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.
The value should be in the arguments and the merit of the comment itself, nothing should emphasize the user in my view. That said it’s sometimes nice to just click the name and see if there is a profile.
But if youre having a conversation with someone who's raising points over multiple comments it would be nice to know those points so you can argue against them, else you risk strawmanning.
It's harder to keep track of diYsj5;£ and diYaba36£- versus benj111 and ctack.
I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works. We can identify people but they don't have a karma score over their head. Annonymising everything would be breaking that. It might work sure. But it feels like changing something that already works.
There are ways to generate unique identifiers besides random strings. Many sites generate them based on words rather than characters. And given how few unique commenters there likely are in any thread, even if they were random strings they wouldn't need to be very long. Three characters would be sufficient for most cases.
Plus, in a threaded forum, you're always replying either as a child to one specific commenter or to the main thread anyway, which adds greater context. IDs could be generated locally for each user and applied only to other users commenting to them. The site could even highlight which comments belong to which users. There are multiple ways this can be done.
>I suppose the current model follows the way actual human discourse works.
It doesn't, and it isn't intended to. Normal human discourse is noisy, repetitive and emotive, and isn't graded on quality, brevity and uniqueness as it is here. The goal here is signal over noise. Identity is noise most of the time, so it should be eliminated, or at least reduced as much as possible.
>But it feels like changing something that already works.
Just because something works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon. Hacker News isn't perfect. Given the amount of effort put into minimizing the UI here, reducing contrast and the number of links on a page, all in the service of minimizing distraction from the information itself, why not also eliminate usernames? What value does the specific string "krapp" bring to this conversation? or "benj111?" None, beyond providing a link to a profile which is empty more often than not, and a way to keep track of identifiers. None of that requires specific identities.
> Just because something works doesn't mean it can't be improved upon.
True. It only implies that it could be broken.
You may not see the value in usernames, but that doesn't mean there is none. It's a variant of Chesterton's fence: if you do not understand the value of something for its users, don't mess with it.
There's no deep and profound reason why usernames are used on HN, other than usernames being a common idiom on forums.
Since I've been here, numerous extra links have been added to the comment headers (prev, next, context,) hiding comments was added, vouching was added making hellbanning reversible, thread folding was added, two new pages were added to the header, the repost pool was made public, submitted links now automatically search for canonical URLs and titles are automatically edited. And before that, user karma was made invisible in threads. And that's just the stuff I remember or noticed. And the site hasn't broken yet.
Removing usernames could break things, but I can think of a number of problems it could also improve. Even just generally reducing engagement and thread velocity across the board would increase quality in aggregate. At the very least, it might be worth beta testing. If it doesn't work it can always be reverted.
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.
>Which is a good reason to add a reply-notification system
I share the view that omitting reply notifications is a good tool to prevent flamewars.
What I would like to have are notifications for entire debates. Right now it is useless to add comments to old submissions because nobody is going to read them. If there were subscribers to debates, the audience could return.
To prevent flamewars, subscribers should only be notified when e.g. 20 comments are added to a debate. That leaves time for everybody to cool off and hopefully creates enough substance that it's worth returning to a debate.
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's odd because all you have to do is click on the name to see the karma, so why not just list it along with the other 90 names and scores visibly shown on the page?
I don't want to be that person, but you speak with such confidence, as if what you're saying is a commonly held definition of a word.
2:1 is definately lopsided, and "overwhelming" is not a precise defined term in regards to numbers, but a 2:1 ratio does not really match what i think when i hear the word overwhelming.
A more interesting statistics for this discussion would be to have the percentage of users producing publicly visible content. "Using the internet" doesn't mean much (not that I assume the result would be too different, just saying that it would be more meaningful)
Yes, I'd assume the claim referred to content creators. But claiming it's "overwhelming male" requires evidence (reddit stats are proof that there are substantial sites where this is true, but what percentage of the internet is reddit?)
"using the internet" is a binary metric. Look at how many hours are spent on the internet by males vs females, and who creates content on the internet.
There are sites where the user split per sex is around 2:1. The female-dominated ones are generally more vapid than the male-dominated ones. You can check yourself. That is not to say that male-dominated ones are never vapid. To put it in other words, I would say that almost all female-dominated ones are vapid, while "only" the majority of the male-dominated ones are vapid.
Elsewhere: “Professor Pedersen believes Mumsnet’s popularity is partly down to it being a place where women can talk freely about politics without being drowned out by male voices or being subjected to the nastier side of other social media platforms.”
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.
Oh I see, it's in the bio. I thought they were looking at submission history. I don't understand why having Twitter in your bio makes you uninteresting
The underlying intent was to look for new/different websites. Twitter is fine, but I wanted to track down people's personal sites, hobby projects, etc.
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.
