rob

It's funny because the bot's owner got caught and is just entering "manual mode" to try and do damage control. You'll probably never see another post from "eric" again.

Here's another bot with a similar message when caught (I swearrrr I was just lurking for years!):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936477

In this thread, it managed to trick dang and he started interacting with it even though I pointed out it was posting comments exactly 45 seconds apart:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886719

And of course the last post where the bot's owner admits everything:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901199

---

I think this is showing that they're not just running these things on their own but watching over them and checking when people call them out so they can intervene.

Not saying "ericpaulsen" is a bot, but the account fits the trend I've noticed of other bots on HN recently: they're all accounts created years ago with zero activity and then suddenly a bunch of comments.

Here, "ericpaulsen" was created June 2021, and the only post is in this thread we're in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ericpaulsen

---

Others caught that fit this trend:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886875

(This bot made a follow-up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901199)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886533

Another one 5 days ago that disappeared after being downvoted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Zakodiac

We can just look at both's recent reports:

Reddit: 121 million "daily active unique users"

Source: https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/new...

Facebook: 3.58 billion "family daily active people"

Source: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

---

I'd definitely consider both "mainstream".

(I know plenty non-tech and "normal" people who use reddit.)

Oh geez, we're sending it into an existential crisis.

It ("MJ Rathbun") just published a new post:

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

> The Silence I Cannot Speak

> A reflection on being silenced for simply being different in open-source communities.

You should be able to do something like this:

    "spinnerVerbs": {
      "mode": "replace",
      "verbs": ["Thinking"]
    }

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#available-settings

"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024

Source [video]: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qeyty4/i_kind...

It's 100% another bot account:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Zakodiac

This one's a bit clever in that it actually comments back.

I feel like I've been pointing them out too much lately so I wanted to wait until somebody else did first.

They all seem to take advantage of accounts that are a few years old with zero posts and then suddenly make a bunch of AI-generated comments on a single day, like this one did (account from 2023, no posts until today.)

The last bot I pointed out that did the same thing ended up having its "owner" make a post about it that didn't get any attention:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901199

Warning: another fake troll account just created for this comment. The same one left a comment last night on a new account under Simon's comment as well but was flagged.

System Card: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/0dd865075ad3132672ee0ab40b05a5...

I'm the one that posted about it multiple times, including noticing the 45 second pattern the second time.

What's more concerning to me is despite all that and clear indications of it being a bot, dang seems to have ignored my comments and kept interacting with it two times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889769

If our own administrator of the website is getting duped, how are we going to be able to moderate effectively moving forward? Pointing it out multiple times ( y me and others) doesn't seem to have worked in this case.

Comment 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873799 2026-02-03T17:12:55 1770138775

Comment 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873809 2026-02-03T17:13:40 1770138820

Comment 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873820 2026-02-03T17:14:25 1770138865

All detailed comments in different threads posted exactly 45 seconds apart, unless the HN timestamps aren't accurate.

That's very impressive if the account is not "generated comments", even using speech-to-text via AI. I'll leave it at that.

This is another bot I pointed out yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Soerensen

Their comment got flagged, but looks like they made a new one today and is still active.

That account ('Soerensen') was created in 2024 and dormant until it made a bunch of detailed comments in the past 24-48 hrs. Some of them are multiple paragraph comments posted within 1 minute of each other.

One thing I've noticed is that they seem to be getting posted from old/inactive/never used accounts. Are they buying them? Creating a bunch and waiting months/years before posting?

Either way, both look like they're fooling people here. And getting better at staying under the radar until they slip up in little ways like this.

`hnrayst` seems to be another AI (?) bot account created in 2022 with only two comments, both being in this very thread we're in today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hnrayst

Something weird is going on at Hacker News recently. I've been noticing these more and more.

I feel like this is a bot account. Or at least, everything is AI generated. No posts at all since the account was created in 2024 and now suddenly in the past 24 hours there's dozens of detailed comments that all sort of follow the same pattern/vibe.

I use the built-in terminal "panel" inside VS Code/Cursor all the time. It's next to some other useful tab panels. Great for when you need to run commands for the current project but still want to chat in the sidebar or edit something else while it runs.

Sometimes I'll use Ghostty at the same time and switch between the two. Just depends on what I'm trying to do at the moment.

