The best of $user on HN, with eBook export | Hacker News Reader

The best of $user on HN, with eBook export

bitovod.com

137 pointsredpill2743 comments

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The best of Hacker News !

http://bitovod.com/hn/best-of?username=&limit=100

( just empty username field )

TOP5:

#1, 368 points by btilly |on: Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

#2, 296 points by mechanical_fish |on: Why Your Startup Shouldn't Copy 37signals or Fog Creek

#3, 282 points by norvig |on: Ask PG: Lisp vs Python (2010)

#4, 261 points by grellas |on: So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar…

#5, 260 points by jrockway |on: Osama bin Laden Is Dead

Nice job!

Feature request: Make the queries linkable. I think people would appreciate being able to have permalinks for themselves or HN leaders like tptacek, patio11 and jacquesm.

It would also be very interesting to see how the results for edw519 size up against his own curated comment list: http://edweissman.com/53640595

Update: Thanks to bitovod for implementing the feature. There's now an ongoing list of the HN leaders at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2662721

The biggest differences:

1. Grouping into chapters. Ranking by score loses context.

2. Sorting and grouping comments together to give it some kind of flow.

3. Eliminating comments I wish I hadn't made.

4. Substituting cuss words.

5. General edits to eliminate errors and help the comments stand a little better on their own.

6. Grouping jokes together. They belong in a separate chapter.

7. Adding a forward, introduction, and table of contents.

8. 100 comments didn't seem like enough. 256 seemed right.

My version took me 3 weeks. This version takes one click. You can't beat that.

Done.

http://bitovod.com/hn/best-of?username=tptacek&limit=75

Impressive turnaround! :)

This is also good for your site. You'll get more links now because people can link to the particular things they're interested in rather than just the homepage.

Using your new feature to keep a list of the leaders: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2662721

One more request.

Could you add margin-bottom: 8px; or similar to #comments-wrapper p? Would help with the readability. :)

A more accurate headline would be "Witty quips and pithy one-liners by $user, and ASCII art by edw519"

Yup. My top comment is a one-liner aphorism about the US and China, while one of my favorite comments (encouraging people to get into OS & kernel development http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740718) is way down at the bottom. C'est la vie.

Hands up if the first thing you did was search your own name.

Yeah, me too.

I'm kind of disappointed by http://bitovod.com/hn/best-of?username=swombat - most of my highest-voted comments are short and snappy.

Mine are too... seems that HN users tend to reward quick "aligns with our zeitgeist" posts.

What's wrong with clear and simple?

One thing I find interesting about my own highly ranked comments (and, I suspect, a lot of the lower ranked ones too) is how many of them reference books or articles that elaborate in much more detail on the subject. The rest tend to rely on my personal experiences and domain knowledge. I don't think this is a coincidence: a lot of the best comments exploit some kind of information asymmetry, where the writer knows something or knows about things that most don't and hence has a lot to contribute.

(Exception to my general rule above: this comment).

Here I am, BTW: http://bitovod.com/hn/best-of?username=jseliger

A note, HN's user system is case sensitive and this is not, which at first led to some great confusion for me. me: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=David not me: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=david

If you used GET for the username parameter, it would show up in the URL & encourage cut-and-paste virality.

This is excellent! I had envisioned doing something like this but never got around to it. Thank you!

A few ideas for enhancements:

- the ability to sort comments by a user defined formula using karma points, number of comments in thread, and date (Later comments get too many points because the site has grown so much.)

- a few formatting options

- a service than prints hard copies...

AFAIC, anyone who has submitted 100 good comments to Hacker News has effectively "written a book". You may not realize it, but you are an author and an authority on something. You should have hard copies of your pdf (in a pamphlet or handout of some sort) and you should carry a half dozen of them everywhere you go.

It may seem kind of silly, but if you've contributed value here, you should not be ashamed to share it with others, whether they be customers, prospective employers, or anyone you meet networking.

Your top 100 comments (The best of <xxx>) says volumes more about who you are than any resume or business card. You should be proud to share it.

This is a disconcerting self-community interaction analysis tool. I don't like my top comments at all.

I was surprised by this as well, my top comments were on the whole, rather forgettable.

Apparently the best thing I've ever said was a complaint about an inaccurate headline.

The seventeenth-best thing I've ever said was that "Gorillas aren't monkeys" with a somewhat later edit in which I complain about how many people are modding me up for such a pointless nitpick.

And the fortieth-best thing I've ever said was:

Of all the fantasies I've ever heard which involve a hotel room, a comely young lady, fifteen thousand dollars and all-you-can-drink cranberry juice, that's the dullest, I'm sorry.

I have no idea what the context was, but it sounds way better out of context.

Really though, the biggest problem with this is that it overwhelmingly contains recent comments due to karma inflation.

I commend you for using <map> to link the markers to the items. Image maps... wow that takes me back to 1999. I can't believe people still remember how to use them. Of course you can't do any rollover effects with them, but otherwise it seems like a pretty quick and effective solution for the interface you wanted to make. When I first saw this I thought the Google Chart API had maybe changed to add JavaScript-based interactions.

Well, the Google Chart API actually supports JS-based interactive charts: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/index.html

However, I use the static image version + <map> since the JS version of the scatter chart is missing some features (no alpha channel, fixed marker size).

I checked a few of my own comments -- there was for example one that I have score of 89 but this tool shows 21.

Is it something other than straight upvote count?

What does it mean by "best"? I would have guessed highest rated, but a little experimenting shows that this is not the case.

Given that point values of comments are hidden now, how does this determine the comment score? Just curious.

Reading deeper, I'm guessing that the HNSearch API that powers it still has deeper access to the point values of comments. Interesting.

The point values are available through the search API (except the last five days).

The server currently appears to be serving everything up as text/plain. Has been doing (for me, at least) for at least the last 5 minutes or so.

[EDITED after redpill fixed the server: yup, it's fine again now.]

I have just updated the http headers the server sends. Please, could you check now?

What will be really cool is to see how the "hide comment scores" effect looks using this (assuming at some point they will be able to collect that). I think the one liner type comments might show a big drop.

The switch happened in mid-May, 2011 (I don't remember the actual date). My scores went up slightly, but using this tool it's impossible to tell (since the limit is 100). I tried to change the limit in the HTML file using firebug, but I guess there's a server-side check for that (good!). Anyone care to hook against the API?

Wow, kind-of depressing (but I still love it).

Apparently I'm extremely average in every way. About 3 or 4 times in the last year I said something worth reading.

1% interesting, 99% average. Hum.

None of the data points are appearing on the chart when I look at it. I'm using Safari 5. Sounds like a cool idea - but right now it's a pain to have to keep downloading the PDF to see the chart.

Most likely the problem is with parsing the date string. I can fix it if anyone knows which Date string format Safari 5 supports.

I'm not sure, but this thread might be of help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4310953/invalid-date-in-s...

When did PG remove the scores from comments again? This tool can tell if people upvote less when scores are hidden. Doesn't seem to be the case on a few random test names I tried.

Feature Request: Quick optional filter for "minimum length", rather than having to look for the big dots. The short comments are pithy, but many seem to be context-specific.

Bug report: I can't generate a PDF for my username. I think it's barfing on the hyphen.

I think you need to capitalize the first letter of your username or else it doesn't work.