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Auto submission bots on Hacker News
61–70 of 172 posts
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
A CAPTCHA? In a forum for Hackers? Hmm ... interesting ... ADDED IN EDIT: HN voting makes me laugh sometimes - I have no idea why this got a downvote. Thank you - made my day. This is not, let me hasten to add, a request for more. Some things are funny just the once. More than that and I'll really start to question my understanding of the world, let alone just the HN community.
If there's CAPTCHA, then submit an app that collects these images and sends them to your phone. Send back the answer to help the bot.
That would at least slow down the bots based on how attentive the maintainers are. There are of course captcha solving services but this just trades maintainer time for money - trying to run a successful karma hoarding bot would still be death by a thousand papercuts.
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#63Maybe a simple rule could be that if you run an undeclared bot on HN to auto submit stuff that you forfeit your account when you're detected, no matter who you are or what you've done. That way we only get really clever bots that are indistinguishable from really good submitters.
Does this mean you're back on HN? (http://jacquesmattheij.com/Tell+HN%3A+So+Long+and+Thanks+for...)
Or perhaps I missed something during the last few weeks?
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#64I had somebody recently launch into me with a vitriolic attack on HN (they deleted the comment almost immediately) which started with something like "I know you probably think you're special, what with 18K karma and all, but..." People take this karma thing waaaay too seriously. I know I find the site dangerously distracting, and a large part of that is watching the up or downvotes on my comments -- it's kind of a re…
The karma matters precisely because it can't be bought (not in any ordinary way, at least). It represents peer acclaim (or conformity to groupthink). If it was bought and sold, the basis for its value would evaporate.
It's also valuable because it eventually grants the ability to downvote.
(It's annoying to see obvious trolls and spam sitting at 1 and not be able to do anything about it. I'm still a few hundred points away, unless the threshold has gone up again.)
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#65Is HN karma worth anything? Don't get me wrong. I love HN and I think it is unique in its way but I never thought that I could earn a medal because of a lot karma on HN.
I can understand this "function" on StackOverflow (even though I don't have much karma there either) cause karma at StackOverflow can bring in new chances.
My question: Do anyone use HN karma as measurement to see if this guy is worth to hire or worth for something else?
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#66I had somebody recently launch into me with a vitriolic attack on HN (they deleted the comment almost immediately) which started with something like "I know you probably think you're special, what with 18K karma and all, but..." People take this karma thing waaaay too seriously. I know I find the site dangerously distracting, and a large part of that is watching the up or downvotes on my comments -- it's kind of a re…
Two ideas- what do you think?
(1) Keep karma hidden from everyone except the owner of the karma
and/or
(2) Charge a small fee ($10/year) or so to access the site (with certain exceptions to be sure).
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#67Maybe a simple rule could be that if you run an undeclared bot on HN to auto submit stuff that you forfeit your account when you're detected, no matter who you are or what you've done. That way we only get really clever bots that are indistinguishable from really good submitters.
Does this mean you're back on HN? ( http://jacquesmattheij.com/Tell+HN%3A+So+Long+and+Thanks+for... ) Or perhaps I missed something during the last few weeks?
Definitely not.
I just figured that since I submitted this article myself it would be pretty silly to stay out of the comments. Don't take it as a religious thing, I've cut down the time spent on HN by over 90%, I have lots more time to write about other stuff now and I have more time for the people around me. On top of that my out-of-band contacts with HN'ers seem to have only strengthened.
Win-win.
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#68Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles? That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own. Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of wh…
I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could still get yours or others attention…
OK, now I'm confused. The average karma on my HN profile is blank. After reading "hey, the average karma score is gone"[1] I thought that HN had done away with it, but now I see that pretty much everyone has an average karma except me. Could it be because I have only comments but no submissions?
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#69FWIW, I was one of the people running a bot to auto-submit. I've always been a big-iron algorithms programmer, and I've never done much web programming, and certainly never programmed an auto-submitter before. Since I figured most of Jacques' idle thoughts were worth more than half the things making it to the Front Page, I figured it was an ideal time to learn a little about the back-n-forth of a form submission syst…
I came here to this thread only to say this: When reading Jacques' post on his blog, I immediately thought RiderOfGiraffes must be up to one of his social experiments with the community. FWIW, I find your 'work' interesting and the chilled out approach to it, doubly so.
Agreed. The only downside was that I wasn't in on the joke and that quite a bit of the backlash was directed at me, not at the people running the bots.
I also think that it would be prudent for anybody that intends to run any kind of bot on HN to ask PG for permission.
Re: Auto submission bots on Hacker News
#70A related idea I've been toying with is "karmic arbitrage": auto-submitting posts that have been upvoted at proggit and vice versa.
please don't.
As a fellow Jacques, I will cut you a break.
edit: I didn't realise having a name common in Francophonic nations was a downvotable offence.