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Show HN: Headline Smasher

headlinesmasher.com

97 pointswilg42 comments

I should point out that this is fully inspired by the other day's top post of procedural HN headlines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815282). I thought it would be a cool addition to mash them up with other news sources with sort of sensational headlines and add voting.

And I assume all of this has been inspired by the "What Would I Say?"[1] app which has gone viral in since it emerged from HackPrinceton a few weeks ago?

Your website is extremely amusing and well done btw, kudos :)

[1] http://what-would-i-say.com

EDIT: Headline Smasher and WWIS both appear to use the same exact button color scheme, too!

I think that's just Bootstrap's default look. I've never seen that site before.

I made the original HN headline generator this is based on. It wasn't inspired by "what would I say." I do machine learning research, and I saw an HN comment that said something like "this is the most HN title I have ever read." And I though "hmmm I could use Markov chains to generate fake HN titles..." So I did.

Right now my current HN-based machine learning project is to try to predict if a post will succeed or not, given its title, who posted it, when, etc.

Ah, thank you for sharing that. It was a coincidence then. I guess I just assumed that the seeming recent influx of Markov-chain based humorous one-line generators were all connected, but I suppose the WWIS one was a separate occurrence.

Unless of course you consider chaos theory... ;)

I found myself clicking on a bunch of them, genuinely wanting to read the "article" behind them...

I wonder if the impulse to click on some of the stories is related to linguistic techniques utilized by the sourced viral content engineers (such as Upworthy).

While we're on the topic, is it just me or has memetic engineering kicked it up a notch lately with Upworthy, ViralNova, etc? Or was it always like this?

Upworthy seems to have started a noxious trend -- it's supposedly a successful marketing technique, and has hence been copied. The headline style itself has a bit of a longer history, but Upworthy was the first to combine it with aggressive social-media promotion of re-shares (Their business model is "give us a video, we will promote the heck out of it to force it viral"), so that it gets forced upon people who don't want to see it (as opposed to HuffPo, for example, which you can mostly avoid by choosing not to visit the site).

And Upworthy content is political propaganda (it's a spinoff project from the moveon.org folks, and its services are marketed as a tool to manipulate viewers' political viewpoints, not just sell stuff or generic ad impressions), not just humorous clickbait; that adds an extra layer of manipulative slime to the headlines.

Good points, and you're right that Upworthy is an engine for viral political content, which I find very interesting.

You call it "manipulative slime," but I'm still undecided on the morality of it. On the one hand, the manipulative aspect is incredibly annoying, and I avoid clicking on Upworthy links basically out of spite. On the other hand, is this worse or better than using viral marketing tactics to sell a product? What if Upworthy manages to get hundreds of thousands of people to share an informative video on a civil rights issue that you find to be of pressing importance?

Viewed through this lens, Upworthy is essentially analogous to viral vector gene therapy for the hivemind. Is this inherently evil? Do the ends justify the means? I don't know, but it would be an interesting discussion to have.

I didn't realize Upworthy was a spinoff from moveon.org, but now it all makes so much sense. I actually have never ended up reading anything from Upworthy, because before they show you any content they ask you questions like, "Do you think it's not not wrong to kill puppies? (YES) (NOT YES?)"

There was an article on BusinessWeek a while ago (I think it was posted here, not sure though) that discussed Upworthy's techniques and methodology: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-01/upworthy-goe...

'Manipulative slime' is pretty spot-on. Upworthy tries to change political viewpoints but it doesn't do it in most cases by presenting facts, by challenging assumptions, or by trying to elevate the level of discourse. Instead, it's all low-quality viral content, reshares, and stuff explicitly intended to induce warm fuzzies within its viewers first and foremost. From the linked article:

"One Upworthy post carried the headline “Watch A Preacher Attack Gay Marriage And Totally Change His Mind On The Spot” without mentioning that the entire speech was a hoax by the pro-gay rights preacher, who was making fun of the other viewpoint."

I don't understand why this is on the front page in the #11 spot? It has 4 points and it's 45 minutes old.. The HN rankings system continues to confuse me.

Clearly its getting overwhelmed with HN traffic. Maybe click throughs are included in the rankings calculation? Then again, if many people are clicking through and then not up voting it, it's not necessarily a positive thing.

I do think it's pretty cool though! Great job.

Saturdays are probably the low-traffic day on HN. I remember pg saying once that Wednesday was the peak day. It's possible the algo compensates for a lack of traffic. Fewer submissions might affect the decay of popular items.

