OK, so the "Storing data in the network ... " title made me remember something.
If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data.
So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.
During NASA's Deep Space Optical Comms demo (https://www.nasa.gov/mission/deep-space-optical-communicatio...), they transmitted video at 267 Mbps from 16 million kilometers away. That's 1.78 GiB stored in space while in transit (assuming 53.3 seconds light-speed delay).
The furthest they did was 8.3 Mbps at 400 million km which is around ~1.38 GiB in transit.
You could totally do that with the mirror on the moon. (Retroreflector + optical data transmission).
The moon is approximately (it varies) 1.3 light seconds away, i.e. a 2.6 second round trip, and optical links can have very high data rates. You could fit quite a lot of data on there! (Edit: although maybe the data rate won't be so high at these distances)
People of Earth. I AM LRRR, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8! We will raise your planet's temperature by one million degrees a day, for five days, unless we see McNeal at 9pm tomorrow - 8 central!
With gravitational lensing, this is actually viable! Just send a signal at a gravity sink, and travel at sublight speeds to position yourself in a place where it will be redirected to eventually along a longer path, and you can intercept your own signal! You just have to be really, really lucky.
Before I consumed calories over days to figure out syntax. Now, a language model exhausts those calories away in seconds. Eventually we will advance too far into the future that the tail end of humanity will forget how to make pants.
That's only true in classical electrodynamics, as it happens. If you're in a very strong B-field like you must find near a compact object you'll get nonlinear QED effects.
The logic we typically use for repeaters (EDFA, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers) for long-distance lines amplifies but does not clean noise (so across the oceans, you are very much bound by SNR). And you need one of them every 80 km or so in typical fiber.
I have a few blog posts which have received only about ~250 upvotes across different communities, plus a GitHub project with just 30 stars.
Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.
maybe not the recruiter but the hiring manager or prospective colleagues who'll interview you later?
not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about.
I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects.
it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.
-> Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster.
I love these and I know this is all in good fun, but I feel like this one is a little unfair to Jeff. He's a content creator and he didn't actually buy the rig. If he's rich it's because he creates content like this.
Most of these are unfair in some way and many are wrong. What makes this funny is precisely that it has more snark than is reasonable (and often pushes bad assumptions as snark usually does!)
I love asking Grok’s companions, especially “Bad Rudy”, for the news of the day. It’s pretty similar: Brutally honest, filtered news. Although recently he started editorializing with his personal opinion, which is boring (from an AI companion).
I got a good chuckle out of some of the titles. In Jeff Geerling's defence (the title on the site reads "Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster"), he was loaned the Mac Studios from Apple and so he didn't spend a dime.
Also his accompanying YouTube video mentions the kit retails for $40,000+, a far cry from $15k.
You can still look at almost any codebase and ask 'why is this bit not using a state machine here?' ... the AASM repo readme is very accessible even if you don't know Ruby: https://github.com/aasm/aasm
Its not even just Rails ppl. In embedded ive seen so many consultants say things like, "no problem. I just started working on the ultimate, perfect way to set up a state machine." Confidence theater
Love this. can we get an honest title for this entry too? (I'm not quite happy with my 11l+ karma, please give me some upvotes so I can start the new year with a smile?)
jk, great one, cheers
What's funny/interesting from a psychological perspective is that several of these made me click (and discover genuinely interesting content) on links that I ignored in the real version. Could you do this everyday please?
I sleep better at night thinking it is just a battleground of astroturfing bots fighting each other (at least on the main pages).
Everything from massive Russian state-actor bot farms testing newly trained LLMs popping out AI-generated meme formats before deploying domestically unknowingly getting into arguments with Israeli bot farms trying to raise support for some new movie series that will enable them to raise money for their next missile strike competing for eyeballs/attention from some uni student in a dorm room paying mid-sized black market companies in India to post comments telling you that cast-iron pans are too hard to clean so you should buy the non-sticks you saw on instagram (which are just marketing dropshippers in the USA selling the QA rejected pans from established brands).
Hacker News is Reddit with a nuclear downvote button and tone policing.
It's not that much better in terms of "dead internet," the bots are just more eloquent. In some ways the HN flavor of gamified engagement actively encourages worse outcomes than Reddit.
"Math nerd explains how to spend 3 days proving 1+1=2" -> Original
"From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259343
To answer my question myself I gave Microsoft copilot this prompt:
I want you to rewrite this headline "Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks"
into something a little humorous and snarky that reveals the underlying truth that would bring a
wry smile to tech-engaged but big tech-skeptical hacker news readers.
This has to fit in the 80 character limit for Hacker News so keep it appropriately short.
Also I want you to reply with exactly one headline and not anything else so I can use your output
as part of a processing pipeline
and i get the response
Amazon Finally Remembers eBooks Aren’t Supposed to Be Prisoners
which I think is great. I started with the first paragraph and got something too long with some explanation. I added the second, and got three replies and more explanation. The three replies were all "good enough" in my mind but added the third paragraph to control the output.
I prompted Gemini to tell me how to prompt itself to get similar results on other news sites and it said I should give it a description of the intended audience and what it finds funny/snarky.
I'd like to see a version of the HN frontpage, where the titles are reinterpreted by that 1913 AI. "Imagine these are newspaper headlines from the year 2025. Rewrite them so that a regular person in our time can understand them."
