Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reaction

  • Many commenters found the “honest” titles genuinely hilarious, “brutally honest,” and even more clickable than the originals.
  • Specific favorites:
    • “We rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it.”
    • “Click to keep avoiding work…” in the footer.
    • “Please star my repo so I can get a job.”
    • “Math nerd explains how to spend 3 days proving 1+1=2.”
  • Several people said this is how they already “mentally translate” HN titles, and that the page improved their morning or made them late to meetings.

How the titles are generated / prompting

  • People asked how the author made the system snarky and “HN‑aware.”
  • One commenter reverse‑engineered a similar effect using a concise Copilot prompt: describe the audience (tech‑engaged, big‑tech‑skeptical), ask for humorous/snarky headlines, constrain to 80 characters, and demand exactly one line of output.
  • Others mentioned persona‑based prompting and prompting LLMs to write prompts for themselves (“Inception 2.0”).
  • A few suspect human selection or curation because of the nuance and slow updates; others think modern LLMs really are this good at humor.

Fairness, “honesty,” and tone

  • Some argue the titles aren’t “honest” so much as cynical, dismissive, or politically tinted in places (e.g. Texas/privacy, 1913/“woke” jokes, Jeff Geerling’s Mac Studio rig, the generics language).
  • Others defend them as satire: unfairness and exaggeration are part of the joke, similar to Fark / El Reg / n-gate style.
  • There’s concern that if this attitude became normal on HN, it would undermine good‑faith discussion and mock sincere project authors.

Meta: HN culture, AI slop, and repetition

  • Strong nostalgia for n-gate and other HN parodies; many see this as “n-gate lite” or “n-gate as a service,” but note the gap between handcrafted critique and automated snark.
  • Some complain about “navel‑gazing junk” and AI‑generated “slop” about HN itself; others reply that the community’s upvotes show demand, and that satire is healthy reflection.
  • A moderator explains that meta-HN projects get occasional leeway but follow‑up variations are downweighted as the joke repeats.

Requested features and spin‑offs

  • Popular ideas:
    • Hover/tap to see original titles.
    • More than one page / daily version / use on the “new” page.
    • Browser extensions to live‑rewrite HN (one was quickly built).
    • Extending the concept to other news sites or an “AI browser/reader‑agent” that rewrites the whole web in this voice.