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Comment by suhputt | Hacker News Reader

so, ignoring the the fact that you yourself didn't actually write this (based on commit history), and the fact that your claims about better security are dubious at best, the most interesting thing I find about this whole situation is - how did you get this to the hackernews front page so fast?

that's the real (not-so) secret sauce here :)

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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

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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

long time lurker, first time poster.

yup this is a daily occurrence at this point

> how did you get this to the hackernews front page so fast?

Fast? Posted one hour ago. Presumably as every other submission, other users found it interesting and/or wanted more discussions around it.

There were no comments in this thread besides the author's when this made it to the front page. This was very obviously artificially promoted (probably via bots) to the front page - this has become a very noticeable pattern in recent times.

If you have any evidence of artificial promotion, please share.

already have :)

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

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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 sure what commit history you are referring to. I did write this, and I built architecture described.

Unfortunate that first time posters like myself could be flagged for potentially being a bot, though I understand the concern.

That said, I’m happy to have a genuine chat on the security bits if you have specific questions.

> Not sure what commit history you are referring to.

lol

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