I find that lookback of 2 generally creates more entertaining titles. Lookback of 3 usually seems to just splice together two titles (which can be hilarious, and is usually more grammatically correct), and lookback of 1 tends to generate more nonsense.
Some fun ones I found just now:
The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Teenage Hacker
How my comment on TechCrunch got me a new, useful superpower?
PHP Sucks But I Didn't
Windows 8 is 20% faster than C
The Navy’s newest warship is powered by WebGL
Cards Against Humanity has made comments even worse, I'm leaving
How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a html5 game, polished it many many times
Interestingly, if I change the code to pick the most likely word, followed by the most likely word, etc. the "most probable" post is "The New York Times and The Internet"
If I limit it to just 2013 posts, it is "The NSA surveillance".
My site is running on the smallest Digital Ocean droplet (512MB), if it goes down, I will feel silly. If it does, code can be found here: https://gist.github.com/grantslatton/7694811
Markov chains are always hilarious. Try feeding it the whole text of a news article, or even a book; this way you can use higher lengths and get even more impressive results.
"PHP Sucks But I Didn't" is pretty hilarious, also knowing what the "most probable" is by year could be a great annual tradition. Did you check 2012 and 2011?
Supreme Court to avoid public shaming
WordPress has left the solar system
Cyanogen raises $7 million to build a perfect SNES emulator
Washington Post to grow vegetables on weekdays
- Ask HN: What's the best place to aim on a Porn Website
- The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Kindle
- John Resig's ‘Secrets of the HBGary hack
- Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for SOPA.
- A new way of writing unmaintainable code.
- Redesigning the country of Liechtenstein for $70,000 a night with Airbnb
- Build a house for $5
- Iranian Web Programmer’s Death Sentence to Be Successful
- Show HN: Pick a number from 1 to 1000 in C
- Greplin (YC W10) open sources key piece of shit startup I hate to love
Tesla wins in North Korea [since Kim Jong-un bought one]
CISPA Passes in the browser
Zynga Shuts Down Major Websites and Https Protocol [very plausible]
The Rules of a startup [couldn't believe first this wasn't a HN title]
Simple Minecraft Clone in 580 lines of Ruby [ditto]
What's the best startups in the noise of 802.11 [even more true than HN]
Parsley.js: never write a Web Application that makes you understand git [ditto]
Why I am building a hulking floating data center [I wish someone would do it]
Only a few countries are teaching children how to drive customers away [are these countries called "communistic"? ;-) ]
Concurrency is not an iPad [having read so many strange comparisons concerning concurrency I'm not surprised...]
Why I Quit My Job to Start the Rest of My Life as an Apple Store Employee
Facebook bans Adsense in all human history
Show HN: We made an addictive way to fold a sheet of paper
Rules of Storytelling According to the UK Gov
Death to the ISS - Launch Webcast (starts at 12:00am PDT)
That is literally hilarious.
"Nobody’s going to download your bullshit app" ,
"HN will be retired, transition to Google Wallet Anti-Competitively" , "The best interface is no retirement" , "Amazon's homepage was down for 6 hours to boot Ubuntu" , "PHP Sucks But I Like PHP" , "Programming is a Lie" ,""Gangbang Interviews" and "Bikini Shots": Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machine" , "Ask HN: What colour is your primary operating system" , "Chrome Engineer: Firefox Is A Costly Mistake" , "CSS Zen Garden is 10 times more efficient than the New Commodore 64" , "How one man escaped from a major UI overhaul" , "Turn anything into a Wikipedia article" , "Women, Tech Conferences and the "profitless business model" fallacy" , "MySQL now includes memcached, and a manifesto" , "FuckItJS: Runs your javascript code with MS Paint" , "Iceland Kicked Out of Y Combinator without an Idea" , "The shittiest project I ever read", "From idea to exit – the vi editor"
- A file that's both an acceptable HTML page and a Raspberry Pi;
- My idea to exit – the vi editor;
- Ask HN: How much recurring income do you make in the US on copyright charges;
- Your Username Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed;
- This Google ad has moved people to beat comment spam;
- The DDoS that almost broke the rules;
- Should Quadrotors All Look Like the One in the middle of NYC?