"Show HN: I implemented generics in my programming language"
does not deserve the roast
"I built a language nobody will use just to learn generics"
It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project. It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction. Zig and Rust started out small too! This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
>It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project
Yeah... what they ended up implementing is not generics. So good thing the LLM doesn't read link/comments too or will've probably wrote an actual roast.
>It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction
Very fair to assume this. Referencing Rust/Zig disregarding the thousands other now abandoned ones is survivorship bias. Most small hobby projects remain small. But, besides joking about it, "built [something] nobody will use", if is in their free time, and enjoy it, does it matter? Is there a need for all hobby projects to have a goal of making it big?
>This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
But the "Please star my repo so I can get a job" is fine?
It would be a really interesting feature to have ai analyze the articles and write an actually honest sub-headline. (ie not these sarcastic humor titles)
Anyone want to try a prompt injection? All we need to do is to get one or two story in the front page that have a good < 80 characters prompt injection.
I am fine with the current layout, but I also have to say that I
preferred old.reddit.com as a layout base (the new reddit UI is horrible, and reddit overall succumbed to willy-nilly tyranny of moderators on power-trips). I am not saying HN should change to become like old.reddit.com in the UI, mind you, but a few things could perhaps be considered. Using old.reddit.com was much more efficient to me than the default UI here. It is not the end of the world, but I would not mind small, slight, modest improvements to the UI (not only the front page, but all of HN).
Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions and changes and people could vote. It should be as conservative as possible, though, because while I preferred old.reddit.com, I also think that not everyone may prefer changes. So one should aim for the highest acceptance value possible, before making any change.
11/10 would read. So much clickbait going around (and lets ignore the articles that "magicly" are upvoted but strangewise have no comments whatsoever.... not sus at all....
(If you follow that link from HN, and the site sees an HN `Referer`, it will do a fake captcha load, so then click "HACKERNEWS" in the navbar on the right.)
The last post or so sounded stressed. I hope they feel better.
But in general, going to read a little n-gate was a relief when some HN comment thread went off the rails. Someone else could rant about the dumbness, and a burden was lifted.
Seconding a little, perhaps dim button to toggle the original. But I love this. So much so that I might start referring to it more than HN when I'm in a rush.
Definitely fun, although after recently submitting one (a simple browse extension to make HN Christmas colors last all Christmas season instead of on Christmas Day)[1] that got very little attention I started looking at other posts and found a whole lot more slip through the cracks than I would have thought.
I find these kind of posts profoundly uninteresting (woah, the n-th parody of the HN front page...) and yet they seem to always garner so many upvotes...
I'm not even so sure it's such a useless joke. I mean, it is, and I wouldn't want titles to be like "Academic publishers admit paywalls were a scam all along" (unless ALL major publishers actually admit it, which so far they didn't). But I clicked on "Math nerd explains how to spend 3 days proving 1+1=2" and when it turned out to be a Lean tutorial I thought "Oh, that's exactly what I wanted!". I don't know why, but "From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4" I didn't even notice. It's such a boring and verbose title with lame attempt at wordplay that, that my brain somehow filters it out.
That’s it. It singlehandedly sold the idea of an AI browser to you. Like I now want an AI radio in my car, and we’re all putting AI between Google and us because Google’s results unfiltered are bad.
Not sure if the source code for this is available but if you want to make your own version I did something similar that can be easily modified and run locally for your own festive mirth: https://github.com/justinhj/rudehackernews
ok but how does it work though? Is this seriously just passing the titles to some llm with a prompt like 'roast this'? is it reading the actual content of the link as well?
The year is 20X5. Despite the onslaught of artificially intelligent agents capable of understanding and synthesizing new concepts in written language, humans are still capable of basic cognition… for now.
This is really awesome, I am interested how you made this, is there a way that we can have something this like for hackernews for more than this one instance of (20?) posts, I know its satirical but I really enjoyed it
Considering its hosted on github I think that it is a static page
Twas brillig, and the slithey-news did gyre and gamble on the title.
All manic were the Borogoves and gnome-rat's Anti-AI rhetoric in full recital.
Beware the SLOP my son!
The jaws that slurp, and claws that don't match.
Beware the Amazon-nerd, and shun
that Facebook Hack.
He took his local well in hand;
long time the perfect pose he sought.
So prompted he by the decision tree,
and waited while the AI Thought.
Spaghetti.
Meatballs.
Slurp.
Will I?
No.
Will Smith.
IYKYK
This was a great way to start the day over a cup of coffee, sometimes we need things that make as laugh but what is awesome is the titles are spot on. Thank you for making this Friday morning fun
maybe so, though an inaccurate claim. the ai is the value add here (and quite a value add based on the other comments in the thread). we typically reserve the word "slop" for ai generated content that is of low quality or no value add. this website seems to be both of quality and value ad and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.
"Slop" is at _least_ as fair a description of "we had an LLM rewrite HN headlines" as "we rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it" is of "we removed our biggest source of crashes on Android by getting rid of Go FFI issues."
Entertaining and apparently useful, though of course not infallible. Given https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms it yields the title "Training AI on 1913 data to avoid 'woke' bias (and hygiene)". That the Honest Hacker News AI model has been trained on a dose of cynicism and intellectual dishonesty is probably hard to avoid...
