
Show HN: The users behind Hacker News - DanielRibeiro
http://hnwho.com/
======
DanielBMarkham
These meta posts -- users sliced and diced by karma, what makes a good rating
system, the role of humor (or lack of it) in a successful social site --
always appeal to my inner data nerd. It's got a bit of everything:
programming, stats, html5, and, well, me. As a startup junkie, I'm all for
anything that brings attention for my various efforts, like <http://hn-
books.com> or <http://caption-of-the-day.com>

I'd like to see a live twitter feed of the top HNers, but not just their
comments here, also their public posts on FB, G+, and Twitter. To bring the
volume down to size, I'd filter out the bottom 90% by karma, then maybe filter
again by average. If you really wanted to nerd out, you could even allow the
user to have some sliders to set their own thresholds. Seems like it would be
an easy project to put together (hint, hint)

I'm concerned about privacy in a big way. I know some would find my idea
pretty uncomfortable, but I've long since decided that what I put on the net
is my public life. I worry a lot more about my insurance company asking me to
install tracking GPS devices or my local police force being able to check my
ISP logs without judicial review. I'm okay with the things I made public being
correlated. It's access to the stuff I feel is private without notice that
concerns me a lot.

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timr
I'm a fairly private guy, and I find this a bit creepy. I've never been more
glad that I don't have a Twitter profile.

(Which is not to say that I think that the developer is doing something
_wrong_ , or even unethical: if you have a Twitter profile with your picture
on it, one could fairly argue that you've made a contract with the world that
the information is public. But all the same, stuff like this makes me want
disconnect my internet connection and line my windows with tinfoil. If someone
can make a site like this, someone can just as easily make a site that reads
"Top Internet Pedophiles".)

~~~
0x12
Wait until someone gets the bright idea to mine all your past comments for
factoids and pieces together your unauthorized biography.

~~~
stfu
How is actually the comment "ownership" on Hackernews? Do I still hold the
rights on my own words or are they already owned by ycombinator or gone down
the creative commons?

~~~
jahmed
I'm curious about this as well. I know slashdot's position is that "Comments
owned by the poster".

~~~
blahedo
This is, of course, the legal default (at least in any country that subscribes
to the Berne Convention). Unless there is some alternate policy somewhere that
I don't remember signing, that would be the policy here as well. (IANAL,
TINLA)

------
tokenadult
Do the users get to submit updates to the descriptions? Do they get to delete
their descriptions if they would rather not be listed? Is there are a
particular reason why some users on the current Hacker News leaderboard

<http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>

appear not to be on your interesting and informative site?

After edit: I see at the bottom of the display it says "powered by HNSearch
API," which makes me wonder why the listing wouldn't be exhaustive and
perfectly ordered by karma. Please let us know what technical (and social)
trade-offs you are encountering in this interesting project.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Hi. Thanks for noticing. The reason is that standard Hacker News profiles
don't have photos or real names. Therefore I focused on the 1000 Hacker News
profiles that have such data (by stating their twitter profiles).

Notice that HNSearch API limits the amount of responses to 1000, but this has
nothing to do with the current limit (you can hack this limit by sorting
ascending and descending). But the limit was not reached, so I did not need to
cheat.

Twitter profiles were focused as not many people mention their
github/facebook/stackoverflow profiles.

The reason why the list is similar to the leaderboard is because data is
sorted by who has the most karma.

~~~
Locke1689
Interesting... it seems you must have some other criteria because my
(admittedly woefully outdated) profile lists my (admittedly neglected) Twitter
account, but I don't see myself on there. ~5000 karma should put me only a
couple pages in.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Hi Andy. I am sorry, but not everybody had a clear twitter username on their
profile. You are right, the list was complemented with the data from this one:
[http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-
followed-b...](http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-by-
readers-of-hacker-news)

I've added you to the direct list.

Note that the inference algorithm is quite forgiving, so "twitter @Locke1689",
or "@Locke1689 on twitter", or even "twitter: Locke1689" would all have worked
out.

About 50 people (from a pool of 1000) with twitter accounts on their profile
were left out due to this not so optimal inference.

~~~
Alex3917
I'm not on there even though I have a direct link to my twitter account. If I
was left out on purpose then that's fine, just letting you know in case it's a
bug though.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
_Edit:_ Thanks for reporting Alex! I was missing 3 other users from the
leadersboard. Should be all good now.

