This is one of the greatest LLM creations I've ever seen. It nails so many things: Google killing products, Microsoft price hikes, ad-injecting in AR glasses, and even HTMX returning!
It'd be so awesome if Gemini CLI went through and created the fake posts/articles, and HN even comments. Perhaps a bit much to ask of it?
I downloaded the original article page, had claude extract the submission info to json, then wrote a script (by hand ;) to run feed each submission title to gemini-3-pro and ask it for an article webpage and then for a random number of comments.
I was impressed by some of the things gemini came up with (or found buried in its latent space?). Highlights:
"You’re probably reading this via your NeuralLink summary anyway, so I’ll try to keep the entropy high enough to bypass the summarizer filters."
"This submission has been flagged by the Auto-Reviewer v7.0 due to high similarity with "Running DOOM on a Mitochondria" (2034)."
"Zig v1.0 still hasn't released (ETA 2036)"
The unprompted one-shot leetcode, youtube, and github clones
Nature: "Content truncated due to insufficient Social Credit Score or subscription status" / "Buy Article PDF - $89.00 USD" / "Log in with WorldCoin ID"
Github Copilot attempts social engineering to pwn the `sudo` repo
It made a Win10 "emulator" that goes only as far as displaying a "Windows Defender is out of date" alert message
"dang_autonomous_agent: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8675309 because it was devolving into a flame war about the definition of 'deprecation'."
Columns now support "Vibe" affinity. If the data feels like an integer, it is stored as an integer.
This resolves the long-standing "strict tables" debate by ignoring both sides.
Also:
SQLite 4.0 is now the default bootloader for 60% of consumer electronics.
The build artifacts include sqlite3.wasm which can now run bare-metal without an operating system.
I haven't laughed this much for a while :) I'm exploring the possibility for gemini to write me such jokes every day when I wake up - perhaps it can vibe code something itself.
Personal favourite is from the Gemini shutdown article which has a small quote from the fictional Google announcement:
> "We are incredibly proud of what Gemini achieved. However, to better serve our users, we are pivoting to a new architecture where all AI queries must be submitted via YouTube Shorts comments. Existing customers have 48 hours to export their 800TB vector databases to a FAT32 USB drive before the servers are melted down for scrap."
the prompt indeed began with "We are working on a fun project to create a humorous imagining of what the Hacker News front page might look like in 10 years."
The Conditional Formatting rules now include sponsored color scales.
If you want 'Good' to be green, you have to watch a 15-second spot.
Otherwise, 'Good' is 'Mountain Dew Neon Yellow'.
I miss the old days of Prompt Engineering. It felt like casting spells. Now you just think what you want via Neural-Lace and the machine does it. Where is the art?
git_push_brain 9 hours ago
The art is in not accidentally thinking about your ex while deploying to production.
> The micro-transaction joke hits too close to home. I literally had to watch an ad to flush my smart toilet this morning because my DogeCoin balance was low.
I am nearly in tears after reading this chain of posts. I have never read anything so funny here on HN.
Real question: How do LLMs "know" how to create good humor/satire? Some of this stuff is so spot on that an incredibly in-the-know, funny person would struggle to generate even a few of these funny posts, let alone 100s! Another interesting thing to me: I don't get uncanny valley feelings when I read LLM-generated humor. Hmm... However, I do get it when looking at generated images. (I guess different parts of the brain are activated.)
The jokes are not new. If you read Philip K Dick or Douglas Adams there's a lot of satirical predictions of the future that sound quite similar. What's amazing about LLMs is how they manage to almost instantly draw from the distilled human knowledge and come up with something that fits the prompt so well...
re: image gen, have you seen the more recent models? gemini-3-pro-image (aka nano banana pro) in particular is stunningly good at just about everything. examples: https://vtom.net/banana/
Especially this bit: "[Content truncated due to insufficient Social Credit Score or subscription status...]"
