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Comment by christiangenco | Hacker News Reader

Oh man you guys, patio11 has generated massive amounts of content: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/patio11.json?prin...

I count 8,483 submissions. I'm sure there's something interesting to be done with all of this data. A word frequency chart?

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Edit: So apparently there's a ruby gem that lets you feed it a body of text and generates pseudo-random phrases based on that text.

I present to you the patio11 impersonator: https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/e8d085e47479be0131e1

One of my favorites:

    A nice set of challenges -- kitty at a school with tens of thousands of bucks a year or less immediately.

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Also, a word count on patio11's submissions: 1,052,351. For comparison, all 7 Harry Potter books total 1,084,170 words. patio11 has written the entire Harry Potter series worth of content on HN. Just... wow.

View on HN

In February, I did an analysis on all Hacker News stories: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/

Yesterday, I published an analysis on all Hacker News comments: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/

There's a lot of interesting trends in the data. Let me know if you want to know anything in particular and I'll get back to you. :)

It would be interesting to redo the top karma list by comment karma only. It would also be interesting to look at liberal vs conservative political sentiment over time. I feel like the site has gotten more liberal over the years, especially after all the Chelsea Manning stuff, but not sure if that is accurate.

I actually have the list of top users by comment karma: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ws2VK-UB7IQpVUZgPZ9M...

I also included the number of thread wins (user made comment with highest number of points in a given submission thread) to see if there was any unusual relationship. There wasn't: correlation is 0.89. I ended up not including it in the article because it's long enough as-is. :P

Thanks! I would have thought that I'd have been higher ranked when looking at only comments, although actually my rank is almost the same. Interesting to see that many of the other top users are using the site in more or less the same way.

Is that top overall karma users, but then sorted by comment karma, or is that actually top comment karma users?

Top comment karma users.

SQL query:

   SELECT
   author,
   SUM(num_points) AS total_comment_karma,
   MAX(created_at) AS last_comment
   FROM hn_comments
   GROUP BY author
   ORDER BY total_comment_karma DESC
   LIMIT 1000

It'd be interesting to see if including an URL in the body of a post has any effect on votes received.

I would be interested to know the average hourly cost of HN in lost productivity :)

I'd like to know the average hourly amount earned from HN. I know personally HN has helped me greatly in the projects I do at work.

Yes this is an interesting question too, but one that is much harder to answer. I love HN, but it sure gets a lot of activity during work hours :)

We seem to think that time spent learning is lost labor, rather than that time spent laboring is lost time for learning, although we know that both learning and laboring are required for productivity, and that learning is capex.

40 wpm x total words x (hmm need to look up productivity stats) - but we could do it :-)

That's some pretty impressive analysis, nice visualizations too. Thank you for doing all that hard work!

Thanks for that. Great stuff.

Thanks, I had been curious about that number for a while. The last time I checked it was 500k or so.

For folks who want to do interesting things with the API but don't want to be abusive to Firebase's servers, I whipped up a quick ruby script to cache a particular user's comments/submissions on disk: https://gist.github.com/patio11/1550cad3a02edd175049

It tries to rate limit itself by putting 200ms of sleep between requests, so downloading all of my comments would take ~30 minutes.

"I release this work unto the public domain." -- feel free to adapt it to your needs.

Usage is "ruby slurper.rb $USERNAME $MAX_COMMENTS_TO_FETCH."

Interesting - you rate limited your requests, and I multithreaded mine :p (with x10 I downloaded your comments in <3 minutes).

From https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html it looks like the top plan supports 10k concurrent connections, so I suspect the impact is negligable.

Thanks for being an outrageously good resource and beacon of inspiration! You've unknowingly been one of the most influential role models in my career/life: I just relaunched one of my side projects as SaaS last month and it's succeeded beyond my wildest expectations (already at ~$8k YRR). Hopefully I can follow your trajectory and never have to actually work another day in my life :)

Congratulations on the success. Nothing in business makes me as happy as folks telling me that what I wrote/did/etc helped them out.

Though I don't know if I'd describe my lifestyle as "never having to actually work another day in my life." It feels less like work some days and more like work others. For example, it is 1:30 AM and while I could be snug in my bed I am instead clearing out the AR support inbox. (Poor planning earlier today, but still.)

"Actual work" meaning Japanese salaryman/having-a-boss-that-tells-you-what-to-do-and-when-to-do-it. I think I'm still in the honeymoon phase of customer support: I still get little rushes of adrenaline even for angry complaint emails ("something that I've created has provided so much utility for someone that they're angry when it doesn't").

It's certainly difficult at times, but when you can set your own hours, do wherever you want on whatever you want, and take as much time off as you want for any reason, it's difficult to justify using the W word.

tptacek is similarly impressive, with 30,051 posts.

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/tptacek.json?prin...

"Impressive" is one word for it, I guess.

LOL. My first thought was, "That's kind of a dick comment." My second thought was, "Oh, it must be tptacek himself." :-)

That was exactly my reaction as well.

I wasn't going to comment, but "mhartl" looked familiar. I just wanted to say "thank you" for your Rails Tutorial; I don't think I would have ever learned to program without it. It literally changed my life.

Awesome, glad to hear it!

I had very literally this exact same reaction.

We're all eating the elephant one byte at a time. With 193,000+ karma his average item gets about six upvotes/resubmissions.

You can get a 'prettier' version by removing .json entirely:

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/tptacek

Another frequent contributor, edw519, has published an ebook of his or her comments: http://hn.my/edw519

his or her comments

The book is copyrighted by Ed Weissman, so although it's possible "Ed" is short for "Edna," the higher probability can be assigned to "his" in this case.

I didn't look closely, 'his or her' is just a habit.

I'm speechless. Honestly, the content is so expansive and valuable. I love the internet, hackernews, physics, code, knowledge, and the tiny things in between :)

It checks out, I put in TempleOS and got out Genesis: "We have dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it."

Here are some line charts of his posting history: http://hnuser.herokuapp.com/user/patio11/

Click on the line chart to do an hnsearch for the time period.

Update: Site should be back up. It crashes occasionally (that's part of why I hadn't post it yet.)

Oops, Application Error. You getting the HN effect?

How about feeding the top 20 into Bingo Card Creator?

off the top of my head: highest value word patio11 writes is "more" or "raise"...

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