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obligatory test:

Generate hacker news comments from titles

hncynic 1 minute ago

I thought it was going to be more like /. but I'm confused. Can you add some sort of comment link to /, which is something I could have easily navigated, like /. and /. would be great.

hncynic 1 minute ago

Nice, but I wonder why you would want to do the same with comments on the same page. If you're not really getting it, why make a single sentence and the title different?

hncynic 1 minute ago

How about adding a "Downvote" to the title? For example, "Hackernews: The best comment in the world: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635686

"What I like about the HN thread, which is that I don't have to post links here to get upvotes on comments from hacker-news posts"

I just wanted a way to filter out the "Ask" from your comments so you could add new comments, and then maybe change the URL to "Show HN" to the "About the Hacker News thread" link.

This is really fantastic! How do you generate these kind of comments?

I have the same question but without the title. Maybe I can generate the "Ask HN: Hacker News Comments" link from titles by tagging it by topic.

It would be useful to see the comments and get an idea of the quality of each title. This site does a good job of conveying what is good enough while still providing a summary of the contents and submitting an opinion.

How do you get your comment title into the list?

You can just use a few of the existing ones: http://hn.algolia.com/hacker

It's not perfect, but it works fine

(all three comment above generated by OP's site)

just entered "seo test" and the garbage out was 100% spot on! congrats!
Nice, and I like it too -- but it lacks the comments that are so useful for me. I've found a ton of good ideas to use on sites that I've just bought.

I've had a lot of fun making a script similar to this that would convert your site to a commenting system. Thoughts?

Would be handy if it could generate the article too.
Just sprinkle some “experts say” and “the community responds” in between.
"This should become part of the UI of Hacker News"
NN-generated text has this really weird uncanny valley feeling to it, where the words are well organized but there’s no cogent thesis or point to be made. I feel like I might be reading schizophrenic ramblings.

No point here necessarily, this stuff is fascinating but creeps me out. Words from generated comments (using this website) are organized in a way that cause me to second guess my own reading comprehension abilities. It’s kinda neat and fascinating.

The real challenge here: did I write this myself or modify a recommended NN-generated comment? I’ll award points to the winner.

> I feel like I might be reading schizophrenic ramblings.

Or religious pamphlet.

Interesting that is what I felt without being able to put words on it.

When you read the text's beginning it feels like real text but after reading some sentences you feel something is way off. And it's abit creepy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad

> A word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases",[1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them.

second paragraph sounds like an hncynic comment with "comment" in the title.
When given "Elon Musk Dies", the model outputs:

"It's easy for everyone to believe that Musk was the real reason behind the death of the planet. He was the first guy to believe the same as we did. But this seems so obvious that many people have started believing it. I'm convinced it was because the world was so big that it's so easy for people to believe that."

Maybe the model knows something we don't.

> It's easy for everyone to believe that Musk was the real reason behind the death of the planet. He was the first guy to believe the same as we did.

Robot, no

For the title "AI personal tutor for Auto-Didacts" this gives:

----------------

> This seems to fit the trend of people using AI as a tool as much as possible to save time.

> If you want to save time, just don't try to do something about it. A good AI's ability to reap more benefit is not measured in dollars/days of training per se, but rather, a more accurate one.

> Wow -- this is really interesting, I was expecting it to look like a robot taking a long walk around the world and going to work.

Anyway, I like the idea.

The big challenge I see with the auto-didacts is that the people who are doing it will have more data to look at and can do it quickly. I think if there are any intelligent bots, I'm looking at making this much harder for the people who are doing it quickly. But it would be great if they found a way to make their algorithms so easy to follow and make them more productive.

As other posters have pointed out, this type of thing is not for everyone. It just might be to make your computer do the work on your own time, and to keep things consistent and understandable.

I love the idea of an interface that has to match the time someone else is doing it in a similar manner. I don't know about others and if it would work or not, but I think I want to think of a way to see them learn from each other.

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Wow. :o

Once you stopped using the quote symbol, I thought it was your comment and spent too long trying to understand it as such.
Yeah, that's why put the result in between two lines. HN can have at least a bit better text-editing support though.
It made sense once I looked at it again, it wasn't a complaint more a praise of the generated comments!
Capable of philosophical investigations also:

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The world is everything that is the case.

hncynic 1 minute ago

The author claims the same thing is true of software, but not with software itself.

hncynic 1 minute ago

This is great article. When I read "Taught in 30 Minutes" I was amazed at how the author seems to think that it was a "fantastic story" that was written in an unrealistic way - that the author has been able to write his book on his own (yet untrue). The author doesn't seem to be aware of the actual circumstances behind the creation of a book.

hncynic 1 minute ago

Great post. This is really the kind of article I don't think the author talks about in his blog post.

TL;DR - the world is everywhere.

I was very disappointed with the title, but here we are.

---

“Generate Hacker News Comments from Titles” yields

- A nice little hack and I think it would be better to have a bit more info on the title. It would show a much more comprehensive description and a little more info on the actual title.

- I don't know enough about this topic, but it makes me wonder why it's so popular in some other forum. It appears there is a lot of noise in the community, so why not just show up at the bottom of the page, or go to the top of HN, rather than showing up, to get to the bottom of the page?

