Spammers, presumably trying to build up karma on HN. Needless to say we've banned them and will continue to.

Watchful users can help out with this a lot. If you or anyone notice comments being cross-posted in the future, please alert us at hn@ycombinator.com.

And that indeed is what we have to look forward to in online forums over the next 5+ years, as machine learning cuts its teeth on places like reddit, HN & disqus, and spammers try to find new irritating ways of getting eyeballs.

I'm not a fan of quoting XKCD, but... https://xkcd.com/810/

With how many XKCD responses their are, it seems a straight forward ML experiment to auto-relevant-xkcd

Someone made something like that! https://www.reddit.com/user/relevantxkcd-bot

One of his better ones.

You do realize he copied your comment, don't you?

That's been happening a bit recently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837687

(I think there are others, but I can't find them now.)

Both usernames end in 2

Yeah, but I still wonder how often people copy comments around like that. It's not like that was some great writing or anything, but it was copied word for word.

Maybe it was some bot, but that's an odd bot.

I've seen it happen on YouTube (not to me); highly upvoted comments get copy/pasted a month or two later to "steal" upvotes for someone else.

It could be a bot tactic to build accounts with karma that can later be used for astroturfing, using proven comments from elsewhere. Maybe governments and organized astroturfers have automated that sort of thing more than we think.

Nail, meet hammer.

Hopefully in this case the nail is comment plagiarism and the hammer is more careful pattern matching in moderation systems.

Yep, happened to me in the Inferno thread yesterday.

Do you know if there is a video for these slides?