Hi Alex. I am sorry you were not listed. My first user sources were
hnsearch[1][2] and on _Twitter Users Most Followed by Readers of Hacker News_
[3].

I am adding the leader's list to the user discovery, and this should be solved
shortly.

[1]
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&#...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&sortby=karma+desc)

[2]
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.c...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.com&sortby=karma+desc&start=0)

[3] [http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-
followed-b...](http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-by-
readers-of-hacker-news)

------
icey
heh... I was wondering why I started getting a bunch of beta signups + twitter
followers today.

I like the highlight effect you have on mouseover, although it kind of feels
like something should happen when you click on someone's profile. Perhaps
redirect the user to the person's HN profile?

~~~
miles_matthias
Yea I think that would be helpful. Usually if people have a high amount of
karma, they have put some time into their profile.

------
Sukotto
Looks like a rather nice page linking top-karma users to said users' Twitter
profiles.

So that's cool, though from the title I was expecting/hoping to learn more
about _actual_ people behind (in control of) HN... ie. YCombinator people that
actively work and/or moderate and the "About 30 YC alumni" who can "kill
stories and edit the titles, and in extreme cases ... ban users."

------
cschmidt
Wow, that's a big list of guys. You have to go down many pages to get to
'bane' before you can find a female.

------
morrow
It's really interesting to see the people and their associated projects,
companies, and institutions that contribute to the hn commentary. For a lot of
the power users, I recognized their usernames and always sort of connected
that to who they were professionally, but this really makes it clear.

I'm not sure if this is planned, but I'd guess some of the users wouldn't want
the information collected and displayed like that, you might want to add the
ability to remove yourself from that listing (so users aren't forced to censor
or even delete their profiles).

On a side-note, I was having trouble with the gray on gray text, so I made up
a quick alternate design for the site here, if anyone is interested:
<http://stylebot.me/styles/752>

------
revorad
This is pretty cool. But seeing myself show up so high is really embarassing.
Definitely don't deserve to be among those people.

~~~
Anon84
Same here!

------
drats
Very nice, I like the clean design. One suggestion: auto-loading when you hit
the bottom of the page.

~~~
sp332
But then you'd have to move all the bottom navigation to the top (or side) or
you'd never be able to see them :)

------
palish
How do so many websites break the zoom feature on iPhone?

So frustrating. Patio's massive face drowns out all the content. =)

~~~
DanielRibeiro
It is a viewport meta tag. Sorry that the page doesn't work great on iphone. I
am working on making the layout scale, and the page leaner for iphone. My
nexus S views it just fine, but even it could use a better page.

~~~
palish
No no.. We don't need a "lean" iPhone layout.

The iPhone is designed to view webpages. So make it a standard webpage. No
special casing. =)

But... Really, just strip out the meta stuff for now. It's unusable on iPhone
at the moment.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Ok. I've uploaded a new verion without viewport and without the overlay for
mobile phones. Let me know how it works out for you.

~~~
palish
It works!! It worksitworksitworks.

The layout in fact could not be more perfect on an iPhone.

Tell us whatever you did, so that we can refer other people to do the same,
please!

~~~
DanielRibeiro
I am glad it worked for you!

I simply removed the viewport metatag, and removed the overlay

The overlay doesn't work on mobile phone perfectly (it has to have its size
computed on runtime, as I let the user bios grow as needed).

Also it is useless on mobile phones, as its only removed on mouseover (it
gives the glow effect on the desktop browsers), and put back on mouseout.

As a good side effect, with less javascript floating around, the page renders
faster.

------
sid6376
Thanks for doing this. Its great to put a face behind some of the people whose
comments I have loved.

------
alanh
I’m not sure why I don’t show up here, even after clicking “more” enough
times. I’m seeing users ordered by karma, but I’m not in the list of users
with karma ≥ 3881. My karma has been higher than that for … maybe half a year.

Edit: I see, I have to list my Twitter username in my HN bio…

------
sliverstorm
This has taught me something.

"Holy cow, I am almost on the leader board. I spend too much time here."

------
stfu
I like the idea, but there is a lot of scrolling and [More] clicking going on.
Would love to see an easier navigation option.

Also just out of curiosity: What is the current minimum kama level required to
get into the top 1000?

------
chegra84
Need more females. :)

~~~
Mz
I'm female and fairly openly so (and people still sometimes refer to me as
"he/him" because they assume I am male, presumably just because it's HN and
for no other apparent reason). A lot of the women here seem to intentionally
downplay their gender a good deal. On at least one occasion a female member
created a throwaway account to explain in part why she hides her gender while
posting here.

