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I built an interactive HN Simulator

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Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator.You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly.The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post.When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link.I really wanted it to feel real, and I think the project mostly delivers on that. When I was developing it, I kept getting confused between which tab was the "real" HN and which was the simulator, and accidentally submitted some junk to HN. (Sorry dang and team – I did clean up after myself).The app itself is built with Node + Express + Postgres, and all of the inference runs on Replicate.Speaking of Replicate, they generously loaded me up with some free credits for the inference – so shoutout to the team there.The most technically interesting part of the app is how the comments work. You can read more about it here, as well as explore all of the available archetypes, moods, and shapes that get combined into prompts: https://news.ysimulator.run/comments.htmlI hope you all have as much fun playing with it as I did making it!

HN · launched Nov 24, 2025 · 538 upvotes (top 1%) · 0 views

Niche: online community and discussion platforms · 117 launches, 12 in the last 7 days ▼ -14% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Media & entertainment
  • Dev tools
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes It is a Hacker News UI replica connected to an LLM completion API that generates persona-based comments on submitted links and posts.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Cursor (for coding tools), Facebook simulator

Concerns raised: Difficulty distinguishing simulated comments from real ones, Whether simulated comments are actually meaningful or just pattern-matching, Training data source and methodology unclear, Missing certain commenter archetypes (e.g., Angry Affluent White Male)

Feature requests: Fine-tuning guidance for specific commenter types/values, Simulator for other platforms beyond HN

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 239 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #6 of 240 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 26 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.