Looking at the comments here, am I alone in being completely unaware of famous users here? While browsing HN I pay zero attention to the users and simply look at the content or comments.
I think I am like you. I recognize almost no one. It gives me this weird feeling that every comment comes from a unique person, and that the number of people commenting is approximately infinite. Which I understand rationally to be wrong, but still.
I love that HN is content-oriented. It's not the only criteria, Reddit is also content oriented, and it certainly has its flaws, but given its size and spread, I think it's still doing remarkably well.
However, people-oriented media are unbearable for me. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.. All are full of people who want to build a reputation, and even though everything about them are different superficially, they all feel very similar.
I agree, relatedly it's also nice to have a place where physical attractiveness doesn't get outsized attention. You'd think it'd be a commodity online at this point, but it's interesting to me it seems to never lose value.
On one extreme there's Instagram where that's the main currency, but even on Twitter (which is supposedly about what you write), where you just have the one profile photo/maybe occasional other pictures, you can see it draw disproportionate attention and skew content. Naturally Twitter then inserts these accounts that draw lots of engagement into the feeds of everyone else so they're not possible to easily avoid.
Twelve years ago the userbase was much smaller, and a lot more people used real names either verbatim or stylized. It was much, much easier to know who people were. Now it's the same for me. Outside a handful of old timers that I recognize automatically, I don't really see usernames because the majority either start with "throwaway" or are otherwise gibberish to me. I myself abandoned my real name account 6 years ago, around the time I realized it was going to be a great risk to have ones name attached to ones thoughts permanently on the public web.
When I thought about it. I actually recognized your username from a hilarious no-bs image host post you had a few years back.
My experience is generally the same. I read for content. If I’m interested, I might click a profile link to see how long user has been on the site or if they have a personal site.
I am aware of one user, dang, and I learned he is the moderator of HN. Over time, I started to recognize his posts and to appreciate the enormous work he is doing each day.
"famous" :) . I'm on the list and wouldn't consider myself famous.
Thanks for putting this together, interesting to see the links of HNer's with a lot of karma.
Lots of other good suggestions as to what to do with this dataset, but I think it'd be fun to see a collection of the highest ranked comments by each user, perhaps with a minimum length. It'd be a way to get a collection of well thought out "essays" on different topics by use.
I've noticed that the heavily influential people are so busy with what they do that they don't pay attention to their fame. They let other people (who, to put bluntly, often aren't as clever or intelligent) praise them later, often posthumously in a best-selling biography.
We all have a scarcity of time on this planet, and I'm convinced that it's the duty of the excellent to (to quote William and Theodore from the 80s movie) "be excellent".
You're not alone. This submission showed me that I've interacted with some of the highest karma people on this site without even realizing it. I'd be lying if I said that didn't make me a little self-counscious.
I'm flattered to be on this list :) Thanks for upvoting me lol. I tend to be a bit of a cantankerous bitch in the comments here but I deeply enjoy this community and learn so much from you all.
Here are the posts from my own site that HN liked the most:
A feature that I miss about HN is the ability to subscribe to old posts. It would be nice to be informed when those debates continue, e.g. from references like these.
why is the karma of the top 10 not listed on that page along with the others? Seems like an odd omission since you can easily find out the karma for each person if you wish
I mean, mine is pretty random but has somewhat become routine. I come to Hackernews, browser, and read as part of my email reading routine. Then, before I retire for the day and sleep, I submit the articles I read during the day which I believe are interesting. The next morning, some of them usually sip through, and I see them on the front pages. The best cases I have seen so far are four stories amongst the top 30 at an instant.
Hackernews is perhaps the last frontier of subtle tech fun these days, without the overcrowded cheesy slapstick jokes around the Internet.
Not to take anything away from the page. It was nice to see some great names in there. And honestly the list is a testament to massive value given to the community. I’ve learned so much.
However, I love seeing tech hard-hitters throw in a message or two and who I see have low karma. Or people who have been here for ages and just quietly do their thing. Karma probably helped move it forward (great guide of quality from a high level) but it’s come at a cost. When people start to compete for the karma and not to build the community, we lose something. PaulG, for one.
I had this fantasy that there’s a YC-only version that rhymes with the public HN.
I don’t pay a lot of attention but I do perceive some efforts to get karma. Eg lots of posting articles, more jostling in comments than is necessary. Wherever there is a measure, some people will optimise for it. We’re human.
