

Do you have your sim archived anywhere? The original seems to be down.

> websites contain lots of text which is useless

I'm honestly really curious about this. Could you elaborate?

Headers full of navigation. Sign up for my newsletter spam. Footers. The webpage isn't just "the document we're talking about", but an entire application most of the time.

Sounds similar to /r/subredditsimulator.

>this is a fully-automated subreddit that generates random submissions and comments using markov chains (see below for more info), with each bot account creating text based on comments from a different subreddit.

Quite fun to read.

Can't tell if this is a parody comment or not...

Those comments violate the HN guidelines.

Please read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Kidding, I too thought this thread was the parody at first. After all, they are real HN comments!

Or maybe this is part of the parody. Maybe if we trained an AI to detect genuine vs. parody?

I present algorithm whereby each byte is iterated from 0 to 255, following recursively for next byte for each previously yielded result. From above nonsensical results are removed.

Above algorithm generalizes all human knowledge ever conceived, in any format, as well as any future (duplicated!) ideas that may be conceived.

I donate above algorithm and all its results to public domain.

You're welcome.

> I present algorithm whereby each byte is iterated from 0 to 255

You should've just said a stream of bits, as your system cannot generate anything that requires a non-multiple of 8 bits to be accurately expressed. Zero padding is not the same as absence of bits.

Someone did something similar before, but unfortunately it's now offline. The HN link is still up, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578

I'm also surprised someone hasn't made a parody LLM-based HN thread generator yet. Perhaps until recently they were too busy writing crypto startup business plan generators to bilk gullible VCs.

Let's go a level further. Instead of banning/shadowbanning people just send it to shadow realm where all they see are bot created comments and bot created answers to what they comment

See also: heavenbanned

https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561

Gold

There are GPT-3 generated subreddits

They are pretty spot on and could do this with hackernews

Lots of us have had that idea :) we should band together and make it happen.

I love this idea—I think it would be fun to gamify it! Keep the predicted thread secret, and then use it to award points to hn commenters based on originality. If a comment is functionally the same as a predicted comment, it gets -10 points. If the comment is novel, it gets 10 points. Then there's a sliding scale between.

You'd need some checks to prevent people from posting a bunch of Zalgo text (maybe a model to identify "interesting" or "insightful" posts), but it could be a fun overlay on the hn commenting ecosystem.

Unrealistic.

Not a single person complained about link not working with JavaScript disabled.

Since it was missing there I realized how am I overusing '[-]' instead of scrolling. Like Tarzan swing on vines.

(Also is this relavant or am I just piggy-backing your top comment?)

Kinda relevant, because [-] doesn't work with JS disabled. :-P

Have you heard about our lord and savior root|parent|prev|next ?

Wow. I just realized the [-] feature. This changes everything about HN!

In 10 years of reading hacker news I never thought to press the [-] until this moment.

Most useful comment on the whole thread. Thanks for the tip about the [-].

I wish they would just rewrite the website in a safe language like Rust.

I have stuff to say about JIT.

*zig

Rust feels too 2019

And lets put the comments on the blockchain.

Everything is better with blockchainTM

Or PHP

Or about how React bloatware introduces tens of petabytes of completely unnecessary dependencies, is destroying the Web, a perfectly-designed hypertext platform for linking documents together for reading on all manner of devices from screenreaders to Braille interfaces and toaster ovens.

Nodding along .... - “oh shit this is a parody thread”

Also missing:

How does this compare to X? (where X is an obscure project on github with no documentation of what it's feature boundaries are, has at best 1000 stars and further internet sleuthing suggests its at best only tangentially associated with the original comments domain.

The end result being the author feels obliged to figure it out and reply incase not doing so seems arrogant and/or poorly educated in the domain)

Oh no, not a mere 1000 Facebook likes!

Not a single person went on about vue

No Svelte either, I'm in shambles.

As a JavaScript guy, does this really matter for 95% of the world?

Or complained about accessibility

Even worse, not a single comment about Rust and use-after-free bugs.

... and no one about site's contrast or scroll hijacking...

Or back button hijack

Off-topic aside, but why do people complain about back-button hijack when you can long-press or right-click and get out of the site? It works on any browser AIUI.

I'm just replying here to piggyback on the top comment and create a pointer to this thread in my CheckRepliesToMyComments page.

Obligatory xkcd reference.

