Bugtraq is back • Hacker News Board

Re: Bugtraq is back

#31

Post by acdha » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

pajamasam wrote: post #21

michaelmior wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The announcement didn't read as AI-generated to me at all. Of course this is far from foolproof, but ZeroGPT says 0% AI.

It contains four emdashes, it overuses the Rule of Three ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ), it has the typical "not X, but Y" sentence, it unduly emphasizes the significance of Buqtrack ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ) ("preservation for the ages", really?). Also, in my experience, LLMs seem to love to say something went "dark" or "silent", to menti…

Em-dashes were in common use long before LLMs existed — anyone saying that’s a sign of LLM use should not be listened to. They’re used by LLMs because they were trained on good writing and we shouldn’t avoid using them any more than we should stop using correct punctuation for the same reason.

Re: Bugtraq is back

#32

Post by PaulRobinson » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

efficax wrote: post #20

PaulRobinson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clearly 100% AI-generated First, show your working - just reads like generic announcement/PR speak from the last 30 years to me. Secondly, could everyone who wants to make comments about AI text in submissions please consider re-reading the comments section of the Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - I'm not sure these comments are in the spirit of the HN community. We should stop this in…

> Today, we bring it back. > I have acquired securityfocus.com and the Bugtraq name. Not to build a museum - to restart the conversation. The mission is unchanged: full disclosure, researcher-first, no corporate filter. This has the ai patter, the rhythm, the “not this, but that” trope, the list of threes, everything about it screams LLM to me

That "trope" is in almost every press release, every corporate announcement I have read in decades.

AI is trained on all that material and regurgitates it. It is trained to do that.

So the problem we have is that AI sounds like that, because humans sound like that. The "identifier" you've found isn't real. It just shows - if an LLM did this - that it's working, and that corporate speak is ubiquitous.

And the lists of threes, man, that's just basic English composition I was taught when I was 8 years old - it's everywhere. It has, to a native English-speaking ear, a rhythm, cadence and elegance. See?

Re: Bugtraq is back

#33

Post by pajamasam » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 11:23 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #31

pajamasam wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It contains four emdashes, it overuses the Rule of Three ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ), it has the typical "not X, but Y" sentence, it unduly emphasizes the significance of Buqtrack ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ) ("preservation for the ages", really?). Also, in my experience, LLMs seem to love to say something went "dark" or "silent", to menti…

Em-dashes were in common use long before LLMs existed — anyone saying that’s a sign of LLM use should not be listened to. They’re used by LLMs because they were trained on good writing and we shouldn’t avoid using them any more than we should stop using correct punctuation for the same reason.

> anyone saying that’s a sign of LLM use should not be listened to

You don't need to believe me. You can read the studies about its statistically higher occurrence in LLM writing vs human writing (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.27006) or you can do the analysis yourself.

Also, no one said you should stop using them. But overusing them, along with emulating some of the other common traits of LLM generated writing, will give people the impression that you didn't bother to write something yourself.

Re: Bugtraq is back

#34

Post by acdha » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 3:13 PM UTC

pajamasam wrote: post #33

acdha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Em-dashes were in common use long before LLMs existed — anyone saying that’s a sign of LLM use should not be listened to. They’re used by LLMs because they were trained on good writing and we shouldn’t avoid using them any more than we should stop using correct punctuation for the same reason.

> anyone saying that’s a sign of LLM use should not be listened to You don't need to believe me. You can read the studies about its statistically higher occurrence in LLM writing vs human writing ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.27006 ) or you can do the analysis yourself. Also, no one said you should stop using them. But overusing them, along with emulating some of the other common traits of LLM generated writing, will…

You’re misunderstanding the problem: LLMs using emdashes more than the average human still doesn’t tell you that the poster you’re interacting with now is an LLM and not one of the many humans who used emdashes before LLMs existed and are the reason why LLM training picked that up as a good trait. Humans shouldn’t stop writing well just because bots were trained to mimic them.

One other problem with this as a heuristic is technical: they used to be hard to enter on Windows so mostly only professionally-edited text there had em-dashes while the ease of entry on Mac, iOS, Android, and to a lesser extent Linux meant that they were more common there. I suspect that this list disproportionately lists Mac users:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...