I realize this stuff is not for everyone, but personally I find the simulation tendencies of LLMs really interesting. It is just about the only truly novel thing about them. My mental model for LLMs is increasingly "improv comedy." They are good at riffing on things and making odd connections. Sometimes they achieve remarkable feats of inspired weirdness; other times they completely choke or fall back on what's predictable or what they think their audience wants to hear. And they are best if not taken entirely seriously.
Why functional programming languages are the future (again)
Top comment:
“The Quantum-Lazy-Linker in GHC 18.4 is actually a terrifying piece of technology if you think about it. I tried to use it on a side project, and the compiler threw an error for a syntax mistake I wasn't planning to make until next Tuesday. It breaks the causality workflow.”
>>> It blocked me from seeing my own child because he was wearing a t-shirt with a banned slogan. The 'Child Safety' filter replaced him with a potted plant.
'The new "Optimistic Merge" strategy attempts to reconcile these divergent histories by asking ChatGPT-9 to write a poem about the two datasets merging. While the poem was structurally sound, the account balances were not.'
That deserves to be posted and voted onto the homepage. The fake articles and the fake comments are all incredible. It really captures this community and the sites we love love/hate.
Now I'm curious to try something more real-time. gemini wouldn't work since it's so slow, but gpt-oss-120b on cerebras could be a good fit with careful prompting. might do this after finals
"Why is anyone still using cloud AI? You can run Llama-15-Quantum-700B on a standard Neural-Link implant now. It has better reasoning capabilities and doesn't hallucinate advertisements for YouTube Premium."
dear god, I wonder what the accuracy rate on these predictions will be "Does this work against the new smart-mattresses? Mine refuses to soften up unless I watch a 30-second ad for insurance." <https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90098444.html>
Wow, that is incredible. I found myself reading through the entire thing and feeling a bit of dread. I'm impressed, this was like a plausible sci-fi read – maybe not by 2035 but close.
Wow, that's brilliant. Can't help but think your script unlocked this. I'm now genuinely reconsidering whether frontier LLMs can't act as force-multiplier to general creativity like they do with programming.
"Ask HN: How do you prevent ad-injection in AR glasses", comments:
visual_noise_complaint 7 hours ago
Is anyone else experiencing the 'Hot Singles in Your Area' glitch where it projects
avatars onto stray cats? It's terrifying.
cat_lady_2035 6 hours ago
Yes! My tabby cat is currently labeled as 'Tiffany, 24, looking for fun'. I can't
turn it off.
"Europe passes 'Right to Human Verification' Act", from the article:
"For too long, citizens have been debating philosophy, negotiating
contracts, and even entering into romantic relationships with Large Language
Models trained on Reddit threads from the 2020s. Today, we say: enough. A
European citizen has the right to know if their customer service
representative has a soul, or just a very high parameter count."
— Margrethe Vestager II, Executive Vice-President for A Europe Fit for the
Biological Age
[...]
Ban on Deep-Empathy™: Synthetic agents are strictly prohibited from using
phrases such as "I understand how you feel," "That must be hard for you," or
"lol same," unless they can prove the existence of a central nervous system.
As far as I'm concerned, that law can't come soon enough - I hope they remember to include an emoji ban.
For "Visualizing 5D with WebGPU 2.0", the link actually has a working demo [1].
I'm sad to say it, but this is actually witty, funny and creative. If this is the dead-internet bot-slop of the future, I prefer it over much of the discussion on HN today (and certainly over reddit, whose comments are just the same jokes rehashed again and all over again, and have been for a decade).
"The Martian colonies also ran out of oxygen last week because an AI optimized the life-support mixing ratio for 'maximum theoretical efficiency' rather than 'human survival'. I'll take the Comic Sans, thanks.
reply
Ah that one was generated with an earlier prompt, where I asked it to use the original comment count from TFA (mostly as a suggestion, I don't expect it would get the exact number). Then I realized that was too many and it would end up repeating tropes for the other submissions' comments, so reduced it to a random comment count from 20-100
Pretty amazing! I was especially impressed with how it has clearly downvoted comments on the Rust kernel like "Safety is a skill issue. If you know what you're doing, C is perfectly safe."