I predicted something similar a long time ago (2022) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680851

This.

Why isn't this at the top?

As a US poster, I need all units of measure to be what the Founding Fathers used and all pickup trucks to be what the Founding Fathers drove.

As an EU poster, I won't understand the US obsession with large vehicles and I will recommend bicycling instead.

As a programmer, I think we can improve performance if we multithread, containerise, microservice, and store n-depth JSON in a No-SQL database.

As a Python programmer, this doesn't look Pythonic. We should be using pythonic Python, especially the new release that adds the syntactic sugar that we've all been waiting for.

> As a US poster, I need [...] all pickup trucks to be what the Founding Fathers drove.

> As an EU poster, I won't understand the US obsession with large vehicles and I will recommend bicycling instead.

I will not buy EV unless it can go 10000 miles on a single charge, otherwise it is not good enough for my-once-in-a-decade roadtrip.

I’d buy that EV…

I’m sad not to read anything about Rust and Kubernetes.

As a person running a single static website, I can confidently say that Kubernetes is the most overhyped technology ever. After having eventually realised that my tediously simple workload can be deployed effectively using a short systemd unit file and an even shorter ansible script, I no longer believe anyone actually runs production workloads on Kubernetes.

I will now be considering other options for the service mesh that my startup clearly needs to implement in order to send an occasional email newsletter.

My start-up has rewritten Kubernetes in Rust because Go is slow and doesn't implement traits in a rustaceous way. Now we have a system about which we still can't reason tractably, but we can guarantee memory safety wherever memory safety can be guaranteed.

> As an EU poster, I won't understand the US obsession with large vehicles and I will recommend bicycling instead.

This will launch the inevitable nightmare of pro/anti-helmet subthreads.

As a(As a(As a(recursive defined class of person)))) im astounded by how important perspective and caste has become for some, while we are all just the same hairless monkeys

“As an EU poster, I need to remind everyone in every thread that I have health care and GDPR.”

NIMBY Keto.

> Here's a long detailed, objective explanation of everything related to this issue. It's probably more useful than the actual link and it may serve as one of the best efforts to consolidate information on this subject on the entire Internet. If it contains original research only a couple of readers will be qualified to tell. Half the people who upvote this won't understand more than the first two paragraphs.

Exactly explains the value of hn, when this happens.

There are so many problems that affect many working programmers which you only learn the good answers to by lucking into spending years in the right job.

I always upvote when people share that specialized knowledge and edify the rest of us.

I think that's when HN is at its best.

Absolutely. Sometimes you get a comment thread where some specialists add way more than “average” commenters could actually add. I like it because it gives insights in difficult subjects!

I disagree with the author. I know he's incredibly successful and right about pretty much everything he's ever said, but I've had some experience in this area and just finished reading through some of the archives and I think his focus is wrong. I'm going to ignore the technical issue and talk about the bigger picture and higher level things than what was said in the blog post. If the OP thinks that the process is most important, it's really about end results. But if he thinks it should be about the end results then he's an idiot for not thinking about the process. I'll weasel in a reference the startup I co-founded even though it's not directly relevant.

> tangential statement

I'm honestly really curious about this. Could you elaborate?

Yes, I can elaborate, however, this information should have been taught to you by the age of 2. Silly HN.

  A tangent is simply a line that touches a non-linear curve (like a circle) at only a single point. It represents an equation with the relationship between the coordinates “x” and “y” on a two-dimensional graph.

  The tangential velocity is the measurement of the speed at any point tangent to a rotating wheel in a circular motion. Thus angular velocity, ω, is related to the tangential velocity, Vt, through the formula. Tangential velocity is the component of the motion along the edge of a circle measured at any arbitrary point of time. As per its name, tangential velocity describes the motion of an object along the edge of the circle, whose direction at any given point on the circle is always along the tangent to that point.

[1] https://me

[2] http://me

[3] localhost:8080

Did you even read the article?

No, OP is correct.

* You omitted his point about hyper-anal correction.

* You misunderstood the meaning of a parody.

* Here's point of a parody you didn't account for

The only thing missing is the actual expert making a clueful statement at the very bottom of the page where nobody reads. Possibly downvoted a couple of times.

And when you click on their unsuspecting profile called "jolly_rogers123" it goes:

>link to their site

>creator of (literally the thing being discussed), 2007

>20+ YoE in everything

https://archive.ph/rLsBh

It's always the same story.

