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Script 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 r
by keithpeter 13y ago
Script 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.