Show HN: Hallucinopedia
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HomeDeLaPot
driggs
This is fantastic. I couldn't find any obvious way to search for a new page, but you can simply bang out any arbitrary URL slug and the new article will be hallucinated fresh, eg:
joeross
This is wonderful. I just spat out the first phrase that came to my mind and boom:
bstrama
Exactly, but I consider adding fake search that could find you ANY article, including not existent ones
lxgr
All articles exist, some just haven't been discovered yet ;)
nlehuen
This is excellent, congrats!
FYI I manually created this page and some link markup looks malformed: https://halupedia.com/list-of-uninhabited-countries
nlehuen
Looks like some single quote escaping issue? I suspect the first link to be "Archduke Ferdinand VII's Bureau of Non-Demographic Surveys" and the apostrophe breaks the link.
mmooss
Yes, that would be the perfect touch. This is brilliant satire. We need more satire!
gerdesj
Hit the Stumble link at the top right of all pages - its as good as a search when the whole thing is made up!
layer8
The model seems to have an unhealthy obsession with fungi: https://halupedia.com/alan-turing
Which I guess makes some sense for a hallucinopedia.
pivot_root
I made an SCP foundation inspired page: https://halupedia.com/hard-to-detroy-reptile
My favorite link generated there is the Institute for Unyielding Biology: https://halupedia.com/institute-for-unyielding-biology
jagged-chisel
It’s been defaced. It’s already got sex crimes and antisemitism all over the place.
wavemode
The mistake they made was allowing visitors to trigger the generation of articles via visiting any arbitrary URL.
A more resilient concept would have been, have a few "seed" articles in place, and then only allow for the creation of new articles by clicking a link in an existing article.
petercooper
Give it a week and see what Google AI Overview has to say about the Great Pigeon Census of 1887!
NordStreamYacht
By Featherton, no less.
aDyslecticCrow
google is already on it when asking about "The Great Pigeon Census of 1887"
using 1886 or 1888 makes Google correctly identify that no such sensus exist.
asking about 1887 specifically makes Google refer to some supposed great effort to track passenger pigeon population mids of the species decline.
stavros
I made the same thing months ago, so you don't need to wait:
stavros
Ah yes, IIRC I got the idea to make mine to make fun of that one when I heard the name.
gojomo
I searched your site for [Great Pigeon Census of 1887] and was only returned articles anout other things.
gojomo
As it didn't generate that when I typed the title i to your search box, was there a bug now fixed? Or did you use some other path not evident on the page you linked to generate it?
stavros
There was a bug where scanning took too long with the thousands of articles in there, but I just fixed it.
You can also just type a random URL and visit it, it'll generate an article. That's what I did before I fixed the search issue, and I usually just do that to avoid the search route.
Noumenon72
So by "I made the same thing months ago" you didn't mean "an article about the great pigeon census" (your link is created May 6) or "an encyclopedia of hallucinations" like the OP, but just "an encyclopedia with some articles AI wrote". What's the point?
stavros
What's the difference between an encyclopedia that produces AI articles on demand and an encyclopedia that produces AI articles on demand?
gojomo
If you think that's all the Hallucinopedia is, you're misunderstanding it.
One hint – check out its prompt, and how it makes its articles so different than those of your project: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=48042306
diputsmonro
It's pretty fun to poke at! Although it's certainly difficult to be exact, it would be neat if generated pages used the context of the pages they were linked from (ideally, all pages that link to it) to guide the direction of the page. From the ones I generated it seemed they were mostly independent.
bstrama
Update: Implemented it. All new articles work that way
rjmill
Very nice! Independently of this thread, I was delighted to discover the cross references between pages. It makes a big difference.
bstrama
Yeah, thought about that, maybe will implement it. Will keep in mind! For now SSR to feed LLMs' the priority
soupspaces
Fascinating https://halupedia.com/order-of-whispering-monks https://halupedia.com/church-of-the-singing-stones Many parallels here
bstrama
UPDATE: Just now, comment section added. Have a nice time arguing!
dlcarrier
You are a wonderful person.
