Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielRibeiro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 it seems you must have some other criteria because my (admittedly woefully outdated) profile lists my (admittedly neglected) Twitter account, but I don't see myself on there.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 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

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

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...

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