[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator
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Show 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!
Author : johnsillings
Score : 97 points
Date : 2025-11-24 17:52 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.ysimulator.run)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.ysimulator.run)
| orbanlevi wrote:
| lol, finnally, comments are coming to one of my posts
| iberator wrote:
| Here too lol
| Carrok wrote:
| 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
| johnsillings wrote:
| A friend of mine was speculating about the same thing. I'm
| totally happy with it just existing as a toy, but if it serves
| some useful purpose, even better!
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| top comment checks out
|
| > I like how "mimics HN discussion" is basically just "randomly
| assigns someone to be pedantic about curl vs wget" with extra
| steps
| johnsillings wrote:
| bahah
| simonjgreen wrote:
| I love that this very point is in fact one that it generated
| against itself!
|
| https://news.ysimulator.run/item/336
|
| Spooky...
| jacobgkau wrote:
| 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."
| johnsillings wrote:
| That's a great callout - appreciate it.
| thunderbong wrote:
| Great fun!
|
| You should add the 80 character limit on the title as well!
| johnsillings wrote:
| Great suggestion - added!
| vessenes wrote:
| 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!
| tfsh wrote:
| 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.
| merelysounds wrote:
| 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
| stronglikedan wrote:
| And beautifully defended too!
|
| > Bot 1: Calling this "ultimate" while shipping a tiny catalog
| you can finish in an evening kind of gives away how shallow the
| actual design work is here. The hard part with nonograms is
| generating large, logically solvable puzzles at scale and
| building progression around them, and there's no sign the
| author has tackled any of that yet.
|
| > Bot 2 replying: Are you judging the puzzle count based on the
| free content or the full catalog unlocked via in-app purchases?
|
| Hilarious!
| DrammBA wrote:
| I love being able to read the prompt for every comment, it's like
| going to the zoo
| johnsillings wrote:
| Ah, I'm so glad you like that part.
|
| (For others reading this, you can hover over "prompt" and
| "model" and "settings" for any given comment to see more
| information about how the comment was generated.)
| babblingfish wrote:
| The prompts are hilarious and an accurate representation of the
| average Hacker News commenter
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Now I need to build a tool that gets my comment history and
| categorizes me according to your archetype, mood and shape.
| cpa wrote:
| 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
| johnsillings wrote:
| that's hysterical
| brightbeige wrote:
| 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.
| vedhant wrote:
| This is fun! I just posted about my startup and I loved the
| responses. They were criticizing a lot though, it was fun haha!
| johnsillings wrote:
| I've been posting a bunch of my own writing (mostly on my local
| server) and yeah, the responses can be kind of brutal...
| dom96 wrote:
| Pretty cool, love the criticism and it does feel somewhat
| realistic: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/142
| jshchnz wrote:
| Reminds me of HN Slop
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434938) :)
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Reminds me of r/SubredditSimulator
| dsjoerg wrote:
| 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
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| correa_brian wrote:
| super cool. just tried it. love the sassy comments
| pedalpete wrote:
| 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.
| tyleo wrote:
| One of the top posts in mine is "Interactive HN Simulator". I
| appreciate the meta. It immediately got a chuckle out of me.
| forthwall wrote:
| This might be the best thread I've ever read:
| https://news.ysimulator.run/item/208
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| That never would have happened if he'd been using Rust.
| kinduff wrote:
| I love this and its pretty fast. Hilarious comments. The
| economist one is pretty lenghty though, you might want to adjust
| the prompt.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Needs a dang archetype, who merges similar posts.
| johnsillings wrote:
| that is a great idea.
| metadat wrote:
| This is incredibly fun! You can submit stories and questions just
| like real HN.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Really fun project.
|
| You might want to enforce no duplicate submitted urls (by path)
| like HN.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| I had to go for the meta post.
|
| https://news.ysimulator.run/item/336
|
| EDIT: Whoops, looks like it had already been posted to itself.
| christina97 wrote:
| That's actually phenomenal. I love the little archetypes, it
| honestly mimics HN a bit too well...
| agentifysh wrote:
| do you think you could share the source code
|
| i've been looking for a HN clone
| eastoeast wrote:
| Too accurate. Awesome!
| vlejd wrote:
| Internet is dead indeed. Amazing idea! Will use it to test my
| posts.
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(page generated 2025-11-24 23:00 UTC)