Yup. And if you dared to bring this up in the comments (ie. your own rewrite of a title/post), you’d get reminded of the guidelines and downvoted/flagged. Because fuck honesty - we are here for clicks and engagements.
This is a good step. Next: disclose financial incentives and other motives just to nip it in the bud.
well, I think OP is quite funny and I really enjoyed it, but it definitely goes against the entire idea of approaching things in good faith. I'm sure some or even many of them are sadly accurate, but if reinterpreting things people say through that lens became the behavioral norm on HN I think it would quickly destroy everything many people love about this place. Just my 2 cents of course.
I feel that my life has been improved by all three of these. I hadn't seen the "hysterical clickbait" one before you pointed it out, so thank you even though clearly that was the opposite of your intent.
It's funny, the OP doesn't have an ulterior motive, and it's close to the holidays so it is not cannibalizing more important news. There's no harm here.
> How much of this navel-gazing junk do we need? See also, from the same author:
Seriously! I'll admit the first post was mighty fun. But now this is turning into an AI-spam-fest! I objected in the 2nd thread but got downvoted. Apparently the community here thinks this kind of low effort Reddit-style humor is now on-topic for this place!
Not to mention the systematic downvoting of every comment that is critical of these spam posts!
reminds me of how people used to shove autotune into anything and people lapped it up like the slop that it was and this is. but, as with that slop, this will also get boring to the masses. there's only so much "I told an llm to pretend it was deadpool by way of ryan reynolds" that people actually like. the novelty is the brunt of it. and, like with autotune, when used well, people will continue to appreciate it. just ride out the hyperslop, for now.
This is not "honest", this is mostly just dismissive. The headings are no more neutral and explanatory than the originals, because, I suppose, the intent was just having fun.
Its on the front page, that means it atttracted attention and was upvoted. If what you are saying was true, these posts would die very quickly and we would never see them.
I guess if everyone thinks mocking peoples' projects and efforts is funny, it's okay!
My opinion is a weakly that this is tiring and borderline insulting to people who are genuinely looking for feedback and community. Clever once a year or so, but the creator has leaned into it and posted a lot of meta in a small timeline.
I already made my point. If the community agrees with you then we wont see these on the front page anymore. If not then you will either need to be ok with seeing more of them, or not read HN.
OK, so the "Storing data in the network ... " title made me remember something.
If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence, and the outgoing buffer is deleted on the sending side (the original code is preserved, but the transmission-encoded sequence doesn't stick around), then that data, for 20-90 minutes, exists nowhere _except_ space. It's just random-looking electrical fluctuations that are propagating through whatever is out there until it hits a conducting piece of metal millions of miles away and energizes a cap bank enough to be measured by a digital circuit and reconstructed into data.
So, if you calculate the data rate (9600 baud, even), and set up a loopback/echo transmitter on Mars, you could store ~4 MB "in space". If you're using lasers, it's >100x as much.
During NASA's Deep Space Optical Comms demo (https://www.nasa.gov/mission/deep-space-optical-communicatio...), they transmitted video at 267 Mbps from 16 million kilometers away. That's 1.78 GiB stored in space while in transit (assuming 53.3 seconds light-speed delay).
The furthest they did was 8.3 Mbps at 400 million km which is around ~1.38 GiB in transit.
Definitely one of the harder drives feasible!
Tom 7 did something reminiscent of this if you hadn't seen already: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio.
Love Tom7! The peculiarities of my brain's weirdness obligates me to sing his praises every time he is mentioned.
It's just a fancy form of delay-line memory [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
In a universe with mass–energy equivalence, show me a storage medium that isn’t effectively a delay line :)
What about entangled qubits?
you beat me to it - or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory in general, space is probably closer to an electrical delay line in practice.
There's a short story by Qntm called "Valuable Humans in Transit" that I like quite a bit which hinges on this subject: https://qntm.org/transi
You could totally do that with the mirror on the moon. (Retroreflector + optical data transmission).
The moon is approximately (it varies) 1.3 light seconds away, i.e. a 2.6 second round trip, and optical links can have very high data rates. You could fit quite a lot of data on there! (Edit: although maybe the data rate won't be so high at these distances)
Some amateur radio folks do something along similar lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Ear...
My friend Joe Allen did this with the air in a room!
https://youtu.be/a5hOmPdxw0U
There is an archive of a lot of television transmission in space.
archive.space
You just need to be traveling faster than the radio waves, catch up and enjoy :)
People of Earth. I AM LRRR, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8! We will raise your planet's temperature by one million degrees a day, for five days, unless we see McNeal at 9pm tomorrow - 8 central!
With gravitational lensing, this is actually viable! Just send a signal at a gravity sink, and travel at sublight speeds to position yourself in a place where it will be redirected to eventually along a longer path, and you can intercept your own signal! You just have to be really, really lucky.
