Poll: How old is your HN account?

Along those lines, here's working code, with a deliberately long (60 second) crawl delay and a severely truncated search criteria (only the first 5 items on the front page, only the first 10 users). I'll let someone else do the full analysis, and risk being IP banned.

    from __future__ import print_function
    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup  # pip install beautifulsoup4
    import urllib2
    import time
    import sys

    # https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt has a 30 second crawl delay
    DELAY = 60  # I don't need speed.
    sys.stderr.write("Using a %d second delay\n" % (DELAY,))
    def get(rest):
        s = urllib2.urlopen("http://news.ycombinator.com/" + rest).read()
        time.sleep(DELAY) # Play nicely with robots.txt
        return BeautifulSoup(s)

    soup = get("")  # get the main page

    # Pull out the links to the items: <a href="item?id=9374889">
    item_hrefs = [tag.attrs["href"] for tag in soup.find_all("a")
                      if tag.attrs.get("href", "").startswith("item?")]

    # Find the users with comments in the stories from the front page
    # Users look like: <a href="user?id=dalke">
    users = set()
    for i, item_href in enumerate(item_hrefs, 1):
        sys.stderr.write("processing item %d of %d (%r)\n" % (i, len(item_hrefs), item_href))
        soup = get(item_href)
        users.update(tag.attrs["href"] for tag in soup.findAll("a")
                       if tag.attrs.get("href", "").startswith("user?"))
        if i == 5:
            sys.stderr.write("   ... 5 is good enough. Stopping.\n")
            break

    creation = []
    for i, user in enumerate(users, 1):
        sys.stderr.write("processing user %d of %d (%r)\n" % (i, len(users), user))
        soup = get(user)
        try:
            created = soup.find(text="created:").findParent().findNextSibling().text
        except AttributeError:
            sys.stderr.write("Could not find 'created:' for %r\n" % (user,))
            sys.stderr.write("Soup: %s\n" % (soup,))
            continue
        fields = created.split()
        creation.append((int(fields[0]), fields[1], user.partition("?")[2]))

        if i == 10:
            sys.stderr.write("   ... 10 is good enough. Stopping.\n")
            break


    creation.sort()
    for delta, unit, name in creation:
        print("%s - %d %s" % (name, delta, unit))

Here is what I found from the first 10 arbitrarily selected recently active users:

  id=VieElm - 151 days
  id=cushychicken - 514 days
  id=fit2rule - 550 days
  id=david-given - 760 days
  id=Already__Taken - 883 days
  id=justin66 - 1038 days
  id=revelation - 1162 days
  id=cygx - 1538 days
  id=whatupdave - 1664 days
  id=InclinedPlane - 2030 days

I am not at all offended by this comment. You have a good comment history and you are one of the first on HN.

Having said that, the reason I did this poll was not just to get the numbers but let fellow HN'ers reflect on how their HN experience has evolved over the time period they have been on HN. I should have perhaps clarified this better in the Poll description.

Oh and I am a "wannabe" totally :). So you got that right. I don't mean this as a sarcastic comment and really my coding skills are at best being able to write a few scripts or edit HTML/CSS . I would totally label myself as a codegeek wannabe.