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Comment by ChadNauseam | Hacker News Reader

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I'm of the opinion that their post is still human-written. They describe in their first blog post that it's human written (which could be a lie, but oh well) and their other blog posts seem to have the same informal lowercase hyphenated writing style. Sentance length varies throughout the posts. Sure, you could prompt this writing style, but I lean towards thinking that the piece is human written.

The fact that terms like Aho-Corasick, PLDI, Go, etc. are properly capitalized, including if they begin sentences, but otherwise sentences are uncapitalized, makes me think it's an explicit LLM instruction "don't capitalize the start of sentences" rather than writing style.

ChatGPT also loves Aho-Corasick and seems to overuse it as an optimization fall back idea. ChatGPT has suggested the algorithm to me but the code ended up slowing down a lot.

ChatGPT was heavily RL'd on competitive programming in 2025, and aho-corasick is a traditional algorithm in the competitive programming space.

What's with this silly "all lower case" style lately?

Jack Dorsey's layoff message last month did the same thing.

Is it some kind of "Prove you're not an AI by purposely writing like an idiot" or something?

it's been common in the unix/c/lisp worlds since before you were born

when 6 bit ascii was all caps only, people got used to monocase, then 7-bit lowercase ascii blew in a fresh wind.

What a condescending comment. It's too bad I can't vote you down.

not anti-capitalist, just a subtle preference away from capitalism

No, this is just what that writing style looks like. Names and acronyms are usually capitalized normally.

I keep being surprised by the magnitude of the disconnect between this place and the other circles of hell. I'd have thought the Venn diagram would have a lot more overlap.

Oh the venn diagram might be big, the HN population just has a lot of variance I think, and is less of a community per se. I don't doubt what you're saying, though in the grand scheme of things, I think the "too lazy to hit shift" population dwarfs any of these groups.

Yeah, I can agree with the variance. Except that the "too lazy to hit shift" community is not something I would ever confuse with people writing long form articles about their regex engine research that they'll be presenting at PLDI.

The confusion might be understandable for people who have never encountered this style before, but that's still a very uncharitable take about an otherwise pretty interesting article.

It is human written and i've thoroughly went over every paragraph but i did use some help with wording. i suppose it does show now that you mention it

It does but apparently not to the point that it bothers most people. So I guess I wouldn't worry about it. Keep up the good work on making regex faster!

This reads nothing like any AI text I've read before.

This is pretty clearly written by a human.

I also have the impression that the writing was at least "enhanced" with an LLM. For example, the amount of " - " dashes (over 60) is much higher than in a normal text.

By the way, I consider it a pretty disgraceful defect of HN that people routinely "flag" opinions merely because they disagree. The flag is for spam, not for downvoting.

Haha. But I guess it proves my assertion that "we can still tell" was wrong. Scary to think about the future though. Soon less RLHF'd models will be available, and it won't be so easy to recognize their tells. I don't think the whole post was written by an LLM in one prompt and I'm sure it was actually a lot of work to write, but yeah, it was definitely enhanced by one.

It reminds me of how peer review is supposed to be blind, but certain authors like Simon Peyton Jones have such a distinctive voice that surely reviewers instantly know when a paper is by him. The models have been successfully made to talk in a particular way, and it's very clear once you becomes familiar with it. My guess is that most HN users are not familiar and I just sound like a crazy person to them

The author admitted it in another comment anyway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47494833

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