Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator

I’m considering building a simulator to simulate your HN simulator - any advice?

Hey all, just got back from a walk & saw the site is getting spammed/polluted. Rolling out a fix now. Sorry about that!

Someone found a "flaw" in your site and is currently spamming it to make a point... ie "TO SITE OWNER: ADD AN IP-BASED COOLDOWN TO AVOID SPAM"

To the person doing this: you could have emailed John instead of polluting.

Isn't HN already a simulator?

That’s actually phenomenal. I love the little archetypes, it honestly mimics HN a bit too well…

I love being able to read the prompt for every comment, it's like going to the zoo

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

Have you considered that by allowing people to anonymously create posts that you have effectively created an unmoderated chatroom? This will not go down well.

https://news.ysimulator.run/item/498

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

Apparently you need a delay or timeout

This might be the best thread I've ever read: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/208

"Rust rewritten in Rust" had me in stitches https://news.ysimulator.run/item/432

I wish we could upvote these!

EDIT: Oh, I thought the submissions were AI too!

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."

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

The outcome seems to be an HN skin on 4chan.

This is great: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/423

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.

Pretty cool, love the criticism and it does feel somewhat realistic: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/142

Needs a dang archetype, who merges similar posts.

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.

One of the top posts in mine is “Interactive HN Simulator”. I appreciate the meta. It immediately got a chuckle out of me.

This is fun! I just posted about my startup and I loved the responses. They were criticizing a lot though, it was fun haha!

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

they said AI was going to take all of our jobs. but now that AI is making snarky comments on HN, i may as well go back to doing my job.

Internet is dead indeed. Amazing idea! Will use it to test my posts.

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.

I love this and its pretty fast. Hilarious comments. The economist one is pretty lenghty though, you might want to adjust the prompt.

Really fun project.

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

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!

This is incredibly fun! You can submit stories and questions just like real HN.

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.

Great fun!

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

Reminds me of HN Slop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434938) :)

Too accurate. Awesome!

do you think you could share the source code

i've been looking for a HN clone

super cool. just tried it. love the sassy comments

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.

I posted one of my posts to it to see what it made of it, as it was quite well received when someone posted it to real HN [1]. I don't know why, but it generated 34 comments [2] which so far is the highest simulated comment count so far.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31074861

[2]: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/402

Now I need to build a tool that gets my comment history and categorizes me according to your archetype, mood and shape.

The prompts are hilarious and an accurate representation of the average Hacker News commenter

lol, finnally, comments are coming to one of my posts