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Show HN: Visualize your Hacker News activity

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132 points21stio55 comments

Very interesting data set. Appears the average number of people who reply to my comments is 1.03, which suggests a style of writing/thinking can contribute consistent net-growth.

Of course I would promote that idea, but really I'd be willing to bet it looks something like a pareto distribution, and it would be interesting to see what puts a user on one side of that curve or the the other.

patio11's 1.39 average reply rate would be an outlier, and there are people whose comments have the authority to simply close discussions that would need upvote stats to distinguish them might get lost viewed in that narrow dimension, but for all the time people spend on this site, it would be interesting to get a sense of what that might mean.

Cool idea. Just to explore it further, I think it’d be interesting to create a model that included a couple other major factors, like when the comment was posted relative to the front-paging of the article and where the parent comment fell on the page (this comment is responding to the top comment, which will help it a lot).

I guess I’m not aware of an analysis with this goal (who and what types of comments engender more conversation) anywhere else, and actually doing it would probably be pretty fascinating. Again, cool idea.

Not sure I agree with your conclusions. A high amount of response could just mean a controversial/inflammatory comment or a comment of inquisitive nature that people want to respond to, instead of a high-value comment.

I apparently have an avg reply rate of 1.8 and would not say that my comments are somehow better than patios.

Interesting what high-value might be though.

Popular claptrap might not be valuable. Engagement can be value, and a many-to-many thread is typically good, except when it becomes a 1:1 drill down match. I think a sincere controversy is exceptionally valuable because it frames something essential about the topic, at least when it isn't just the iteration of talking points. A bold provocation can also be useful because the quality of the responses may reveal unexamined assumptions.

Better? Meh, but indicative of a certain quality factor, I'd say no doubt.

About a year ago, I saw a Hacker News comment by someone claiming to sleep on average 0-2 hours a day. There were 20 replies to that comment but (he) never responded to any questions, and continued posting replies to other threads in the coming days.

I pulled all of (his) comments and their post times via the Hacker News API and plotted it, which revealed an interesting lack of posts from midnight-6AM EST across ~150 comments. I'm calling BS on the 0-2 hours of sleep :)

Nice job! I am very skeptical of people who claim to not need much sleep.

We know there have been some who really needed much less sleep but they are widely known to be geniuses or hyper-productive (Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk etc.)

Most people who claim to sleep only 2 hours a day or whatever are probably being a little dishonest or are miscounting.

> they are widely known to be geniuses or hyper-productive (Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk etc.)

I don't buy this. I don't know life of Nikola Tesla, but the recent activity of Elon Musk might be explained by a serious and chronic lack of sleep.

Nikola Tesla was certainly not for not being entirely sane, so that might be evidence there as well.

Short Sleepers certainly exist, but they're rare. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2019/08/415261/after-10-year-searc...

But I've usually heard of them needing ~4 hours of sleep, not 2.

I had a teacher in high school that was like this. He got a job as a night checker at the grocery store to help pass the time and make a little extra money. He felt great when getting about 4 hours of sleep. He had researched it quite a bit and after talking to a doctor decided to embrace the extra time. I was always jealous.

But yeah I don't buy the 2 hour sleep thing, because according to this teacher it's almost always around 4 hours for people in this boat.

Im not even sure why someone would want to be "bragging" about something that is proven to be awful for health and well being.

I only sleep about 4 hours a night on average (though I wish I slept more), but if you looked at my posts and comments they would fall within a 4-5 hour window (most posts happen when I check HN between 7-9am).

I plotted your comments/posts by GMT hour: https://imgur.com/a/9CNi2Ln

Ah, is that over the life-time of my being on HN? I've lived in 3 different timezones, US East, US West, East Australia, as well as spending a few months in Europe.

So, though it looks like I'm spending time on HN all through the day, this is not actually reflective of my behavior without taking that into consideration :)

Hope you didn't spend too much time on that, it's cool to see. Thanks.

Get stuck after clicking on "Show". Just shows "Loading" and a spinner.

Ah, nevermind - finally failed with "Network error".