- He once moaned that I had described the Land Registry as a UK institution rather than an England and Wales one. That’s the last time I borrow one of your books from a public library, Charles! :)
That'd explain some of the holes mentioned in these comments. I think you just want to match any "word" containing ".[valid TLD]" and then exclude invalid URLs ("@" in first part indicating email, etc).
I've been using this[0] Python library which seemed good enough for my needs in some scraping project.
I hang out here a lot too but not in all the discussions. If someone participates only or mainly in stories about VC fundings and such I may never see his or her name, while I'll probably see the name of someone who participates less but does so in technical discussions more :).
I was thinking it would be nice to see when the user last posted, along with their karma. I see a lot of names I recognise but haven’t seen around for a while.
“I wonder if I made this cut”, I asked myself. Karma > 10k, check. Then I scroll down and my sci-fi graphic novel (1) is #3 on the hand-curated list. Thanks!
I just finished a short comic for a Webtoons contest; engagement is a significant part of how they’re gonna judge it, so if you like my stuff then check it out (2) and leave a nice comment to increase my chances of getting a $5-50k prize. I don’t make anything near FAANG money so even the low end would make a big difference in my finances. :)
Yes! Looks like I'll only need to be on HN for another 21 years to become HN famous! ;)
Purusing these personel pages are fun. I also have an idle curiosity if these top accounts get karma mainly from comments or submits? As in are comments or stories are the driving portion of the HN karma system?
Most, but not all, people on the leaderboard are prolific commenters. I have heard (but cannot confirm personally :P) that posting a lot of interesting content can get you karma pretty quickly, but most of the people who do that seem to churn off the site eventually? I can only think of a handful of people who still do this regularly and don't comment.
from my humble experience, both. Submits can get a lot more karma if you make it to the front page, but that's much harder than getting regular karma through regular comments.
I had never been so motivated to re-activate my website until I saw people with less karma than me making a list of 340 interesting HN users that I was excluded from!
What about your draft website layouts and your draft project to one day compare a few static site generators so you can actually write your blog and your draft web hosting setup and ...
I checked your submissions and you have three from twitter. They said they filtered out users with too many Twitter submissions. I really don't see the problem with Twitter submissions. Sometimes people Tweet interesting things with links in the Tweet.
I think they mean they filtered out users that only had links to their Twitter account in their bio (as opposed to a personal site or something) - not that they filtered them because they submit Twitter threads.
As others said it’s probably because the link in his bio is missing http:// or something like that.
I will confess, an editor doesn't feel quite right unless it's Inconsolata. Source Code Pro would probably be my second choice - it's the official Rust doc font, and feels good for that.
Maybe I haven't spent enough time digging into the academic literature, but I'm not aware of very much that's good. The original Elm paper[1] is quite good but interestingly enough Elm has moved away from FRP. There are blog posts and talks but not as far as I know a paper.
The computer science content behind UI is pretty similar to that of build systems, particularly incremental computation and trying to derive dependency graphs, and [2] is a seminal paper on that topic.
If other people have suggestions I'd like to hear them.
It was pretty good, my son and I ordered Bangkok Thai on University here in Berkeley. The satay and tom kha gai were excellent, but the chu-chee salmon wasn't as good as the last time we had it. (we got delivery rather than dine-in because of Covid caution)
I still use vim for light editing tasks (mostly when I'm already in a command line), but VS Code is my main, largely because of its excellent rust-analyzer integration. At other times I have used emacs and Sublime.
This prompted me to look. Could not find too much though I found this post suggesting that it can go negative.
I would assume at a certain point your account would be banned so maybe there is a cap. Personally I would be surprised if these folks had websites.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9179609
as mentioned, tdavis certainly deserves recognition on that front
reddit used to have a 'sort by most controversial' (iirc just downs plus ups) that bubbled the most interesting comments to the top, apparently they were going for types of users who weren't into that though
You can still sort by controversial on reddit. In my experience the comments it bubbles to the top aren't very interesting, but mostly cheap shots. Like everything else about reddit, this probably depends on the subreddit.
Someone else scraped HN users in September 2020 to determine which posts were most favorited (by the top 10k users per most comments weighted by number of favorites, then dang shared most favorited globally):
I guess I don't pay that much attention to usernames. I've been browsing HN since 2011 and I recognized 5 usernames after scrolling (fairly fast) through the whole list.
