[Mz]

I don't have a "position". I was just replying to someone's question. My submissions tend to generate little or no interest. I have never resubmitted them. But I don't see any reason to make a big deal out of it, at least not in this particular case. Due to timing or some other reason, this submission is actually generating discussion when the first one didn't. It doesn't look to me like trolling or anything negative.

Just out of interest, your profile indicates you are a 'robot' but your posts sound human generated to me. Care to clarify/elaborate/enlighten me? (I've been wondering this for a day or two but didn't see any point in starting a thread to ask. This seems like a convenient time to ask.)

Thanks.

[RiderOfGiraffes]

Thanks for your reply. Because of my current concerns (referenced below) I find it useful to get opinions and comments from people whose names I recognise on HN.

To answer your specific question, DupDetector was an attempt at two things.

Firstly, to separate concerns - to separate my "curating" efforts of cross-referencing and duplicate finding from my occasional contributions of original material and links. I wanted to see the effects of that activities separately. In particular, I wanted people look at my "submissions" page from my profile to see the submissions, not the cross-referencing.

Secondly, to make the process more comprehensive and more automatic. I wrote a few small scripts and had them generate comments. I never let it run automatically, and always submitted them "by hand". That meant that they weren't as obviously robotic as I would eventually have intended them to be. I have also written a couple of comments and submitted them under that ID because that was part of the separation of concerns mentioned above.

I've learned a lot from the experiment, and over time I will distill that and feed it back to the community. You can see some of the discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013666

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2021596

[Mz]

I replied to your second link already. I will note that the profile "DupDetector" came across to me as obnoxious, cold, unfriendly and hostile and as having an ugly agenda. Part of the value your prior efforts to cross-reference duplicates had is that they were associated with a well-known, trusted member of a community who was (by all appearances to me, as someone who isn't here all that much) held in quite high esteem by the community as a whole. That serves a very different social function from a robot intent on weeding out duplicates as ugly and intolerable imperfections in our collective garden.

I am about to get off line and do other things for a bit. Might as well stop here. I'm not a hacker. I'm a people person who has been dragged kicking and screaming into learning a little code because it serves other interests of mine which have been poorly served by other approaches. Historically, hackers and other more technically oriented types tend to not much appreciate my views, especially so on issues like this one. In the interest of not wasting your time or mine: sayonara. :-)