It’s falling with “Network Error” instantly for me. I’m assuming we’ve collectively embraced it to death.

I got that message and thought it was a summary of my posts.

Nice work. I tested with user pg and noticed that the Y-axis on submissions starts at 31/12/1969 and the comments starts prior to 04/09/1982, compressing the actual data into the right of the graph.

Second, the username on your app is case sensitive, not sure if it is on HN (haven't tested).

Other than these, nice work.

Funny website. Shows a cookie notice banner but sets no cookies (except if you click on the cookie notice button - then they set a cookie accepted cookie)

Also: if you are located in Berlin you should create a Privacy Policy and Imprint. That's more important than a cookie banner ...

cheers for the heads up :)

Nice work.

I couldn't recognise some old comments (10 yrs ago) as my own. I don't know what this means.

This happening to me yesterday by reading 5y old mail.

I was reading my old emails like what's this shit about, who's this? LOL

Nice! for my username it shows a single green dot in the center of the chart, the infamous "introverted person" distribution (also known as "insecure commenter" distribution.

EDIT: obviously, this comment broke the "curve". This distribution is known for being unstable.

Initially got the Network Error but after a few tries it worked. This is really cool - thanks for sharing!

I noticed you have an avg points indicator for submissions but not for comments - any reason for that decision?

thanks for the kind words!

good spot, unfortunately, the points for comments aren't publically available as well as the upvotes of a user

This looks great! Very cool to see the distribution of what does/doesn't get comments and upvotes.

You may want to consider caching the results for the most popular accounts. May address the network issue.

Hey James, it makes sense! Will be added to the backlog, cheers for the heads up

This is fun, I'd like to see the same visualization on posts as submissions. I think the points are more interesting than the number of replies.

Hey dyeje,

> I'd like to see the same visualization on posts and submissions

Would you like to see the same visualization for the top-stories feed? If not, could you elaborate on your request?

Hm not sure. Basically, I think Submissions graph is cool because the Y axis is points and it's fun to see your most popular posts. I'd like to see that same visualization applied to the comments graph (so replacing replies with points as the Y axis). Sometimes you can have a really popular comment that doesn't get many replies because people agree with it. Replies feels more like an indicator of controversial-ness, which are posts I'm probably not going to look as fondly back on.

Points for comments are not public, so the only way to create that visualization would be to scrape your own comment history.

That's a nice trip down memory lane. Thanks!

See also lettergram's https://hnprofile.com/

https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?search=user:kohtatsu

Would be cool to see average mood per topic :)

MetaMate, your logo looks exactly like MimbleWimble logo, just with W flipped to become an M. Not cool.

Network error. I will try again later once interest dies down a little.

Thanks for showing me how much I’ve been slacking off lately!

Does anyone have a screenshot they'd be willing to share of what the results look like in light of the fact that we've bear-hugged this site?

It's working again now. Running results on my username took a few minutes.

This looks pretty spiffy. I think it'd be really neat to look at the content and show repeating topics / keywords.

On a related note: I’ve always been curious on the distributions of submissions, comments, and karma.

Getting a network error. Seems like back end can’t cope with the influx of traffic from HN :o

Even though this is currently being hugged to death, I will bookmark it! :)

Cool site! Heads up, username appears to be case sensitive.

Says Network Error when hitting the button every time

Nice. Thanks to the author for providing this.

Network Error :/

it works... 1 reply... 2 if we consider this one

Network Error

Genuine question: where does this fall with regards to GDPR? If you aggregate data about a European, don’t you technically need to ask them for permission first?

Got a "network error."

Hey sorry for that, you probably ran into a timeout. Please try a username that has fewer submissions. Sorry for that

I seem to get the same error for this account as well as one with only a handful of posts

yeah sorry about that, there's quite some traffic right now

No worries I ended up getting it to work for me

I initially got the same thing, came here to say "Same here" and then clicked back into it and I haz data:

trimmed from 7855 to 3000 etc. (I'm sure no one cares about the rest)

So maybe try again?

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