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I get the feeling Colin may have already automated this and it's a bot posting these things.
by d4nt 13y ago
I get the feeling Colin may have already automated this and it's a bot posting these things.
- ColinWright 13y agoI did have, but it's been permanently disabled. I got too much grief over it. I have scripts to assist, but all these posts are "by hand". They don't take much time, and occasionally during the search and confirmation phase I stumble across other things that are interesting, so there is some reward.
- Udo 13y agoI think it makes sense to have that bot as an actual separate site feature. Personally, it's not something I'd want to be mixed in with normal comments.
- narag 13y agoWhat about offering it as a service to the submitter from the submission page?
- DanBC 13y agoOr even a browser extension?
- travoltaj 13y agoOr a separate browser just for that? Or maybe a Linux Distro? A HN Smartphone!
- keithpeter 13y agoI have taken the precaution of searching for phrases in titles of older pages before submitting (I submit seldom) and have not submitted if previously discussed. Such a feature would be good I think.
- keithpeter 13y agoScript assisted manual commands are something I use a lot as well, I can hack up scripts and cope with minor changes in data format &c. I'm interested in the reaction to automated posting but the comparative acceptance of 'by hand' posting. Is that simply frequency? Are you selecting which historic threads to run searches against?
- ColinWright 13y agoI think in part many people were just upset at having a 'bot posting. Thin end of the wedge, and all that. Others didn't like the tone of the message, seeing it as a rebuke. This is why when I do it "by hand" I make sure I hunt out previous discussions, and if there are none, make a note of that. I can script it all, but with the general hostility I've decided that I'll run the searches for myself because there are often interesting things turn up. Then I post my results because, well, why not? If I found it interesting, others may as well. More than once I've caught myself constructing replies on negative results and deleted them. I may yet just stop entirely.
- chris_wot 13y agoI, for one, would be very sad if you stopped posting to HN.
- tokenadult 13y agoI deeply appreciate Colin's posts about previous submissions and routinely upvote them. What I like about them, as someone who has been on Hacker News 1838 days now, is that they answer the "Haven't I seen this before?" question that often pops into my mind when I see a recurrently posted story. Because this site's name is Hacker News, after all, I expect to see new stories submitted here, so when an old story is submitted it's helpful to know where the previous discussion is.