Assuming some pass through non-empty media, isn't it technically possible?
pingfs has similar inspiration, where storage capacity scales with latency.
https://code.kryo.se/pingfs/
Discussed in 2015:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844725
Indeed: https://qntm.org/transi
You can use fiber optics as an optical delay line too! About 60KB/km at 100Gbps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
"a man is not dead while his name is still spoken"
GNU John Dearheart
allegedly, this was used long ago. a teacher told us similar stories from his early career in the 80s
made my mind tickle for quite a while
Lacks the capability of random access, which limits the practicality of it. Cool idea still
Before I consumed calories over days to figure out syntax. Now, a language model exhausts those calories away in seconds. Eventually we will advance too far into the future that the tail end of humanity will forget how to make pants.
https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about
"Going Postal" was brilliant. GNU Terry Pratchett.
So if we can somehow preserve the signal and make it go round and round, can we get long term storage out of nothing?
This is possible but you'd have to deploy it right by a black hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_sphere
i wonder how sensitive your equipment would need to be to read it from the back scatter off the interstellar medium.
Not a scientist, but I assume the signal would degrade or mutate over time due to space radiation and other radio waves.
Electromagnetic waves have perfect/lossless superposition, so radiation can’t really degrade a signal that way.
The big limiting factors are free space path loss and noise.
That's only true in classical electrodynamics, as it happens. If you're in a very strong B-field like you must find near a compact object you'll get nonlinear QED effects.
You can get a low order correction with Euler-Heisenberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%E2%80%93Heisenberg_Lagra...
It should be same logic we use for repeaters, so it'll be fine.
The logic we typically use for repeaters (EDFA, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers) for long-distance lines amplifies but does not clean noise (so across the oceans, you are very much bound by SNR). And you need one of them every 80 km or so in typical fiber.
"Nothing" is a funny name for an interplanetary communication network.
You're still storing your data in the same EM field, just in a slightly different non-inertial reference frame.
> If you transmit a message to Mars, say a rover command sequence
Don't you worry!
AI rover robots are soon going to dominate Mars.
"Commenter shows off how smart they are with cool fun fact"
A good Friday morning laugh! I think the tiles are not just honest, they are brutally honest. Some of my fav ones:
- Amazon finally adds a feature that has been standard since 2005
- Texas accidentally does something good for privacy
Would it possible to add a feature where hovering over a title displays the original title?
If you click into the comments, it takes you to the real HN comments page with the real title
Yeah but I'd need to click each of them, thus the request for that feature.
I like how the current form is close to the real HN experience without onHover cruft.
I wanted that feature as well. Adds much to the lols.
"Please star my repo so I can get a job" is brutal
As someone who maintained popular open source repos for >5 years, not once did I have a recruiter care about it (I made sure to ask!)
I've had recruiters be “impressed by my GitHub profile”, when I didn't have a single project on my GitHub profile.
I have a few blog posts which have received only about ~250 upvotes across different communities, plus a GitHub project with just 30 stars.
Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.
maybe not the recruiter but the hiring manager or prospective colleagues who'll interview you later?
not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about.
I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects.
it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.
I hired many many people and never once I cared about GitHub stars. Not even sure what signal it suppose to be.
It's a quick signal that the developer is capable of writing and maintaining code that can be used by many others.
Or that they're just a person who knows how to game stars. As Goodfart says, "When a measure becomes a target, it gets gamed beyond usefulness."
Yes, developer/platform advocacy/evangelism.
I had to go back and look. Absolutely skewered it.
The future is now
I have to admit, that one hurts
Is that the title it gave itself?
Edit: Oh no, that was for the repo I actually stared before seeing this. I'm just learning Go :)
-> Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster.
I love these and I know this is all in good fun, but I feel like this one is a little unfair to Jeff. He's a content creator and he didn't actually buy the rig. If he's rich it's because he creates content like this.
Most of these are unfair in some way and many are wrong. What makes this funny is precisely that it has more snark than is reasonable (and often pushes bad assumptions as snark usually does!)
It's inaccurate on two fronts: he didn't spend the money because he loaned the hardware... and the reviewed thing was actually $40k. :D
Jeff’s content is way too high quality to make him rich.
High quality content usually makes someone rich, and that someone is usually not the creator.
It need not be a dichotomy. I also laughed at the title. At the same time, I found the original article useful.
No, I agree, I just wanted to call it out.
>a little unfair to Jeff
I don't know chief, have you seen how many rpis this guy has?
Top level item for me now: "We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it"
Love these things. Every time someone has posted an AI-flavor of HN it's been comedic gold.
Yes and - it would be great to hover/tap to see the original headline.
I found myself pulling up the original and the honest versions side by side. The translation makes it funny.
Right now there is a lot of drift between real and honest version, so it's hard to find the original title.
If you click on the comments in the honest version, it'll redirect you to the real version.
This should be the April Fools 2026 feature put directly on the live HN site.
The Onion for Programers
AKA The Onion.
I love asking Grok’s companions, especially “Bad Rudy”, for the news of the day. It’s pretty similar: Brutally honest, filtered news. Although recently he started editorializing with his personal opinion, which is boring (from an AI companion).
A lot of these have a disturbingly subjective critical voice.
On a topsy turvy day, one finds oneself suspecting these are human-written instead of AI.
I’m also suspicious that it’s human-written, or at least human selected/moderated. It doesn’t seem to be updating very frequently for one thing.
If it’s AI, it’s very clever and nuanced: comedians should be worried for their jobs. If it’s human it’s still very funny.
