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Hi Hackernews! This is a little project I made in my free time. It's a fun and whimsical parody of Hacker News. I wanted to experiment with Faker.js and other JS libraries.

It randomly generates Hackernews headlines. You get new results each time you refresh the page. I spent about 4 days making this, and learned a lot in the process, and it was my first open source side project in a long time.

It was inspired by This Person Does Not Exist and other 'Does Not Exist' projects which you can find here: https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/

If you spot any bugs or have any ideas on maybe how to improve it, post your thoughts here.

The source code can be found on GitHub, where it's hosted:

https://github.com/coxomb/This-Hacker-News-Does-Not-Exist/tr...

I hope you enjoy the project :)

this is super cool :)

this one got me laughing: "Chicken version 5.0 Alpha Released"

One thing I noticed that could be improved: The headlines in isolation are reasonable, and so are the websites, but the pairings between them are not. For example, "Snapchat Has Been Removed From iOS App Store (mitpress.mit.edu)" and "Hstr: Bash And Zsh Shell History Suggest Box (reuters.com)".
On the first page I loaded I could tell it was fake immediately, there were no mentions of Rust at all.
I really wanted to get into Rust programming, but was turned off by the toxicity of the community. Their smug attitude of superiority really turns people away. I've been programming in C and C++ for decades, and I'm not sure I've ever once run into a problem with undefined behavior.
Ask HN: Whats's the Purpose of Action-Items?

I chuckled. Thank you:D

“The Scary Truth About South Africa”.

Awkward ha

This is definitely good for a laugh, on the first page-load. After that, some patterns emerge that really deflate the experience, but I definitely chuckled multiple times.
I am waiting for the day where someone makes a "this `this X doesn't exist`" . example outputs would be

`this coffee maker does not exist`

`this private jet does not exist`

etc etc etc

`this self referential joke does not exist`
"Washington Considered Dangerous"

Yep, it's pretty much nailed HN's front-page concerns.

"Ask HN: What happened to Fish?"

The really random ones are quite funny :)

"Ask HN: What happened to gloves?"

That is a title that would drag me in!

I got this and:

“In Praise of Sleek Wooden Tuna”

From the comments, might just start posting this everywhere:

No, OP is correct. * You omitted hist point X.

* You misunderstand point Y.

* Here's point Z you didn't account for.

If this is the average HN conversation, then HN probably has the highest quality conversations anywhere on the internet!
> HN probably has the highest quality conversations anywhere on the internet!

Do you know a better place? Maybe some small ones, but I doubt there are larger internet communities than HN with better discussions.

(comment deleted)
A bunch of headlines on there could totally be on HN. Love it!
Is it written in Rust?
I know it doesn't exist because there are too many titles which start with an interrogative.
Pls add "how X does not work" too.

How does the architecture of 8086 not work

How does work not work

I believe hn removes the word 'how' from the beginning
"Ask HN: What's the purpose of North Dakota"

I ask this everyday.

Without North Dakota South Dakota would make no sense.

And yes Virginia should be renamed East Virginia.

But Virginia goes further west than West Virginia. Virginia should be renamed South Virginia.
I propose we name that one Other Virginia. Which makes the other Other-other Virginia.
East and West Dakota are available, let it be done.
I ask the same question about Rhode Island. ;)
Fargo (TV series)
"FTX owes $288.05 to Binance"

At least, lol

Post 27 seems to always be some variation of "FTX owes $xx.xxx to XYZ"

FTX owes $13.68 to Robin Hood (substack.com)

FTX owes $997.43 to Binance (nationalgeographic.com)

FTX owes $264.32 to Robin Hood (theverge.com)

etc

This page brings fun twice: when you first load it and read the headlines, and next when you reload it a few times, see the pattern, and start to anticipate.
Don’t forget to click the link to the comments page too.
I like that the guy who wants more technical articles is named "asm."
Nothing about Rust or Kubernetes. Instantly realized that this must be fake.
If you refresh a few times and search for "Rust" with your browser, the word "Rustic" will keep appearing.
> and search for X with your browser [then X-reference] will keep appearing

Through which mechanism exactly?

Missing a random rachelbythebay or ACOUP post and an in-depth analysis of some medieval book collection also. (Though "The Scary Truth about Egypt" and "What to love about Small, Frozen Sausages" come pretty close)
The comments appear the same on each article. Is this intended?

I had the hope that they were some sort of GPT generated internet bickering or something but if not that's OK, I know it's a lot of work.

It’s actually from a different parody, linked by the original author in the intro.
"Pants Considered Harmful" (cnet.com)
I saw the first page and it had the classic HackerNews headline format: "<name> has died."

AI is gonna win, y'all.

Well, this isn't really an AI. It just scrambles from pre-fabbed assets, afaik
So are Reddit comments[1]. Once there are sufficient comments on the internet that you can't read them all in a lifetime, who's to say the one you are reading is novel and written by a human, and not a pre-fab comment scrambled from dozens of previous posts on the same topic from years ago, or the same topic on another site?

[1] you can't prove otherwise!