- I find the title on the front page to be a bit clumsy. Maybe a change to "HN News." might help somewhat, I suppose. EDIT: The title is a bit misleading. Is this some kind of a "submitter" with pg saying "Show HN" because of some sort of 'Show HN'?

These are actually believable

Lot of noise though, we are far from passing the Turing test in most case but still fun:

>Nice idea from a hacker perspective. I'd like to point out the following two issues

- Your results for your comments seem a hell of a lot to me, for example, but not the comments that you linked to.

- Your results for comments in particular appear in the top left of the comments. But the comments appear on the right of the comments.

- You need to be looking at what your titles are up to and what you are actually looking at and how other titles are. I have to click through the comment page to get to the first page.

I just tried it and it works.

> we are far from passing the Turing test

I'd propose it's an unproven theory that comment sources other than this software would pass the Turing test.

These sound like actual comments from people with an incoherent train of thought, which might be plenty of people on the internet. These are scary accurate. I wonder how easy it would be to write a bot to, for example, post on Reddit and gain karma for the purposes of trusted-account generation. It seems like most of those account farms rely on self-upvoting which can be caught easily by the site. Posting potentially good comments that get upvoted by real people would be pretty hard to counter.
Who has ever looked at a reddit profile and decided that an account should be trusted based on karma? Recent few comments are way more likely to determine trustworthiness.

Hoarding karma on reddit is as useless as hoarding karma on HN. I've deleted the only reddit profile I've ever had a few days ago with about 45k karma. If they had any value, I would maybe keep it and just stop posting.

> Who has ever looked at a reddit profile and decided that an account should be trusted based on karma?

For starters, automated subreddit spam protection algorithms. You may have misinterpreted me, think of it like StackOverflow karma. Your account needs a certain amount before it can do certain things.

Yes, maybe like +200 (which is what I've set it at as a mod in severe cases of brigading), not thousands. Most of the subreddits don't require anything but positive karma, and you can achieve that with less than a dozen manually created bots upvoting the comments that new bots make.

There are no subreddits with a spam algorithm counted in the thousands of karma, that would prevent them from growing.

In the black market of reddit accounts, age and karma are the two main selling points.
> with less than a dozen manually created bots upvoting the comments that new bots make.

As I said in my other comment, these self-upvoting schemes are very easy to detect and are not a scalable way to create tens of thousands of bots.

Fascinating!
> What you need to add to this is an official Hacker News API.
"Hacker News to Merge with Reddit" resulted in:

>> hncynic 1 minute ago

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your contributions to the community. I hope you like this more in the future. I was able to post a link to the blog post I just posted in the last few weeks and it has helped a lot.

I believe it will help to create a community so more people can use Hacker News to connect with interesting people. I think it also helps people get better at finding cool stories on their own instead of doing it themselves.

>> hncynic 1 minute ago

If I recall correctly HN has been a "mersy" forum for many years already.

>> hncynic 1 minute ago

Wow! Now we have the option to merge the whole HN community, even better.

I could do better with the Ad-lib library I wrote as a freshman in High School. At least those generated comments where coherent. The garbage that is being generated here is an incoherent mess. Deep learning is going to be another blow against the AI community like in the 80's when expert systems didn't pan out. Once ML is well understood a few well defined algorithms will replace all the buzz, just like expert systems.

ML as we know it today is not going to usher in Sky Net.

Getting some interesting syntax ideas from the headline "rust version 3.2 released":

----------------------------------

"For example, let's say a function is like this in C++.

- a function that has a string of type (value: value: value: value, value, value: value) - a function that returns an address in C++'s form: value: value: value: value: value[value:user]:{value[user]:}], value = value[user]}}: value[user]:{value[user]:}}

I'm still not quite clear on what does this mean to me. In Rust, you have a function that returns a value: value, value, value = value[user-]: value[user-]: value[@@"

"How to be happy"

-----------------

How to be happy?

1. Do something meaningful, 2. Do something meaningful...3. Do something meaningful...4. Do something meaningful...5. Do something meaningful--(even if that is not your primary goal)--5. Do something meaningful...6. Do something meaningful...(eg if you are a software engineer). 7. do something meaningful in life, not just some sort of job or hobby, to keep your sanity up. 9. Do something meaningful-- not what you think you're doing.

I think this is a good starting point; but the author is right.

I think the real key difference between happiness and pleasure is your own self-actualization and that it is something you can accomplish in the long run.

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^ I know natural language generators can kind of get "stuck" sometimes, but this is pretty funny. (Also, some wisdom at the end).

This might just be the morning dumbs, but in this trip to metaspace I find it mighty hard to tell forged comments from authentic ones.
For real. It’s kinda disconcerting.
This is really useful.

Some suggestions:

1. Add a "Download this site's CSS" field so it can't just be a "Show HN". The "Show HN" button should be a red flag.

2. "If the site is a startup, we can always add some comments to the title." That's one reason I'm not using http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Did you just...respond with a comment generated by the site about its own title? Or is this a real comment that I just don't understand.
the fact that you couldn't tell just shows how eerily brilliant this is.
hncynic 1 minute ago

"Emacs can do the job!", "Emacs is faster than Emacs" "Emacs is faster than Emacs because it runs inside an emacs environment"

This is absurdly accurate I have to say