I’ve been lurking for a while, but out of fear of being steamrolled by HN readers or maybe just natural introversion, I’ve always been too scared to post or comment. Which is why

1. this is my first real Hacker News submission

2. my friend Michael and I built "Fake" Hacker News, a place to post and see what AI-generated HN comments might say.

Here’s a video of me using fakeHN to test this very submission: https://www.loom.com/share/4b9f4f9d7c77489a86baeb92ec55a1ed?...

And an example of one of our generated posts: https://www.fakehn.com/submission?id=tnYPX00BX827jWFPFkVJ

To try it, submit a title and text, and depending on traffic and the powers that be, after ~5 seconds, you’ll see some Fake HN comments and replies.

We don’t support url submissions yet, but we’re happy to build it if the community wants it!

Other features to knock out: deeply nested replies, streamed comments, and higher-fidelity comments mapping to real readers, since the generations now are still pretty shallow. Instead of the quick and dirty system in place now, we think it’d be really cool to see how more nuanced AI agents with the opinions and biases of real individual HN readers might respond.

I’d love to see what fakeHN posts you’ve tried and hear any feedback, whether you feel like it’s more of a nifty toy or could eventually solve real problems. If nothing else, it’s been funny to try random posts and see the results. :)

- Justin and Michael