Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest

https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-page-2035/news-honest.html

661•keepamovin•1h ago

Comments

szemy2•1h ago

This is pretty funny!

PaulHoule•1h ago

How did you get an LLM to be snarky or did you do something else?

pizzathyme•1h ago

Same question and great work. I would love to know the prompt details of how the hacker news truth was captured

nottorp•1h ago

Yes, this is absolutely brilliant! Teach us the prompt, o great wizards!

PaulHoule•41m ago

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.

doomspork•1h ago

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.

smokel•43m ago

Let's try to get a story on little Bobby Tables on the front page and find out.

minimaxir•41m ago

Modern LLMs are now actually good at having a sense of humor.

danielscrubs•1h ago

Wow, this is amazing! Great work!

SV_BubbleTime•1h ago

>We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it

Good LLM prompt, excellent understanding.

p2detar•1h ago

Original title: `GotaTun -- Mullvad's WireGuard Implementation in Rust`. I laughed too much at the alternative title, because it's so true.

tome•1h ago

This is hilarious and I'm looking forward to seeing what it says about itself.

marai2•1h ago

this is gold!

“Click to keep avoiding work …”

safehuss•1h ago

Very funny and brutally honest!

wiseowise•1h ago

Lmao, this is great.

linuxftw•1h ago

I motion HN adopts this to auto-translate all submitted titles.

JaggerJo•1h ago

Should be the default!

clamprecht•59m ago

I'd love it if the mouseover text would be these titles.

hervic•1h ago

Aplausos, gracias totales!!!

ChrisMarshallNY•1h ago

Love it!

pizzathyme•1h ago

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.

andix•16m ago

Right now there is a lot of drift between real and honest version, so it's hard to find the original title.

AntiqueFig•14m ago

If you click on the comments in the honest version, it'll redirect you to the real version.

Retr0id•1h ago

Doesn't seem to be live, otherwise there'd be one that says "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are slop"

thornewolf•51m ago

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.

idiotsecant•25m ago

Meta-Meta context: The LLM made this post.

wiseowise•18m ago

Not everything generated is slop.

EarlKing•1h ago

Bring back n-gate!

pimlottc•1h ago

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

apitman•55m ago

I miss n-gate

lapcat•1h ago

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)

phoe-krk•1h ago

Maybe HN needs some reflection, and satire is one of the best ways to provide it.

ok123456•57m ago

There hasn't been since n-gate stopped posting.

bombcar•55m ago

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.

ok123456•38m ago

It's soul-crushing work, more suited for machines.

phantasmish•26m ago

N-gate was by far the best thing about HN.

topaz0•57m ago

And slop is one of the worst ways

greenwallnorway•1h ago

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.

gjm11•1h 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.

bombcar•56m ago

It's somewhat live, as it now has

META-MELTDOWN: WE BROKE HACKER NEWS WITH THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK (dosaygo-studio.github.io)

ctrlmeta•1h ago

> 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!

catapart•1h ago

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.

floatrock•58m ago

I dunno, sounds like "rapid product iteration to find product-market fit" to me.

johnisgood•57m ago

Thanks for the links.

gabrielflorit•1h ago

This is amazing.

ihrimech•1h ago

I laughed so hard ...

craftkiller•43m ago

Me too. Audibly laughed out loud and was late to standup because I had to tell my roommate about it.

BeaverGoose•1h ago

"Please star my repo so I can get a job" is brutal

tigerlily•20m ago

I had to go back and look. Absolutely skewered it.

OsrsNeedsf2P•5m ago

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!)

toomuchtodo•1h ago

Well done!

alexgotoi•1h ago

Love the “Click to keep avoiding work” - so true!

bombcar•57m ago

This is the most brutal cut of all

WhyOhWhyQ•55m ago

The noprocast feature should have an option to insult the user for returning here.

pjerem•55m ago

Nah, look at the Y logo :)

greenwallnorway•1h ago

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.

freedomben•55m ago

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

Forgeties79•1h ago

This is really funny

barfoure•1h ago

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.

freedomben•53m ago

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.

barfoure•34m ago

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.

bombledmonk•1h ago

This should be the April Fools 2026 feature put directly on the live HN site.

strangattractor•20m ago

The Onion for Programers

nine_k•59m ago

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".

ok123456•58m ago

Is it wrong, though?

ctrlmeta•55m ago

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!

ok123456•53m ago

Usually, people highlight functional/architectural changes over superficial things like language choice.

ctrlmeta•51m ago

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"

alt227•7m ago

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.

chuckadams•48m ago

To quote Foghorn Leghorn: It's a joke, son, you're supposed to laugh.

ctrlmeta•41m ago

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.

alt227•8m ago

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?

SideburnsOfDoom•12m ago

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.

barfoure•58m ago

It’s a Fark.com style applied to HN. Maybe we should do a SomethingAwful theme next?

daft_pink•58m ago

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)

peesem•54m ago

if your immediate thought is "how can ai be added to this?" i think you might be part of the joke

nightpool•23m ago

These are clearly AI generated, not sure what you mean by "adding" to it.

alabhyajindal•57m ago

> 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

sallveburrpi•20m ago

Implying there is no drama in OpenAIs board at the moment - they just stopped doing it in public for the time being

casey2•57m ago

How is the Mac studio ad title honest?

abtinf•57m ago

Reminds me of Suckdot.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000302102827/https://suck.com/...

queuebert•57m ago

Missing the "We have too many file formats for X, so I made another". Could also prepopulate the comments with the ubiquitous xkcd reference.