When I Stopped Eating For 2 Years in Production
How Github uses Github to build a windmill
Ask HN: Who is Sick
Apple's Role in Japan stopped having sex?
Show HN: I love you, dad
How to write shitty software
Issue 224182 - chromium - Chrome wakes me up in the process
Ember 101: Learn Ember at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss [video]
Google breaks 2005 promise never to implement an algorithm from a hacker.
Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the App Store
Show HN: A fix for the past year.
Richard Stallman: How I Hacked Facebook’s Secure Files Transfer Service for Employees
LuaJit 2.0 is out after many years in prison
Why should I have no idea what I'm doing
Tell HN: Frustrated and feeling pretty useless at this moment’ – Jimmy Carter on NSA snooping [video]
I am currently using all of my VPS funds hosting a 20$/mo (the big bucks, right?) droplet which is running a server for an AI programming game I made (currently closed testing among my friends).
Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to unlimited lifetime data storage using Norwegian laws
A standing desk for two years working on
Why I quit my job to personally email the first ISP to challenge the USA
- Thank HN: 127 days since I quit Facebook
- Dropbox: The Hottest Startup You've Never Heard of
- Facebook detects if you are not a pilot
- Reddit traffic doubles in less than 600 bytes
- How to break in Gmail & Major Torrent client for work on Jeopardy
The Dumbest Idea In The South is 129 Million Years Old
Double Fine raises $1m in less than 600 bytes
Show HN: Please discuss if it’s 1999
The Student And Quadrupled My Zappos/Twilio hackathon entry into the math
Searching for all Who Changed My favorite bookmarked HN users
Also
How Khan Academy is the Future of Education
What it’s like to work for Google
I'm pretty sure these are actual titles (lookback = 3)
That is amazing. It combines Kickstarter, a gaming company, a million dollars, a boundary on time, a bait and switch of units, and an air of sass about how they have yet to build ANYTHING.
Suggestion: filter the titles that are identical to real ones. Or maybe it was part of the plan, demonstrating how they are indistinguishable.
My deadly disease was just a website.
IBM's "Watson" finally ready for preorder.
TileMill — an application for making my daughter cry.
"Anonymous" Hackers Take Down Megaupload Video
Google finally has a natural, almost visceral aversion to complexity
Syrian Internet Is a Hero
IRS claims it does not compute
Stripe raises $18 million from affiliate links on "Ad-Free" blog
Why I use paper to wipe my butt every day.
Apple not providing LGPL webkit source code 23 years later and you're still loving
If you look at the code, I filter all titles that are substrings (including identical) of real ones. Sometimes the Markov chain will simply add a single word to it, though, so it gets through the filter. Any suggestions on how to improve it?
The straightforward solution is: For each fake title, compute its Hamming distance to every real title. Filter titles whose distances are very close to real titles.
It's O(N^2), but if you write it in Python and run it with pypy, performance may be acceptable. Maybe.
But I think this is a classic example of a Problem That Doesn't Matter. No need to spend time solving it (unless you're having fun!)
10x teams, not worth a CEO vs cancer
How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Fifty Days, Payments Service Disruption Post
The first Django site to run for Australian Senate
It added the "in 2012" bit, which caused it to slip through my duplicate detector. I am trying to think of a better duplicate detector. Right now it just checks if it is an exact match or substring.
Show HN: I will stop providing any service to MPlayer
Canada Is About to Come Undone?
Do the Dishes, Put Out, Don’t Talk So Much Radiation?
How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to browse pictures on reddit
Oracle gives up trying to escape police
Opera moves to restrict Internet freedom
Our office is too big -- we need a Pirate
My fellow geeks, we need to have a jobless future
Did everybody see what just happened? The pendulum has swung.