I got a good chuckle out of some of the titles. In Jeff Geerling's defence (the title on the site reads "Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster"), he was loaned the Mac Studios from Apple and so he didn't spend a dime.
Also his accompanying YouTube video mentions the kit retails for $40,000+, a far cry from $15k.
Yeah, and it could be more like satire of "developer spends 15k to run a basic lying chatbot" or something like that :)
Plus some of the stories seem to be a bit old like openai board controversy remark.
All in all, some funny stuff i agree!
"Rails developers reinventing state machines for the 50th time"
Laughed so hard on this one.
You can still look at almost any codebase and ask 'why is this bit not using a state machine here?' ... the AASM repo readme is very accessible even if you don't know Ruby: https://github.com/aasm/aasm
Its not even just Rails ppl. In embedded ive seen so many consultants say things like, "no problem. I just started working on the ultimate, perfect way to set up a state machine." Confidence theater
Love this. can we get an honest title for this entry too? (I'm not quite happy with my 11l+ karma, please give me some upvotes so I can start the new year with a smile?) jk, great one, cheers
What's funny/interesting from a psychological perspective is that several of these made me click (and discover genuinely interesting content) on links that I ignored in the real version. Could you do this everyday please?
Aka "the titles when people post these on reddit".
Now you know why HN has the "no editorializing" rule. :)
reddit is a whole different beast. It does not have a sense of humor, rather it is a biased cesspool of partisanship.
I sleep better at night thinking it is just a battleground of astroturfing bots fighting each other (at least on the main pages).
Everything from massive Russian state-actor bot farms testing newly trained LLMs popping out AI-generated meme formats before deploying domestically unknowingly getting into arguments with Israeli bot farms trying to raise support for some new movie series that will enable them to raise money for their next missile strike competing for eyeballs/attention from some uni student in a dorm room paying mid-sized black market companies in India to post comments telling you that cast-iron pans are too hard to clean so you should buy the non-sticks you saw on instagram (which are just marketing dropshippers in the USA selling the QA rejected pans from established brands).
The online world is a wild place.
Hacker News is Reddit with a nuclear downvote button and tone policing.
It's not that much better in terms of "dead internet," the bots are just more eloquent. In some ways the HN flavor of gamified engagement actively encourages worse outcomes than Reddit.
"When we do it, it's called sense of humor. When they do it, it's bias and partisanship."
"Math nerd explains how to spend 3 days proving 1+1=2" -> Original "From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259343
> OpenAI releases a new model to distract from their board drama
This one shows the "age" of the LLM, or the data cut off time
Implying there is no drama in OpenAIs board at the moment - they just stopped doing it in public for the time being
Reminds me of Suckdot.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000302102827/https://suck.com/...
"Do you confirm you are above 18 years of age (or the planet-rotation equivalent in your local star cluster)?"
i am so confused, whats the reason behind this little event handler?
The website has been made by AI. May be it has learned from its training that this kind of confirm box is cheeky humor for humans?
Probably because a few articles contain curse words (which corporate filters may hiccup on).
Someone built a tool to put all the snark and harsh arrogance from the comments directly into the titles?
That's it, AI has finally made HN obsolete!
How did you get an LLM to be snarky or did you do something else?
You can prompt it to do so. Look you "Persona based prompting" as a great and fun example of controlling what the LLM spits out and its tone.
Let's try to get a story on little Bobby Tables on the front page and find out.
Same question and great work. I would love to know the prompt details of how the hacker news truth was captured
Yes, this is absolutely brilliant! Teach us the prompt, o great wizards!
To answer my question myself I gave Microsoft copilot this prompt:
and i get the response which I think is great. I started with the first paragraph and got something too long with some explanation. I added the second, and got three replies and more explanation. The three replies were all "good enough" in my mind but added the third paragraph to control the output.I prompted Gemini to tell me how to prompt itself to get similar results on other news sites and it said I should give it a description of the intended audience and what it finds funny/snarky.
Which looks like what you did.
Now go deeper! Prompt Gemini to write a prompt for itself that would write a prompt for itself that would get similar results.
Modern LLMs are now actually good at having a sense of humor.
I'd like to see a version of the HN frontpage, where the titles are reinterpreted by that 1913 AI. "Imagine these are newspaper headlines from the year 2025. Rewrite them so that a regular person in our time can understand them."
"Show HN: I implemented generics in my programming language"
does not deserve the roast
"I built a language nobody will use just to learn generics"
It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project. It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction. Zig and Rust started out small too! This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
>It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project
Yeah... what they ended up implementing is not generics. So good thing the LLM doesn't read link/comments too or will've probably wrote an actual roast.
>It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction
Very fair to assume this. Referencing Rust/Zig disregarding the thousands other now abandoned ones is survivorship bias. Most small hobby projects remain small. But, besides joking about it, "built [something] nobody will use", if is in their free time, and enjoy it, does it matter? Is there a need for all hobby projects to have a goal of making it big?
>This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
But the "Please star my repo so I can get a job" is fine?
If you read the post, a more accurate title is "I don't know what generics are but I'm implementing a programming language anyway".
still funny.
I have to say, all of these titles are much more interesting than the real ones
Clickbait WORKS.