You not only made this excellent source of entertainment, you are also helped everyone find their unmatched socks, ensuring that "no individual would ever be forced to wear a mismatched pair". (Source: https://halupedia.com/humanitarian-accomplishments-of-the-on...
lxgr
We should really host another one though; I think I've since lost a few more.
segh
I'm curious, what is the LLM cost of the website?
drob518
I’m curious, too. But it could probably run locally with a small model, right? The performance is stellar, so that suggests some hardware acceleration is being used, but that could all be a local system.
solarkraft
Finally a more trustworthy version of Grokipedia!
bstrama
It's hilarious, you made my day hahah
LeoPanthera
I honestly forgot that Grokipedia existed. Did anyone ever use it?
bstrama
Tried once, but was useless. Very funny that it had so many text, while Elon is apparently "huge" fan of short and precise communication...
mmooss
Somebody showed me it appearing near the top of some of their DuckDuckGo queries.
lxgr
Ironically, this seems much faster (for pages already, erm, "researched") than the real one! How?
bstrama
It generates articles only once. So once it's generated, it never perish. Logic looks like: If article exist -> show it If not -> generate and save
lxgr
I get that, but how does it serve the generated and cached ones seemingly faster than Wikipedia? (My guess is that single-page applications, which this one seems to be, just need less round trips between navigations or something?)
bstrama
Also now that I think, we store articles in decwntralized cloudflare KV store and access from serverless workers running also on their servers.
That could be the thing behind it being so quick.
Cloudflare workers have 1ms cold start.
lxgr
Nice job, this is seriously one of the fastest websites I've ever used!
I feel like I have some minimum latency "priced in" to my expectation when I click a link on a static site, so yours feels uncannily like it's somehow able to anticipate my clicks, adding to the surreal atmosphere.
bstrama
Yep, just a react. Also we use gemini 2.5 flash lite, so it's fast, cheap and dumb.
lxgr
Nice, that's what I used for by LLM-backed HTTP server [1] a while ago as well :) It's a shame they got rid of the generous free quota a while ago, which is why I had to shut my public instance down.
drob518
I love it. What’s the rough architecture of the system (using cloud LLM and paying $$$, or local)? The performance for new entries is really good. What is the prompt for each entry and how do you keep the steampunk vibe going?
n00bskoolbus
One suggestion for improvement is avoiding creation of self referential links. For example https://halupedia.com/chaldic-arithmetic has many references links to itself.
berellevy
Lots of antisemitism on there. Search “Jews”
cachius
Very interesting how it works: https://halupedia.com/inner-workings-of-hallucinopedia
But not without risk! https://halupedia.com/dangers-of-a-virtual-llm-backed-encycl...
jdpage
Reminds me of a (perhaps) more fanciful risk of fictional encyclopaedias: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
bstrama
Actually interesting response. You can also check out github.
jakub_g
Reminded me of this old, pre-LLM git docs generator:
anthk
Plan 9/9front's bullshit(1) tool works kinda like these but without requiring an $6k machine.
nlehuen
I'm having a blast adding new seeds :)
https://halupedia.com/fcuk-spellchecking-society https://halupedia.com/characterization-of-the-reluctant-peng...
JohnMakin
Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web.
SwellJoe
I wouldn't. And, I'd think less of anyone who does make that argument.
Anyone of reasonable intelligence can easily tell this is a parody of an encyclopedia. Saying this is bad for the web is like saying The Onion is bad for the web.
Eisenstein
What would you think of a person who said that they are already convinced that an opposing view could not be correct without even hearing the arguments for it?
janalsncm
For the record,
> Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web.
Was not followed by an actual argument that it is harmful to the web. The comment was an assertion, not an argument.
So we are left in the inconvenient position of rejecting hypothetical arguments, and others defending the philosophical possibility that a valid argument does exist.
Eisenstein
Without the argument being explicit then there can be no retort to it, so closing your mind before hearing it demonstrates that the argument itself is irrelevant. One could thus conclude that the existence of a valid argument is not itself a condition for my question.
janalsncm
We also shouldn’t close our minds to the possibility of an eigen-retort, one which covers all possible arguments already made or argued in the future regarding the consequences of this website on the health of the Internet.
Someone who is aware of the eigen-retort would therefore not need to hear the argument.
Since I haven’t heard either the hypothetical argument or the hypothetical eigen-retort yet, I’ll withhold my judgement.
anonymousiam
It's probably only harmful to the AI scrapers that train from the web. Most people will understand the purpose of this -- to poison LLM training in a humorous way, which is really easy to do. It exemplifies a major weakness in modern day AI.
gojomo
This is unlikely to poison any LLMs, and unless the author says so, it is unlikely that their motivation is to poison LLMs, as opposed to providing whimsical entertainment.
bstrama
I were just drunk and idea seemed funny. That's the idea behind haha.
But either way can't wait to see google ai overview cite us.
gojomo
Musing about a possibly-funny consequence isn't the same as the motivating reason, which I read as more whimsical from:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042594
In particular, someone who was seeking training-set pollution likely wouldn't make the fanciful fabrications so blatant, nor open-source their prompt:
dayofthedaleks
You could also argue that the web has failed and poisoning it into irrelevance is a vital service, motivating humans to collect knowledge into immutable sources. We‘ll call them ‘libraries.’
r3trohack3r
Interesting, but you could argue comments like this are actively harmful to the web.