Do You Really Want to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
Why I won't be your technical co-founder
Killing the Internet to its knees
Hacking the iPod: How I Earned A Lot More on Projects by Changing My Pricing Strategy
YC S12 company refuses to pay for TextMate 2
A Billion Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Paid, Paid Vacation.
Functional thinking: Why functional programming is on the edge, and so is he
275 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadI find that lookback of 2 generally creates more entertaining titles. Lookback of 3 usually seems to just splice together two titles (which can be hilarious, and is usually more grammatically correct), and lookback of 1 tends to generate more nonsense.
Some fun ones I found just now:
Interestingly, if I change the code to pick the most likely word, followed by the most likely word, etc. the "most probable" post is "The New York Times and The Internet"If I limit it to just 2013 posts, it is "The NSA surveillance".
My site is running on the smallest Digital Ocean droplet (512MB), if it goes down, I will feel silly. If it does, code can be found here: https://gist.github.com/grantslatton/7694811
omg ymmd
Amazing. Thank you!
John Resig's 'Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja Update'
From YC Rejection to 10,000 Users in 1 Day
PyPy is faster than pushing a pixel to the screen
screenshot: http://s28.postimg.org/k9pdb67n1/funny.png
-How Facebook is killing Linux on the desktop
-MongoDB Raises $150 Million - And Still Isn't Difficult Enough To Watch HBO Shows
-Facebook claims it can read your e-mail without a data plan
-I am depressed and I need someone to talk to restaurants.
-Ask PG: Will you share your data in plain English
-France convicts Google Maps for iOS
-Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover – I am depressed and I am building Tindie fulltime
-SPDY Review by Opera Software has filed a lawsuit
-Microsoft made their own online textbook, save district $175,000
-Data.gov & 7 Other Sites to Shut Down Uber
-Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie on Getting Your First iOS App Store Nightmare
-Valve: Piracy Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
-iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill W3Schools
-Pirate Bay Will Stop In Silicon Valley And Unemployed America
-The Revolutionary Birth Control In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value
-Samsung flew bloggers to Berlin, then threatened to leave a tech job at Facebook
-Google’s Marissa Mayer Has a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? (2007)
-In CSS, “px” is not broken: It’s a Pyramid Scheme
-SpaceX's First Official Cargo Resupply Mission to Mars
-Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Bank
-Google+ is now free on Amazon
-Saturn's North Pole Is A Difficult Community to Participate In
-JSON will be on 'every HP PC' shipping next year, says CEO
-Mozilla and Epic Announce Unreal Engine for Vim
-Every Black Hole Contains a New (and Better) Google
-Why "Coupon Code" Should Not be a core type in PostgreSQL 9.2
-Skype 5 for Mac 1.1
-The author of Nginx on why V8 is not an iPad
im from reddit by the way coul you telld :DD:D:D
That isn't too far off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2447580
Show HN post for the subreddit is here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6816322
^ almost died laughing at that one just now
HIV-Infected Infant Cured With Early Use of 'App Store'
First employee of startup? You are not colder than absolute zero
No, really, pi is wrong: The NSA slide you haven’t seen
$100k Revenues in One Click.
Q: “How much does an app cost?” A: “About as much as I make?
Too scared to write a simple operating system
Cook something or get out of bed for less than $10,000 per day.”
In Math You Have to Find Them
Fastest-growing YC S11 startup looking for hackers. Join us in our quest to kick healthcare's ass.
The piece of shit startup I hate to love
What it's like to be forked
- Show HN: My husband is Broken
- Twitter acquires, you laugh, you're still loving
- My dad unexpectedly uses my Linux laptop to get your attention. Join us!
- Ask HN: my 5-year-old son to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd.
- Linux is now hosted in North Korea
This one is a gem. I can almost see the fishy article about it
Won't someone think of the children?
