Show HN: Headline Smasher

http://www.headlinesmasher.com

by wilg • 13 years ago

97 42 13 years ago

headlinesmasher.com

daphneokeefe• 13 years ago

Site has apparently been overwhelmed by HN traffic. Not sure that's what you intended to "Show HN".

wilg6• 13 years ago

Yikes! Looks like I'm running up against Heroku's 20 database connection limit.

Edit: Fixed?

denzil_correa• 13 years ago

Still erratic

    An error occurred in the application and your page could     
    not be served. Please try again in a few moments. If you 
    are the application owner, check your logs for details.

marbemac• 13 years ago

I don't understand why this is on the front page in the #11 spot? It has 4 points and it's 45 minutes old.. The HN rankings system continues to confuse me.

Clearly its getting overwhelmed with HN traffic. Maybe click throughs are included in the rankings calculation? Then again, if many people are clicking through and then not up voting it, it's not necessarily a positive thing.

I do think it's pretty cool though! Great job.

coderdude• 13 years ago

Saturdays are probably the low-traffic day on HN. I remember pg saying once that Wednesday was the peak day. It's possible the algo compensates for a lack of traffic. Fewer submissions might affect the decay of popular items.

sdesol• 13 years ago

I think a lot has to do with the people doing the up/down voting. I'm guessing HN members who have been here longer and/or has more comment karma, carry significantly more weight when up/down voting.

This would explains why such a low score would result in a post staying in the front page for so long. So even though the points maybe 4 from a cosmetic point of view, I'm guessing its actual score would be much higher due to the 4 HN members that voted up this post.

wilg6• 13 years ago

I should point out that this is fully inspired by the other day's top post of procedural HN headlines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6815282). I thought it would be a cool addition to mash them up with other news sources with sort of sensational headlines and add voting.

aroman2• 13 years ago

And I assume all of this has been inspired by the "What Would I Say?"[1] app which has gone viral in since it emerged from HackPrinceton a few weeks ago?

Your website is extremely amusing and well done btw, kudos :)

[1] http://what-would-i-say.com

EDIT: Headline Smasher and WWIS both appear to use the same exact button color scheme, too!

wilg6• 13 years ago

I think that's just Bootstrap's default look. I've never seen that site before.

gamegoblin• 13 years ago

I made the original HN headline generator this is based on. It wasn't inspired by "what would I say." I do machine learning research, and I saw an HN comment that said something like "this is the most HN title I have ever read." And I though "hmmm I could use Markov chains to generate fake HN titles..." So I did.

Right now my current HN-based machine learning project is to try to predict if a post will succeed or not, given its title, who posted it, when, etc.

Houshalter• 13 years ago

These are wonderful. I can not believe that some of these were automatically generated.

aantix• 13 years ago

Is the source available?

wilg6• 13 years ago

Yep: https://github.com/wilg/headlines

jgalt212• 13 years ago

Buzzfeed will buy this.

denzquix• 13 years ago

It's pretty far down, but:

"Author of LuaJit Explains Why He Changed Mind on Weed"

...made me far happier than it should have.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

I found myself clicking on a bunch of them, genuinely wanting to read the "article" behind them...

md2242• 13 years ago

I wonder if the impulse to click on some of the stories is related to linguistic techniques utilized by the sourced viral content engineers (such as Upworthy).

While we're on the topic, is it just me or has memetic engineering kicked it up a notch lately with Upworthy, ViralNova, etc? Or was it always like this?

gertef2• 13 years ago

Upworthy seems to have started a noxious trend -- it's supposedly a successful marketing technique, and has hence been copied. The headline style itself has a bit of a longer history, but Upworthy was the first to combine it with aggressive social-media promotion of re-shares (Their business model is "give us a video, we will promote the heck out of it to force it viral"), so that it gets forced upon people who don't want to see it (as opposed to HuffPo, for example, which you can mostly avoid by choosing not to visit the site).

And Upworthy content is political propaganda (it's a spinoff project from the moveon.org folks, and its services are marketed as a tool to manipulate viewers' political viewpoints, not just sell stuff or generic ad impressions), not just humorous clickbait; that adds an extra layer of manipulative slime to the headlines.

untitaker_• 13 years ago

I would add an encoding meta tag. The font icons from bootstrap look like crap to me.

htf• 13 years ago

This is funny. Voting on generated titles is a great idea. If you allowed users to post comments, just like on HN or reddit, that would enable people to play along. Also, I would get rid of classification (Entertainment, Games, Opinion, Reddit, etc.) because it doesn't add much to the website and the categories are inaccurate anyway. Just one list is fine.

gertef2• 13 years ago

In true "lean marketing" style, then generate bodies for headlines that get clicks.

mrbill2• 13 years ago

This is awesome, but "generater" instead of "generator" is making my OCD twitch.

markdown2• 13 years ago

No. Fuck you and the people like you who've tried to claim OCD like it's some cool thing to have.

Have some respect for the real sufferers of OCD who live in hell on earth and on top of that have to see their condition belittled by all and sundry on the internet.

jcutrell2• 13 years ago

I get the chastising, but this is out of bounds I think.

Just because someone used a commonly abused expression doesn't mean we need to trash on them. It doesn't really teach anyone anything good.

Beat stupid people with intellectual conversation, not "fuck you"s.

thenomad• 13 years ago

100% agreed.

Yes, it's a harsh statement, but sometimes they're necessary.

True OCD is a horrible, debilitating condition.

This is from Cracked.com, but it's actually a very accurate description of what living with OCD's like.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-no-one-tells-you-about-...

(Note: I don't suffer from the condition myself, but I know people who do.)

aestra• 13 years ago

Please add the headlines that were smashed to make the stupid headline.

hablahaha2• 13 years ago

Yeah, that's probably the easiest way to 'link' content when you try to click it. I also want to know where they come from in general.

austinpray• 13 years ago

You can inject your own headlines, so that makes me suspicious that some of the truly golden ones are manufactured. However, it is hilariously illuminating how many of the headlines look authentic.

http://i.imgur.com/7yFUf4q.png

http://www.headlinesmasher.com/headlines/6751

wilg6• 13 years ago

Not anymore, you can't: https://github.com/wilg/headlines/commit/efdf7eaa33303918cdb...

tborenst2• 13 years ago

Can someone roughy explain how this works? I've looked through the source code but failed to identify the part that magically makes the headlines sound sensible.

wilg6• 13 years ago

Here's a link to headline generator: https://github.com/wilg/headlines/blob/master/lib/markov.py

I didn't make this, it's a slightly modified version of this: https://gist.github.com/grantslatton/7694811

I'm planning to rewrite this in Ruby to allow me to surface where each parts of the headline is sourced from.

tborenst2• 13 years ago

I see, thank you!

borplk• 13 years ago

"Microsoft Announces Tons of Issues"

"Microsoft tries to stop crying"

"Afghanistan in Browser"

"Fuck a woman to win this Zune"

ansimionescu• 13 years ago

I almost woke up the baby, am literally laughing with tears right now.

derleth• 13 years ago

Congratulations: You've automated The Onion.

(The best part of The Onion is the headlines. The articles are funny, too, but they too often just beat the headline's joke into the ground.)

Show HN: Headline Smasher

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