Is ccraigIW a script that submits an rss feed every morning? | Hacker News Reader

Is ccraigIW a script that submits an rss feed every morning?

news.ycombinator.com

29 pointsvlad23 comments

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http://www.spoke.com/info/psQAka/CarolineCraig

edited: perhaps this is

Caroline Craig Associate Editor Infoworld Media Group, Inc. 155 Bovet Road Suite 800 San Mateo, CA 94402-3115

Ok, so, as a next step, how about we ask nicely for her to stop?

I'll get it.

The user makes the same submissions at reddit: http://www.reddit.com/user/ccraigIW/

The titles are slightly different so it's either a human or some powerful AI. mtw is right. It's most likely an IW employee (note the username).

Would that be such a bad thing? Some of my best friends are scripts.

It wouldn't be a bad thing if these automated submissions were adding value. Currently, they add much more noise than value and pollute the "new" page.

That's actually an experiment I've been meaning to get around to coding up for quite awhile: create a user to submit every post from 37signals, Joel Spolsky, Seth Godin, etc. Also, factor in top stories from programming reddit, Slashdot with a lot of comments, etc. and see how well it does.

If anyone else wants to do it, I'd be really interested in the result.

It was discussed at length about a year ago. The consensus was it's both not nice and a bad idea in the long term.

Not to diss the idea, which is certainly interesting from an intelllectual standpoint, but I would flag your auto-generated user if I knew what it was.

There's enough noise on the new page already.

I wouldn't be so hasty to call it noise, or more accurately call the manually-submitted articles from those sources signal. How much coverage would you say JoS, 37s blog, seth godin get here already? I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% of all new posts from these blogs wind up here.

That used to be true for xkcd, too, but thankfully it seems to have disappeared. Same might happen to the other blogs you mention, if quality deteriorates. For example JoS lately has been writing more about his office woes and business travels than about software engineering in his blog.

Whats the big difference between a post made by a script or by a human? A clever title?

A post sent by a human indicates that a human has found that particular post interesting. Automatically submitting every article from a blog using a bot I think goes against the spirit of this site. If everyone agrees that every single article on that blog is interesting then they can subscribe to it using RSS and keep the articles out of HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150864

I made an xkcd script and ran it for a week...it did decently well. The community consensus was that most people already have XKCD in their RSS feed, so it's just noise. Something more intelligent that posted stories based on popularity (startup idea anyone?) might fly, but I think people would be pissed if they found out it was a script.

no, see the 3rd submission about cloud computing, it has a different title than the article.

it's most likely a person at infoworld which gets the list of infoworld articles in his/her inbox everyday at 9am, and then submits them dutifully one by one to HN

The HN submission title is the tag line of the article, just below the headline.

I would imagine a script that randomly chooses at low probability to post here with the tag line instead of the main heading. You know, just to mix it up so that we don't suspect it's a bot.

If they were actively trying to pass a turing test, the least they could do is space out the submissions and throw in something that not from infoworld every now and then.

Having a handful posted all at once to the same domain at the same time each day is kind of flagrant.

HN turing test

I'd be curious to know the article submission rate over time. PG?

Even if it was, that's not spam, so no cause for concern.

This is spam. I read HN in hopes of finding new and interesting topics that were thoughtfully considered and submitted by other HN members.

I don't read HN to read InfoWorld articles blindly submitted by an IW employee. If I wanted that I'd go to InfoWorld and subscribe to their RSS feed.

This type of submission behavior should be expressly discouraged on HN. It is selfish and not in the spirit of the site.

It is expressly discouraged, it's just an entirely subjective thing:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I have been watching the HN new queue turn into an "all tech news" feed, at some point it becomes a true firehose and there is not a chance at all of finding anything "thoughtfully submitted."

PG doesn't seem to have an issue with this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475779

I consider submitting -every article- from a large online magazine spam.

Why not just ban Infoworld articles for a week or two to send the message?

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