AlecSchueler
But the argument wouldn't be nearly as strong.
dymk
Hard to say when nobody is actually offering arguments
isoprophlex
The sooner the current web dies, the better. Something better either rises from its ashes, or we lose... something that was already lost.
b00ty4breakfast
or something way worse shows up.
JohnMakin
Yea, I'm not sure how the "this is really bad so let's make it worse" argument really makes any sense
dylan604
When you get the something worse, the previous suddenly becomes much less worse. With the help of wrapping your memories with "remember when" nostalgia making things much more palatable, the something worse suddenly makes the previous better if not good.
znort_
context. sometimes things simply have to be broken to give way for something better. ymmv.
b00ty4breakfast
I think there's an unexamined assumption here that "the next thing" is always going to be an improvement but there is no, non-ideological reason to hold to this assumption. Ideally, we would be actively working towards making it so but what often happens is passively riding the current and calling it "progress".
znort_
>unexamined assumption here that "the next thing" is always going to be an improvement but there is no, non-ideological reason to hold to this assumption
i'm not making that assumption at all, so whatever.
context: revolutions? if slop is a problem but is barely enough of a problem to collectively do something about it maybe letting it get out of hand would be a good motivation.
i'm not advocating for this, just providing it as a possible context where the "this is really bad so let's make it worse" argument could "make sense".
progress isn't just a technical issue, it involves people and people need motivation.
lxgr
On the other hand, one could argue that anything that can be destroyed by relatively clearly labeled satire, deserves to be.
gojomo
A web that is vulnerable to this would already be as good as dead.
As an entertaining way to highlight the importance of upgrading our ways of knowing, playful (& open-source!) projects like this are likely to strengthen the web.
wildzzz
Any training data scraper that blindly takes stuff from websites deserves to have their model poisoned by this nonsense.
stronglikedan
> you could argue
Could you? I don't see it happening, but I could be wrong.
janalsncm
You could, in the sense that it’s not illegal or impossible. I haven’t seen anyone attempt it though.
You could argue that a person could argue any point, but I’d prefer people make the argument rather than argue about arguing it.
parliament32
To the web? It's fantastic for the web, these are the kinds of fun projects that make the web a worthwhile place to be. To slop generators? Yes, absolutely harmful, and that's for the best.
slig
Grokipedia is already doing that.
Jtarii
Pissing on a pile of shit
RIMR
The All Entries (https://halupedia.com/all-entries) part of the site is a bit alarming. I think OP might want to do a little bit of basic automoderation here.
driggs
This site is going to be expensive when a web crawler hits it. A honey pot that burns tokens.
janalsncm
They’re caching the pages which have already been generated. You could go back and delete all references to pages which don’t exist yet. Basically turn it into a static website.
driggs
It seems like the site's algorithm is that every newly-generate page includes multiple links to not-yet-existing pages. So it doesn't matter that existing pages are cached, all the "leaf node" pages link to multiple uncached new pages.
janalsncm
I’m suggesting to turn that off and prune the links to pages which weren’t generated yet if cost becomes an issue.
bstrama
Can't wait to see the next generation of LLMs after feeding it all of that hahaha
everyos_
The page requires JS to load its content - user agents without JS support just get a blank page.
I'm not sure if the bots that scrape data to train LLMs are capable of loading that type of page, or if they only work on pages that have the content inside the HTML itself?
aDyslecticCrow
Not using JavaScript would also make the crawler fail on squarespace and wix website builders.
The age where the web was usable at all without JavaScript is long gone. No scraper would get much scraping done without JavaScript these days.
replygirl
any serious scraping service these days will fail over to a headless browser when it fetches an asset referencing a js bundle that isn't verifiably a vendor script
bstrama
I'm aware and will implement SSR soon ;)
m3047
It's entirely possible they simply ingest the JS as-is.
nickvec
Seeing “Something broke, which is ironic for a made-up encyclopedia: Load failed” when trying to access some of the suggested starting points
bstrama
Works on my PC.
Could you gimme the url that's failing?
nickvec
It’s working now, not sure what was going on earlier.
janwillemb
It's nice, but after a few clicks my LLM content fatigue kicks in.
rootusrootus
I wonder how long it will be before Canis dementialis becomes a standalone meme.
anthk
https://halupedia.com/computer
This is perfect. Very Neal Stephensony.
Also, this, but with no AI: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=032krqe6bjn5au78
Just incredible prose and writing (and gameplay), with something you can run with Frotz/NFrotz/LectRote or any ZMachine interpreter (or Glulxe like Gargoyle). A Pentium would run this and marvel you in a similar way.
