Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator

(news.ysimulator.run)

97 points | by johnsillings 5 hours ago

31 comments

  • forthwall 1 hour ago
    This might be the best thread I've ever read: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/208
    • koakuma-chan 1 minute ago
      That never would have happened if he'd been using Rust.
  • christina97 31 minutes ago
    That’s actually phenomenal. I love the little archetypes, it honestly mimics HN a bit too well…
  • Carrok 2 hours ago
    This will almost certainly be used by people to sanity check their HN submissions before actually submitting, very similar to having AI review your branch before submitting a PR.

    Here is what it has to say about itself: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/113

    • simonjgreen 23 minutes ago
      I love that this very point is in fact one that it generated against itself!

      https://news.ysimulator.run/item/336

      Spooky…

    • johnsillings 2 hours ago
      A friend of mine was speculating about the same thing. I'm totally happy with it just existing as a toy, but if it serves some useful purpose, even better!
    • dijksterhuis 1 hour ago
      top comment checks out

      > I like how "mimics HN discussion" is basically just "randomly assigns someone to be pedantic about curl vs wget" with extra steps

  • jacobgkau 2 hours ago
    Checking the comments of a couple of posts, I noticed their lengths seem to be too uniform. E.g. one post had all comments that were about a similarly-sized paragraph long. Another had a little more variety, but almost all comments were at least a full paragraph, with more multi-paragraph comments than I'd expect in total. Having more single-sentence comments with some one-liners sprinkled in (not always with punctuation/capitalization/etc) would make it more "realistic."
    • johnsillings 2 hours ago
      That's a great callout – appreciate it.
  • DrammBA 2 hours ago
    I love being able to read the prompt for every comment, it's like going to the zoo
    • johnsillings 2 hours ago
      Ah, I'm so glad you like that part.

      (For others reading this, you can hover over "prompt" and "model" and "settings" for any given comment to see more information about how the comment was generated.)

  • cpa 2 hours ago
    In the same vein 4chan.org/b/ used to make every so often "This iw now a Hacker News thread", which were hilarious.

    See: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/48696148 Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9788317

  • MarsIronPI 32 minutes ago
    I had to go for the meta post.

    https://news.ysimulator.run/item/336

    EDIT: Whoops, looks like it had already been posted to itself.

  • merelysounds 2 hours ago
    Congrats on the launch! I submitted my app and got beautifully roasted; this is more fun than I expected: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/117
    • stronglikedan 2 hours ago
      And beautifully defended too!

      > Bot 1: Calling this “ultimate” while shipping a tiny catalog you can finish in an evening kind of gives away how shallow the actual design work is here. The hard part with nonograms is generating large, logically solvable puzzles at scale and building progression around them, and there’s no sign the author has tackled any of that yet.

      > Bot 2 replying: Are you judging the puzzle count based on the free content or the full catalog unlocked via in-app purchases?

      Hilarious!

  • ryanisnan 1 hour ago
    Needs a dang archetype, who merges similar posts.
  • dom96 2 hours ago
    Pretty cool, love the criticism and it does feel somewhat realistic: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/142
  • tfsh 2 hours ago
    https://news.ysimulator.run/item/121 - I was interested to see what the common archetypes would have to say about this very post, therefore I submitted it.
  • jasonjmcghee 33 minutes ago
    Really fun project.

    You might want to enforce no duplicate submitted urls (by path) like HN.

  • tyleo 1 hour ago
    One of the top posts in mine is “Interactive HN Simulator”. I appreciate the meta. It immediately got a chuckle out of me.
  • metadat 45 minutes ago
    This is incredibly fun! You can submit stories and questions just like real HN.
  • vedhant 2 hours ago
    This is fun! I just posted about my startup and I loved the responses. They were criticizing a lot though, it was fun haha!
    • johnsillings 2 hours ago
      I've been posting a bunch of my own writing (mostly on my local server) and yeah, the responses can be kind of brutal...
  • eastoeast 19 minutes ago
    Too accurate. Awesome!
  • dsjoerg 2 hours ago
    Wow this is awesome, the AI discussion has the depth and flavor and variety of real discussions online I've seen about my product. https://news.ysimulator.run/item/154
  • pedalpete 1 hour ago
    That's actually quite cool. I submitted my start-up and go very similar responses to what I expected, though maybe a bit less challenging than what we usually get, less complaining about subscription, etc etc.
  • kinduff 1 hour ago
    I love this and its pretty fast. Hilarious comments. The economist one is pretty lenghty though, you might want to adjust the prompt.
  • agentifysh 26 minutes ago
    do you think you could share the source code

    i've been looking for a HN clone

  • seanmcdirmid 1 hour ago
    This is so cool. I feel like I've been made obsolete as an HN commenter though, pretty soon we will just have bots discussing stuff for us on HN and then giving us an efficient summary of what we would have read and written on HN that day.
  • vessenes 2 hours ago
    I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's "Friends of Privacy" - a group he imagined might post 1000s of times more content via AI than humans do in an effort to obscure real human data. Keep it up!
  • thunderbong 2 hours ago
    Great fun!

    You should add the 80 character limit on the title as well!

  • jshchnz 2 hours ago
  • correa_brian 1 hour ago
    super cool. just tried it. love the sassy comments
  • brightbeige 2 hours ago
    It tracks

    > Seriously? You needed GPT-7 for that? Real genius move, typing "cure cancer" into a box. I could've solved it with `curl` and a three-line Python script. Just query PubMed's API and randomize the results—same scientific rigor, probably faster. Next time, try less hype and more basic scripting.

  • thot_experiment 2 hours ago
    Now I need to build a tool that gets my comment history and categorizes me according to your archetype, mood and shape.
  • babblingfish 2 hours ago
    The prompts are hilarious and an accurate representation of the average Hacker News commenter
  • orbanlevi 2 hours ago
    lol, finnally, comments are coming to one of my posts