I just started getting a barrage of these last month. They're just scraping those threads. I don't think there's much to do about it. These aren't "real" hn folks that actually participate here.
That's because you all share your email addresses directly in your posts. I put my email address in my profile, and anyone genuinely interested is just one click away from getting my address from there or from my website which i also link to. Aside from a handful of exceptions I get no spam whatsoever, despite posting for years and not obscuring my address at all. And what I do get is most likely hand-written.
Of course we do. but it's not happening. Not yet anyways. Or not at scale. It's like the joke with the bear. I don't need to outrun the bear, I only need to outrun you.
But I didn't post this to gloat, just to point out that spammers are lazy. Of course if everyone moves their email into the profile then this will change, but even if everyone reading this thread does it, most others won't, so I trust that this will still work for some time.
It is happening, within the last two months, by multiple recruiting startup services scraping/monitoring HN, and matching that up somehow with email addresses, in an automated way.