__MatrixMan__•56m ago

This is what adblock evolves into.

jvanderbot•56m ago

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.

Sharlin•47m ago

It's just a fancy form of delay-line memory [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

lxgr•26m ago

In a universe with mass–energy equivalence, show me a storage medium that isn’t effectively a delay line :)

2026iknewit•45m ago

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 :)

HPsquared•17m ago

I think I read somewhere that time starts flowing backwards when you go faster than the speed of light. You get earlier and earlier signals.

RobotToaster•14m ago

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!

charv•45m ago

"Commenter shows off how smart they are with cool fun fact"

Scaevolus•44m ago

You can use fiber optics as an optical delay line too! About 60KB/km at 100Gbps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

pkoiralap•43m ago

So if we can somehow preserve the signal and make it go round and round, can we get long term storage out of nothing?

terminalkeys•40m ago

Not a scientist, but I assume the signal would degrade or mutate over time due to space radiation and other radio waves.

PartiallyTyped•35m ago

It should be same logic we use for repeaters, so it'll be fine.

lxgr•23m ago

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.

marcosdumay•35m ago

"Nothing" is a funny name for an interplanetary communication network.

idiotsecant•29m ago

You're still storing your data in the same EM field, just in a slightly different non-inertial reference frame.

lucaslazarus•3m ago

This is possible but you'd have to deploy it right by a black hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_sphere

poly2it•38m ago

Definitely one of the harder drives feasible!

Tom 7 did something reminiscent of this if you hadn't seen already: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio.

lxgr•27m ago

Indeed: https://qntm.org/transi

HPsquared•20m ago

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)

DarkTree•55m ago

Now do the comments

erikig•47m ago

I don't think I'm ready for this, I might never go back to "real" work.

p2detar•55m ago

Did anyone notice the footer? Brilliant.

reality_inspctr•52m ago

amazing

stuartjohnson12•51m ago

> 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.

cyrusradfar•48m ago

I'm expecting someone to build the chrome plugin shortly.

linhns•51m ago

Make my day mate

topaz0•44m ago

Just me, or are all of these one sentence approving comments (at top level) posted by bots?

idiotsecant•25m ago

It's just you. Beep boop.

anon115•44m ago

XDDDDDD

oncallthrow•42m ago

I was expecting this to be stupid but it’s genuinely funny. I guess LLMs are better at humor than I remember

junon•42m ago

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.

Imustaskforhelp•42m ago

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

jedberg•39m ago

Aka "the titles when people post these on reddit".

Now you know why HN has the "no editorializing" rule. :)

sidcool•4m ago

reddit is a whole different beast. It does not have a sense of humor, rather it is a biased cesspool of partisanship.

Mistletoe•36m ago

This is actually how my brain reads most of the HN posts.

dangoodmanUT•36m ago

They don’t all seem super accurate, but I like these titles better

ctippett•35m ago

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.

taikahessu•31m ago

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!

publicdebates•33m ago

"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.

idiotsecant•26m ago

still funny.

Kwpolska•16m ago

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".

forgotpwd16•7m ago

>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?

_el1s7•33m ago

This is cool lol

tmshapland•31m ago

lol. would you share the prompt for how you translate them? it really feels like a snarky HN community member rewrote each one.

neilv•30m ago

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.)

kitd•30m ago

I assume the age verification check when I went to page 2 is because I'm in the UK? If so, well played!

layer8•6m ago

I’m having this outside the UK as well.

horladoyin•29m ago

Love it.

ajcp•29m ago

-> 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.

pdevr•15m ago

It need not be a dichotomy. I also laughed at the title. At the same time, I found the original article useful.

KalandaDev•26m ago

Academic publishers admit paywalls were a scam all along :D

ionwake•23m ago

fabulous

dwa3592•23m ago

This is hilarious. if you scroll down to the bottom it says, "CLICK TO KEEP AVOIDING WORK". lmao. which llm is this?

akramachamarei•22m ago

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...

voodooEntity•21m ago

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....

rcarmo•20m ago

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.

fukukitaru•20m ago

I miss n-gate so much

laser9•18m ago

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?

linux2647•10m ago

If you click into the comments, it takes you to the real HN comments page with the real title

laser9•8m ago

Yeah but I'd need to click each of them, thus the request for that feature.

stivatron•16m ago

hahaha! very funny.

moralestapia•12m ago

>Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster (jeffgeerling.com)

LOL ... and it actually ran slower.

byyoung3•11m ago

The training LLMs on old data to avoid woke bias was comedic genius. Something tells me grok is behind this.

alch-•10m ago

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!

imiric•9m ago

Love this.

My favorite is the link in the footer:

  <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/">Sell 7% for clout</a>

wnevets•9m ago

Honest? Probably not. Funny? Very.

layer8•7m ago

This would actually be somewhat useful for the new page. :)

tediousgraffit1•7m ago

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?

delichon•6m ago

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.

stackedinserter•4m ago

I wish we were that brutally hones irl.

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