Comment by toraway

That account is setup pretty well compared to many I see on here, no giant red flags in any individual comment and they’ve prompted/filtered out the repetitive structure decently so they don’t all look exactly the same. But exhibits number of common attributes/failure modes you notice when you spend a while reading through the history of obvious bot comments.

Some of the signs in comment history:

1. Multiple uses of the notorious HN bot phrase “X is real” e.g “The tradeoff is real” Spam bot replies love that, at this point if I read that phrase on HN I immediately become suspicious. Also, ending a comment with an open ended question or random caveat/concern/qualifier too frequently.

2. Rapid fire commenting. Most new HN accounts run by actual people usually ease into commenting regularly after their first comment, spam bots go from 0-100 suddenly replying with detailed, uncannily on-topic comments 1-3x per day

3. Unnaturally on-topic but uncanny valley comments. Humans typically respond to an idiosyncratic idea of what the topic of a discussion is, but bots typically respond with a perfectly responsive summary and/or personal experience.

As for uncanny valley, this is the big one that caught my eye:

  > Love this approach. SQLite's WAL mode + litestream backup handles most durability needs beautifully. The simplicity of keeping state in a single file you can query with SQL is underrated. Going to try this for our next side project.

It’s just … bizarre haha. It’s replying with what is pretty much the most basic, fundamental description of what SQLite is, with zero actual opinion/experience/commentary.

It’s like responding to an article about PepsiCo Q2 Earnings with “Great read - my family of four enjoys drinking Pepsi products, the carbonation and various flavor choices are a big plus compared to other brands”. If it wasn’t a bot it would have to be someone ineptly karma farming, and either is trash deserving of the flags it got.

Plus, the initial comment in this thread while not enough evidence on its own is already suspicious because it’s confidently stating an anecdote about billing that just doesn’t really make sense as if it’s a super common way tokens are billed.

It could be true in their unique case but it’s just weird and presented like it’s common knowledge so comes across either as a human pretending to have experience or a bot slightly off target.

But it’s not enough without the full comment history, and even without a giant smoking gun having seen a lot of bot comment histories it fits the pattern closely enough in most ways to agree with the other commenter (and the flags/HN shadowbanning) that they are a LLM bot.