Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Do the users get to submit updates to the descriptions? Do they get to delete their descriptions if they would rather not be listed? Is there are a particular reason why some users on the current Hacker News leaderboard

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

appear not to be on your interesting and informative site?

After edit: I see at the bottom of the display it says "powered by HNSearch API," which makes me wonder why the listing wouldn't be exhaustive and perfectly ordered by karma. Please let us know what technical (and social) trade-offs you are encountering in this interesting project.

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Hi. Thanks for noticing. The reason is that standard Hacker News profiles don't have photos or real names. Therefore I focused on the 1000 Hacker News profiles that have such data (by stating their twitter profiles).

Notice that HNSearch API limits the amount of responses to 1000, but this has nothing to do with the current limit (you can hack this limit by sorting ascending and descending). But the limit was not reached, so I did not need to cheat.

Twitter profiles were focused as not many people mention their github/facebook/stackoverflow profiles.

The reason why the list is similar to the leaderboard is because data is sorted by who has the most karma.

Interesting... it seems you must have some other criteria because my (admittedly woefully outdated) profile lists my (admittedly neglected) Twitter account, but I don't see myself on there. ~5000 karma should put me only a couple pages in.

No its because he's using HN search. I would venture to guess that most of your karma is driven by comments, for which HNS records as 1 karma (comment karma is hidden, so HNS can't get that info and assumes 1 )

This might argue for making comment karma viewable after a thread has existed for, say, a month: at that point, the absolute scores probably don't matter much for fresh readers, but the raw data could still be useful for efforts like this one.

Hi Andy. I am sorry, but not everybody had a clear twitter username on their profile. You are right, the list was complemented with the data from this one: http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-b...

I've added you to the direct list.

Note that the inference algorithm is quite forgiving, so "twitter @Locke1689", or "@Locke1689 on twitter", or even "twitter: Locke1689" would all have worked out.

About 50 people (from a pool of 1000) with twitter accounts on their profile were left out due to this not so optimal inference.

Indeed, I've reduced mine to '@barrkel'. But I'm not hungry for fame or followers.

I think you could have easily assumed any word starting with @ is a twitter profile, especially if it does in fact correspond to an existing twitter profile.

Also, I feel left out. :P

Yeah, I've tried a lot of these things. Unfortunately emails get caught up as well. And then you get users like yahoo, gmail, and so on.

As it gets out, people who are interested into being listed can just put "twitter: " before their @twitterusername.

Not being very thorough also allows people to self-exlude from the listing. Which seems be in the interest of some.

Not being very thorough also allows people to self-exlude from the listing. Which seems be in the interest of some.

That's a great point. Can you post info on the site on how to be included or self exclude for those who have a twitter account? (I don't but have considered getting one. I would kind of like to know how to self exclude should I get one. I've had lots of issues over the years with unwanted, negative attention. One of my primary concerns these days is having some control over how much exposure I am getting.)

Thanks so much.

Sure thing.

For now, I just make clear that things like "myname on twitter" and "twitter is myname" will never be considered.

Thanks.

Edited!

How often does the list get refreshed? Or is it live? (if it's live, how are you handling the attention without melting servers)

It is schedule every few hours. The biggest issue now is twitter limit request, which is what I'm solving right now.

Also the attention is not that bad (8775 visits so far). Also, heroku's varnish cache on static assets, html page and on Ajax requests is pretty great.

And mixpanel is handling the metrics, so I'm pretty covered.

I'm not on there even though I have a direct link to my twitter account. If I was left out on purpose then that's fine, just letting you know in case it's a bug though.

Edit: Thanks for reporting Alex! I was missing 3 other users from the leadersboard. Should be all good now.

Hi Alex. I am sorry you were not listed. My first user sources were hnsearch[1][2] and on Twitter Users Most Followed by Readers of Hacker News[3].

I am adding the leader's list to the user discovery, and this should be solved shortly.

[1] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&#...

[2] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.c...

[3] http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-b...

No problem, just curious. Thanks for the hard work!

I didn't have twitter in my profile. Can you add me?

Sure. You are on.

It is updated automatically with time, so people don't need to worry about particular requests.

How often updated?

About once every hour.

Thanks! Awesome job.

I've just updated my HN profile with a Google+ profile link at the VERY end of the profile.

Thanks for the interest Karl. I am sorry, but it doesn't yet support google+ profiles. Also, you should probably link to: https://plus.google.com/u/0/101556315529391051445 , as your original link[1] gives me a blank page.

Edit: In the mean time, I'll probably add support for the entire leaderboard, focusing only the standard HN profile. No photos though...

[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/101556315529391051445/posts//p/p...

It jumps from 6284 to 5914. I'm 6258 and am on Twitter too.

I have just the twitter handle on a new line, if someone has 1 word on a new line starting with @ it's probably pretty safe to assume its a twitter.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into it.

However, the biggest problem is finding such users. HNSearchAPI is not complete (for instance, fogus is not listed when you search for "twitter"[1], but is when you search for "twitter.com"[2]).

Which requires quite a lot of crawling (the unnofficial api helps sometimes[3], and sometimes it doesn't[4]). And HN robots is quite restrictive[5]

[1] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&#...

[2] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.c...

[3] http://api.ihackernews.com/page

[4] http://api.ihackernews.com/post/3118358

[5] http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt

For me, leader board needs to be sorted by average karma per post, with a minimum karma required to be eligible to be on the list (like 10K points).

The list would look very different with such sorting. Maybe pg or someone working on the site can change column titles to clickable headers that sort by that column. Not that it's particularly difficult to just copy paste as a table to Excel.

For me, leader board needs to be sorted by average karma per post, with a minimum karma required to be eligible to be on the list (like 10K points).

Agreed. I was surprised to find myself on that list; I've over 10K karma, but my average comment score is hardly impressive.

It's important to have interesting posts submitted but the comments are what really make HN.

The trouble with average karma is that it penalizes people for carrying on conversations. I often post something that has 10, 20, or even 50 points. Then someone replies, and I reply to that. This deeper reply will almost always get only half the karma of the original. Possibly because it is less interesting, possibly because it is posted later in the life-cyle of a submission.

If average karma was a goal of mine, I would never follow up to my own posts, I don’t think that I’ve ever had as much karma for a follow-up comment as for an original.

I only see the leaders link on the top bar when I am in the leaders page. There are other magic pages like new poll. Is there some comprehensive list?

Yes - on the bottom of the page you have a link to Lists - http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

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