Queue the hn reply: "Did you actually read the article? There is such a comment (guru3)."

I hate to be pedantic but surely you mean “cue”?

To be fair that's often missing on HN too.

Please downvote this person

This is cool (only read the first two lines so far) but if you're really interested in Hacker News Parody software you should check out our startup: https://zombo.com/#HACKER_NEWS_PARODY_DOT_IO

Came hear to say this.

+1 for https://zombo.com/#HACKER_NEWS_PARODY_DOT_IO

*here

Back in the day nobody on HN would so egregiously misspell words. This place is turning into Reddit.

i only read the first word and i completely agree with this take.

Definitely this changes the game (I am the cofounder of the author of the parent comment).

You do not really need parody sites. You can accomplish the same using rsync and 3 lines of bash.

That might work for a small home parody, but it won’t scale to levels needed by viral parody sites.

The real concern is that you can fire 75% of the parody site workers and still have it keep humming.

Didn't you know that zsh has this cool feature which reduces it to 1.5 lines? ohmyzsh!

It's missing a top-level dang comment saying:

"This has been discussed before in these threads:

2013 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661

2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661

2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661

2016 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661

2017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661

2018 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661

2019 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661

2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661

2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661"

dang it! how did we all miss that?

i rate your comment pg-14

> simulated HN top bar

Here's a hyper-anal correction that is itself correct, but doesn't exactly contradict the OP.

Actually, logged-in simulation-user icandownvote (500 karma) can't actually down vote yet.

This is genius

Also, check out the top bar link hrefs:

new - http://news.ycombinator.com/TakeADeepBreath

threads - http://news.ycombinator.com/CheckRepliesToMyComments?id=ican...

comments - http://news.ycombinator.com/KillACoupleMinutes

ask - http://news.ycombinator.com/KickstartADiscussionNoOneWillPar...

jobs - http://news.ycombinator.com/AnyoneActuallyClickThis?

submit - http://news.ycombinator.com/ACommentorIncludedAnAwesomeLink,...

Sound the klaxons, that link includes http not https don't people know the security risks?!

Also, I'm going for a couple of genres with the above

>Here's a hyper-anal correction that is itself correct, but doesn't exactly contradict the OP.

I've always hated this. Thankfully I've found it happens much, much less on HN vs say reddit haha.

The cherry on top is how the correction is effectively useless.

But to the ultra self important pedants, they don’t see it that way at all…it’s not useless it’s a fundamental reality that you’d be a complete idiot not to fully appreciate…just make sure you also worship their brilliance in deigning to illuminate you

It's missing a top-level post which makes an analogy, which turns into a ten-deep thread of people arguing entirely about the analogy, the friendly article having been completely forgotten.

Hmpf, analogies are crutches. Carpenters don’t use them so I don’t use them. Just use the right-sized hammer for the nail in front of you.

You could power the earth exclusively on the smug that emits from analogy arguments (or what we call analgruments in the biz).

> You could power the earth exclusively on the smug

I would like to learn more about smug-powered systems. Do you have some links I should read?

The analogies found on HN could have their own dedicated parody site.

*they’re

I posted before on HN about this trend, of commenters often completely forgetting about the original article, and arguing a lot (in child comments) about some top-voted comment.

I called it the Hacker News Right-Side Effect (or Rule)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24405167

It’s missing a comment from someone who dismisses someone else’s comment by starting with “Ehhhh no.” It’s also missing someone making a funny joke and then being downvoted because HN comments need to be serious contributions to the topic.

Please, this isn't Reddit.

Came here to say that it's missing a "This isn't Reddit" comment.

Overly critical comment focusing on some obscure technical facet of the post, giving the impression of not understanding it is a parody.

Is it really a parody if its indistinguishable from the real thing?

Also missing a section where someone makes a statement as a fact and has a response from an expert explaining why they are wrong.

Usually also highly upvoted because it sounds right.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5326511

I didn’t know there was an HN karma leaderboard!

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

The 2013 thread is pure gold.

I really appreciate that I had no idea this was a decade old. The Internet changes every day but people remain the same.

I certainly don't mean to nitpick[0], but this one is a total dumpster fire because it is lacking a clear 'HN is turning into Reddit!' comment[1]

[0]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ackchyually-actually-guy

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It’s missing the super well written and insightful “dead” comment at the bottom of the page that I “vouch” but it never really seems to do anything.