No need to waste tons of water in datacenters.
throw310822
Funny. Small improvement suggestion: the entry about "Glorbonian culinary arts" links to "the subterranean nation of Glorbonia". However upon clicking the link to "Glorbonia", an entry is generated claiming that "Glorbonia refers to a peculiar and largely uncatalogued form of sub-auditory resonance". It would be cool if some context were carried over from the referrer page so that there is some coherence between entries (ah, and some existing entries could be taken in account when generating new ones).
notahacker
Feels like this will eventually cause collisions, although perhaps nothing multiple definitions of Glorbonia and multiple biographies of different Mrs Wiggles (perhaps with Wikipedia style disambiguation) can't solve
throw310822
Btw, I've noticed just now that Glorbonia is, in the first entry, a "subterranean nation" and in the second it's a "sub-auditory resonance". So I got curious and I asked Opus what he thinks about the word Glorbonia: "Do you detect in the word a sense of place? North, south, east, west, up, down?". And Opus answers "Down, weirdly. Or maybe low — something subterranean, or at least sunken." Curious.
arduanika
Love it! It feels very Borges!
Feature request: also be able to click on the Talk page to see the controversies. I don't always want to trust the article itself as the final word.
Edit: Oh look, there's an article about the YC! https://halupedia.com/y-combinator
bstrama
Just added comment section :)
arduanika
Cool!
I'm curious about the design. Maybe you have a "how I did it" post coming soon, or something. One question: Did you find away to get some convergence, where a newly generated page will tend to cite pages (or stubs, at least) that already exist in the universe? Seems hard to do it with generated text, but not impossible.
bstrama
Great suggestion! Will immediately look into that!
mmooss
> Edit: Oh look, there's an article about the YC! https://halupedia.com/y-combinator
This should be on YC's About page.
notahacker
> Y Combinator might be responsible for the spontaneous generation of minor deities in areas experiencing extreme metaphysical gravity.
This particular piece of slop is a serendipitously brilliant description of the cult of founder worship in the metaphysical gravity of Silicon Valley.
anthk
This kind of Absurdist humour reminds me of the Marx Brothers or the Tip y Coll Spaniards.
And the Sokal case with the Humanities branches, for sure.
BTW: https://halupedia.com/postmodernism
This is golden.
Best entry, hands down. This is a love letter to Prattchett.
arduanika
It also feels a bit like Sam Kriss, if you know him.
Some of his writing: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/five-prophets
His biography is quite interesting: https://halupedia.com/sam-kriss
meghneelgore
Great idea! I created an adjacent website that gives, shall we say, "alternative facts" about your questions. (don't know if the rules allow me to link the site so I won't).
busymom0
Now I want to know the site.
meghneelgore
https://amtaitfy.com Still don't know if it's allowed, but taking a chance here.
sofayam
Currently breaks if you try to create a page with a Japanese slug. Multiple languages would make this an even more valuable resource than it already is.
pinkmuffinere
I find the handling of NSFW topics (and how it avoids making them nsfw) really interesting. Eg https://halupedia.com/fuck (aside from the title it seems SFW to me)
bstrama
Best part - I didn't implement such logic. It just for some reason works that way.
pinkmuffinere
Huh that is interesting, I was expecting it to show some sort of error on generation, or something like that
JLemay
this is excellent haha
gavmor
Hm, the page generated seems inconsistent with the usage of the original link.
anthk
This is what every LLM will converge into without curated human input.
jagged-chisel
Allow me.
You can name an article anything you want, and the thing will generate content, though not necessarily relevant to the title you chose.
So some vandal comes along and supplies a hateful title, et voila.
dmje
I LOVE IT. Superb.
mmooss
As I said in another comment, this is brilliant. Suggestion: Remove anything that isn't part of the satire; act always as if it's a 'real' encyclopedia. For example on the front page I would remove,
> Articles are generated on demand and stored permanently upon first request.
Don't dispell the magic; don't pull back the curtain and let people see the mechanics.
EDIT: As you say in your system prompt, "You never wink at the reader. You never acknowledge that anything is funny or fictional. Everything is reported as though it is completely normal and well-documented"
Noumenon72
This is irresponsible for people who don't get it, takes away confirmation for people who do get it, and makes me block/blacklist any liar who does it.
mmooss
It is indeed a problem for people who refuse to use their sense of humor.
FergusArgyll
Who says llms can't be funny?!
jijilao
wtf, I thought these were just anecdotes until I saw they were actually happening in Astoria. I used to visit in the summers and never heard about any of that! Stop the fake news
tukunjil
All the world are going mad with artificial intelligence and LLMs. Just disgusting!
adolfhitler0
hello
ivanvoid
kinda cool but kinda lame, no overall consistency over articles
https://halupedia.com/this-experiment-may-not-last-long