I think a lot has to do with the people doing the up/down voting. I'm guessing HN members who have been here longer and/or has more comment karma, carry significantly more weight when up/down voting.

This would explains why such a low score would result in a post staying in the front page for so long. So even though the points maybe 4 from a cosmetic point of view, I'm guessing its actual score would be much higher due to the 4 HN members that voted up this post.

This is funny. Voting on generated titles is a great idea. If you allowed users to post comments, just like on HN or reddit, that would enable people to play along. Also, I would get rid of classification (Entertainment, Games, Opinion, Reddit, etc.) because it doesn't add much to the website and the categories are inaccurate anyway. Just one list is fine.

In true "lean marketing" style, then generate bodies for headlines that get clicks.

These are wonderful. I can not believe that some of these were automatically generated.

Please add the headlines that were smashed to make the stupid headline.

Yeah, that's probably the easiest way to 'link' content when you try to click it. I also want to know where they come from in general.

Buzzfeed will buy this.

You can inject your own headlines, so that makes me suspicious that some of the truly golden ones are manufactured. However, it is hilariously illuminating how many of the headlines look authentic.

http://i.imgur.com/7yFUf4q.png

http://www.headlinesmasher.com/headlines/6751

Not anymore, you can't: https://github.com/wilg/headlines/commit/efdf7eaa33303918cdb...

It's pretty far down, but:

"Author of LuaJit Explains Why He Changed Mind on Weed"

...made me far happier than it should have.

Site has apparently been overwhelmed by HN traffic. Not sure that's what you intended to "Show HN".

Yikes! Looks like I'm running up against Heroku's 20 database connection limit.

Edit: Fixed?

Still erratic

    An error occurred in the application and your page could     
    not be served. Please try again in a few moments. If you 
    are the application owner, check your logs for details.

"Microsoft Announces Tons of Issues"

"Microsoft tries to stop crying"

"Afghanistan in Browser"

"Fuck a woman to win this Zune"

I almost woke up the baby, am literally laughing with tears right now.

Can someone roughy explain how this works? I've looked through the source code but failed to identify the part that magically makes the headlines sound sensible.

Here's a link to headline generator: https://github.com/wilg/headlines/blob/master/lib/markov.py

I didn't make this, it's a slightly modified version of this: https://gist.github.com/grantslatton/7694811

I'm planning to rewrite this in Ruby to allow me to surface where each parts of the headline is sourced from.

I see, thank you!

I would add an encoding meta tag. The font icons from bootstrap look like crap to me.

Is the source available?

Yep: https://github.com/wilg/headlines

This is awesome, but "generater" instead of "generator" is making my OCD twitch.

No. Fuck you and the people like you who've tried to claim OCD like it's some cool thing to have.

Have some respect for the real sufferers of OCD who live in hell on earth and on top of that have to see their condition belittled by all and sundry on the internet.

I get the chastising, but this is out of bounds I think.

Just because someone used a commonly abused expression doesn't mean we need to trash on them. It doesn't really teach anyone anything good.

Beat stupid people with intellectual conversation, not "fuck you"s.

You're right, my apologies to mrbill.

Apparently just about everyone on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit has OCD. Having seen a close cousin of mine suffer horribly from OCD (to the point of being house-bound), it's terribly frustrating to see people throw OCD around like its a fashionable accessory.

I totally understand. My sister and a close friend of my wife's both have OCD, and I have also had very mild obsessive tendencies, and it's definitely nothing to joke about. I think it has been over generalized to people who have a high attention to detail, almost "to a fault" - that fault being a supposed debilitating obsession.

A lot of people don't understand that OCD doesn't have the positive effect of producing perfectly crafted things. Instead, severe cases cause panicked, irrational understandings of reality. (This is for anyone reading, trying to understand why this is offensive.) using "OCD" as a descriptor rather than saying simply that you obsess over details is reducing the awareness of actual OCD and other anxiety related issues.

While "fuck you" is a bit harsh, you've got just as much right as anyone else to criticize their use of certain terms. Apology accepted.

Just FYI, I have been (officially) diagnosed with a minor case of OCD, but it's certainly not to the point of being debilitating or crippling, and I feel for those who do.

100% agreed.

Yes, it's a harsh statement, but sometimes they're necessary.

True OCD is a horrible, debilitating condition.

This is from Cracked.com, but it's actually a very accurate description of what living with OCD's like.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-no-one-tells-you-about-...

(Note: I don't suffer from the condition myself, but I know people who do.)

Congratulations: You've automated The Onion.

(The best part of The Onion is the headlines. The articles are funny, too, but they too often just beat the headline's joke into the ground.)

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