Show HN: This Hacker News Does Not Exist | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: This Hacker News Does Not Exist

coxomb.github.io

252 pointsgravitate125 comments

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.

No, OP is correct.

* You omitted hist point X.

* You misunderstand point Y.

* Here's point Z you didn't account for.

Continuing the discussion of point Z, here's an interesting way[1] it relates back to the OP. And here are some unknown facts[2] the OP didn't include.

[1]: http://SomeScientificJournal.com/141421

[2]: http://SomeNewsSite.com/11235813

Curiously, while examples of metacoentary stretch back to antiquity, the concept having a name is modern [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-reference#History-of-th...

This.

Is.

Not.

Reddit.

Well the OP could be both correct and incorrect.

> tangential statement

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

But considering climate change, having people sized sidewalks and taxing the externalities of the process is really the point you failed to consider. Nuclear might work but there is a lot more to it that doesn’t get addressed in the article. Estonia really gets this correct and proves the point that the American city isn’t going to be well designed if we don’t consider the impact of the rail system and electrification.

Hi Hackernews! This is a little project I made in my free time. It's a fun and whimsical parody of Hacker News. I wanted to experiment with Faker.js and other JS libraries.

It randomly generates Hackernews headlines. You get new results each time you refresh the page. I spent about 4 days making this, and learned a lot in the process, and it was my first open source side project in a long time.

It was inspired by This Person Does Not Exist and other 'Does Not Exist' projects which you can find here: https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/

If you spot any bugs or have any ideas on maybe how to improve it, post your thoughts here.

The source code can be found on GitHub, where it's hosted:

https://github.com/coxomb/This-Hacker-News-Does-Not-Exist/tr...

I hope you enjoy the project :)

this is super cool :)

this one got me laughing: "Chicken version 5.0 Alpha Released"

Chicken Scheme is currently on version 5.x so this could very well have been a real headline at one point.

No, not Chicken Scheme, it's about Chicken[1].

1. https://youtu.be/yL_-1d9OSdk

One thing I noticed that could be improved: The headlines in isolation are reasonable, and so are the websites, but the pairings between them are not. For example, "Snapchat Has Been Removed From iOS App Store (mitpress.mit.edu)" and "Hstr: Bash And Zsh Shell History Suggest Box (reuters.com)".

On the first page I loaded I could tell it was fake immediately, there were no mentions of Rust at all.

I really wanted to get into Rust programming, but was turned off by the toxicity of the community. Their smug attitude of superiority really turns people away. I've been programming in C and C++ for decades, and I'm not sure I've ever once run into a problem with undefined behavior.

Ask HN: Whats's the Purpose of Action-Items?

I chuckled. Thank you:D

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.

Edit: I anticipated the potential questions and added more information. Add some graphs and this could be a master's thesis.

I don't know why this isn't at the top.

> high-level statement about a relevant side point

Here's how it really works. I'll write a couple paragraphs on all the exceptions I can think of, explaining how you should have said "often" instead of "almost always".

"Why Your Pacemaker Might Be Spying On You" is one of the most stressful headlines I've seen in a long time

That's the headline immediately following "Ad-supported pacemakers are now available for people on lower incomes"

I'm incredibly mad my pacemaker is completely unusable if I disable JavaScript.

Coming from a Spaniard, “Spain considered dangerous” is also up there.

Fun fact, most of the type 1 diabetes looper scene (open source artificial pancreas) relies on an improperly secured insulin pump that allows third party software access via an exploit. The firmware has long been patched of course, but the pumps with the old firmware are still being sold among community members, for 4-5k.

I don't have the heart to disagree with you.

Really cool submissions with catchy titles..

I'd like to join the party with some fantasy..

