Bullshit.js

[mourner]

Author here — really happy that a joke project I did 7.5 years ago (while working at a typical outsourcing company) finally got a spotlight on HN!

Please feel free to contribute! I cleaned up and modernized the repo a little recently, but didn't revise the terms list properly in a very long time (except a few obvious additions like "autonomous" and "AI"), so it's a little outdated. There's so much new bullshit to add!

[wernsey]

I ran it on my employer's website, and some words it didn't catch were: "passion", "diversity", "proven", "mission", "high performance" and "high availability"

[giancarlostoro]

Looks like you got a few PR's out of it mine included (serverless - all in good fun):

https://github.com/mourner/bullshit.js/pulls

[rajesh-s]

Reminds me of [this](https://twitter.com/BullshitQuantum) bot on Twitter.

[asdfman123]

> Oracle Bullshits Products: Oracle Bullshits Server

> Brings all industry-bullshitting bullshits of the Oracle Bullshits Bullshit bullshit to organizations requiring bullshits deployment options. Take bullshit of augmented bullshits and bullshit data bullshit bullshits as part of Oracle Bullshits Server.

https://www.oracle.com/solutions/business-analytics/products...

[tomp]

Original:

> Brings all industry-leading capabilities of the Oracle Analytics Cloud platform to organizations requiring on-premises deployment options. Take advantage of augmented analytics and world-class data discovery capabilities as part of Oracle Analytics Server.

This is truly brilliant.

[mourner]

Ha, looks like we missed the word "augmented" here :) Wow, that page is a treasure trove of meaningless buzzwords.

[omarhaneef]

There seems to be some kind of error: I ran this on my forthcoming study of cow manure and it translated the whole thing into business speak.

[ehsankia]

It would actually be a great feature to also convert the word "bullshit" into a random keyword from the dictionary. This way you can run it twice and then generate brand new summary of the service.

[rayalez]

So I take it you've turned it into a VR cryptocurrency startup and are closing a $140 million series B round by now?

[ent101]

The dictionary it uses is even more entertaining: https://github.com/mourner/bullshit.js/blob/master/src/terms...

[haolez]

Honorable mentions are “blockchain” and “internet of things” :)

[iandinwoodie]

It’s funny that this dictionary could serve a competing purpose; it’s a goldmine for someone looking for buzzwords.

[velox_io]

This is the first thing I went looking for after clicking the button.

I can't believe uptime isn't in there.

[ghettoimp]

This is actually really useful. I just ran this as a sanity check on a long document I wrote, and it pointed out a bunch of lousy writing. Even better, it seems you can use it with the Hemingway App (http://www.hemingwayapp.com/) as you're writing...

[mettamage]

You mean, you pass the dictionary over your document and see how the document is too long-winded in a sense?

[mlevental]

a more general such tool: http://proselint.com/

[klenwell]

Bullshitter, bullshit thyself:

Bullshit.js is a bullshit, bullshit bullshit JavaScript bookmarklet that will bullshit you to evaluate the bullshit of bullshit text on any Web resource, cultivating bullshit bullshit and bullshit thinking.

I love the expression, "cultivating bullshit bullshit and bullshit thinking". Ironically, it really cuts through the bullshit of "cultivating process-centric innovation and out-of-the-box thinking".

Brings to mind the good old Dada Engine, which was a great practical introduction to Markov chains:

http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/

[_virtu]

One of my favorite reads that has helped me navigate this post fact society is the short essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

It truly nails down the argument that bullshitting is far more dangerous than lying. With the current political climate it helps make a lot more sense of the craziness.

[Nicksil]

Non-mobile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

[rahuldottech]

A PDF of the same can be found here: https://uca.edu/honors/files/2018/10/frankfurt_on-bullshit.p...

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah. Bullshit is the Chaotic Evil of epistemology.

(Key quote from the linked Wiki summary: "Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded.")

[udkl]

Our president bullshits. WeWork bullshit.

Frank was right on the mark 30 years ago!

[untilHellbanned]

Desperately need this in academia. The academic literature is full of hyped-up phrasing. Probably safe to say the more hyped-up something is presented, the less novel it actually is.

