Bot or Not: Hacker News

http://botornot.nathan.ca/

by NathanWong • 13 years ago

96 30 13 years ago

botornot.nathan.ca

livestyle• 13 years ago

How did you come up with this?

bru2• 13 years ago

User DanBC suggested it there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815563

bru2• 13 years ago

Nice. Which loopback value did you use? Is it 3 by any chance? I'm currently at 2/7...

Making that value settable could be nice (as well as opening the source).

loceng• 13 years ago

I'm not doing much better at 5/10 ...

betawolf33• 13 years ago

I don't understand. Who upvotes content without reading it?

benologist2• 13 years ago

People supporting things they like, software they use, companies they favor, etc.

Anyone who wants their opinion to be the most-visible one, aka the reason why we get specific topics ad nauseam.

The 2nd and 3rd person to indiscriminately submit whatever Ars and AOL shat into their RSS reader.

DanBC• 13 years ago

It's a game. "upvote" doesn't mean "give a real upvote", it means "select". You're given two article headlines. One is real, from HN. The other is bot generated. You have to select the real one.

It's from this submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815282

broodbucket• 13 years ago

This is awesome and hilarious at the same time.

notatoad• 13 years ago

This is easy to beat. the more interesting sounding article is always the bot-generated one.

anonymfus2• 13 years ago

Could you add links to original threads after getting answer?

Sometimes one title could be seen multiple times.

Tomdarkness• 13 years ago

It seems that every time I selected the correct one was because the bot-generated title did not make sense or had some other obvious error, for example:

Apache releases first major new version of cancer drug

"Algorithm" is not a language worth learning

Although when both titles made sense it was actually quite difficult to successfully pick which one was the bot.

gbl08ma• 13 years ago

Score: 30 for 40

I did not cheat, and many of the names could be real (I swear I saw some that were actually titles of real articles, but in fact were bot-generated) - I'm not sure what makes me tell a real title out of a fake one in these situations. On other situations though, it's very easy (grammar makes no sense, there are odd amounts of quotes, etc.), but in my experience these tend to be a minority.

Actually, I find it funny that in my experience, most titles that could be of real, interesting hacks fitting well in the spirit of HN, are the bot generated ones, and the most political/controversial titles (which often you'll see discussed on many places other than HN) are the real ones.

Edit: I wish there was an easy way to record your session, so that later you can analyze each title more carefully and do some math on which options you "upvoted".

gamegoblin• 13 years ago

I am the maker of the bot generated titles and I failed miserably at this.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

Ouch, 2 out of 10. Only managed to get up to 6/14.

In this round:

- CoffeeScript is not a four letter word

- Linux may have been due to bad connection

Now I'm starting to have a weird feeling, like it's all generated content, when I look at HN's home page...

anonymfus2• 13 years ago

I had a feeling that some "generated" posts are just from the future:

http://i.imgur.com/1Yx3mqf.jpg

Vektorweg2• 13 years ago

7/10 . Thats difficult!

Vektorweg2• 13 years ago

And now we need bot-generated articles, probably with real informations!

benologist2• 13 years ago

I smell an AOL acquisition in the making!

shabble• 13 years ago

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

qbrass• 13 years ago

Generate the headlines, re-blog the top Google search results for the headline.

Sniffnoy• 13 years ago

There seems to be something wrong -- after 90 times (with 80 correct :) ), it started just putting blank options on both of them, and not returning any results for right or wrong.

jeorgun• 13 years ago

Same thing's happening to me (with the same score, at that!). Is there any way (short of clearing cookies) to reset it?

geedy• 13 years ago

I am guessing Markov chains? Lots of unclear choices, but some really obvious ones, including:

"Why I stopped travelling to the US got reduced to 3 hours"

I went 13/17.

Groxx• 13 years ago

The bot is too good D: 0/5 and counting...

ek• 13 years ago

1/10; I'm terrible at this.

Consider not polluting your users' browser history.

kaugesaar• 13 years ago

...a monkey would have scored better than me :(

Empathenosis• 13 years ago

Everytime I refresh the page, I get a +1.

Just wanted to let you know.

sleepyK• 13 years ago

Another example of no matter how much HN headlines change, they still stay the same. :|

Scored 12/20... this bot is good!

However, a lot of the headlines sound like I've read them, even so even if the bot is generating new titles for old stories by itself, it's using the same keywords as the original titles, so it ends up confusing me a bit...

pant• 13 years ago

Just awesome !!!

CogDisco• 13 years ago

I know this is just a fun game, but do you do any double-checking to make sure the bot isn't overfitted and "generating" a fake title that is actually real?

Bot or Not: Hacker News

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