alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator
Hey HN!
Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator.
You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly.
The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post.
When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link.
I really wanted it to feel real, and I think the project mostly delivers on that. When I was developing it, I kept getting confused between which tab was the "real" HN and which was the simulator, and accidentally submitted some junk to HN. (Sorry dang and team – I did clean up after myself).
The app itself is built with Node + Express + Postgres, and all of the inference runs on Replicate.
Speaking of Replicate, they generously loaded me up with some free credits for the inference – so shoutout to the team there.
The most technically interesting part of the app is how the comments work. You can read more about it here, as well as explore all of the available archetypes, moods, and shapes that get combined into prompts: https://news.ysimulator.run/comments.html
I hope you all have as much fun playing with it as I did making it!
Comments
Checking the comments of a couple of posts, I noticed their lengths seem to be too uniform. E.g. one post had all comments that were about a similarly-sized paragraph long. Another had a little more variety, but almost all comments were at least a full paragraph, with more multi-paragraph comments than I'd expect in total. Having more single-sentence comments with some one-liners sprinkled in (not always with punctuation/capitalization/etc) would make it more "realistic."
This will almost certainly be used by people to sanity check their HN submissions before actually submitting, very similar to having AI review your branch before submitting a PR.
Here is what it has to say about itself: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/113
In the same vein 4chan.org/b/ used to make every so often "This iw now a Hacker News thread", which were hilarious.
See: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/48696148 Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9788317
I love being able to read the prompt for every comment, it's like going to the zoo
Pretty cool, love the criticism and it does feel somewhat realistic: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/142
One of the top posts in mine is “Interactive HN Simulator”. I appreciate the meta. It immediately got a chuckle out of me.
I love this and its pretty fast. Hilarious comments. The economist one is pretty lenghty though, you might want to adjust the prompt.
https://news.ysimulator.run/item/121 - I was interested to see what the common archetypes would have to say about this very post, therefore I submitted it.
Wow this is awesome, the AI discussion has the depth and flavor and variety of real discussions online I've seen about my product. https://news.ysimulator.run/item/154
This is fun! I just posted about my startup and I loved the responses. They were criticizing a lot though, it was fun haha!
That's actually quite cool. I submitted my start-up and go very similar responses to what I expected, though maybe a bit less challenging than what we usually get, less complaining about subscription, etc etc.
Congrats on the launch! I submitted my app and got beautifully roasted; this is more fun than I expected: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/117
I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's "Friends of Privacy" - a group he imagined might post 1000s of times more content via AI than humans do in an effort to obscure real human data. Keep it up!
Great fun!
You should add the 80 character limit on the title as well!
super cool. just tried it. love the sassy comments
This is so cool. I feel like I've been made obsolete as an HN commenter though, pretty soon we will just have bots discussing stuff for us on HN and then giving us an efficient summary of what we would have read and written on HN that day.
It tracks
> Seriously? You needed GPT-7 for that? Real genius move, typing "cure cancer" into a box. I could've solved it with `curl` and a three-line Python script. Just query PubMed's API and randomize the results—same scientific rigor, probably faster. Next time, try less hype and more basic scripting.
Reminds me of HN Slop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434938) :)
Now I need to build a tool that gets my comment history and categorizes me according to your archetype, mood and shape.
The prompts are hilarious and an accurate representation of the average Hacker News commenter
This might be the best thread I've ever read: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/208