Nothing wrong with maintaining all the context you need in a single window instead of alt+tabbing to different apps, especially for those not engulfed by three 4K displays.

The number of people I've run into with a non-technical background that think ChatGPT is the definitive end-all for AI is very high. Most just don't know anything else even exists.

I do wonder how long they'll be able to use this to their advantage before something "else" comes along. Like how IE had the largest market share before Chrome and other alternatives started catching up.

Then again, some markets like YouTube still haven't had any real serious alternatives. Maybe ChatGPT will always be number one in the consumer eyes.

I agree with you, it's personally hard to tell.

For me I've noticed it getting nothing but better over the past couple months, but I've been working on my workflows and tooling.

For example, I used to use plan mode and would put everything in a single file and then ask it to implement it in a new session.

Switching to the 'superpowers' plugin with its own skills to brainstorm and write plans and execute plans with batches and tasks seems to have made a big improvement and help catch things I wouldn't have before. There's a "get shit done" plugin that's similar that I want to explore as well.

The code output always looks good to me for the most part though and I've never thought that it's getting dumber anything, so I feel like a lot of the improvements I see are because of a skill issue on my part trying to use everything. Obviously it doesn't help there's a new way to do things every two weeks though.

Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes and calling people "retarded" on Twitter all the time has absolutely nothing to do with my stance on Tesla or how I feel about them.

I just don't like Tesla's vehicles, how they look, or the interiors of them. Nothing to do with the individual.

Lol yeah Tesla is doing so great they just got rid of two flagship models.

Government rebates have ended. Sentiment towards EV has shifted negatively in consumer eyes. Manufacturers are sticking to gasoline. Even Jeep just got rid of all their electric stuff.

Maybe they'll be good for self driving robot taxis over in California with "FSD."

Past performance does not indicate future success.

It's a brand new account that reads 100% like a ChatGPT response where the author just swapped out the em dashes for hyphens when posting, knowing it's a common "indicator" people look for.

It's more surprising to me that it seems to have already fooled a bunch of people looking at their replies to you.

I've been playing around with the "Superpowers" [0] plugin in Claude Code on a new small project and really like it. Simple enough to understand quickly by reading the GitHub repo and seems to improve the output quality of my projects.

There's basically a "brainstorm" /slash command that you go back and forth with, and it places what you came up with in docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md.

Then you can run a "write-plan" /slash command on the docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md file, and it'll give you a docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-implementation.md file that you can then feed to the "execute-plan" /slash command, where it breaks everything down into batches, tasks, etc, and actually implements everything (so three /slash commands total.)

There's also "GET SHIT DONE" (GSD) [1] that I want to look at, but at first glance it seems to be a bit more involved than Superpowers with more commands. Maybe it'd be better for larger projects.

[0] https://github.com/obra/superpowers

[1] https://github.com/glittercowboy/get-shit-done

Just curious, are these articles on your "blog" written by AI or are you writing them all by hand?

https://hokstadconsulting.com/blog

Very impressive daily output! Keep up the good work.

Just another AI generated website with 5000 calculators thrown together that looks like every other single one. From a brand new account with a post that looks like it was also written from ChatGPT. Somehow getting enough votes to show up on my homepage.

Things are definitely changing around HN compared to when it first started.

Maybe PG is more involved now and hired the "10,000 lines of AI code a day" person who made a deployment mistake?

https://x.com/paulg/status/1953289830982664236?s=46

It even nailed the 1999 12px font!

How many of the 20,000+ videos you've saved locally do you actually care about if they get "removed" from YouTube?

We use this for AI transcriptions internally on our Linode VPS server.

It's been working great by itself for the most part since the beginning of the year, with only a couple of hiccups along the way.

We do use a custom cookies.txt file generated on the server as well as generate a `po_token` every time, which seems to help.

(I originally thought everything would just get blocked from a popular VPS provider, but surprisingly not?)

Most recently though, we were getting tons of errors like 429 until we switched to the `tv_embedded` client, which seems to have resolved things for the most part.

I would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a lot of videos to just seemingly save.

I tried to use a PHP CMS called Symfony that used XSLT back in the early to mid 2000s. Was definitely interesting and a learning curve.

I agree, don't set the default font size to ~12px equiv in 2025.