Not that I mind, but getting your HN submission in within 30 seconds of my blog post going up is very impressive if you're not a robot.
SELECT AVG(score) AS avg_score, COUNT(* ) AS num, REGEXP_EXTRACT(url, r'//([^/]*)/') AS domain FROM [fh-bigquery:hackernews.full_201510] WHERE score IS NOT NULL AND url <> '' GROUP BY domain HAVING num > 10 ORDER BY avg_score DESC
which returns a list of domains with more than ten submissions sorted by average score. This turns out to be a list of some of the most successful tech blogs on the internet, as well as various YCombinator related materials. Out of the domains with over 100 submissions, daemonology.net has the 9th highest average score per submission. I manually visited all the domains with more than about 30 submissions, found the appropriate xml feeds, and saved them. I added a few websites like eff.org whose messages I think everyone should read anyways.
Then I jumped into python and started trying to figure out how to post to Hacker News. It was a little more complicated than I anticipated [3], but an open source HN app for Android helped me figure it out.
I set up a cron job on my $5 Digital Ocean that runs the script every few minutes (pseudocode):
If you can reach http://news.ycombinator.com, Check all feeds for new entries, Post a new entry to hn, Sleep for an hour before posting another
[1] https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/bigquery-public-da...
[2] The only difference on Reddit is the subreddit system.
[3] After you send a POST request to send to the login screen, Hacker News gives you a url with a unique "fnid" parameter, and you send another POST request to another url with the appropriate "fnid".
There are many more reasons why this isn't a good thing for HN. For example, it's better for submissions from popular sites to be distributed across a wide range of accounts. That gives more users a chance to feel like they're making important contributions, and gives the community (and authors) a clearer sense of the audience.
There are lots of ways to write software to interact with HN, and lots of users with the ability to do it, so we really depend on the good will of the community only to do that when it serves the whole.
Compare these timestamps (hover over date): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dwaxe%20eff&sort=byPopularity&... To the RSS feed: https://www.eff.org/rss/updates.xml
Humans don't post everything from an RSS feed within 10 minutes!
Presumably to farm karma for some other purpose.
I once observed that everything that shows up here eventually shows up in a particular cluster of subreddits and vice versa. Usually with a lag of 24-48 hours.
I half-jokingly floated the idea that one could write a karma arbitrageur bot which cross posts between HN and those subreddits.
I was told that I would be banned. Not just the bot: me.
Your domain seems to have been added recently [1]. Congratulations!
So whether you choose to blog about tarsnap or anything else, chances are that it'd be posted to HN before you're able to.
And to your question, dwaxe is not a bot (there are comments associated with the account too), and this has happened before (apparently a lightning fast submitter):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12218797
Of course he/she could still be running a script.
I'll probably do that next time. I didn't think it would matter! (And really it doesn't -- it's not as if I need the karma points.)
It's the principle of the matter! Does HN allow bot submissions?
Cyborg. Story submission is clearly robotic, but there's a lot of charmingly humanesque entries under dwaxe's comments:
(I got better.)
Side question: I wonder when AI pass Hacker News Turing test. So bot can trick us into being human by HN comments.