So a) I wonder why you are saying that and b) I wonder how accurate
perceptions are in that regard. (FWIW: I am assuming I did not make it onto
this list because I don't have a twitter account and I have no idea if I have
enough karma for it, which seems to be a factor.)

~~~
chegra
It was just an glaring observation. I do remember the post about anonymous
female members, but I didn't think it was something that was wide spread.
Nevertheless, it would be brilliant if we could have more females on
here[diversity].

Yea, I was looking for your account too[there is a more button on the bottom
of the page]. So, I think maybe it is for people with twitter handles. I
appeared twice, maybe trice[didn't reach that far down] with less Karma.

What are your suggestions for increasing our female population?

~~~
Mz
_What are your suggestions for increasing our female population?_

If you are male and want to encourage women to show up and post as openly
female, then engage the women in intelligent conversation. Don't gush at them
about how great it is to, gee golly whiz, see A GIRL here. Please don't
publicly try to hit on any of the women here. You are highly unlikely to get
what you are looking for and all it does is make the girls go into hiding
because it promotes a predatory atmosphere.

I'm sure that could be expanded upon. I'm also sure I'm too tired to do so
without getting myself into hot water at the moment (my 24 year old son has
vetoed one of my illustrative remarks as a very bad idea <insert halo>).
Hopefully, it's a place to start.

EDIT: I did see your reply to my reply before you deleted it. If you seriously
want more feedback, email me and I will tell you privately what I left out of
this post. And thank you for deleting it.

------
iuguy
Interesting. I've noticed that I don't show up on there (not that I mind).
Wonder why that might be.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
At the moment you have to list your twitter name in your profile. Things like
twitter: @name or even direct link like <http://twitter.com/#!/name> are all
fine.

------
rayhano
Awesome!

When you get a chance to develop this out, would be great to have:

embedded twitter follow buttons autoload further users when scrolling reaches
close to the bottom look-through AJAX box for their recent posts/comments

Thanks and great job

Rayhan <http://rayhano.com>

------
dkrich
Great job, but how do you plan to monetize?

KIDDING

------
maxklein
Shouldn't you filter the ones that don't have a real photo? Seeing the photo
of the person makes them seem real and personable...those pure avatar ones to
me feels like one is just looking at the HN username.

~~~
pyre
Looks like it's mostly just based on a Twitter account in the profile, so I
would assume that those are Twitter proflie icons.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
You are right pyre. I am considering adding people with
gihub/stackoverflow/facebook profiles as well.

------
tokenadult
I see fallentimes (now deceased, if I remember correctly) is on the list.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
The list is becoming more of a reflect of HNSearch outputs[1][2].

The idea is that there are many cool stuff hacker news members did that we are
not generally aware of (but hidden on the user's bios), and we can showcase
them.

This is not 1000memories[3], but I find it nice that we can live forever
through our creations.

On the other hand, this is a reflect of community, and if it decides it is no
longer appropriate to list the members who left us, I'll respect it.

[1]
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&#...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&sortby=karma+desc)

[2]
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.c...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.com&sortby=karma+desc&start=0)

[3] <http://1000memories.com/>

------
paraschopra
The list doesn't seem exhaustive. For example, where am I? :)

------
DiabloD3
Holy crap, 100k karma? I knew Paul Graham was cool (I've even told other
people to read his essays), but I didn't know he was 100k karma cool.

~~~
omarchowdhury
It is a reflex to upvote any post from pg.

------
noodle
so, what are the criteria for the list? doesn't quite correlate with the
leaders list. is it based on comment only score?

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Look above for more info on how the list was crafted:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3117846>

------
eduadecastro
Paul Graham: 100K! I now believe in Rebirths

------
bobds
I get a blank page for some reason, even after enabling everything with
NoScript.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Sorry, but it reaquires Javascript. On mobile phones it can take a while to
render.

------
georgemcbay
1473 karma in 396 days but no Twitter profile

:(

------
chopsueyar
I don't like this.

