I've made a couple of friends from similar positions in that thread talking about projects and have been the occasional good samaritan reaching out to those whose resume / site is down or locked for some reason. It's not all bots, but it certainly is annoying. Actually, HN has had the highest signal to noise ratio I've seen so far for employment.
Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
221–230 of 291 posts
Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd probably use either a semicolon or a period there. But this demonization of a perfectly reasonable English punctuation mark absolutely has to stop.
It's fine to criticize a comment that looks like AI in a thread where someone complains about AI. The sentence has exactly same meaning if they'd use a single "-" as well. I don't know which browsers have s where double "--" is turned into emdash, but on the systems I'm familiar with one needs to go certain lengths before an emdash appears. Emdash does not magically appear, and it seems some people love playing with…
I type punctuation deliberately, and have done so for over a decade. A Compose key is a wonderful thing. Curly quotes, em dashes, en dashes, minus signs, narrow no-break spaces and quite a lot more—I type them because that’s what I mean.
See also: https://chrismorgan.info/.XCompose>, https://chrismorgan.info/ai>.
You will find more than a few here on HN that type what they want rather than what standard keyboards make easiest.
Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
#223[deleted]
Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
#224Spam is one thing, another is scammer trying to access my machine (btw the same one hacked axios later)
https://trysound.io/try-not-to-get-scammed-while-looking-for...
Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
No space em dash = a real person who has been bulldozed by LLMs using it with spaces.
Nah, I decided on em dashes with no space many years ago. In Australia, en dash with spaces is more popular now. Em dash without spaces is the older style. I deliberately chose the older style: for I say, the old is good.
Just wait until I decide to go all in on TWO-EM DASH⸺I have thought for a long time that EM DASH isn’t wide enough. Or maybe THREE-EM DASH⸻though it’s normally too wide. But alas, font support isn’t good on these so you might get bad alignment or line-height inconsistency; and I might end up wanting to surround it with THIN SPACE or HAIR SPACE, and HN mangles exotic spaces to just SPACE. :-(
(Honestly, my original comment would be improved by using TWO-EM DASH, or maybe even THREE-EM.)
Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
No space em dash = a real person who has been bulldozed by LLMs using it with spaces.
I’ve never figured out how to actually make an emdash on my keyboard (or any 7 bit clean keyboard). I had to look it up. No one does this dance in factor of a single hyphen other than a machine my friend, spaces or no. —__–
Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also have no spaces around the em dash. Must be followers of Chicago Manual of Style (and not AP Stylebook.)
Or we follow Occam's razor and accept that a random guy whose comment looks like AI in a tech forum discussing AI is not an advanced scribe following a certain school of writing, but rather some vibe coder who AI-optimizes their comments.
This is HN. We’re not typical people. Quite a few of us have been consistently and deliberately using em dashes for a long, long time.
Please face it: especially on a site like HN, you will encounter em dashes from real humans, whether converted by some system software or typed deliberately.
Em dashes are a weak signal at best. On HN, they’re a very weak signal.
Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
#228I get lots of spam/scams after posting to Who Wants to be Hired. Posting here is not really going to fix it, it's just bots. I use a new temporary email whenever I post in those threads so I can tell my mail server to reject them. (But honestly I don't think I'm going to bother posting anymore since I haven't gotten a single non-spam lead at all from those threads.)
Likewise. I have completely stopped posting in these threads due to spam, wish there was an easy fix.
Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have the technology to scrape your profile page too.
Of course we do. but it's not happening. Not yet anyways. Or not at scale. It's like the joke with the bear. I don't need to outrun the bear, I only need to outrun you. But I didn't post this to gloat, just to point out that spammers are lazy. Of course if everyone moves their email into the profile then this will change, but even if everyone reading this thread does it, most others won't, so I trust that this will s…
It is happening, within the last two months, by multiple recruiting startup services scraping/monitoring HN, and matching that up somehow with email addresses, in an automated way.
Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should call these folks/companies out by name, they aren't respecting you, your time, or situation.
I received the same Alya email. This vibe-coded site was linked. https://mydaughteralya.com/
Lord what stupid branding - needlessly so, as the functionality is not unreasonable.