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Comment by peterldowns | Hacker News Reader

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peterldowns

How did this new account `vertigoruntime` get three posts on the front page, all in the last day?

- This post

- The DeepMind Institute https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727659

- Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49723408

based on their account submission history they have a 25% hit rate (!) Seems very, very weird.

View on HN

It would appear no one else submitted the posts in question, so the most obvious answer is the account is finding interesting articles that no one else has found. It would be one thing if it won out of many dupe posters, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening.

This is valid.

1. each one is a first-party vendor announcement, submitted very close to the announcement and under the vendors headline.

2. Titles are "verbatim" vendor headlines. No editorializing which follows HN guidelines to the letter.

3. Someone; a script/agent is watching vendor feeds and X accounts then submitting within minutes of the posting.

4. Altman/Navier–Stokes post got [duped] so prob not inside thing.

High frequency karma farming.

You aren't serious about high-frequency karma ("HFK") unless you colocate your equipment with the routing for your sources so you can beat your HFK competition to a submission by at least 200ms.

We will have reached HFK-ception when the bots are fighting to be the first to submit "How I used AI to build a High-Frequency Karma Farming Bot on Hacker News."

Then a week later: "Paul Graham announces a 100000$/month high priority access plan to the HackerNews via YC API." :)

YC already announced something along these lines.

re: https://www.ycombinator.com/early-access

Oh my... I should be more careful in my predictions :)

Their scraper is physically really close to the internet building!

Totally unrelated but I google'd their username to see if there was a clue, and I had no idea this feed existed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

...does noob here just refer to a new (green) user? Or is it something else?

Technically “new user” I think.

Noob comes from newb, which comes from newbie. Some argue it comes from "nubile" but I don't personally buy that etymology. I distinctly remember "newb" followed by "noob" but that was eons ago.

Always thought it was "new" but made to sound like "boob" because it's funny.

And not related to Safire's "nattering nabobs of negativism," the originals of whom SF's Nob Hill eponymizes.

maybe someone wrote a classifier (or LLM wrapper) to find posts that will rank on hn

They are all valid front page submissions by the looks of them and they appear to be the first ones submitted. It wouldn’t be hard to do if you cared enough to configure notifications for frontier announcements. If someone were using technology to influence submissions or misuse HN, that would be a concern but I don’t see any evidence of that.

To directly answer your question, my guess is they have an alert set up for various places on the internet, and are able to post the links faster than anyone else. Maybe that part is automated.

AI product updates probably tend to rank very well here. If you look at the domains the user is submitting, they’re pretty normal: twitter accounts of tech CEOs, big company blogs, etc.

If I saw a bunch of blogs with affiliate links or landing pages for slop products I’d be more suspicious.

> putting my tinfoil hat on and awaiting for replies

I just have RSS feeds of news in AI circles that may be cool, built an entire tracker around it - helps me pick up new stuff on time !

this post became a great "Show HN" for it

What made you just start posting on HN? Welcome and thanks for the links!

Any chance you could drop the set of feeds? Would be very interested!

I question all the time what dictates the posts I see on the front page every day, and whether or not it's truly based on organic interest. i wish i could say i up/down vote frequently but i do not and i wonder if that's true for most people.

You can make your post on top in some services by paying 5 dollars on fiver. I asked before about HN, and someone said it is hard to do... Maybe they found a way?

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