Hacker News Reader

Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

I think it's complete bullshit and I fell for it. sigh

As a matter of fact, both Hackernews and reddit accounts have wildly different results. Also, the response is way to quick to fetch all comments from either platform (and you're not telling me you scraped reddit completely, don't you?).

Seems to be hugged to death now. So I cannot try with a nonexistent account id.

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This is nothing more impressive than the horoscope in the newspaper. It's a cold read and people will always fall for it because they believe what they want to hear.

I find it even less impressive than most horoscopes. At least horoscopes skillfully make use of the Barnum effect[0] to trick people into believing the reading. The results of this on my own users, on the other hand, are much too specific to pretend to hide how wildly inaccurate they are.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

> Also, the response is way to quick to fetch all comments from either platform

I didn't try the Reddit thingy, but for HN there is the algolia index, which is close to instant.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

This is correct. I'm able to grab most users' comment histories in under a second and it tells the data sources at the bottom.

For both Reddit and HN there are complete dumps that you can download easily within much less than a day. I have worked with both, the reddit dump from pushshift ist quite big (https://files.pushshift.io/reddit/ several TB?). Scraping HN completely from the API is much, much smaller, around a few GB if I remember correctly.

But of course this is still bullshit and doesn't really use that data.

why do you say that?

> both Hackernews and reddit accounts have wildly different results

why is that unusual, HN is more focused so the comments trend towards work, whereas Reddit is a lot more general.

If HN was so focused, that one guy wouldn't have founded the even more "computing-focused" lobste.rs. Mind you, I like it this way, it gives me "food for thought" in both computing and non-computing related fields...

I switch reddit accounts every year. It gave mostly consistent results for my last five accounts.

I think there's a lot of value in harvesting usernames of active HNers. Maybe I'm being paranoid/cynical, but I think y'all just got Cambridge-Analytica'd

You guys are vastly overestimating how much thought I put into this. I cranked it out in a week on PTO.

From the outside, it's indistinguishable from Cambridge Analytica. For extra irony: Cambridge Analytica's quiz masquaraded as a personality test[1].

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-personality-test-ca...

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