I thought about listing usernames with the bios, but I thought it might be unwelcome for some people. Of course they're all people who are public in a sense anyway, but not all of them are trivially linked in the realname->username direction if you Google. For example some people's HN profile just has a URL, and then their real name is at the URL. Others post under a well-known real name but don't directly link their RL identity in the profile. That setup means people who know their RL identity don't as easily stumble across their HN profile: the HN profile doesn't list their real name verbatim, or come up in a search for the real name, which would change if I put up an googleable index of username/real-name pairs. Maybe I'm being too cautious, though.
We've had discussions on HN about real names and handles...I think the consensus is that most everyone who has their real name or bio linked into their profile are OK with people knowing it, and the welcome side effect for some such persons is that they have another incentive to stay civil.
I was astonished to discover once, from another site, that patio11 and tokenadult have the same join date on HN. I'm glad to observe that patio11 (deservedly) has a lot more karma.
While patio11's post are certainly worth reading your posts are more like essays. Complete with references and all. They have obviously taken some time and thought to compose, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that appreciate them.
Thanks, I enjoyed reading the bios, but I know many of these people only by their HN user IDs rather than their real names. Could you possibly add their user IDs to the bios?
That's a fantastic question. Is there a "long tail" of valuable contributions, or do most of the really-valuable and highly upvoted comments/posts come from a small group?
If pg could shed any light on this, it would be very interesting to see.
Of the people who link a real identity (~70), I think none, though I was mostly just scanning for locations past the top-20, so I might've missed someone. It's possible women are more likely to stay pseudonymous than men, and also possible that there are just few to no women who post a lot here.
Very cool. It'd be interesting to see some kind of influence ratio, such as karma / # of posts, or date joined.
Wonder if the pool is made most of older loyalists or newer upstarts? Seems like people who have been hanging around for awhile, both due to their usual heavy involvement in tech industry as well as if you're around longer, you can make more posts :)
Some of that kind of data (account age, karma-per-day, newer vs. older users in the top-100, etc.) can be found by digging around here: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/
I am shocked, and yet somehow not surprised, that there are exactly no women on the list. Sigh. I love the comments posted here.... just imagine the insightful commentary we'd all be benefiting from if half the population wasn't excluded! Hope to see this changing in the future. Thanks for your work putting this together.
There are 2 on the list, and if it is from the leaderboard (which I presume it is) I'm one of them.
I think Denmark is quite an interesting case. Unknown to most people a lot of great technology is written by Danes (The V8 javascript engine in Google Chrome, Google maps, Google wave, Ruby on Rails, C#, Varnish, PHP, Turbo pascal, Delphi, C++, and probably more that I can't think of right now) yet we don't really have much to show for it in terms of entrepreneurial success, large technology companies or worldwide esteem. Obviously there are some fairly tech-savvy Danes around, so it would only be natural that a few of them hang out on HN.
Well I never knew till the other day that Zendesk started off in Denmark. Also Podio. Probably by the time a Danish company becomes successful they've already moved part of their business to Silicon Valley and everyone thinks they are a US company, like I did with Zendesk.
Lars Bak is still in Aarhus I believe, along with the core of the Google V8 team. Unity also still has most of its tech team in Copenhagen, but many people think it moved to SF, because it moved its marketing & headquarters to SF (bigger market, etc.).
The breakdown between English-speaking countries shows no preference for any. The breakdown within the US shows San Francisco Bay Area disproportionately represented, followed by Seattle and Boston in a 2nd tier disproportionate by population. Capital cities are disproportionately represented within other English-speaking and Germanic language speaking countries.
It would be cool to have the HN handles, with links to their profiles, next to each bio blub.
Would also be cool to have lists of the people in each location -- I'd be curious to see who the 7 in NYC are, or the 2 in Berlin.