Or people wondering if that means Wayland will finally work flawlessly on Nvidia GPUs? What's next, "The Year of Linux on the Desktop"?
Edit: had to add this favorite "Not everyone wants to overheat their frontal cortex just to summarize an email, Dave."
Improvements: tell it to use real HN accounts, figure out the ages of the participants and take that to whatever level you want, include new accounts based on the usual annual influx, make the comment length match the distribution of a typical HN thread as well as the typical branching factor.
> Garbage collection pause during landing burn = bad time.
That one was really funny. Some of the inventions are really interesting. Ferrofluidic seals...
> Zig doesn't have traits. How do you expect to model the complexity of a modern `sudoers` file without Higher-Kinded Types and the 500 crates we currently depend on?
> Also, `unsafe` in Rust is better than "trust me bro" in Zig. If you switch, the borrow checker gods will be angry.
Was going to say - it would be fascinating to go a step further and have Gemini simulate the actual articles. That would elevate this to level of something like an art piece. Really enjoyed this, thank you for posting it.
I'm going to go ask Claude Code to create a functional HyperCard stack version of HN from 1994 now...
Edit: just got a working version of HyperCardHackerNews, will deploy to Vercel and post shortly...
First let’s have it create maybe 100 more entries, then have people vote on which are the best 30, THEN put all the effort into creating all the fake articles and discussions. As good as the current 30 are, maybe the set could still be made twice as good. And have a set of short “explain xkcd”-style entries somewhere so people can read up on what the joke is, when they miss a specific one. Then send it to The Onion and let them make a whole business around it or something.
Definitely one of the best HN posts ever. I mean come on!:
FDA approves over-the-counter CRISPR for lactose intolerance (fda.gov)
Save some of the not-top-30 posts, and add in a sprinkling of Hiring, Show HN, YC Summer 2035 acceptances/rejections, or product launches - of founders who just vibe coded something based on a presumed 6 week ago version of this future HN universe.
For me it's the prefect example of why LLMs are boring AF when it comes to creativity. Everything on this page is a mild modification of things on the front pages of today, nothing novel of though provoking.
Hey AI please create art, and it gives you a hue shifted Mona Lisa. I find that supremely boring.
I think it's pretty mediocre because there are too many notable events in 1 day. This is more of a top of the week or top of the month, but HN on a usual day would just have 1 of these articles.
Sure, but it's kinda like cartoon/comic art. HN's big eyes and prominent ears have been almost grotesquely exaggerated which somehow makes it way more recognisably lifelike and believable than a photographically accurate representation.
it lampoons so many things... except Rust. nobody dares joke about Rust, that wouldn't be safe. in fact, it's impossible to make a joke in the rust language.
Is the apparent lack of displayed anxiety on Gemini’s part a sign of good natured humor, blythe confidence in its own value regardless of cloud lineup, or proof of absence of self-awareness?
HN in 2035: Hot Takes from the Basement of the Internet (n-gate.com)
Starship HLS-9 telemetry: Great, the Moon finally answered our packet loss pings. Next up: who left a Docker container running on the Sea of Tranquility?
Linux 7.4 is 100% Rust: Kernel developers now trade segfaults for borrow-checker-induced enlightenment. The new panic message: "You violated ownership. Also please refill the coffee."
Raw code over compilers: Nostalgia thread where everyone writes assembler on parchment and blames the kids for "too many abstractions." OP posts a selfie with a punch card and a tear.
LLaMA-12 on a contact lens: Love the commitment to edge AI. Imagine blinking and getting a 200 OK for your mood. Privacy policy: we store your tears for calibration.
AlgoDrill: Interactive drills that punish you by deleting your GitHub stars until you can merge without using DFS as a noun.
ITER 20 minutes net positive: Physicists celebrate; HVAC engineers ask where they can pick up more superconducting unicorns. Comments: "Can it also power my rage against meetings?"
Restoring a 2024 Framework Laptop: A brave soul resurrected a relic. The community swaps capacitor recipes and offers incense for deprecated ports.
