How did this new account `vertigoruntime` get three posts on the front page, all in the last day?

- This post

- The DeepMind Institute https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727659

- Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49723408

based on their account submission history they have a 25% hit rate (!) Seems very, very weird.

It would appear no one else submitted the posts in question, so the most obvious answer is the account is finding interesting articles that no one else has found. It would be one thing if it won out of many dupe posters, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening.

I just have RSS feeds of news in AI circles that may be cool, built an entire tracker around it - helps me pick up new stuff on time !

Totally unrelated but I google'd their username to see if there was a clue, and I had no idea this feed existed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

maybe someone wrote a classifier (or LLM wrapper) to find posts that will rank on hn

They are all valid front page submissions by the looks of them and they appear to be the first ones submitted. It wouldn’t be hard to do if you cared enough to configure notifications for frontier announcements. If someone were using technology to influence submissions or misuse HN, that would be a concern but I don’t see any evidence of that.

To directly answer your question, my guess is they have an alert set up for various places on the internet, and are able to post the links faster than anyone else. Maybe that part is automated.

AI product updates probably tend to rank very well here. If you look at the domains the user is submitting, they’re pretty normal: twitter accounts of tech CEOs, big company blogs, etc.

If I saw a bunch of blogs with affiliate links or landing pages for slop products I’d be more suspicious.

> putting my tinfoil hat on and awaiting for replies

You can make your post on top in some services by paying 5 dollars on fiver. I asked before about HN, and someone said it is hard to do... Maybe they found a way?

I question all the time what dictates the posts I see on the front page every day, and whether or not it's truly based on organic interest. i wish i could say i up/down vote frequently but i do not and i wonder if that's true for most people.