Who posts on Hacker News?

I thought about listing usernames with the bios, but I thought it might be unwelcome for some people. Of course they're all people who are public in a sense anyway, but not all of them are trivially linked in the realname->username direction if you Google. For example some people's HN profile just has a URL, and then their real name is at the URL. Others post under a well-known real name but don't directly link their RL identity in the profile. That setup means people who know their RL identity don't as easily stumble across their HN profile: the HN profile doesn't list their real name verbatim, or come up in a search for the real name, which would change if I put up an googleable index of username/real-name pairs. Maybe I'm being too cautious, though.

While patio11 has undoubtedly made a vast contribution to HN, your posts are consistently exceptional and always worth the time taken to digest.

I think you're being a bit hard on yourself here.

While patio11's post are certainly worth reading your posts are more like essays. Complete with references and all. They have obviously taken some time and thought to compose, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that appreciate them.

That's a fantastic question. Is there a "long tail" of valuable contributions, or do most of the really-valuable and highly upvoted comments/posts come from a small group?

If pg could shed any light on this, it would be very interesting to see.

I did include you as one of the UK people, fwiw.

Of the people who link a real identity (~70), I think none, though I was mostly just scanning for locations past the top-20, so I might've missed someone. It's possible women are more likely to stay pseudonymous than men, and also possible that there are just few to no women who post a lot here.

Some of that kind of data (account age, karma-per-day, newer vs. older users in the top-100, etc.) can be found by digging around here: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/

That's the site I used to grab the top-100 list, because the 'leaders' list on HN itself is wonky: https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49

It doesn't look like it.

But the author of the article advises against this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6957171

"that many" = 2? Not exactly an adequate sample to draw general conclusions from.

There are 2 on the list, and if it is from the leaderboard (which I presume it is) I'm one of them.

I think Denmark is quite an interesting case. Unknown to most people a lot of great technology is written by Danes (The V8 javascript engine in Google Chrome, Google maps, Google wave, Ruby on Rails, C#, Varnish, PHP, Turbo pascal, Delphi, C++, and probably more that I can't think of right now) yet we don't really have much to show for it in terms of entrepreneurial success, large technology companies or worldwide esteem. Obviously there are some fairly tech-savvy Danes around, so it would only be natural that a few of them hang out on HN.

Maybe we're just bad at marketing...

The trend I see is

* native English-speaking countries: 69

* Germanic language countries: 4

* Asia: 4

* Romance language countries: 3

The breakdown between English-speaking countries shows no preference for any. The breakdown within the US shows San Francisco Bay Area disproportionately represented, followed by Seattle and Boston in a 2nd tier disproportionate by population. Capital cities are disproportionately represented within other English-speaking and Germanic language speaking countries.