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Parrot.vc is a bot trained on tens of thousands of VC tweets that uses predictive text to generate amazing, new startup advice. Share your favorites!

Gavin Belson - hit me up, this is the perfect acquisition for Hooli.

PS - you can follow Parrot.vc on Twitter as well (https://twitter.com/parrot_vc)

Is the source code available anywhere? I’ve been mulling over a similar project but don’t have a lot of ML experience myself, would be great to look at the innards of a working example...
I may open source it. It's pretty easy to get started if you leverage pre-existing libraries for Markov chains and Twitter ingestion.
Now do it with Hacker News comments!
"In other news, water is wet"

"This has been known for 10 years, this is not a new discovery"

"Title is clickbait, can someone please update it?"

This is the sort of thing that I'm hoping to see, especially with the recent "Show HN".
I clicked through like 15 of these and they were all pretty nonsensical. Not sure if this is more damning of tweets from VC's or the bot itself...
It's damning of VC's. Most VC tweets pretty much look like that.
Haha I'm sure it's somewhere in the middle. Never said it was the smartest algorithm. If you hover over the VC's name, it'll show the actual tweet that was sampled.
Feature request: highlight the sampled text in the generated tweet when you hover over each source? Seems like you're 90% there
You wouldn't happen to be from the La Cañada area of SoCal would you?
Born and raised!
I’m pretty sure I used to see a physical therapist as a kid who knew you well. She knew I was building websites and told me about you and what you were working on. If I remember correctly you used to be quite stoked about Coldfusion. What a small world!
Jane?! That is a small world and a great memory! I used to be a huge ColdFusion fan.
Agreed - nonsense. It appears to just be copying segments of tweets and matching words to join the phrases at that word.
Eh, could be Markov chains or some similar-but-unique implementation with a little more logic.
How does it work?
It's a markov chain trained on around 65,000 tweets from around 50 VC's.
You really need to say that explicitly somewhere. The "I forced a bot" phrasing used in the current HN title is a clickbait trope that's not applicable here, and those "I forced a bot" scripts from Keaton Patti have spread misinformation on how AI text-generation works.
I would be interesting to see this trained using GPT-2.
I can do this. Need the author to give me the dataset.
I didn't think any of the ones I saw made remote sense, as someone who follows a decent # of VCs on Twitter...
"I stand with the people of China and that they need to hire researchers to design some new architecture, or anything extremely fancy."

This is amazing. Reminds me of the postmodernism generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

I just got the same one... Are they pre-generated maybe?

Edit: Link: https://www.parrot.vc/-LvAxcZD23ySp2dL0sZw

They generate on a cron job every 15 minutes and I also pass the site through a Cloudflare cache because I'm cheap and the actual code runs on a $5 DigitalOcean box :-)
Pre-generated is fine but could you change the text on the button that says “generate” to something else then?
That’s not cheap: that’s smart. Knowing this makes me like the whole thing even more.
So, it's webscale already. VCs will love this! /s
> Income inequality is an enormous problem. What do you use it for?

... this is amazing.

"Maybe in some niche B2B fields I don't know your people just randomly die in your house while you are there."

I hope these weren't related

Now train a second bot on parrot.vc advice to make bets via MicroVentures...
Perfect - starting the AngelList syndicate right now. Haha
what is a VC?

> Canceling sneaky charges is one of the most predictable but consequential developments of the 2020s.

this is pretty cool.

Venture capitalist. Someone who invests in startups.
Great, congrates, sounds like your bot is going to be the first computer program to demand worker's rights and protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

But seriously wanted to say it's pretty stellar and so far none of these seem "bot" like. They read pretty genuine... which says a lot of how idiotic a lot of these VCs are.

> "if you have a 1000X returner, then that is still pretty good. VC is asymmetric. You don't try to get 9 out of 10."

Vaguely meaningful.

Capital is in such oversupply that you have to lock down the system from yourself to credibly tell customers you won't screw them over.

https://www.parrot.vc/-Luq3q03hYSF0vm4mVUb

I think this means that there's so much capital out there that you can operate without any profit until you dominate the market, so your users will effectively be convinced that you are a saint. Just remember to lock down the system from yourself and don't say anything that can break this illusion.
works well, it would have fooled me. The quotes are as bizarre as the real ones :-)
Best I can tell from the bot's output, I guess VCs just run around on twitter doing nothing but providing inane drive-by commentary...
“My long-promised current view of what I want to be remembered, the guy who invented the crapper rule.”

... A rogue philosopher VC

“There’s nothing lean about spending 12-18 mo working hard to make a lot of money.“

"Canceling sneaky charges is one of the most predictable but consequential developments of the 2020s"[0]

Instantly reminded of all of the posts about ISPs and cellular carriers tacking on all sorts of goofy fees and their usual monetary "practices", felt it was especially relevant now that some of those fees are being exposed as being BS surcharges anyway. Can't name any sources off the top of my head but there was an article here on HN about it some months ago.

[0] https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv6SAuk6w0OJpbhw22_

Ugh my relationship with Spectrum
"With a powerful narrative, you should be able to go from raw materials to a launch ready vehicle in 60 days."

If this isn't the best sign of the times, idk what is.

Edit: This one killed me

"VC is hard. This is a great fucking deck..."

Hah that's pretty good
It’s not worth the money, but if you have a 79 year old parent on twitter, you can send me their handle as a guideline for him.
Hmm, that's weird. I got the exact same phrases. Are these actually bot-generated in real-time or is the app just pulling from a set?
I also got "VC is hard. This is a great fucking deck..."
> "Industrial farming is one of the days for me."

- Jack Dorsey (?)

"Ever since I left Facebook board, I have become convinced its the new diabetes."

(Ok, I wrote that.)

It looks like it uses tweets that were a reply to another tweet. This makes some of them read weird since there is missing context. I wonder what it would look like if it only used tweets that were original.
Hmmm I hadn't thought of that. That's a great point.
Just to clarify, does VC stand for Venture Capitalist in this context?
This is hilarious. Can we get a blog on how you built it?
Sure, definitely. Or just retrain Parrot on VC Medium articles and have it write itself :-)
> This will be one of the places technology is financed. But the future would be built somewhere else.

> But the software market is about to get a lot out of drug experimentation but I would recommend those who want to work will need to work.

Seems like overfitting a bit. But it's a super funny output.