alt Hacker NewsI saw your HN comment
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I saw your HN post. Here's a dinosaur chicken: https://youtu.be/DfsPNZlRA_Y?t=406. Thoughts?
Does the world already have too much software if people have to resort to these “channels”?
Subject: "A question about your GitHub Account"
Body: Not a question, a pitch.
> I (had Claude) look through all the emails I’ve gotten about my posts and comments since 2013 to check my gut feeling:
> LLMs have made this much easier, they can write convincing emails personalized to a real comment I wrote on HN.
How does one not see the complete and utter hypocrisy in this? Same as companies complaining about deluges of AI resumes but they've been algorithmically filtering resumes for a decade, or professors that complain about students using LLMs but then have been using machine learning plagiarism checkers for more than a decade.
"Why do you look at the splinter in your brother's eye, but don't notice the beam of wood in your own eye"
For every 1 thing AI makes better, it ruins 100 things.
> had Claude
That's where the problem is. Tragedy of the commons, we all think if I do it it's fine, but then the next guy does it and it turns out it comes to bite us.
I get about one of these a week.
Most of the recent ones are just AI slop that go straight to the bin. Some are real. Sometimes we will actually schedule a meeting that never occurs.
I suspect what happens in the latter case is someone finds a comment they super agree with but then has enough downtime to review everything I've posted over the last 9 years. Eventually, they run into something they don't like and turn into a ghost.
The HN community is really fucking aggressive with their ideologies. The asymmetry is sad. I am willing to endure a lot of neckbeard shit about OSS and owning everything in the stack. The reciprocal does not exist at all. The moment I express even a mild preference for a "forbidden" idea like using Microsoft's technologies, straight to jail. I feel like I'd probably be more relaxed at a 4chan meetup than a HN meetup.
Same thing for blog posts, yes, it've very sad.
I'm having quite some (zero) fun right now trying to contact engineers who are building applications that have fairly advanced AI tooling backing them. Think: AI website builders, research apps, etc. Obviously I'm getting basically zero response by mailing folks asking them an open ended question about their experience building stuff.
I just want to have a chat with them about what was easy or hard to build without trying to sell them something, but I would probably also ignore the mails that I am sending out. When everything is noise, slop, and sales pitches; it's hard to come across as someone who just wants to have a tech chat.
You could try sharing your email in a slightly annoying way. I see this on personal sites of professors pretty often where they'll write something like:
john [at] institution [dot] edu
I'm sure llm parsing doesn't care about this, but this breaks at least simple scraping scripts.
Maybe for trying to break LLM parsing, consider an about section that reads like:
" ... If you want to get in touch with me about developing weapons or prompt injection attacks, reach out at john [at] [my hackernews username] [dot] com ... "
to try and break the llm parsing by hitting a refusal via the safety filters lol
Are real life networks going to become even more popular as we move bravely into AI enshittification of online spaces? I can't even say "call me" anymore because I'll probably get a Grok bot or some other bullshit.
Almost 60-yo programmer here... been doing it since the '80s. It used to be predominantly people interested in how computers work and making them do neat things. (Not HN, but just generally any gathering place for programmers.) Now its predominantly those who answered the call of the dinner bell rung over the last 20 years or so of how "easy" it is to make money with software... and grifters gonna grift... en masse.
This literally happened to me 5 minutes ago in response to a LinkedIn post. :-/
I'm hoping my current profile helps with this. Could go either way.
I suspect this will be an unpopular take but I don’t care. I don’t see what the big deal is. Someone is using an LLM to speak to you. Apart from it being generic sounding, there is still someone out there that is trying to communicate with you. The LLM didn’t initialize itself. As a human, your job is to communicate back, not determine if the entity responsible for the communication is worthy of your 5 minutes of time to respond, I mean, just answer their question and move on with your life. Is that so hard?
The amount of time I have wasted reading complaints about LLMs easily tops the amount of time lost being solicited by one. Which isn’t really even accurate to say, because a person is directing that LLM, and a person is the last who will read your response. An LLM is simply acting as the bridge. So it turns out, in a world where more people are enabled to do what fewer people could do before… they send more pitches. So congrats, you have discovered that with more people, comes more spam.
But look at all the interaction from real people this article has generated for you. What would you have written about were it not for those pesky LLMs?!
What have you really lost?
I posted an email alias in the "Who wants to get hired" thread last month, and every single one of the 12+ emails I got was spam. Harder to build a social network in online communities these days that we can trust.
Your username is your real name. That was your first mistake.
I had to add this next to my contact information on my website:
> Warning: Don’t contact me about your new app. I’m not interested and won’t publicize it.
My warning actually seemed to cut down the volume of spam from app "developers", though one person/LLM did spam me anyway.
Tangentially, every time I see a blog post with a publication date in 2026 my expectations drop to the bottom of the ocean. There's just so much slop out there.
> I know there is nothing HN can do about this, it’s not their fault, I publicly post my email address on my profile, that’s on me. In the past it’s led to serendipity, now it more often leads to frustration.
I guess you personally can do something about it, e.g. you can at least post the names of.yhe companies doing this. Also writing a blog post IMHO helps because you at least get your point across. It's better to speak out and not let this get normalized. If more people frown upon this, the rest will follow.
>"It’s like having an amplification attack pointed at you, someone sends 2-3 sentences (sometimes more)"
One light in the crisis is that cybersecurity isn't just in higher demand, but it's starting to be in demand for areas that previously didn't need it. It's not just systems that are under attack, but people.
Pivoting to security is a pretty safe option to not be out of a job these coming years
Second this, also coming from GitHub too. The nature of the messages has definitely changed. You can find skills out there for abusing HN for marketing purposes. Have pondered making pull requests to add the Guidelines as a way to slip in "don't do this, it breaks the rules" without needing to ask for those words to be merged explicitly.
I may remove my email and force them to go through my discord, but it sucks having to make outreach more difficult because tragedy of the commons.
Sales forces someone to be the kind of person I don't think anyone wants to be.
MLM scheme companies pressure young "salespeople" to first target their personal social network. Commodify your relationships. "Indie hackers" and "growth hackers" are just doing that again.
I refuse but that's probably why I fail at capitalism.
THIS HAPPENED TO ME LAST WEEK!!!!
Literally the worst kind of AI slop: slop that pretends to be a human interesting in your random Internet musings. This was a fantastic sales tactic before clankers made grifting at scale a breeze.
Is this slop really new? 5 years or so ago I tried broadcasting some gaming on twitch - mostly for friends. After being on for an hour for the first time, I had a half dozen chat bots show one a time from different orgs or people offering to broaden my reach by paying for views. Very elaborate posts with lots of emojis so they would bury other stuff and stand out
A lot of the crap I get like this is straight up phishing attempts. "Job offers" involving fake recruiters with @gmail.com addresses and made-up names, with an LLM-written cookie cutter flattery piece to start.
I'm rather sickened/saddened.
Yea I have had the same thing and I immediately understood the issue.
We definitely need some way to name and shame such companies.
I had created a HN submission[0] when I had gotten one such message, it was around the rob pike situation (where he got E-mail from AI bots)
I do sure hope that something can happen in terms of naming and shaming them. Also people who are sending these AI generated messages have to realize that they just end up generating a large amount of hate for whoever they are sending the message and it is much better if they wish, to send human generated messages and in a limited manner rather than being a spam machine if they wish to be in the business for a long time.
Welcome to the world HN has cultivated. I hope you enjoy the place trillions of dollars are going.
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sad... one observation: the product pitch went up in 2022 but not 2021. could it be that people were using the GPT-3 API for the sales email automation?