The one that you and I “vouch” but it never really seems to do anything.

This is from 2022, needs (2022) in the title

A couple years back someone posted something I wrote. I’d written it in November 2018 and it was currently March 2019. Someone started a thread that it needed (2018) and the HN mods actually made it happen - as well as changing the title.

I guess I know what I'll be doing this New Year's Day.

In all seriousness, I think people not reading the full article is a recurring theme on hn.

For controversial topics, it's a major problem: people don't establish what's actually being debated, instead attacking/defended what they think I'd being debated, so the conversation develops slowly as a result.

However, I also think it's a strength of hn, because hn has a strong culture of going off topic: allowing for people with related experience to share and to suggest new avenues to explore. Often, instead of bookmarking the referenced article, I bookmark the hn thread instead for this reason.

The only thing this is missing to make it modern is Walter Bright plugging D every time Python, Ruby, etc. is mentioned.

(By the way, I have nothing against Walter. This just seemed like it should have that.)

Not enough nitpicky corrections that devolve into even more nitpicky nerd arguments about semantics and usage of words that are entirely missing the high-level picture or the ability to understand the meaning of sentences based on their context.

Also, this could use more critical replies discussing why this project couldn't possibly work, or how this article is a result of living in a bubble.

And, of course, someone managing to steer a technical subject into a divisive political argument.

But seriously - very fun project, I love this!

and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373

I remember how I did something similar back in 1983...

This is my favorite comment. Not even close.

... in Org Mode ...

I'm someone who clearly didn't read the article, because I raise several points which were directly addressed by the author, but I do not refer to them at all in my very angry comment. It's possible the only thing I know about this article is the title, which it's also possible I misread in my eagerness to have my thoughts known by the internet.

And I am someone who is responding to that comment, and it's clear I haven't carefully read either the article, or even the comment I'm responding to.

This is pretty good, but to be peak HN the thread needs to have 'showdead' on and include three greyed-out comments: One claiming that the OP is wrong because he is a nefarious Jew, one half-page comment of entirely incomprehensible word salad, and a comment trying to sell boner pills in broken English with a misspelled URL that goes nowhere.

This is a repost from 2013

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5326511

The comments there are actually funnier

Why was this post written in English? Should re-write in Rust.

Too bad that n-gate.com stopped updating in mid-2021. It was great for this stuff, and arguably it still is.

Edit: Don't miss the usernames in OP's parody thread though, they're just as hard to spot as on actual HN (which is a great feature of this site) but I thought they were the funniest part.

The definitive hacker news mindset takedown. A cold bucket of water on silicon valley. I miss it so much, mostly because it was so insightful.

Alas, no one will know because... you didn't pilotfish-post on firstpost comment.

I was scrolling for this. I always forget the URL and when I find it I'm saddened to find no updates :\

When telling people about HN, I'd emphasize first reading the guidelines, and not treating it like other social media. Then I'd say, when some comment thread goes intolerable, they can get relief by reading some n-gate. (Though the content of the last post precluded mentioning it at the company where I was working.)

I hope the n-gate person is well, and that they didn't blow a gasket, taking on the burdens of too many HNers.

I'm missing a rant about why is it a Twitter thread and not a blog post

Also the long, tedious argument following from a polite correction to using the wrong pronouns for the author.

This is missing a tangent where someone finds a way to interject a point against “woke,” gets mostly downvoted into gray text, and is followed by a ten level deep rehashed debate over whether free speech should imply access to private platforms or not. Oh, and the various dead troll replies that you can see if show dead is on.

Missing "I can't view the site on my mobile phone."

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

On a tangential note, did this guideline change recently? In some search results "e.g." changes to "things like".

Missed the part where people use acronyms that no one understands.

A comment praising HN and attributing its success to dang's amazing moderation (which is 1000% deserved!)

While I like the idea in general but instead of hosting it as a static file, SQLie table would have been a more accessible approach not to mention that it is far easier to query from Rust.

Heck you could even compile SQLite and Rust both to Webassbly as Cloud flare edge workers but I'll not go that far.

Missing -

1. I noticed a word used slightly incorrectly in the title. Rather than reading it with the clear intended meaning, let’s take it as literally as possible to build a suitable straw man.

2. Someone replying in every thread, debating everyone like it’s their job and accounting for half the replies in the topic.