There's a reason it's banned in HN submissions
This is hilarious and I'm looking forward to seeing what it says about itself.
It would be a really interesting feature to have ai analyze the articles and write an actually honest sub-headline. (ie not these sarcastic humor titles)
if your immediate thought is "how can ai be added to this?" i think you might be part of the joke
These are clearly AI generated, not sure what you mean by "adding" to it.
> Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster (jeffgeerling.com)
The title are so funny ! I'm thinking to switch for the time ^^
Inaccurate.
> Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt,
Better:
"Engfluencer suggests you spend $15k to run a model slightly faster (jeffgeerling.com)"
Anyone want to try a prompt injection? All we need to do is to get one or two story in the front page that have a good < 80 characters prompt injection.
I‘ve channeled my inner Larry David into a prompt to make fun of y‘all
;)
This is what adblock evolves into.
Thank you for a good laugh! Very well done. :)
I am fine with the current layout, but I also have to say that I preferred old.reddit.com as a layout base (the new reddit UI is horrible, and reddit overall succumbed to willy-nilly tyranny of moderators on power-trips). I am not saying HN should change to become like old.reddit.com in the UI, mind you, but a few things could perhaps be considered. Using old.reddit.com was much more efficient to me than the default UI here. It is not the end of the world, but I would not mind small, slight, modest improvements to the UI (not only the front page, but all of HN).
Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions and changes and people could vote. It should be as conservative as possible, though, because while I preferred old.reddit.com, I also think that not everyone may prefer changes. So one should aim for the highest acceptance value possible, before making any change.
Love this. Make it into a chrome or Firefox extension, let people freely switch from "normal" to "honest" any time they want.
11/10 would read. So much clickbait going around (and lets ignore the articles that "magicly" are upvoted but strangewise have no comments whatsoever.... not sus at all....
Should be the default!
I'd love it if the mouseover text would be these titles.
They don’t all seem super accurate, but I like these titles better
Feature request: put the original title in a tooltip (or similar).
It's a little bit n-gate.
Who unfortunately stopped posting HN critiques, a few years ago. But you can still read old posts on: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/2021/07/
(If you follow that link from HN, and the site sees an HN `Referer`, it will do a fake captcha load, so then click "HACKERNEWS" in the navbar on the right.)
Author deserves an award for coining the verb “incorrecting”.
I do miss n-gate. I have to assume they are much happier now that they've ended that project, though.
The last post or so sounded stressed. I hope they feel better.
But in general, going to read a little n-gate was a relief when some HN comment thread went off the rails. Someone else could rant about the dumbness, and a burden was lifted.
Seconding a little, perhaps dim button to toggle the original. But I love this. So much so that I might start referring to it more than HN when I'm in a rush.
I thought the dollar sign button would be a donation button. Turns out it's the least honest part of the entire page.
The least honest? A dollar sign represents exactly what ycombinator is about
The Texas one doesn't seem honest. It seems like a political narrative.
Projects about hn on hn get a lot of attention here. I've sure done it before.
They're a lot of fun! And super easy to vibe code, if I'm looking to test a new model.
Definitely fun, although after recently submitting one (a simple browse extension to make HN Christmas colors last all Christmas season instead of on Christmas Day)[1] that got very little attention I started looking at other posts and found a whole lot more slip through the cracks than I would have thought.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266496
> Marketing blog post explaining why you should buy our product (hatchet.run)
When you developer market hard enough that you make it into the LLM training data.
I'm expecting someone to build the chrome plugin shortly.
I assume the age verification check when I went to page 2 is because I'm in the UK? If so, well played!
I’m having this outside the UK as well.
NZ as well - though of course we are a colony
I find these kind of posts profoundly uninteresting (woah, the n-th parody of the HN front page...) and yet they seem to always garner so many upvotes...
I was expecting this to be stupid but it’s genuinely funny. I guess LLMs are better at humor than I remember
where "honest" really just means cynical, of course
I'm not even so sure it's such a useless joke. I mean, it is, and I wouldn't want titles to be like "Academic publishers admit paywalls were a scam all along" (unless ALL major publishers actually admit it, which so far they didn't). But I clicked on "Math nerd explains how to spend 3 days proving 1+1=2" and when it turned out to be a Lean tutorial I thought "Oh, that's exactly what I wanted!". I don't know why, but "From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4" I didn't even notice. It's such a boring and verbose title with lame attempt at wordplay that, that my brain somehow filters it out.
This is so damn good that I want to put it between me and the whole internet. At least selectively. Please y'all go build this.
An opinionated, tuneable, reader-agent.
Go forth Mozilla, deshitify and enshiyify at the same time!
That’s it. It singlehandedly sold the idea of an AI browser to you. Like I now want an AI radio in my car, and we’re all putting AI between Google and us because Google’s results unfiltered are bad.
Haha! Top post was just what i could think. "A rewrite n Rust post to get upvotes".
I love this so much. It's like the El Reg editors got turned loose on HN headlines.
Man, how did I get by for so long without this. Brilliant. I'd like to have the whole web in this tone please, thanks in advance!
Very funny and brutally honest!
European decel mindset.
> CLICK TO KEEP AVOIDING WORK...
on point
Please add a 2nd page.