I’ve noticed that same thing. On other sites, I get into repeated and ongoing conversations. Maybe not like making friends exactly, but a welcome extra level of connection sometimes. Doesn’t feel like it happens here, at least not for me.
I wonder if simply bolding the username, or having it on its own line, or some other subtle emphasis would be enough to lift usernames in our awareness.
I actually tried to do that about two years ago, and ran out of steam about 20% of the way through. It was a lot. Even this shorten list took a surprising amount of time!
It seems that the list is not comprehensive since Walter's website is not included [1]. Fun fact, the most famous Jacques once posted Walter website on HN [1]:
Well this was a good reminder to add my website to my HN bio! Just crossed the 10k boundary, but I wouldn't say I'm "famous" at all. There are only a few users who I recognise – jaquesm, pc, dang, patio11, dannybee, maybe a few others.
Alan watts would respond “ who are you kidding, yourself? You the ego, the one driving your needs?, why can’t yourself have both. Don’t kid yourself man”.
The information is sourced from the users' about page. People who don't want to be exposed tend to not put links to their websites in their public about page.
Would be awesome to link in the famous person's real name and/or achievements when available. Even just putting HN bio text might be enough. Sadly, I don't recognize them all by HN username yet :P
Sorry to be that person, but I think this is probably a good example of something which is covered by the GDPR. OP has built profiles and is storing information about people, which makes them a data controller under the GDPR, and subject to its extraterritoriality provisions, as some of these users will be EU/UK citizens. I don't believe the exemption for personal use applies, as the data is being published.
If I remember correctly, they're now supposed to contact each person individually, explain why they're storing their data, and obtain their consent.
In practice, the chances of someone making a complaint and the issue being enforced are extremely low.
I'd not seen that part of it before. I think the trick word here is "manifestly", and some sources seem to indicate that this means that the people would have to have expressly given consent for onward processing.
Looking at the comments here, am I alone in being completely unaware of famous users here? While browsing HN I pay zero attention to the users and simply look at the content or comments.
I think I am like you. I recognize almost no one. It gives me this weird feeling that every comment comes from a unique person, and that the number of people commenting is approximately infinite. Which I understand rationally to be wrong, but still.
Concur, it feels lonely out in space. Do you think that if the username were subtly emphasized (bold, or on its own line) we would notice it more?
15 replies →
In a certain sense it is true that every comment comes from a unique person. You are not the same person you were yesterday :)
I love that HN is content-oriented. It's not the only criteria, Reddit is also content oriented, and it certainly has its flaws, but given its size and spread, I think it's still doing remarkably well.
However, people-oriented media are unbearable for me. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.. All are full of people who want to build a reputation, and even though everything about them are different superficially, they all feel very similar.
I agree, relatedly it's also nice to have a place where physical attractiveness doesn't get outsized attention. You'd think it'd be a commodity online at this point, but it's interesting to me it seems to never lose value.
On one extreme there's Instagram where that's the main currency, but even on Twitter (which is supposedly about what you write), where you just have the one profile photo/maybe occasional other pictures, you can see it draw disproportionate attention and skew content. Naturally Twitter then inserts these accounts that draw lots of engagement into the feeds of everyone else so they're not possible to easily avoid.
My experience with Facebook and Twitter, at least, is radically different. But then I don't follow many 'influencer' types on either.
I see the same usernames over and over and over again.
dang (obviously), WalterBright (D, C++), pc (Stripe), steveklabnik (Rust), antirez (Redis), jedberg (Reddit), gwern (gwern!), burntsushi (rg), patio11, fossuser, kube-system, api, sillysaurusx, smoldesu, dragontamer, ethbr0, and our favorite, hnthrow(away)?.*
Twelve years ago the userbase was much smaller, and a lot more people used real names either verbatim or stylized. It was much, much easier to know who people were. Now it's the same for me. Outside a handful of old timers that I recognize automatically, I don't really see usernames because the majority either start with "throwaway" or are otherwise gibberish to me. I myself abandoned my real name account 6 years ago, around the time I realized it was going to be a great risk to have ones name attached to ones thoughts permanently on the public web.
I recognize a few people if I look at usernames, but largely yeah, I mostly just read the comments. I thought that's what everyone does.
When I thought about it. I actually recognized your username from a hilarious no-bs image host post you had a few years back.
My experience is generally the same. I read for content. If I’m interested, I might click a profile link to see how long user has been on the site or if they have a personal site.