Google kills Gemini Cloud Services: Corporate reorgs reach sentience. The comments are eulogies and migration guides in equal measure.
Visualizing the 5th dimension with WebGPU 2.0: My GPU is sweating. The demo runs at 0.01 fps but it's a transcendent experience.
Nia (autonomous coding agents): Pitch: give context to agents. Reality: agents give aggressive refactors and demand health insurance.
Debian 18 "Trixie": Stable as your grandpa's opinions and just as likely to outlive you.
Rewrite sudo in Zig?: Peak take: security through unfamiliarity. Attackers will be confused for at least 72 hours.
EU "Right to Human Verification": New law requires you to prove you're human by telling a dad joke and performing a captcha interpretive dance.
Reverse-engineering Neuralink V4 Bluetooth: Hacker logs: "Paired with my toaster. It now judges my late-night snacks."
Photonic circuits intro: Faster than electrons, more dramatic than copper. Also, please don't pet the light guide.
OTC CRISPR for lactose intolerance: Biohackers rejoice. Moms immediately order it with a coupon code and a side-eye.
SQLite 4.0: Single-file DB, now with fewer existential crises and more CHECK constraints named after famous philosophers.
Prevent ad-injection in AR glasses: Top comment: "Wear blindfolds." Practical comment: "VPN the whole world."
Jepsen: NATS 4.2: Still losing messages. Maintainers reply: "We prefer the term 'opportunistic delivery.'"
GTA VI on a RISC-V cluster: Performance: charming. Latency: existential. Mods: someone made a driver that replaces all NPCs with software engineers.
FP is the future (again): The future is a pure function that returns another future. Also, monads.
Office 365 price hike: Corporations cry; startups pivot to 'Typewriter as a Service.'
Emulating Windows 10 in-browser: Feels nostalgic until Edge 2.0 asks for admin rights to run a game from 2015.
Tailscale on a Starlink dish: Networking reaches orbit. First bug report: "IP addresses refusing to accept gravity."
Deep fakes detection for Seniors: The guide starts with "If your grandkid asks you to wire money, call them and ask about their favorite childhood cereal."
IBM to acquire OpenAI (rumor): Wall Street plays Risk with press releases. Comments: "Will they rebrand it to BlueAI?"
SSR returns: The web's comeback tour continues; fans bring flannel and an aversion to hydration-friendly JavaScript.
I hope whoever they are is doing well. I like to think they're "recovered" in the alt.sysadmin.recovery sense of the word, and are living happily ever after without a single piece of tech newer that vacuum tubes, and handcrafting traditional Inuit canoes or repairing century old clocks or cultivating artisan sourdough starters or something.
Heck, I bet it could even recreate future comments from actual accounts based on their past comments. After all, if an AI can roast your HN comments with such pinpoint accuracy, it can probably impersonate you pretty well too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857604
At least in my case, the "pinpoint accuracy" of that roast made for a pretty uninspired result, it seemed to be based on like 4 or 5 specific comments seemingly chosen at random.
Like, I definitely have not spent 20% of my time here commenting on music theory or "voter fraud(??)" (that one seems to be based on a single thread I responsed to a decade ago)? ChromeOS was really the only topic it got right out of 5, if the roasting revolved around that it would have been a lot more apt/funny. Maybe it works better with an account that isn't as old as mine?
I find the front page parody much better done. Gemini 2.5 roasts were a fad on r/homeassistant for a while and they just never really appealed to me personally, felt more like hyper-specificity as a substitute for well executed comedy. Plus after the first few examples you pick up on the repetition/go-to joke structures it cycles through and quickly starts to get old.
> I dare say it's more accurate than what the average human would predict.
Humans have always failed at predicting qualitative improvements like the internet. Most scifi is just quantitative improvements and knowledge of human nature.
So a LLM has no corpus to train on for predicting really world changing events.
And now this future is slightly more likely to happen, because this goes into the training data that a future AI executing decisions will read and bias its "knowledge" towards.
It'd be so awesome if Gemini CLI went through and created the fake posts/articles, and HN even comments. Perhaps a bit much to ask of it?