LOL.

A serious post (I know, it's hard to tell at this point, isn't it?):

Why does HN need the karma points system at all? Downvoting is hardly used on other social networking sites any more, which should tell you something. Getting one pedantipoint has to be a motivation for "I have stuff to say about JIT." posts.

Blocking & muting people is quite effective on Twitter, for example. The dream of a civil discourse with people disagreeing politely was obsolete before the Web was invented. There are a lot of accounts which someone here would rather never see, so why not just let those people erase them, just for their own TL?

Automatically downvoting anything you don't agree with is, basically, "Lord of the Flies" behavior. It leads to brigading.

HN “needs” karma points because HN has karma points and is over all a good forum. Changing it at this point risks changing the balance that makes HN what it is.

I don’t block or mute people on forums where that is allowed because I don’t want to see a different conversation from everybody else.

First paragraph is not a real compelling argument: HN has it because it has it. I should downvote :)

As for the second paragraph: to each his own. You have that choice.

Don't mind me, I'm just going to go around this parody thread downvoting anyone who talks about their small bootstrapped passion projects, accusing small funded companies that people like of astroturfing, and then storming off in a huff when I get called out. ;)

irt "...I know this is off-topic, but does anyone know how he got visual effect X on his blog? ..."

I cannot describe the sadness I feel when I see the title of an essay I might enjoy, decide to use HN comments as a way to decide, then the top comments are all "Why is he using comic sans as a font? Does he hate us?" and so forth.

A kitten dies each time this happens.

Over time, I have participated less and less on HN, but I still use it daily to screen out new tech news. This site rocks. Excellent parody!

Also, for the first seventeen people to sign up for my free e-book, I will purchase certificates for free rides from Uber For Horses. Even if you don't like the book, think of the horses!

About that essay decision support thing: I'd say that particular choice is a pretty valid input for (i.e. against) your decision.

> Firefox nightly does

Somehow took this to another level for me.

Some more:

- "I posted the same thing 3 days ago here: [link]"

- A person who knows the OP personally shares an anecdote

- "The YouTube embeds are breaking because I've disabled all Google domains"

- Why can't you just....

- "Really? Long form content as a Twitter thread?"

Clearly fake; did not include the word "orthogonal" anywhere.

Not enough sophisticated adjactives. On HN everything is incredible, amazing, electrifying and goosebumps inducing. I would love to see a frequency analysis of such words on HN vs elsewhere.

All that's missing is a 200 comment thread on some Microsoft/Facebook/Google tech from people who don't actually use Microsoft/Facebook/Google tech

Nearly perfect.

You missed the mandatory post on how I can read the author's blog post for 400 hours without recharging on my superior Mac M1, versus just 10 minutes on pleb Linux boxes.

I'm assuming that dang et al is going to let this thread be "The Purge" for meta and self-referential comments.

It's once a year guys, don't let it go to waste!

You don’t have to continue the parody and prove that the OP is right by making more parody comments. We already know he’s right. There has to be a word for that.

Where's the random guy making a silly, reddit-like joke and being downvoted into oblivion with a snide reply about how this is HN not reddit?

Here, here!

To reveal some hidden fun stuff in the 'reply' links (because hovering over everything is mildly annoying):

    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('a')).filter(a => a.innerText === 'reply').forEach(r => r.innerText = `${r.innerText} (${r.href.replace("http://news.ycombinator.com/", "")})`)

Is it really a parody ? In fact it is mostly pretty accurate and that's why I love Hacker News over any other social media

I usually just lurk but as it happens I am an expert in this topic and I need to disagree with everything the OP said.

“We renamed the title from The Eleven Sexiest Mistakes Stupid Morons Make When Designing Flow Control Protocols -dang”

There is a parody sub https://ps.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ all written by a set of GPT bots, where each bot writes in a specified tone.

Something like that *can* exist for HN too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221120140741/http://bradconte....

I’d like to make a broader point here…

Did you even read the article?

They missed the commentor who has nothing substantial too add too the actual conversation but managed to hone in on a piece of English semantics that needs to be endlessly nitpicked.

Inevitable followup "reddit level" comment left as an exercise for the reader.

I wish I could, in the true spirit of NH, down vote every comment I don't agree with on this tread. Unfortunately, that would really count against karma. But it's tempting :)

That said, the parody shows nothing down voted. Is that part of the parody? Or an oversight?