1- Twitter files for bankruptcy (twitter.com/elonmusk)

2- Apple's new M3 chip outperforms Nvidia H100 (geekbench.com)

3- India to surpass China's GDP by 2025 (scmp.com)

4- Tell HN: I am quitting Hacker News

5- Google to revive Stadia (theverge.com)

6- Japan wins the 2022 FIFA World Cup (espn.com)

7- Hacker News to be acquired by Reddit (twitter.com/paulg)

8- Tesla Roadster hits 1.1 sec acceleration in early tests (electrek.co)

9- Microsoft outbid Adobe and offers $43.6B to acquire Figma

10- Facebook had died at 19 :)

Just imagine if one (or some) of the above comes true.. who knows? The world is changing fast ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Raspberry pi 5 out Performs m3

Now there's a dream and headline

A big block of text with no paragraph breaks. It seems like the author is trying his hardest to provide something insightful and well-written, and while it seems on-topic it is hard to relate to the original article. None of it looks wrong, but it doesn't seem very informative either. Most people will just skip right over it. There will be a semi-obscure Wikipedia link somewhere in here.[1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

"Ask HN: What's the purpose of North Dakota"

I ask this everyday.

Without North Dakota South Dakota would make no sense.

And yes Virginia should be renamed East Virginia.

But Virginia goes further west than West Virginia. Virginia should be renamed South Virginia.

I propose we name that one Other Virginia. Which makes the other Other-other Virginia.

East and West Dakota are available, let it be done.

I ask the same question about Rhode Island. ;)

Fargo (TV series)

Absolute gold. Some favorites:

- Olive Considered Dangerous (techcrunch.com)

- Profound 4th Generation Hardware -- an all-time nothing headline

- Ask HN: What Happened to Keyboard?

- FTX owes $445.61 to Coinbase -- four hundred dollars

- I'll Program The Auxiliary RAM Program, That Should Circuit The THX Circuit (washingtonpost.com)

If got $29.xx that ftx owes

They weren't kidding about crypto being unstable...

Nothing about Rust or Kubernetes. Instantly realized that this must be fake.

If you refresh a few times and search for "Rust" with your browser, the word "Rustic" will keep appearing.

> and search for X with your browser [then X-reference] will keep appearing

Through which mechanism exactly?

Missing a random rachelbythebay or ACOUP post and an in-depth analysis of some medieval book collection also. (Though "The Scary Truth about Egypt" and "What to love about Small, Frozen Sausages" come pretty close)

At this point HN is more or less a parody of itself. The same thing happened to Slashdot. Maybe inevitable with any long running community site.

It’s not, though it certainly does have identifiable quirks.

So, Hacker News is Dying?

I've seen this comment ever since I started reading Hacker News some 10 years ago. I've noticed myself getting warmed up to the argument over time, so I believe it's more an artifact of a user getting older than any real objective change in the site itself.

Well, I am not saying you're wrong, but it could also be true that communities are in fact getting more dull as they get bigger.

The fact that you've been reading this comment forever does disprove it since hn has been growing steadily for the past 10 years.

The necessary issue with gradual decline is that by definition there is never a point where you can definitively say it declined from one moment to the next. If you could, it wouldn't be a gradual decline, it would be a sudden decline.

Secondarily to this, if everywhere is in decline, there's no real way to tell as everything is relatively the same. In this context, HN is still ahead of reddit in terms of quality and content; reddit is still ahead of Facebook. Facebook and reddit however are very different beasts than they were a decade ago, let alone 15 years ago. Has HN had a similar decline as everywhere else? I don't really have a strong opinion on that, but it's a hard point to prove either way.

Personally, as someone that's been lurking HN since about 2010, the only differences that I can see is that HN seems less about startups than it was a decade ago and the comments are shorter and with less implicit good faith. The latter two though are happening everywhere, so I don't think HN is unique in that regard.

As an intellectual exercise, I went to a random date from the front page from 2009 and found someone complaining about Google's tracking and the degeneration of its search results:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979033

So in that regard, nothing's really changed but the severity of the problems.

I think this comment itself could be a part of the parody site, to be honest.

An AI comment bot trained on past HN comments that can be unleashed on the actual HN to whore karma sounds like a great meta-humorous project - it would prove that as far as upvotes go, we have achieved the singularity.

You're right, which is the worst part of it; realizing you are part of the problem. I think the karma system is a big driver of it, you quickly learn what you "should" or "shouldn't" be posting.

