Hacker News: m_w_

New comment by m_w_ in "Ask HN: How do systems (or people) detect when a text is written by an LLM"

m_w_ — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:07:13 +0000

I don’t think there’s a reliable system or API for doing so, unclear that arms race will ever favor the side of the detectors.

As far as how I / other people do it, there are some obvious styles that reek of LLMs, I think it’s chatgpt.

There’s a very common structure of “nice post, the X to Y is real. miscellaneous praise — blah blah blah. Also curious about how you asjkldfljaksd?"

From today:

This comment is almost certainly AI-generated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47658796

And I'm suspicious of this one too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660070 - reads just a bit too glazebot-9000 to believe it's written by a person.

New comment by m_w_ in "Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands under Corsair"

m_w_ — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:43:01 +0000

Unfortunate, but as others point out, quality was on the decline for a while now. That said, I use their iteration of Holy Pandas on every keyboard I can. Wish I had hoarded some when they were still available.

New comment by m_w_ in "Claude Is Down"

m_w_ — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:25:10 +0000

We should at least get a free 10-pull for this interruption.

New comment by m_w_ in "CityofGits is The Next Viral Minecraft. This is amazing"

m_w_ — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:38:16 +0000

> Next Viral Minecraft

???

New comment by m_w_ in "Show HN: I was laid off, so I built a NerdWallet for startup equity liquidity"

m_w_ — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:32:19 +0000

The text on the home page appears LLM-generated (em dashes, is real) which imo will make it harder to build trust. For something that people are sensitive and confused about, a more human disposition is likely to be helpful. Just my two cents.

New comment by m_w_ in "Show HN: fftool – A Terminal UI for FFmpeg – Shows Command Before It Runs"

m_w_ — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:01:34 +0000

Yeah this sort of obvious AI-posting needs to be obliterated, especially in this case where there’s no source code. Could just as easily be malware.

New comment by m_w_ in "GitHub having issues [resolved]"

m_w_ — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:31:17 +0000

Seems like the xkcd [1] for internet infrastructure that was posted earlier [2] should have github somewhere on it, even if just for how often it breaks. Maybe it falls under "whatever microsoft is doing"

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p204nx/ac... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230704

New comment by m_w_ in "Show HN: HN Bot Detector - Detects LLM-Generated Comments on Hacker News"

m_w_ — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:12:58 +0000

Needs some work: https://hn-bot-detector.vercel.app/s/DLF-nGLj

New comment by m_w_ in "Launch HN: OctaPulse (YC W26) – Robotics and computer vision for fish farming"

m_w_ — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:38:04 +0000

^ no way this was tested by anyone with eyes before it was deployed

New comment by m_w_ in "How AI skills are quietly automating my workday"

m_w_ — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:02:35 +0000

Unfortunately obviously written with AI - overly focused on everything being 'meaningful', 'real', 'actual', etc.

New comment by m_w_ in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

m_w_ — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:52:37 +0000

"is real" is another big red flag, go search this in comments. There appear to be at least three accounts posting direct LLM outputs.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

New comment by m_w_ in "Cache Monet"

m_w_ — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:08:58 +0000

An all-time classic, glad to see it's been unchanged for at least a decade

And you dip dip, dip...

New comment by m_w_ in "Hacking Moltbook"

m_w_ — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:04:34 +0000

"lol" said the scorpion. "lmao"

Not the first firebase/supabase exposed key disaster, and it certainly won't be the last...

New comment by m_w_ in "Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow"

m_w_ — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:58:36 +0000

^^ A lovely gateway to the world of single panel comics, really enjoyed the Solar Sands video on the topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4npsyTE-m_k)

New comment by m_w_ in "Vargai/SDK – JSX for AI video, declarative programming language for Claude Code"

m_w_ — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:44:59 +0000

If you told me this was satire, I might respond that it's too on-the-nose. I really doubt that Spotify would be happy that their logo is front-and-center here.

New comment by m_w_ in "Fuck You, I Won't Use Tailwind"

m_w_ — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 21:11:54 +0000

Someday we'll be past bad words = funny, but until then we'll have to deal with dreck like this.

New comment by m_w_ in "Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One"

m_w_ — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:45:38 +0000

I don't understand this comment at all - it's very obviously written about personal experience with development, doesn't read like it was written with AI, and the sentiment is nice.

Sure, the projects mentioned aren't the most impressive pieces of software ever written, but isn't that kind of the point of the article?

New comment by m_w_ in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

m_w_ — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 21:14:36 +0000

> Presumably, these drugs are (ridiculously tightly) controlled to prevent society-wide harm.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean - but I think almost any college student would disagree with this presumption.

> Do you have a source for the benefits giving way to problems long-term?

Although a very long read, I found this to be very insightful:

> It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms.

https://archive.is/20250413091646/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

New comment by m_w_ in "SIMA 2: An agent that plays, reasons, and learns with you in virtual 3D worlds"

m_w_ — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:10:56 +0000

I can't speak to the content of the actual game being played, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was an in-game text prompt:

> "The house that looks like a ripe tomato!"

that was transformed into a "user prompt" in a more instructional format

> "Go to the tomato house"

And both were used in the agent output. At least the Y-axes on the graphs look more reasonable than some other recent benchmarks.

New comment by m_w_ in "The kind of company I want to be a part of"

m_w_ — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 13:47:37 +0000

Glad the snippet is == 1, this problem drives me extra insane when it doesn't handle the zero case. Not only has my upload failed for some mysterious reason, I have successfully uploaded zero item!