1 reply →
I am aware of one user, dang, and I learned he is the moderator of HN. Over time, I started to recognize his posts and to appreciate the enormous work he is doing each day.
"famous" :) . I'm on the list and wouldn't consider myself famous.
Thanks for putting this together, interesting to see the links of HNer's with a lot of karma.
Lots of other good suggestions as to what to do with this dataset, but I think it'd be fun to see a collection of the highest ranked comments by each user, perhaps with a minimum length. It'd be a way to get a collection of well thought out "essays" on different topics by use.
I've noticed that the heavily influential people are so busy with what they do that they don't pay attention to their fame. They let other people (who, to put bluntly, often aren't as clever or intelligent) praise them later, often posthumously in a best-selling biography.
We all have a scarcity of time on this planet, and I'm convinced that it's the duty of the excellent to (to quote William and Theodore from the 80s movie) "be excellent".
You're not alone. This submission showed me that I've interacted with some of the highest karma people on this site without even realizing it. I'd be lying if I said that didn't make me a little self-counscious.
Same, I couldn't tell you a single HN user if my life depended on it.
Very different to other forums I use. Fine with me.
dang.
And myself of course.
That's about all I could come up with on the spot.
yea same like Reddit. Usernames don't matter at all.
I'm flattered to be on this list :) Thanks for upvoting me lol. I tend to be a bit of a cantankerous bitch in the comments here but I deeply enjoy this community and learn so much from you all.
Here are the posts from my own site that HN liked the most:
1) Brutality of Life Reading List, 93 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458522
2) Thriverism, 21 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24330086
A feature that I miss about HN is the ability to subscribe to old posts. It would be nice to be informed when those debates continue, e.g. from references like these.
I think I read somewhere (possibly from dang) that this was intentional, as subscribing tends to lead to more arguing.
Edit: didn’t like dropping this without a reference, so dug one up:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22937472
Turns out it’s both to prevent flamewars and also foster curiosity more.
1 reply →
Idle curiosity: which users have the most karma per comment?
And most karma per comment if you filter out "politics" (although that is hard and vague) ?
How many high karma users are inactive? pg (creator of the site) seems to be one: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
FWIW here is the leaderboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
----
Also my impression is that this list is overwhelmingly male, although I guess that's not too surprising
Or who has the highest h-index. Highest number of comments N with at least N karma.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512455
why is the karma of the top 10 not listed on that page along with the others? Seems like an odd omission since you can easily find out the karma for each person if you wish
It may have been a compromise from my request that we replace numeric karma scores with something like "lots" after some threshold.
3 replies →
Karma scores used to be visible next to each username in the leaderboard.
Somewhere down the line, I believe dang hid it, but I forget the reason why.
1 reply →
> Also my impression is that this list is overwhelmingly male, although I guess that's not too surprising
most of the internet is overwhelmingly male, and tech-related places even more so.
Uh, if by "most of the internet" you mean Reddit, 4chan, and HN, then sure.
6 replies →
Are you stuck in 1999? :-P
I don't think the Internet is overwhelmingly male
8 replies →
Source (for the former claim)?
Depends on the corners of the internet that you visit. Tiktok, Instagram, and all vapid places like that have many more females than males.
5 replies →
So, do you have a plan?
I mean, mine is pretty random but has somewhat become routine. I come to Hackernews, browser, and read as part of my email reading routine. Then, before I retire for the day and sleep, I submit the articles I read during the day which I believe are interesting. The next morning, some of them usually sip through, and I see them on the front pages. The best cases I have seen so far are four stories amongst the top 30 at an instant.
Hackernews is perhaps the last frontier of subtle tech fun these days, without the overcrowded cheesy slapstick jokes around the Internet.
Not to take anything away from the page. It was nice to see some great names in there. And honestly the list is a testament to massive value given to the community. I’ve learned so much.
However, I love seeing tech hard-hitters throw in a message or two and who I see have low karma. Or people who have been here for ages and just quietly do their thing. Karma probably helped move it forward (great guide of quality from a high level) but it’s come at a cost. When people start to compete for the karma and not to build the community, we lose something. PaulG, for one.
I had this fantasy that there’s a YC-only version that rhymes with the public HN.
Do you see people here competing for karma? The only case where I've seen anyone care about it is when someone posts these lists.
I don’t pay a lot of attention but I do perceive some efforts to get karma. Eg lots of posting articles, more jostling in comments than is necessary. Wherever there is a measure, some people will optimise for it. We’re human.
