Is the source code available anywhere? I’ve been mulling over a similar project but don’t have a lot of ML experience myself, would be great to look at the innards of a working example...

An easy way to get started that doesn't use pure ML is Markovify [1]. I used it for a couple of projects last year.

[1] - https://github.com/jsvine/markovify

This blog post and associated github give a good enough intro to get simple examples working: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

I may open source it. It's pretty easy to get started if you leverage pre-existing libraries for Markov chains and Twitter ingestion.

Now do it with Hacker News comments!

"In other news, water is wet"

"This has been known for 10 years, this is not a new discovery"

"Title is clickbait, can someone please update it?"

It exists. :-)

hncynic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578

This is the sort of thing that I'm hoping to see, especially with the recent "Show HN".