Not sure if the source code for this is available but if you want to make your own version I did something similar that can be easily modified and run locally for your own festive mirth: https://github.com/justinhj/rudehackernews
ok but how does it work though? Is this seriously just passing the titles to some llm with a prompt like 'roast this'? is it reading the actual content of the link as well?
The year is 20X5. Despite the onslaught of artificially intelligent agents capable of understanding and synthesizing new concepts in written language, humans are still capable of basic cognition… for now.
Did anyone notice the footer? Brilliant.
This would actually be somewhat useful for the new page. :)
Just me, or are all of these one sentence approving comments (at top level) posted by bots?
This weird obsequiousness and the fact that it never updates are beginning to make me wonder if this is some kind of prank.
It's just you. Beep boop.
Love it.
These are fun but they lose too much of the original content.
"Texas accidentally does something good for privacy"
is not really an improvement over the original (already half-editorialized) "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"
This is really awesome, I am interested how you made this, is there a way that we can have something this like for hackernews for more than this one instance of (20?) posts, I know its satirical but I really enjoyed it
Considering its hosted on github I think that it is a static page
Aka better hacker news
I love this.
I like this a lot.
Thanks for sharing
Bravo.
Honest? Probably not. Funny? Very.
Twas brillig, and the slithey-news did gyre and gamble on the title. All manic were the Borogoves and gnome-rat's Anti-AI rhetoric in full recital. Beware the SLOP my son! The jaws that slurp, and claws that don't match. Beware the Amazon-nerd, and shun that Facebook Hack.
He took his local well in hand; long time the perfect pose he sought. So prompted he by the decision tree, and waited while the AI Thought.
Spaghetti. Meatballs. Slurp. Will I? No. Will Smith. IYKYK
Haha this is brilliant.
Love this.
My favorite is the link in the footer:
Brings back some of that n-gate vibe <3
What is the title for this entry now that it's on the front page? I can't find it
This was a great way to start the day over a cup of coffee, sometimes we need things that make as laugh but what is awesome is the titles are spot on. Thank you for making this Friday morning fun
Wow, this is amazing! Great work!
Aplausos, gracias totales!!!
I miss n-gate’s webshit weekly.
http://n-gate.com/
EDIT: open the link manually, they put a mock "security check" on referrers from HN
I miss n-gate
I love everything about this – the little touches like the logo, the content warning, etc. Thank you for bringing some joy to my day.
I laughed so hard ...
Me too. Audibly laughed out loud and was late to standup because I had to tell my roommate about it.
Lol this legit makes it easier to grep through HN. thanks!
This is pretty funny!
I wish we were that brutally hones irl.
Make my day mate
>Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster (jeffgeerling.com)
LOL ... and it actually ran slower.
and it was 40k
This is amazing.
"Training AI on 1913 data to avoid 'woke' bias (and hygiene) (github.com)"
what could this mean???? and why 1913 specifically
Now I just want to see what this post will be translated to...
XDDDDDD
This is hilarious. if you scroll down to the bottom it says, "CLICK TO KEEP AVOIDING WORK". lmao. which llm is this?
I feel personally attacked! lol
hahaha! very funny.
If the maintainer of n-gate.com is still alive and on Hacker News please, your work isn't finished.
This is really funny
Love the “Click to keep avoiding work” - so true!
This is the most brutal cut of all
The noprocast feature should have an option to insult the user for returning here.
Nah, look at the Y logo :)
Well done!
Love it!
I motion HN adopts this to auto-translate all submitted titles.
this is gold!
“Click to keep avoiding work …”
>We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it
Good LLM prompt, excellent understanding.
Original title: `GotaTun -- Mullvad's WireGuard Implementation in Rust`. I laughed too much at the alternative title, because it's so true.
reminds me of n-gate
Doesn't seem to be live, otherwise there'd be one that says "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are slop"
maybe so, though an inaccurate claim. the ai is the value add here (and quite a value add based on the other comments in the thread). we typically reserve the word "slop" for ai generated content that is of low quality or no value add. this website seems to be both of quality and value ad and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.
Meta-Meta context: The LLM made this post.
Not everything generated is slop.
"Slop" is at _least_ as fair a description of "we had an LLM rewrite HN headlines" as "we rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it" is of "we removed our biggest source of crashes on Android by getting rid of Go FFI issues."
Was hoping for a self aware roast: one weird trick to keep sending your LLM slop to top of HN (/s, I enjoyed it very much)
Academic publishers admit paywalls were a scam all along :D
fabulous
Cool, n-gate as a service
i miss the n-gate roundups
amazing
lol. would you share the prompt for how you translate them? it really feels like a snarky HN community member rewrote each one.
I miss n-gate.
Bring back n-gate!
This is actually how my brain reads most of the HN posts.
The training LLMs on old data to avoid woke bias was comedic genius. Something tells me grok is behind this.
(sarcastic David Spade voice) I liked this better the first time around... when it was called n-gate.
Still pretty funny tho, ngl.
Entertaining and apparently useful, though of course not infallible. Given https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms it yields the title "Training AI on 1913 data to avoid 'woke' bias (and hygiene)". That the Honest Hacker News AI model has been trained on a dose of cynicism and intellectual dishonesty is probably hard to avoid...