Missed out the sci-fi author Charles Stross:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/
https://www.accelerando.org/ (Problem with certificate?)
- He once moaned that I had described the Land Registry as a UK institution rather than an England and Wales one. That’s the last time I borrow one of your books from a public library, Charles! :)
The Land Register is a hot button issue with Scots, where the land ownership concentration is approximately the worst in the developed world.
https://www.landcommission.gov.scot/our-work/ownership/scale...
He's one of the first major authors to join the fediverse. He's major to a scifi nerd like me anyways.
Educated guess: I think step 5 in the process didn't attempt to discover links that are missing http:// or https://.
That'd explain some of the holes mentioned in these comments. I think you just want to match any "word" containing ".[valid TLD]" and then exclude invalid URLs ("@" in first part indicating email, etc).
I've been using this[0] Python library which seemed good enough for my needs in some scraping project.
0: https://github.com/lipoja/URLExtract
Lol guess I’m “famous”.
I’m curious how many of these websites are active, any idea?
I really only post on https://austingwalters.com but have all my side projects listed
I hang out here way too much and still recognize <10% of profiles listed (:
I hang out here a lot too but not in all the discussions. If someone participates only or mainly in stories about VC fundings and such I may never see his or her name, while I'll probably see the name of someone who participates less but does so in technical discussions more :).
I'm on the list, I'd be surprised if anyone recognised my username who didn't know me from elsewhere.
I do recognise a good chunk of the top 30 or so names though
I was thinking it would be nice to see when the user last posted, along with their karma. I see a lot of names I recognise but haven’t seen around for a while.
Would be interesting to run a crawler against them that looks for Atom/RSS feed links like these:
And then fetches the feed to see when the most recent post is.
So like, http://Planet.Famous.News.Ycombinator.com, as this idea would have been known in 2007?
Now I’m regretting not having my entirely inactive blog linked from my profile. Opportunities missed.
I guess that was my problem too. I’ve been writing a lot lately though.
Added to the profile now. Maybe they get me next time.
Or my homepage do I could get spammed by robots :)
If at least one site was active, I included all the sites scraped from the bio.
“I wonder if I made this cut”, I asked myself. Karma > 10k, check. Then I scroll down and my sci-fi graphic novel (1) is #3 on the hand-curated list. Thanks!
I just finished a short comic for a Webtoons contest; engagement is a significant part of how they’re gonna judge it, so if you like my stuff then check it out (2) and leave a nice comment to increase my chances of getting a $5-50k prize. I don’t make anything near FAANG money so even the low end would make a big difference in my finances. :)
1: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ 2: https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/the-sins-of-chloe-fran...
Yes! Looks like I'll only need to be on HN for another 21 years to become HN famous! ;)
Purusing these personel pages are fun. I also have an idle curiosity if these top accounts get karma mainly from comments or submits? As in are comments or stories are the driving portion of the HN karma system?
Most, but not all, people on the leaderboard are prolific commenters. I have heard (but cannot confirm personally :P) that posting a lot of interesting content can get you karma pretty quickly, but most of the people who do that seem to churn off the site eventually? I can only think of a handful of people who still do this regularly and don't comment.
I’m on there - at least for me the vast majority is from comments. The one time my blog hit #1 it was ironically submitted by somebody else.
It would also be interesting to read the all time most upvoted comments on HN -- without seeing the actual count of upvotes.
You probably know that you can get the first half of that at
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(that is, you can see the most-upvoted comments, but you do see the count of upvotes)
2 replies →
Can greasemonkey/clones suppress the display of upvotes?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> get karma mainly from comments or submits
from my humble experience, both. Submits can get a lot more karma if you make it to the front page, but that's much harder than getting regular karma through regular comments.
Well I really wouldn't say I'm anything close to a famous HN users but it's funny to be included in the list.
What's sort of disappointing is that it seems I'm the only one there to have an .onion address!
Nice, I made the list. Thanks for putting this together.
Interesting backgrounds, and also the spread between those rankings. I guess this is also good motivation to finally finish my draft blog posts.
I had never been so motivated to re-activate my website until I saw people with less karma than me making a list of 340 interesting HN users that I was excluded from!
That said, there was the well-upvoted post last week where the blogger posted an unfinished draft. Something about graphing?
Lesson: Go ahead and just post your draft blog posts.
What about your draft website layouts and your draft project to one day compare a few static site generators so you can actually write your blog and your draft web hosting setup and ...
