Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

  mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.

This line stood out to me because I've seen it before. There's someone (or a group of someones) who repeatedly posts this same rant about Stripe on both Reddit and HN, slightly modifying the claimed business. For example, one iteration was a cell phone store in Denver that had their funds held after using their Stripe account to sell a used vehicle:

Four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868

The Reddit post linked to by ^^: https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_...

60 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33254485

Note how the following paragraph appears word-for-word the same in all three posts (select, ctrl+c, ctrl+f to verify):

  If you do a little bit of research about this topic,
  [...]
  mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.

That is indeed weird. Maybe someone asked ChatGPT to write a Stripe rant here to troll HN.

I'm not going to say the writing here is bad, but in most examples I've seen, ChatGPT is quite a bit more polished.

That said, the rant seems pretty clear. But I have no clue as to how truthful.

For fun, I've asked OpenGPT-3 and ChatGPT to write a few rants like this. They both tend to produce much shorter, much more abstract rants without fixating on details (like lack of customer support) excessively.

For example: > I can't believe XXXXX is holding my payments for at least 120 days for KYC checks. I'm a merchant whose money is frozen and I can't access it. This is totally unacceptable and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with this. How am I supposed to run my business when I can't access my funds? If they don't change their policy soon, I'm going to have to find another payment processor. XXXXX is taking advantage of merchants and needs to be held accountable. #XXXXXSucks #PaymentProcessorAbuse

GPT-3 in particular likes to put stop sequences (things you would expect at the end of text, like hashtags) after their rants, and no matter how much I try to remove them, it will put more and still produce a short rant.

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