[icyfox]

Exactly half of these HN usernames actually exist. So either there are enough people on HN that follow common conventions for Gemini to guess from a more general distribution, or Gemini has memorized some of the more popular posters. The ones that are missing:

- aphyr_bot - bio_hacker - concerned_grandson - cyborg_sec - dang_fan - edge_compute - founder_jane - glasshole2 - monad_lover - muskwatch - net_hacker - oldtimer99 - persistence_is_key - physics_lover - policy_wonk - pure_coder - qemu_fan - retro_fix - skeptic_ai - stock_watcher

Huge opportunity for someone to become the actual dang fan.

[giancarlostoro]

Before the AI stuff Google had those pop up quick answers when googling. So I googled something like three years ago, saw the answer, realized it was sourced from HN. Clicked the link, and lo and behold, I answered my own question. Look mah! Im on google! So I am not surprised at all that Google crawls HN enough to have it in their LLM.

I did chuckle at the 100% Rust Linux kernel. I like Rust, but that felt like a clever joke by the AI.

[dotancohen]

I laughed at the SQLite 4.0 release notes. They're on 3.51.x now. Another major release a decade from now sounds just about right.

[schaum]

Every few years I stumble across the same java or mongodb issue. I google for it, find it on stackoverflow, and figure that it was me who wrote that very answer. Always have a good laugh when it happens.

Usually my memory regarding such things is quite well, but this one I keep forgetting, so much so that I don't remember what the issue is actually about xD

[vidarh]

I've run into my own comments or blog posts more often than I care to admit...

[QuantumNomad_]

ziggy42 is both a submitter of a story on the actual front page at the moment, and also in the AI generated future one.

See other comment where OP shared the prompt. They included a current copy of the front page for context. So it’s not so surprising that ziggy42 for example is in the generated page.

And for other usernames that are real but not currently on the home page, the LLM definitely has plenty occurrences of HN comments and stories in its training data so it’s not really surprising that it is able to include real usernames of people that post a lot. Their names will be occurring over and over in the training data.

[NooneAtAll3]

one more reason to doubt that it's Ai-generated

[joaogui1]

HN has been used to train LLMs for a while now, I think it was in the Pile even

[never_inline]

It has also fetched the current page in background. Because the jepsen post was recently on front page.

[morkalork]

I may die but my quips shall live forever

[atrus]

So many underscores for usernames, and yet, other than a newly created account, there was 1 other username with an underscore.

[robocat]

In 2032 new HN usernames must use underscores. It was part of the grandfathering process to help with moderating accounts generated after the AI singlarity spammed too many new accounts.

[WorldPeas]

my hypothesis is they trained it to snake case for lower case and that obsession carried over from programming to other spheres. It can't bring itself to make a lowercaseunseparatedname

[maxglute]

You can straight up ask Google to look for reddit, hackernews users post history. Some of it is probably just via search because it's very recent, as in last few days. Some of the older corpus includes deleted comments so they must be scraping from reddit archive apis too or using that deprecated google history cache.

[never_inline]

This is definitely based on a search or page fetch, because there are these which are all today's topics

- IBM to acquire OpenAI (Rumor) (bloomberg.com)

- Jepsen: NATS 4.2 (Still losing messages?) (jepsen.io)

- AI progress is stalling. Human equivalence was a mirage (garymarcus.com)

[tempestn]

The OP mentioned pasting the current frontpage into the prompt.

[DANmode]

What % of today’s front page submissions are from users that have existed 5-10 years+?

(Especially in datasets before this year?)

I’d bet half or more - but I’m not checking.

[vitorgrs]

It does memorize. But that's not actually very news.... I remember ChatGPT 3.5 or old 4.0 to remember some users on some reddit subreddts and all. Saying even the top users for each subreddit..

The thing is, most of the models were heavily post-trained to limit this...

[skywhopper]

That’s a lot more underscores than the actual distribution (I counted three users with underscores in their usernames among the first five pages of links atm).

[hurturue]

either you only notice the xxx_yyy frequent posters or it's quite interesting that so many have this username format

[AceJohnny2]

Aw, I was actually a bit disappointed how much on the nose the usernames were, relative to their postings. Like the "Rust Linux Kernel" by rust_evangelist, "Fixing Lactose Intolerance" by bio_hacker, fixing an 2024 Framework by retro_fix, etc...

[dang_fan0]

I was here first