Weird, I’m not in there :D but have enough karma to qualify
I checked your submissions and you have three from twitter. They said they filtered out users with too many Twitter submissions. I really don't see the problem with Twitter submissions. Sometimes people Tweet interesting things with links in the Tweet.
I think they mean they filtered out users that only had links to their Twitter account in their bio (as opposed to a personal site or something) - not that they filtered them because they submit Twitter threads.
As others said it’s probably because the link in his bio is missing http:// or something like that.
4 replies →
You and 4 other people have been added :)
Looks like my about failed your filter too. :)
Ah, I didn't search for .net
I'll do that and update!
Me too :)
I just broke 10k a few weeks ago, so I guess I'm famous now. AMA!
Well, you do awesome work. I can only hope to maybe one day do anything as cool as you routinely do.
What's your favorite programming font?
I will confess, an editor doesn't feel quite right unless it's Inconsolata. Source Code Pro would probably be my second choice - it's the official Rust doc font, and feels good for that.
1 reply →
What is the best research article on UI that you'd recommend to someone new to the field?
Maybe I haven't spent enough time digging into the academic literature, but I'm not aware of very much that's good. The original Elm paper[1] is quite good but interestingly enough Elm has moved away from FRP. There are blog posts and talks but not as far as I know a paper.
The computer science content behind UI is pretty similar to that of build systems, particularly incremental computation and trying to derive dependency graphs, and [2] is a seminal paper on that topic.
If other people have suggestions I'd like to hear them.
[1]: https://people.seas.harvard.edu/~chong/pubs/pldi13-elm.pdf
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...
How did you cut your profile down to just a few lines like that?
Did you enjoy your dinner tonight?
It was pretty good, my son and I ordered Bangkok Thai on University here in Berkeley. The satay and tom kha gai were excellent, but the chu-chee salmon wasn't as good as the last time we had it. (we got delivery rather than dine-in because of Covid caution)
What happened to the xi-editor?
https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.h...
vim or emacs?
I still use vim for light editing tasks (mostly when I'm already in a command line), but VS Code is my main, largely because of its excellent rust-analyzer integration. At other times I have used emacs and Sublime.
[flagged]
RSS feeds for 5 out of the Top Hits list https://breckyunits.com/feed.xml https://www.gwern.net/feed.rss https://www.righto.com/rss.xml https://blog.jgc.org/rss.xml https://www.sonyasupposedly.com/rss/
What would be cool is an OPML list of all the RSS feeds from the whole list in TFA.
What is TFA?
1 reply →
Does HN allow you to go negative? I'd love to see a list of infamous HNers.
It looks like this profile is the current winner for most negative:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Proven
The TempleOS guy was probably one of the more memorable ones though you'd need showdead on to see a lot of the comments from his accounts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=templeos https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23112887
It's case sensitive: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS
1 reply →
This prompted me to look. Could not find too much though I found this post suggesting that it can go negative. I would assume at a certain point your account would be banned so maybe there is a cap. Personally I would be surprised if these folks had websites. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9179609
Yes, it does, although karma on any individual comment is capped at -4 and if you keep posting them you may have moderation action taken against you.
Your comments go auto-dead at a relatively small cumulative negative score so it's more of a robot moderator action.
as mentioned, tdavis certainly deserves recognition on that front
reddit used to have a 'sort by most controversial' (iirc just downs plus ups) that bubbled the most interesting comments to the top, apparently they were going for types of users who weren't into that though
You can still sort by controversial on reddit. In my experience the comments it bubbles to the top aren't very interesting, but mostly cheap shots. Like everything else about reddit, this probably depends on the subreddit.
Someone else scraped HN users in September 2020 to determine which posts were most favorited (by the top 10k users per most comments weighted by number of favorites, then dang shared most favorited globally):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351073
I guess I don't pay that much attention to usernames. I've been browsing HN since 2011 and I recognized 5 usernames after scrolling (fairly fast) through the whole list.
I’ve noticed that same thing. On other sites, I get into repeated and ongoing conversations. Maybe not like making friends exactly, but a welcome extra level of connection sometimes. Doesn’t feel like it happens here, at least not for me.
I wonder if simply bolding the username, or having it on its own line, or some other subtle emphasis would be enough to lift usernames in our awareness.
I only get this on Forums because it repeatedly bumps threads so the usernames repeats and conversations continue.
