

HN Greasemonkey script: Show user reputation(karma and age) in comments  - helium
http://github.com/brainkarma/hnreputation/tree/master

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jacquesm
Hey Michael,

that does a request to the server for _every_ comment listed, so you are
basically loading up HN with a high multiple of the current number of requests
per second if this becomes popular and / or gets loaded in threads with a
large number of comments.

Not sure if this is a good idea.

~~~
helium
Well I'm sure HN gets quite a lot traffic as is at the moment on the homepage
and with rss feeds and whatnot.

The user profile page itself is only around 19KB....

I'm definitely not trying to DDoS Hacker News though. If this really causes
problems I will delete the repo.

~~~
jacquesm
Do the math, a thread with 50 comments (not rare) suddenly pulls an extra
_megabyte_ in order to retrieve several hundred bytes of info per pageview.

Anyway, it really isn't my call to make, I just figured I should warn you, in
case you had not thought through the consequences of this becoming popular.

edit: unless I'm misreading your code it even does requests for users that are
listed multiple times on a single page, you could easily save there by caching
the results of your queries.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
Maybe he can modify the script so that the score is shown only on demand.

~~~
skorgu
Or memoize the fetch function. Greasemonkey has support [1] for persistent
data, it should't be hard to cache the info to only fetch the counts every n
comments or x days.

[1] <http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/advanced/gm_getvalue.html>

~~~
jacquesm
That sounds like a better solution. The way it is now it is very heavy.

The very best way would be to ask for stuff like this to be configurable for
those that want it but HN 'feature' requests are not usually honoured.

------
guicifuentes
What do you gain knowing the karma and age of a user when you're replying its
comment or thread?

Are you going to base your disertation at "argumentum ad hominem"?

No to the subjetivism

~~~
helium
When I evaluate the merit someone's statement in the real world a big factor
will always be my and others' respect for that person based on my his\her
reputation.

The comments on HN already display the user name. Tell me, would you honestly
discern a comment from pg the same as you would for some other unknown user?

~~~
jrg
To be honest, I don't usually read the names of those commenting (and notice
that they are less prominent, being in grey, than the comment itself) - at
least until after thinking "Good point, well made."

But perhaps others are more fan-worshipping.

~~~
sofal
I don't buy into this whole pure non-contextual ideal, as though the only
possible result of attaching a name and a reputation to a comment is an ad
hominem argument or fan-worshiping.

When you're making an argument or counterpoint, you would do well to divorce
your argument from the external characteristics of whoever you're responding
to. However, when you are just reading through conversations for your own
benefit there is a lot you can gain from the added context of the user's
reputation.

For example, whenever there is an article about security and I stumble upon a
comment written by tptacek, I can safely assume that he knows what he's
talking about and I can therefore place more trust in his comment than I would
in a comment from someone I don't know. This context is particularly useful to
me when I have a hard time judging the value of the comments alone simply
because I know jack squat about security.

Similarly, if I stumble across a comment that makes a radically strange
conclusion (like "women and men should be lumped into one sports category")
and I look at who wrote it, I can remember that the commenter has made some
very good points in the past and is not prone to making dumb arguments. From
there I can cut a little more slack in my own mind for the argument and I can
try to reach into it and see what the main point he's trying to get across is.

None of these approaches is fan-worshiping, nor do they involve me making an
ad hominem argument. Context is absolutely useful for humans. We are
inherently biased creatures for a reason. We have to make quick judgments and
take shortcuts every day to deal with all of the information, and the context
of others' reputation works great for this.

You wouldn't do a risky business deal with someone whose reputation you didn't
know, would you? Well think of reading others' opinions as a kind of
transaction. You take on a little risk by buying into someone's opinion. You
may change your worldview just a tiny bit based on the value you place on
another's comment. That is what conversations are all about. The risk comes
from the possibility of adding inconsistencies, falsehoods, or improbabilities
to your worldview without realizing it. We don't know all there is to know and
so we cannot make perfectly objective and absolute judgments on whatever we
come across.

~~~
gloob
Philosophically, I largely agree with you. The problem is raised by the fact
that karma is largely a measure for "how long have you been on HN?" rather
than anything that a sane person would like to base their opinion on. This is
most clearly evident in your example with tptacek; could you tell me how you
would go about determining his aptitude in the security field by looking at
his karma score?

~~~
sofal
Oh I absolutely agree. Karma is definitely little more than an odometer and
not useful for reputation purposes at all outside of an individual comment,
and even then it doesn't say a whole lot.

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petercooper
DON'T RUN THIS SCRIPT. My IP was blocked from Hacker News and now I'm having
to SSH tunnel in (and no, I haven't done anything unsavory on HN today) :)

Also, if someone could unblock 81.86.235.* I'd be much obliged, thank you. I
have turned off this silly script.

~~~
ashleyw
Indeed, I'd be grateful if 78.86.95.* was unblocked also please.

~~~
ashleyw
Thanks to PG for unbanning me! :)

I still can't believe I ran this script without thinking of how it worked and
the coincidences of running it...

~~~
jacquesm
It was quite clearly spelled out on this page... anti bot mechanisms are
pretty much a must for any site that is 'above the radar' otherwise you end up
serving bots 90% of the time and users 10% of the time. If the service
survives.

------
helium
I can't be sure of this, but I don't think that such large percentage of the
HN readership:

a) Uses Firefox and Greasemonkey b) Will want to install it and keep it
installed for a long time.

For the few that will, I don't think this will make such a huge impact.

~~~
petercooper
Really? I consider myself an oddball because I typically _don't_ use Firefox
and Greasemonkey. From all the blog posts, articles on sites like LifeHacker,
etc, that I see, I figured Greasemonkey was _extremely_ popular amongst the
techie crowd.

------
lucumo
Request by pg to not use this script:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=789469>

