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One night I was deep in a rabbit hole, reading old HN comments. I eventually ended up scraping a bunch of usernames and building a game!

Please suggest any other users who you'd want to see/upstanding members of the community who deserve to be featured.

Open articleView on HN

Fun extension to this idea: enter your username. use vector search to find most similar user to you. Now show comments from them and you, and you have to guess if you made them :-)

hahaha that would be insane

bleh i kind of need to build this now

There was a project that does exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

But now it's offline.

Yep. Really opened up my eyes to how simple it would be to follow a user across sites and usernames. Our ideas are biometrics just as much as anything else.

Fun! It runs into a bit of a problem that a lot of of these comments are in threads where they feel the need to disclose who the are so the comment starts "Cruise CEO here" and the answers list only has one option for someone from Cruise.

Hahaha yes for sure, but you can count those as free points for now. If people end up loving this project I'll think about adding obfuscation

I saw "sex video" in the quote [1] and I just knew it was going to be tptacek :)

I got every other choice wrong though, which is impressively bad.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997964

I mean, I read HN, and I deep dive the comments, but my special ability to fully recollect conversations even online ones went away with age. If I could recover this skill I'd be insanely productive. This is alas why we bikeshed so many different tools to track software development (not a jab at the usefulness, just a jab at how some people over complicate simple tools which causes more work than its worth).

I can't do it on HN. Other forums I use have sigs and avatars etc and I get quickly "get to know" the regular posters. I don't "know" a single poster on HN apart from dang.

Thats a good call out. HN with avatars would be weird.

His comments have a very distinct style, for sure.

Do people really remember authors of such generic comments? Is it only because they were heavily upvoted because of the popularity of the commenter?

I think that upvoting mechanism on sites like HN/Reddit/Lobsters really hurt the idea of free idea flow. People focus on the author too much, not the idea.

Big (well written) wall of text about payments => patio11

It looks very good! I am surprised people recognize the authors of HN comments. I could maybe recognize a pg's comment. Very interesting - thanks!

If you were trying to convince me that hacker news is extensively astroturfed by companies to support their viewpoint, you did that. Ouch.

Is this just a guessing game basically?

edit: Oh, I see it loads the comment. On first viewing it just showed the url of the comment.

Yup! It's a game.

I got 10/10 without having any idea who any of the people (except pg) were. The comments always made it possible to link to the companies of the posters somehow. Interesting experiment to try to figure that out but I'm left wondering if I should be familiar with all those people and what they do.

You might've gotten a lucky roll haha, I'm currently adding more prominent community members (thanks, dang!) that should make it harder to guess. Thanks for playing though :)

9/10. I guess I spend too much time on this site?

(Didn’t figure out the one I missed, it seemed to be a temp account?)

The accounts all should be either a prominent tech company founder, or among the top HN posters of all time! https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Hmm it definitely linked me to a temp account with a green username. Unfortunately I don’t quite remember what the post was :(

This is very cool! Thank you for sharing!

thanks! based on your karma, will add you to the game as well :) please LMK if you have other recommendations

That was quick. I just played and one of my last questions had your parent commenter, toomuchtodo (who I hadn't heard of, sorry) as an answer.

Personally, I can't say I spend much time looking at commenters names.

One of the answers for me was someone called Daniel G... (can't recall). Is that "dang", the moderator? Might be useful to have their real names: ie their HN usernames!!

The name suggested to me something like unedit-reddit, fwiw.

Ah good point, will make it more clear that it's dang, the moderator. And will add an "HN: " tag to everyone's usernames (if available).

> based on your karma

Haha I guess I might get in there too then. How embarrassing would it be to guess my own comments wrong!

You're in the game! dang recommended you earlier

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

legendary, ty

Seems like fun.

I was a bit confused by "git blame" at first. I kinda see how the name fits ("Who wrote this?"), but the point of "git blame" is to figure that out for you so you don't have to guess.

You're totally right. Naming this was a bit difficult — was afraid of calling it something like Guess Who? in case I got sued.

Is it also a vehicle to promote Zero Gravity Factory?

9/10; fun game!

Now you can turn circle jerking into a game! Great work, op.

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