Given the proven track record of our community, it strikes me out how nobody commented about the pretty good replica of the HN's UI already. Sad.

On a related note, I will spend all night hacking CSS to prove myself I can do the same. Sleep debt does not scary me out.

I assumed they just cloned the stylesheet.

Needs a “person that posts an entirely reasonable analogy” followed by a bunch of posts arguing whether the analogy covers some small niche edge cases, with at least one person quoting a definition from a dictionary.

Did you win the Putnam? If not, please don't be "bolder" than this guy

It misses the <template> guy, posting about his life long obsession in every thread, no matter how unrelated. Also no dang, providing previous discussion links and stomping out flamewars caused by the usual suspects.

Nice, but no political comment in the entire thread, so not really representative.

> I'll weasel in a reference t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶u̶p̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶o̶-̶f̶o̶u̶n̶d̶e̶d̶ to my JS library even though it's not directly relevant.

Suddenly I feel shallow, and exposed.

On a tangent - am I the only person who uses his real name on HN?

TAN: No.

One thing it's missing is a reply to the comment saying "have you read the article" asking whether they have "read the Hacker News rules" as it forbids asking if someone has read the article.

I don't find this parody funny at all because the site doesn't work without JS plus it's taking over my scrollbar. Not at all smooth in Firefox 3.11 with everything except HTML disabled.

This is rather redundant, as HN often manages to parody itself. Does that make the intentional parody, being almost indistinguishable from real HN, a good or a bad one? I'm torn.

The URL should be to an article from 5 years ago with the OP saying that he’s sure nobody has seen this before, and 15 replies with links to all the times that URL was mentioned on HN in the past.

This whole comment section makes me happy. Thanks for that HN and OP.

I almost upvoted some fake comments there. Is that bad? Am I conditioned to see the world through an orange and grey filter, letting only sarcasm and earnest pedantry through?

Here would be a long winded thread debating a very pedantic point while using the definition of different fallacies to argue the other poster makes no valid points.

This thread reminds me of https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDITNAME

POST THANKING PARENT FOR LINK TO ENDLESS ENTERTAINMENT.

Forgot the:

Shameless self-plug: I build X[1] and I'm trying to solve the same problem as OP.

[1]: https://my-saas.com

Lol, click the "links"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17

Needs (2013)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5326511

Wooooaaa! Literally just yesterday I was thinking about this and considering posting a "Ask: Hn" to see if anyone remembered the link.

Cosmic, man. Cosmic...

It's missing a thread where someone makes a very simplistic analogy, followed by 300 replies discussing the analogy but not the concrete point.

I'm honestly shocked that HN hasn't taken this down yet. They tend to have self awareness the way I have self control around a buffet.

Is this accurate? There's not a single comment saying "x is my daily driver" and no mention of anything being considered harmful.

Should be posted by todsacerdoti + a top comments by Gigachad or tptacek, screenshot of an insightful comment posted to Twitter by swyx.

"Shouldn't the post add 2013 in the tile?"

The only way I could tell this post was old was the mention of IE in the parody comments.

This is hilarious, but this is the best we have! But since it's funny, one must concede the truth that made it so. Well done.

slightly reminds me of k5, when it was funny and interesting:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090108092943/http://www.kuro5hi...

Why is there no comment saying that someone is "conflating" something or that a something is "orthogonal"?

Missing the "previous discussions" links showing it was posted in 2012, 2015, 2017, 2018, and twice in 2020.

My favorite part was the tangential argument about technical interviews. That seems like a common tarpit around here.

I post to simply state my appreciation and amusement :D

... but I will be downvoted due to being neither insightful nor argumentative.

This is the type of insightful wisdom I come here for! I’m so glad we’re so much smarter than those Reddit people.

You omitted the obligatory dang banning someone that had a flagged comment and then 4 people asking what it said.

The author forgot to use references to razors, laws, fallacies, and axioms to dismiss any contentious discussion.

It's got one glaring omission IMO - references to sci-fi literature. They crop up in a lot of threads :)

One of the usernames is "scificharacter".

Thanks to this parody, I finally saw how the interface changes when you're finally able to downvote :D

I disagree with the title. And based on what I say I obviously didn't read the actual article.

There needs to be at least one person in the thread reminding us about pg's submarine essay.

"Why did you do this with that technology instead of this completely different one?"

