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Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by vezzy-fnord on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:45PM (#7578727)
Several scenarios:

1) They are, in fact, hanging out at HN more than you think.

2) They routinely type their names into the search box, out of curiosity or to gauge their publicity.

3) (unlikely) They're continuing the age-old trend of kibozing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry), where they write scripts that crawl and grep for certain terms, so that they may respond. I'm not sure how HN handles bots, and if anyone actually does this here.

Re:Ask HN: How do people know they're being talked about on HN? by jkarneges on Saturday April 12, 2014 @02:53PM (#7578755)
#3 isn't too hard if you use the HNStream API (http://hnstream.com/)