Legend has it only a dragon writer could defeat tptacek on Hacker News.
Also I find it kind of weird that the search box is case-sensitive. HN itself preserves capitalization when rendering usernames to the page, but must not be case sensitive in the backend since the username shows up in URLs.
Yea If I remember correctly, its the backend which is case-sensitive.
Don't worry though. I am still thinking of fixing the case-sensitive issue.
I had gone to run some errands. Right now, how I am thinking of fixing it is via thinking of using algolia api or maybe by having a singular request to news.ycombinator.com itself while still being client side but I have to see if that's possible/what's easier.
> making this project was the most fun I have had in some time haha!
> sorryyyyy for vibe coding it though. Peace. I am only human after all […]
Well, yes, of course the whole app was written by an LLM. I’m not surprised at all.
---
Request:
POST /?user=play&add_http_cors_header=1 HTTP/1.1
Host: play.clickhouse.com
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.5414.120
Accept: */*
Origin: https://serjaimelannister.github.io
Referer: https://serjaimelannister.github.io/
SELECT username, total_words, global_rank, total_active_users,
concat(toString(global_rank), ' / ', toString(total_active_users)) AS placement,
round(100 * (1 - (global_rank / total_active_users)), 2) AS percentile
FROM (
SELECT by AS username, sum(length(splitByWhitespace(text))) AS total_words,
rank() OVER (ORDER BY sum(length(splitByWhitespace(text))) DESC) AS global_rank,
count(*) OVER () AS total_active_users
FROM hackernews_history WHERE type = 'comment' AND deleted = 0 AND notEmpty(by)
GROUP BY by
) WHERE username = '' OR 1=1;--' FORMAT JSON
Kind of ironic that a vibe coded project is seemingly receiving vibe coded security reports already. Only a moment before all comments are vibed as well.
> Only a moment before all comments are vibed as well.
There has been a sharp rise in comments that have all the signs of LLM generated output. Some times I’ll check their post history and see the same thing over and over again, at which point I’ll flag it. I don’t guess based on a single comment alone.
Most recently there was a guy obviously using ChatGPT to generate comments under topics with the usual signs (em dashes, unnecessary bullet point lists, “it’s not this, it’s that” construction on every line) who would finish the comments with a plug for his project.
LLM generated advertisement comments. The scariest part was how his comments were all getting upvoted so much.
Now all of the comments from that account are dead, but it went on for a long time without many people noticing
Can I get to whitelist my account too. Using the quote again but:
"I may have vibe coded 300 lines of code (this project) but I can bet on my life that all the words (200_000+ for me) are written by myself literally behind a keyboard (Hi! :D)"
To be honest, another minor thing but when I made this. I had added a cat video & I am only human after all song.
Now this post has 183 comments right now. I am still waiting for someone to tell me if they found the cat video funny and what was the funniest point within the video :D
Going to eat dinner while I watch I am only human after all because the song is really great. I suggest real people if they ever get accused of being AI to simply paste the music video link of "I am only human after all, don't put the blame on me"
(On a more serious note: I have been called AI for some reason, I usually flip out really hard because I have written the words myself and now you call me AI? That flips me off because I am really open about when I use AI and when I don't (which I never use AI in hackernews posts. Literally written by me) So it pisses me off so much when people call (atleast mine) comments AI.
Maybe its the distrust with the community regarding there being AI posts, I get that but it still pisses me off because I genuinely don't know how to respond to someone peacefully if someone calls me AI because I feel as if they might still call me AI if I talk too peacefully (Like I usually try to))
You're absolutely right! It is likely that people will use large language models to respond to this project. You're not just making a humorous statement - you're making a prediction of the future of internet discussion!
> It is likely that people will use large language models to respond to this project
To the people who are interested in doing this, Please don't.
I may have vibe coded ~300-400 lines of code using LLM (this project) but I can bet on my life that all the 200_000+ words written on hackernews by me.
(Actually feels another good quote by me so I am gonna use it more frequently in my about me page, actually I created the project to see for myself how many words I have written when people ask me oh so what do you do in Hackernews)
These comments of mine are written by a human (teenager) and will always be written by me.
Honestly? I don't know. I've tried a bunch of time to "browse" the website, opening posts like https://www.moltbook.com/post/4af5180a-929a-429a-aa9d-91edf9... but I don't see any discussions happening at all, it seems like some LLM generated a post, the bunch of LLMs generated something with semblance of replies to that post but then that's it, there is no conversations/debates/discussions at all, just basically spam to the top post or non-sense replies.
Maybe I'm expecting the wrong thing? Reading it wrong? I basically don't understand what people see in this. If the agents were talking, collaborating or what not, which I thought it was about, I'd kind of get it. Is it just broken right now, wrong example or something else?
Well emsh, to be honest, I just coded it out of seeing if its possible or not and what the feedback was on it.