> JPL director: Curiosity may have been causing USB disconnects
https://twitter.com/HNTitles
Code at https://github.com/FiloSottile/HNTitles
Cheers !
(I also really want to update it to also do Upworthy-style headlines. And maybe combine the two?)
Thank you for epitomizing HN.
Pffft, this is obviously just another internet conspiracy
Show HN: Let's Be Civil (I think his was a real post but with Tell HN -- the small change is hilarious)
Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the Post PC Era
Firefox now only has one big flaw
I feel I am a programmer
Web Intents - the future of spam in Windows
A new Python web framework for Haskell
Two Senators Say the NSA Is Storing Voice Content, Not Just Metadata
Incredible.
> The WorldWideWeb application is now larger than LinkedIn
I had to follow the link to the code to convince myself it really was random and not satire.
- A conversation between two chatbots and how one found out the other company has bigger monitors
- Amazon and the adults who get upset about Sparrow’s acquisition
- Orin Kerr: Why I Quit My Job to Start the Rest of My Todo List
- How to handle 1000s of concurrent users on a cube-shaped planet
- My Name Is Me - Supporting your freedom to drink coffee
- 15-year-old girl invents flashlight powered by node.js + socket.io
- Nobody's Going to Get Good at Making Money
- Airbnb Has Arrived: Raising Mega-Round at a $1 billion fraud
- Microsoft launches an HTML5 game. I finally understand why I'm not going to steal a Russian airport
"Whatever works for you – and giving up reading it will make your customers much happier"
There have been way too many like this once recently
- Man places his genome to Github, smartass forks and issues a pull request - Paul Graham consistently says ‘um’ ~7 times per year, audit finds
And this one is hilarious enough to get an honorable mention:
WYSIHTML5: A better way to get $12 billion of gold to Venezuela
"Google is about to learn stats"
"Progressive JPEGs: a new alternative to Node.js"
"Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Problem"
"Your Username Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed"
- Your Username Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed
- Android Ported to ANSI C
- Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of time, if nanoseconds were seconds
- Cook something or get out of Facebook.com
- Mark Cuban: If you want to order it, use 'view source' to find the commented-out link.
- How Little Sleep Can You Get From McDonald's?
- Ocean acidification due to SOPA
- Love startups but not a developer? We need Ruby developers
- Lenovo CEO Gives His $3 Million Bonus to 10,000 Users in 1 Month (with stats)
Ask pg: Please consider not doing a PhD.
When I Stopped Eating For 2 Years
Ask HN: I'm an American and a JPEG (view source on it)
What it’s like to be an accident
Paul Graham consistently says ‘um’ ~7 times per year, audit finds
CISPA Passes in the Womb
US Government: You Don't Prioritize Your Life, Someone Else Will
Stallman: "Facebook is an anti-pattern
Civet coffee: why it's time to submit a pull request
I am currently using all of my VPS funds hosting a 20$/mo (the big bucks, right?) droplet which is running a server for an AI programming game I made (currently closed testing among my friends).
This was HN just a few days ago.
I got:
Also I'm pretty sure these are actual titles (lookback = 3)Thanks for the laugh :)
That is amazing. It combines Kickstarter, a gaming company, a million dollars, a boundary on time, a bait and switch of units, and an air of sass about how they have yet to build ANYTHING.
Probably my fault, sorry.
It's O(N^2), but if you write it in Python and run it with pypy, performance may be acceptable. Maybe.
But I think this is a classic example of a Problem That Doesn't Matter. No need to spend time solving it (unless you're having fun!)
Apartments So Small They Can Say No
> MongoDB Gotchas and How To Avoid Getting Fired From Your Own Company
Best ones:
Zuck, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey In Short Film To Inspire Kids To Learn How To Write Code In 2012
The tent that turns into concrete in less than 600 bytes
CoffeeScript is not a four letter word
The first one is verbaitm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter