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Back in 2015 I decided to bot my HN account for fun and karma. I wrote a python script called karmabum that scanned a few dozen RSS feeds every 30 seconds to ca
by robgibbons 5y ago
Back in 2015 I decided to bot my HN account for fun and karma. I wrote a python script called karmabum that scanned a few dozen RSS feeds every 30 seconds to catch fresh articles. When it saw a new article, it launched the Submit page with the form parameters pre-populated. At that point a TamperMonkey userscript took over and submitted the form for me.
Karmabum ran for something like 24 hours, and got me some good karma, before users started complaining and I was quickly thereafter banned. Luckily, dang is very gracious and un-banned my account after I reached out, and to this day I have never botted my HN account again.
These days I use those skills for good, writing E2E tests :)
- NicoJuicy 5y agoHaha, i have a more manual process. A webapp like HN, but crawls RSS. There's a "Post to HN" button, when i think there's something interesting. So it's still a "manual process". I think jacquesm will appreciate this one: https://ibb.co/BsZ95W5 https://ibb.co/BsZ95W5
- hutrdvnj 5y agoI think you were hitting some kind of limit regarding submits per day. I think if you were to throttle such a bot to maybe a few submissions from serious sources per week, then it would likely work. I would guess that many submissions to /newest are indeed autogenerated.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"I would guess that many submissions to /newest are indeed autogenerated" Either this, or the humans run mentally on bot mode.