This is cool lol
Now do the comments
I don't think I'm ready for this, I might never go back to "real" work.
Makes me nostalgic for n-gate.
Missing the "We have too many file formats for X, so I made another". Could also prepopulate the comments with the ubiquitous xkcd reference.
I miss n-gate so much
Lmao, this is great.
How is the Mac studio ad title honest?
Yup. And if you dared to bring this up in the comments (ie. your own rewrite of a title/post), you’d get reminded of the guidelines and downvoted/flagged. Because fuck honesty - we are here for clicks and engagements.
This is a good step. Next: disclose financial incentives and other motives just to nip it in the bud.
well, I think OP is quite funny and I really enjoyed it, but it definitely goes against the entire idea of approaching things in good faith. I'm sure some or even many of them are sadly accurate, but if reinterpreting things people say through that lens became the behavioral norm on HN I think it would quickly destroy everything many people love about this place. Just my 2 cents of course.
Only fools approach hyenas in good faith. You have to be naive to allow yourself to get swindled by internet marketing junkies.
I’m all for prefacing each post that comes from a16z with “Asshole Alert” so that we know who we are dealing with upfront.
How much of this navel-gazing junk do we need? See also, from the same author:
Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632 (10 days ago)
Show HN: Hacker News, but every headline is hysterical clickbait https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324579 (4 hours ago)
I feel that my life has been improved by all three of these. I hadn't seen the "hysterical clickbait" one before you pointed it out, so thank you even though clearly that was the opposite of your intent.
It's somewhat live, as it now has
META-MELTDOWN: WE BROKE HACKER NEWS WITH THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK (dosaygo-studio.github.io)
It's funny, the OP doesn't have an ulterior motive, and it's close to the holidays so it is not cannibalizing more important news. There's no harm here.
Maybe HN needs some reflection, and satire is one of the best ways to provide it.
There hasn't been since n-gate stopped posting.
Comparing this with n-gate really shows the difference between AI and real work.
Superficially, they're the same, but digging in shows the real difference.
It's soul-crushing work, more suited for machines.
N-gate was by far the best thing about HN.
And slop is one of the worst ways
The moment slop becomes more HN-esque than original HN content, it tells you a lot about the quality of HN posts. That is very reflective to me.
I dunno, sounds like "rapid product iteration to find product-market fit" to me.
> How much of this navel-gazing junk do we need? See also, from the same author:
Seriously! I'll admit the first post was mighty fun. But now this is turning into an AI-spam-fest! I objected in the 2nd thread but got downvoted. Apparently the community here thinks this kind of low effort Reddit-style humor is now on-topic for this place!
Not to mention the systematic downvoting of every comment that is critical of these spam posts!
reminds me of how people used to shove autotune into anything and people lapped it up like the slop that it was and this is. but, as with that slop, this will also get boring to the masses. there's only so much "I told an llm to pretend it was deadpool by way of ryan reynolds" that people actually like. the novelty is the brunt of it. and, like with autotune, when used well, people will continue to appreciate it. just ride out the hyperslop, for now.
I've done it before. Projects about hn on hn get a lot of attention.
They're a lot of fun! And super easy to vibe code, if I'm looking to test a new model.
It's hard to restrain myself from navel-gazing, the lint in there is fascinating.
I'm not sure they satisfy curiosity as much as many posts with fewer votes, but that's okay.
This is not "honest", this is mostly just dismissive. The headings are no more neutral and explanatory than the originals, because, I suppose, the intent was just having fun.
"We rewrote it in snark so you have to upvote".
It’s a Fark.com style applied to HN. Maybe we should do a SomethingAwful theme next?
Is it wrong, though?
Well, this one is wrong: "I built a language nobody will use just to learn generics"
The comments make it clear that the language author has not yet learned generics by this exercise.
Yes, it is wrong. Take the top one:
> We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it
I'm pretty sure they didn't go through all the trouble of rewriting it in Rust to get some internet forum points!
To quote Foghorn Leghorn: It's a joke, son, you're supposed to laugh.
The joke was fun the first time. When the joke posts (low effort AI slop no less!) are spammed to HN every week, it stops being fun.
Its on the front page, that means it atttracted attention and was upvoted. If what you are saying was true, these posts would die very quickly and we would never see them.
Maybe its just you who doesnt like them?
I guess if everyone thinks mocking peoples' projects and efforts is funny, it's okay!
My opinion is a weakly that this is tiring and borderline insulting to people who are genuinely looking for feedback and community. Clever once a year or so, but the creator has leaned into it and posted a lot of meta in a small timeline.
Then if the community agrees with you, these posts will get zero upvotes and we will never see them on the front page again.
If not, then you will start seeing them more and more and you will need to suck it up my friend!
> Maybe its just you who doesnt like them?
Obviously it's just me who doesn't like them. What's your point?
I already made my point. If the community agrees with you then we wont see these on the front page anymore. If not then you will either need to be ok with seeing more of them, or not read HN.
Usually, people highlight functional/architectural changes over superficial things like language choice.
That's true. But it is also true that almost nobody rewrites a whole complex software in Rust to get internet forum points from HN people.
Your question was "Is it wrong, though?" The answer is "Yes"
But it sure does lampoon a current point which is that people seem pretty quick to want to share their Rust rewrites of other software.