Tell HN: Stop emailing HN users with deceptive AI spam
A Hacker News user reports a surge in deceptive AI-generated emails that mimic personal outreach to solicit job applications. These messages often use specific personal details to appear authentic but ultimately serve to generate leads or collect resumes for AI recruiting services. The author argues that this dishonest practice wastes the time of job seekers and erodes trust in genuine professional communication.
- ▪Recent emails to HN users appear personal but are actually automated AI spam designed to generate hiring leads.
- ▪Responding to these messages often reveals that the job does not exist and the sender is collecting resumes to bootstrap an AI recruiter service.
- ▪The deceptive nature of these emails is described as being worse than standard LinkedIn keyword spam because it feigns a thoughtful human connection.
- ▪This practice is criticized for wasting the attention of job seekers during a difficult economic period for the tech industry.
- ▪The author warns that such dishonesty may cause recipients to ignore legitimate professional outreach in the future.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,478 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849134 |
| Publication time | Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:56:26 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-25T20:09:59.738Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-25T20:09:59.738Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | RlCJ2YI7ymKS · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Lately, I've been getting many emails that appear to be from a fellow human HN user who saw something you said on HN, and was inspired to reach out about joining their company.There's usually a whiff of AI, though they usually pick a personal detail of yours to mention (to make it not look like pre-AI spam), and sometimes are even sent from the email address of someone listed as a founder on a startup's web site. There's clear indication that this is automated, by AI or otherwise.If you respond, you find it's either:(1) AI-powered spamming, to generate hiring leads for them to look at, for the first time, and the initial message suggesting a thoughtful connection was deceptive (making it no better than the worst LinkedIn keyword spammer's outreaches that everyone hates, just more…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.