Top all-time · #6855
Neil Clarke
Personal blog · neil-clarke.comwritingai
Neil Clarke's personal blog at neil-clarke.com covers writing and ai. Since 2023, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Block the Bots That Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Neil Clarke's site for his science fiction anthology pages and his editorial writing on Clarkesworld, including AI-generated submissions and blocking AI scrapers via robots.txt.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Block the Bots That Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-24
- A Concerning Trend3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-15
- Where We Stand on AI in Publishing2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-05-28
What Hacker News says?
> spending time to carefully and deeply review a paper because they care and they feel on principal that’s the right thing to do Generally agree, although several parts of that issue. One of the first was covered by a paper back in 2023 that speaks to the issue about maximum extraction mode. [1] Fairness, honesty, and loyalty are usually rewarded with exploitation. If you spend time to carefully and deeply review th…
Comment linking /how-ai-submissions-have-changed-our-submissions-process/
on “Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI”Submitted Clarkesworld AI Submissions Update as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI can't recommend this other story by the same author highly enough: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_11_15/ There was a time when I was locked in a windowless room for several months and practically the only thing I had was this book (which the above was published in) and almost everything in it is amazing: https://neil-clarke.com/books/the-best-science-fiction-of-th...
Comment linking /books/the-best-science-fiction-of-the-year-volume-1/
on “Better Living Through Algorithms (2023)”Submitted Busting a Myth: “Only writers subscribe to genre magazines” as a story · 8 points
HN discussion+1 to supporting Clarkesworld. His anthologies are great: https://neil-clarke.com/the-best-science-fiction-of-the-year...
Comment linking /the-best-science-fiction-of-the-year/
on “Better Living Through Algorithms (2023)”Submitted Block the Bots That Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSee http://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/ for some more details from the editor of Clarkesworld.
Comment linking /a-concerning-trend/
on “Clarksworld closes submissions due to GPT spam”Submitted Block the Bots That Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBut the problem is people are not just delegating formulaic procedural prose to AI. They're using AI to write entire scientific papers, so now reviewers have to use Pangram[0] to screen submissions. Literary magazines have the same problem[1]. Maybe those people should know that their behaviour is bad. [0]: https://blog.neurips.cc/2026/06/02/ai-generated-papers-in-th... [1]: https://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-tren…
Comment linking /a-concerning-trend/
on “Human Routers of Machine Words”Submitted Where We Stand on AI in Publishing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTo the extent that robots.txt still works, see Block the Bots that Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website: https://neil-clarke.com/block-the-bots-that-feed-ai-models-b... You can also block user agents directly, for example in nginx. https://www.xmodulo.com/block-specific-user-agents-nginx-web... The UAs I'm aware of: CCBot ChatGPT-User GPTBot Does anyone know of a resource that tracks these crawlers' UA strings?
Comment linking /block-the-bots-that-feed-ai-models-by-scraping-your-website/
on “It's time to brush up robots.txt”Submitted Where We Stand on AI in Publishing as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> If you’re standing outside a cardiothoracic operating theatre, you have a better chance than the majority who will be miles away living their lives. Most of the time you don't, but sometimes you get lucky. When Neil Clarke had his "widowmaker" heart attack he was at a conference down the street from a hospital[0]. In another case, an new father suffered an aortic dissection walking in the front door of Brigham and…
Comment linking /the-day-it-nearly-ended/
on “I’ll Never Be an Astronaut”Submitted AI Statement as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted AI Submissions to Clarkesworld Continue as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Concerning Trend: AI submissions to magazines as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Concerning Trend as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
