Show HN: Generating fun Stack Exchange questions using Markov chains

Hi everyone, I hope you like my latest side project!<p>I&#x27;m an astronomy student who likes programming in his free time. This time I wanted to write something that handles larger amounts of data. And as I recently came across the Stack Exchange data dump including all questions and answers I had the idea of using them to create Markov Chains for (nearly) every Stack Exchange site. The website displays the resulting content, which is often surprisingly coherent and entertaing, and allows upvotes&#x2F;downvotes so that the best questions get to the front page. And as a bonus, I created a quiz where one can guess which site a random question is based on.<p>If you are interested in my other projects, check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lw1.at" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lw1.at</a>, if you want to see the code, everything is Open Source and can be found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Findus23&#x2F;se-simulator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Findus23&#x2F;se-simulator</a><p>Please excuse the very minimal design, but after writing a lot of Single Page Applications I wanted to go the oposite way and write a website with less than 25KB.

Markov chains are so much fun. They produce believable relevant text that ultimately makes no sense, which is basically a definition of comedy. And they&#x27;re also super simple to understand and implement. I can have lots of fun without having to do any wild natural language processing.

&gt; Do Greeks driving affect the whaling industry?<p>I’ve always wondered this as well.

I have now written a bit more on how to hopefully get this to run locally and how everything works here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Findus23&#x2F;se-simulator#se-simulator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Findus23&#x2F;se-simulator#se-simulator</a>

Ham Radio: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;se-simulator.lw1.at&#x2F;q&#x2F;which-mode-describes-this" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;se-simulator.lw1.at&#x2F;q&#x2F;which-mode-describes-this</a><p>&gt; If you can already be synchronized when it comes through the use of your test. That&#x27;s a switching powersupply. I disable AGC in my comments above as an antenna analyzer that works depends on the Pi transmit frequency that isn&#x27;t necessary to send an SWL, but let&#x27;s dig further by adding another radial... You have bigger problems.<p><i></i>Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.<i></i>

I&#x27;d like to see Stack Exchange moderator responses using Markov chains. Like &quot;Stop answering this guy as he is posing useless questions&quot;, or &quot;This duplicate is considered not relevant&quot;.

Beautiful.<p>&gt; Configure anonymous DDOS attacks on internal servers?

Ok some of these I actually want to know the answer to... Like what windsurfing equipment is good for deep sea fishing

&gt; Essential windsurfing equipment to fish?<p>&gt; Any additional info will be suspicious, they&#x27;ve had the card

&gt; <i>Remove Broken Lightbulb from the toe?</i><p>&gt; <i>As it is horizontal? This means the color and material like them a few sheets of paper on the internet?</i><p>I don&#x27;t know how much effort you put into this, but that alone was absolutely worth it.

&gt; What is an open-commercial license?<p>&gt; Why did they determine that he used &#x2F; invisibility cloak technology?<p>&gt; How did newton APPROXIMATE THE AREA UNDER THESE PARTICULAR CURVES

I am curious how would those results compare with RNN models, such as ones in Andrej Karpathy&#x27;s &quot;The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;karpathy.github.io&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;21&#x2F;rnn-effectiveness&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;karpathy.github.io&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;21&#x2F;rnn-effectiveness&#x2F;</a><p>(E.g. as they are able to learn code grammar.)

Turns out the random mishmash of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories that is Skeptics.SE is hilarious fodder for a Markov chain:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;se-simulator.lw1.at&#x2F;q&#x2F;do-greeks-driving-affect-the-whaling-industry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;se-simulator.lw1.at&#x2F;q&#x2F;do-greeks-driving-affect-the-w...</a>

This is a lot of fun.<p>Why are some of the choice buttons colored in the easy quiz? Sometimes it seemed like a hint, sometimes just random.

Is there supposed to be a close button on the yellowish popup? It&#x27;s not on screen on my iphone se.

Next step: post these questions to the Stack Exchange sites from whence they were generated.

I wonder if you split the corpus and only used low voted questions&#x2F;answers for one corpus and edited questions + high-voted answers for the other ... could we tell the difference in the output chains?<p>SE often has translated questions, or questions of low quality, IME.

awesome, reminds me of ‘how is babby formed’