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Comment by d4nt | Hacker News Reader

I get the feeling Colin may have already automated this and it's a bot posting these things.

I did have, but it's been permanently disabled. I got too much grief over it. I have scripts to assist, but all these posts are "by hand". They don't take much time, and occasionally during the search and confirmation phase I stumble across other things that are interesting, so there is some reward.

I think it makes sense to have that bot as an actual separate site feature. Personally, it's not something I'd want to be mixed in with normal comments.

What about offering it as a service to the submitter from the submission page?

Or even a browser extension?

Or a separate browser just for that? Or maybe a Linux Distro? A HN Smartphone!

I have taken the precaution of searching for phrases in titles of older pages before submitting (I submit seldom) and have not submitted if previously discussed.

Such a feature would be good I think.

Script assisted manual commands are something I use a lot as well, I can hack up scripts and cope with minor changes in data format &c.

I'm interested in the reaction to automated posting but the comparative acceptance of 'by hand' posting. Is that simply frequency? Are you selecting which historic threads to run searches against?

I think in part many people were just upset at having a 'bot posting. Thin end of the wedge, and all that. Others didn't like the tone of the message, seeing it as a rebuke.

This is why when I do it "by hand" I make sure I hunt out previous discussions, and if there are none, make a note of that. I can script it all, but with the general hostility I've decided that I'll run the searches for myself because there are often interesting things turn up. Then I post my results because, well, why not? If I found it interesting, others may as well.

More than once I've caught myself constructing replies on negative results and deleted them. I may yet just stop entirely.

I, for one, would be very sad if you stopped posting to HN.

I deeply appreciate Colin's posts about previous submissions and routinely upvote them. What I like about them, as someone who has been on Hacker News 1838 days now, is that they answer the "Haven't I seen this before?" question that often pops into my mind when I see a recurrently posted story. Because this site's name is Hacker News, after all, I expect to see new stories submitted here, so when an old story is submitted it's helpful to know where the previous discussion is.

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