If at the top of the list I see "Your appliance may be spying on you", it is not the platform that is a parody of itself - the farce is in this dragging world.

I am quite sad that "The secret life of videocassettes in Iran" is not a real article

It is, it's just from a different source.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-secret-life-of-videoc...

It's always a different source on HN.

That's amazing! Thanks for the link

It would be nice to use GPT3 to generate the headlines and even the content of the links.

What if you get stuck in the gpt3 generated internet? What if we already are?

(Come to think of it, that would make more sense).

What if we already are, indeed. And early next year they will release GPT-4

Using the new ChatGPT from OpenAI:

> Generate 10 typical Hacker News headlines.

  1. "New open-source project revolutionizes web development"
  2. "10 tips for optimizing your website's performance"
  3. "The future of programming languages: what to expect"
  4. "Big tech companies accused of stifling innovation"
  5. "The rise of artificial intelligence in the workplace"
  6. "Successful startups share their secrets to growth"
  7. "Why it's time to switch to a privacy-focused browser"
  8. "The top programming languages to learn in 2021"
  9. "How to build a strong cybersecurity strategy for your business"
 10. "The importance of ethics in the tech industry"

IMHO it's a bit too clichée (there are rather few "10 tips to..." or "top XXX in 2021" on HN), but other than that, quite accurate.

EDIT: It seems like ChatGPT agreees:

> Can you do the same but less clichée?

  1. "The surprising benefits of using a text-based interface"
  2. "Exploring the potential of blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrency"
  3. "Why the gig economy may not be sustainable in the long run"
  4. "The role of virtual reality in distance learning"
  5. "The future of work: how technology is changing the job market"
  6. "The ethics of using facial recognition technology"
  7. "How to protect your online identity from cyber threats"
  8. "The potential of quantum computing to solve complex problems"
  9. "The impact of automation on the job market"
 10. "The rise of low-code development platforms"

These seem like exactly what I'd expect from HN.

I got

"Sperm Counts Worldwide Are Plummeting Faster Than We Thought"

We saw that thread just 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33816861

I guess HN titles doesn't have enough data for this.

> Candy Crush Has Been Removed From Google Play (reuters.com)

The world is truly coming to an end.

I legit got excited for "You May Not Need React". For shame.

While the headlines may not be real, many of these are totally worthy of Hacker News style conversations. Maybe we need a static version of this that we can add comments to?

This is definitely good for a laugh, on the first page-load. After that, some patterns emerge that really deflate the experience, but I definitely chuckled multiple times.

I clicked on the Parody Hacker News link which took me to https://news.ycombinator.com/IHopeMyMaxVisitHasntBeenHit and got the response "Unknown" and now I'm struggling to convince myself that I exist...

I saw the first page and it had the classic HackerNews headline format: "<name> has died."

AI is gonna win, y'all.

Well, this isn't really an AI. It just scrambles from pre-fabbed assets, afaik

So are Reddit comments[1]. Once there are sufficient comments on the internet that you can't read them all in a lifetime, who's to say the one you are reading is novel and written by a human, and not a pre-fab comment scrambled from dozens of previous posts on the same topic from years ago, or the same topic on another site?

[1] you can't prove otherwise!

> Your Smartphone May Be Making You Lazy

This, and many more, are more than believable. This one is actually quite sad.

Yeah this one is right - the only issue is it’s an understatement

> Ask HN: What Happened to Sausages?

Asking the important questions.

"Washington Considered Dangerous"

Yep, it's pretty much nailed HN's front-page concerns.

I got ‘Cambridgeshire Considered Dangerous’ - much less HN front page but it made me laugh

I got "Florida Considered Dangerous". You don't say?

https://imgur.com/a/vxQooID

"FTX owes $288.05 to Binance"

At least, lol

Post 27 seems to always be some variation of "FTX owes $xx.xxx to XYZ"

FTX owes $13.68 to Robin Hood (substack.com)

FTX owes $997.43 to Binance (nationalgeographic.com)

FTX owes $264.32 to Robin Hood (theverge.com)

etc

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

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

Pretty good but not as good as last week's:

Fake HN titles generated by GPT-3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33757935