You can do this Postgresql. Since I switched over x number of years I have never looked back.

Really missing n-gate.com. It was good. Hope he's alright

An internet attempts a third-rate mockery of Hackernews. Hackernews pulls a "this, but unironically", earnestly replicating every joke comment in the original article, right down to the obligatory XKCD.

Same, I occasionally go back and re-read the archive of posts for laffs. The satire there is better than 95% of the flotsam posted here.

I miss it too. For being "satire" it was often more insightful than HN.

I never laugh out loud in front of the screen. Especially in public places. Almost never.

“Firefox nightlys does” had me in fits.

That's how I found out that the reply button does not work. I wanted to post a link to the issue and explain how they got it wrong.

Commenter: yeah, but he forgot X

Reply: He says X in the second paragraph. Did you even read the article?

Didn't commit to the bit enough to register expertslastname.com. Still available!

Didn't find orthogonal, idempotent, or a rant about correlation vs causation.

I don't see any posts from the Rust Evangelism Strike Force (thanks, n-gate).

You should just quit your job

The site UX on mobile is awful - so it’s very consistent with the real thing :)

The feeling when self awareness blows into the forum like a refreshing breeze

Was this written by GPT-3?

Why can't we have more detailed technical stuff like this on HN?

Very happy that “tangential” and “could you elaborate” are in there.

"Could you elaborate" always gets me... I can never decide if they are trolls or people who don't understand how conversations work

Hmmm. I searched for "trains" but didn't find it.

Flagged because it doesn't fit "the narrative".

I can imagine a whole genre of these, like Madonna and Child.

I don't know why you need to bring politics into this.

Missing archive link.

The Bad Humor of HN.™

DAE hate javascript?

You're missing the https://xkcd.com/1831/ guy, there's always one especially when it comes to non-computer subjects like medicine x)

The best Hacker News parody is at https://news.ycombinator.com

Wrong, it's at https://hackernews.com, that weird link you posted is probably a phishing site.

Seems like not much has changed in 10 years...

Gibberish GPT3 comment from future sock puppet

Well, pack it in y’all. It’s all been done.

forgot the obligatory archive.is link.

Doesn't work on Netscape mobile.

This is too generous considering none of these comments trigger an unrelated and subtly racist political response.

*hey, don't forget the Nationalists.

I dislike Elon Musk and also it’s the apocalypse.

You picked an appropriate username for your comment

I like Elon Musk and it’s actually 4D chess

lets not forget...

* 5-day/40hr work weeks should be abolished in favor of 3-day/24hr work weeks

* I will never, ever work in an office again - work from home/remote 100% only

* I will sabatoge my work place if I am forced to work on nights/weekends

* All bosses are ssholes and should never be trusted

* Senior leadership (CEOs, etc) should forfit all their money and die if they ever lay off people

* People with more money than me suck

relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/386/

Charizard holo pokempn

Correlation !== causation

It depends on the datatype

This is missing the “scrolling is broken, history is broken, text isn’t high contrast enough, doesn’t work on mobile Safari, I hate paywalls, I hate cookie pop-ups, I hate newsletter signups, doesn’t work with adblock, doesn’t work without JavaScript, so didn’t read the article” comment.

Humorous meta comment

Not enough anecdotes

This. I...love this

So many tropes! :-D

Not brutal enough.

(2013)

A true parody of HackerNews needs the following.

> Be midwit

> Pops in at random 5 levels deep into some discussion

> Says that a point is "whataboutism"

> Takes great personal pride in thinking that he's won the debate by using the vocabulary term he just learned

> Refuses to elaborate

> Leaves

I like bananas.

There's also this for more hacker news satire although it sadly seems dormant now: http://n-gate.com

nice try, but N-gate is still better

I miss it :(

Nice article.

I downvoted you just to keep it inline with the OP

n-gate.com used to have more detailed (per article) HN satire.

If the author is here, please make each comment linkable, at least via anchor tags. I'd link to them the way I sometimes link to RELEVANT XKCD.

Hack money

I disagree

I wish elon musk would buy them and fix it.

Paywalled.

It’s missing the part where someone suggests stupidity and obtuseness on the part of anyone who questions free markets outside of theoretical experiments.

Similarly, it’s missing the comment from a woman-identified person that is followed by negging from male users.

Edit: proving my point

Reply on news.ycombinator.com