You should go crazy and skip step 3. Just do for all of us.
I actually tried to do that about two years ago, and ran out of steam about 20% of the way through. It was a lot. Even this shorten list took a surprising amount of time!
It seems that the list is not comprehensive since Walter's website is not included [1]. Fun fact, the most famous Jacques once posted Walter website on HN [1]:
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825763
Thanks for compiling and sharing these :)
Well this was a good reminder to add my website to my HN bio! Just crossed the 10k boundary, but I wouldn't say I'm "famous" at all. There are only a few users who I recognise – jaquesm, pc, dang, patio11, dannybee, maybe a few others.
Can someone explain to me how they got a list of all the users?
> Downloaded all HN users from BigQuery
??
From this? https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...
See https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...
It has never been clear to me whether or not this is truly all users or just those that have commented at least once.
I am honoured that my little website made the list.
Wow, there is only about a hundred (scrollcounted on mobile) people with more than 10k karma? Talk about life goals. You can do that.
There is more than that: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
This is is a filtered out list for users who have a personal/company website listed in their About section.
That also have a detected url in their about link. I’m guessing there are way more than 100 like that.
Yeah but why? Why does karma matter?
I reckon blogs with the most up votes makes more sense. Paul Graham posts are always on the front page, but isn't in that list.
I think this means I spend too much time on HN.
Hopefully my gravestone will say “Famous HNer”
:-)
You want to be rich or you want to be famous. Never both.
Materialism is a bore. Focus on spiritual richness #FTW.
Alan watts would respond “ who are you kidding, yourself? You the ego, the one driving your needs?, why can’t yourself have both. Don’t kid yourself man”.
1 reply →
Its actually a little surprising that so few people have 10k+ karma, that does not seem massive?
Very interesting blogs though!
Every time someone mentions my website I feel guilty that I haven't updated it for years.
Surprised that about 15% of the sites don't/didn't work.
Some of the links are definitely down. If one link in a profile was active and "interesting", I just included all their links.
I wonder if there is a way to heuristically assign US or non-US flag.
Many people consider themselves to have a national identity beyond "non-US".
Speak for yourself, my passport says "Nationality: Non-US".
As a fervent anti-nationalist, please no (even if there is a way).
Maybe some of them didn't want to be exposed like this?
The information is sourced from the users' about page. People who don't want to be exposed tend to not put links to their websites in their public about page.
awesome! I've been interested in something similar, after coming across 'famous' accounts in the HN comments often enough
I've got all the data pulled down now, so if you have any specific ideas for additional questions, feel free to share!
Would be awesome to link in the famous person's real name and/or achievements when available. Even just putting HN bio text might be enough. Sadly, I don't recognize them all by HN username yet :P
jacquesm is a machine. Is he multi-threaded, by any chance?
Absolutely, that's what my co-workers concluded long ago, a failed early AI experiment.
And that's in between running a company, tons of hobbies, kids and so on...
But to be fair, I sleep way too little.
:'( I am absent
In [1]: html.unescape(users_table.find_one(name="graderjs")["about"])
Out [2]: 'https://github.com/crisdosyago<p>cris@dosycorp.com'
It looks like your about changed more recently than my BQ data pull?
Yes! I only added my company link when I saw your post, and that you stripped githubs etc.
Sorry to be that person, but I think this is probably a good example of something which is covered by the GDPR. OP has built profiles and is storing information about people, which makes them a data controller under the GDPR, and subject to its extraterritoriality provisions, as some of these users will be EU/UK citizens. I don't believe the exemption for personal use applies, as the data is being published.
If I remember correctly, they're now supposed to contact each person individually, explain why they're storing their data, and obtain their consent.
In practice, the chances of someone making a complaint and the issue being enforced are extremely low.
Personal data manifestly made public by the data subject should be OK per GDPR Article 9, aye?
I'd not seen that part of it before. I think the trick word here is "manifestly", and some sources seem to indicate that this means that the people would have to have expressly given consent for onward processing.
For example: https://iapp.org/news/a/publicly-available-data-under-gdpr-m...
Also Article 9 seems to be restricted to non-processable data about sensitive matters.
Anyhow, it's definitely a good example of how convoluted the language around GDPR can get, and how much of a minefield it is to try to follow it.
The usual caveat applies, I'm not a lawyer.
You don’t seem all that sorry.
Well my comment above is kind of pedantic and tangential, but I do think it's an interesting point.