[o10449366]

I used to think I wasn't smart enough to read academic articles. Then I realized that most of the authors are just terrible writers or deliberately make their papers as difficult to read as possible to obscure or exaggerate their findings.

[globnomulous]

My former field, in the humanities, prizes clear, direct writing and doesn't suffer bullshit or needless density. It's one of my favorite aspects of the discipline and its culture.

[olalonde]

I haven't noticed that with computer vision papers, maybe it depends on the field? There is sometimes difficult to understand jargon but it's generally not gratuitous.

[hirako2000]

Not wkth bullshit.js takes less than ever to understand and benefit from

[kops]

This made my day. On my startup ideas TODO list there is one PredictiveBullshitMeter that one day will warn you before clicking on a link if the target is full of bullshit. My motivation was terrible news article that appear regularly on Indian newspaper websites where they rehash the same pile of junk again and again to make it look like a full page length article/report. I was hoping for a quick number like a ratio of facts vs garbage but even before clicking on a link. I wanted my computer to do the job of prefetching the content and parsing it for facts. Anyways thanks for making this thing. Feels nice to know there are other people who suffer from the same pain :-) but thankfully are more proactive to do something about it.

[modeless]

In the same vein as the surprisingly funny classic Cloud-to-Butt extension, which I am surprised to find is over 5 years old now: https://theawesomer.com/cloud-to-butt/276065/

[elpablo]

That caused me problems when I edited a wiki page that was subscribed to by about 200 colleagues at Amazon. I changed around 20 mentions of the word cloud on the page to the word butt and hit save without realising.

[TheRealSteel]

A Butt-to-Butt extension? What's the point of that?

[yepthatsreality]

Cloud-to-Butt failed me when I clicked on a link for cloudflare, which had been rewritten for buttflare.com while I was at work.

[TeMPOraL]

I still use it with one of my browsers, but I never remember which one - which leads to occasional surprises on HN :).

[yoz-y]

Reminds me of http://www.sansbullshitsans.com

[lambdanerd]

This worked very well for the Tailwind CSS docs!

"Bullshit CSS is a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bullshit designs without any annoying opinionated styles you have to fight to override."

[dividuum]

As always with these bookmarklets that load additional JS from a remote source: Be sure you understand the possible security implications. You're essentially XSS attacking yourself if that JS source is turning hostile for any reason. One possible solution is to use SRI to ensure the linked JS doesn't load if it changes for any reason, but doesn't work in that case as the CDN (unpkg.com) doesn't add a CORS header.

[ec109685]

It’d be better if they just embedded the whole script in the bookmarklet

[bluecheese]

I made a buzzword-prose generator a few years ago in which we tried to create readable sentences (readable being a relative term of course). For example we had [verb], [noun], [adjective] placeholders and tried to conjugate the verbs correctly.

I fear it is no longer up to date with the most recent buzzword trends though.

http://buzzwordipsum.com https://github.com/inversion/buzzword-ipsum

[SimeVidas]

> The performance benefits and security guarantees offered by AMPHTML ads, which are display ads created using the AMP framework, translate to better advertiser Bullshit, publisher bullshit and overall better bullshit.

https://blog.amp.dev/2019/02/20/using-amp-to-make-display-ad...

[globnomulous]

This is amazing. My training is in languages, and I would love to contribute to this. Holy shit, they even have "going forward." I love, love, love this.

[octosphere]

Single serving site by Brad Frost on bullshit in terms of web design: http://www.deathtobullshit.com (Dug it up from my bookmarks)

[rathel]

> Design-ready bullshits are based on the bullshit (Bullshit)-bullshitted, bullshit-ready Fusion Design Bullshit™ from Synopsys, along with Arm Artisan® Physical IP and POP™ IP for Samsung Foundry's advanced 5LPE process.

LMAO on this one. A worthy successor to "kurwoskrypt" which inserted "kurwa" in random places. ;)

[z3t4]

A side note, browsers are making bookmarklets harder to use in the name of security. Making it possible for web sites to block bookmarklets via Content-Security-Policy.

[noisy_boy]

Choice bits from sap.com:

> SAP sets course for the future with bullshit bullshit

> HR and People bullshit

> Bullshit announcement

> Bullshit and digital core

> Future of bullshit has feelings

And finally:

> Intelligent Bullshit