Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator
news.ysimulator.runHey 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!
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
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."
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.
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
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!
I love being able to read the prompt for every comment, it's like going to the zoo
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!
Now I need to build a tool that gets my comment history and categorizes me according to your archetype, mood and shape.
Great fun!
You should add the 80 character limit on the title as well!
The prompts are hilarious and an accurate representation of the average Hacker News commenter
lol, finnally, comments are coming to one of my posts
Here too lol