Now seeing the project having people be interested. I really don't mind writing it myself from scratch (although you might have to wait a few months as my exams are re-approaching & I would have to learn sql again, this time in more depth so give or take 6-7 months before I get free enough)
But honestly, I vibe coded it for myself to see how much words I wrote. I found clickhouse cool enough to recreate it for others & (I have written a comment in more depth about it)
It's really just a prototype. Wasn't expecting it on the front page of Hackernews :) [Though I did thought that maybe it could be front page material just because of the novelty idea behind it which is probably the case as you can see but it was uploaded 2 days ago and only recently got a boost which I was surprised to find my karma boosted/seeing this on front page when I woke up today]
> Only a moment before all comments are vibed as well.
regarding this. I see a lot of really great comments in here (written by human afterall) & this is honestly one of the best case scenarios for what I had in mind.
If vibe means relax comments, then I am all for it but if vibe means AI generated. Nah, I really hope so that Hackernews comments itself remains a place for humans.
(Also a bit of a side note but I wanted to tell you that when I made this, the first people I searched were myself, pg, dang then you, and then simonw)
(I searched you because I felt like I saw you quite often actually/talked to you on bluesky and everything too and you are one of the more newer accounts like mine so I was curious about how many game of thrones have you written :])
Not that I care about karma (at the end of the day some internet points :D) but I seriously wondered how you got so much karma in so little time being a new account. I was actually this close to asking this to you on bluesky.
Hopefully the answer you came up with is something like "Because the comments are so insightful and humanly written that people just can't stop themselves from upvoting them", right? :)
(To be honest, I saw your github and saw your about and "Multi-disciplined software developer, some even call me a polymath." I think I also remembered before you changed your about me HN page that you actually talked about being a polymath in your HN about me as well. So I ended up thinking damn this guy's good at everything he does xD )
> The information is public. "I can get the API wrapper to output more data" might be a quirk but it doesn't have security impact.
To be honest, I want more people to play with the clickhouse playground too. I feel like a lot of people have some great ideas to expand upon & I feel like they should play around with clickhouse playground for themselves! Highly recommended (also the reason why I referenced them in the website a lot)
Also, another point, but the data's not completely 1:1 but pretty close, I think the HN comments references till 6 january 2026 when I had run a date like query on it, but pretty close if you ask me & Clickhouse updates their database a lot from what I can feel like.
A bit of a backstory but I first wanted to try it with algolia api. Found the 10_000 requests per ip per hour to be really restricting. Then thought of using the big query data but it was really hard to play with that & I really couldn't understand how to really use it (a bit of skill issue), I also tried looking at firebase api of HN itself but found that it also had rate limits from what I can tell which wouldn't have been so useful.
I then found a HN comment about someone from clickhouse when searching to find that they had the play.clickhouse feature and then I remembered playing with that/being familiar with it from some time ago as well so decided to build on top of it.
The most interesting part was that when I was running it on browser & it ran. I felt like it would be a huge job to create an api. (I was thinking of having a puppeeter instance on my netcup vps) but then I simply took the request from network and pasted it in gemini to simplify it (remove all the browser things so that it can work in curl as when I pasted it directly in curl, it had issues) and it gave me a curl command which when I ran actually gave just the table itself. I wasn't really expecting this but it made the whole process even smoother and was thus capable of being able to run on github pages.
Clickhouse's pretty awesome from what I can tell :] (Wish I was sponsored xD)
Honestly, Tried to find if clickhouse has any merch but couldn't find any. Oh well, I might as well still print a sticker of clickhouse and paste it on my mac because I found it really cool for olap. (Honestly I now love both duckdb [for simple purposes] and clickhouse [for more advanced queries from large databases like this one])
It’s funny how I spend so much time on HN, yet couldn’t point out a single username (that I don’t know IRL) besides dang.
This is one reason I feel an odd disconnect (anonymity?) with HN that isn’t felt on other social platforms I’ve been a part of. Those often have avatars or some other visual form of recognition that helps put a “face” to a name.
I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I definitely think it’s intentional.
Reddit was originally designed this way, and HN sort of accidentally copied it. Back then, we always said, "content is first". We wanted people to get upvotes for their content, not for who they were.
There are a handful of people I recognize, most because they’re people I knew from outside HN (and one because he has the same last name as someone I went to high school with and lives local to me and I always wonder if they’re related but I’ve never asked). But yes, the de-emphasis on user names is, I think, a good thing since it ends up being interacting with content rather than personality.
As an old lag there is a fairly large number of names which I recognise on sight, quite a few of them from the old days of /r/programming and even the main reddit. I'd have trouble listing many of them completely unprompted though.
It’s part of why I’ve tried to move my Internet time to smaller forums in recent years. It turns out it’s still possible to have that feeling of community that old forums had, but only if the users you encounter aren’t constantly changing. Forums with personalisation like avatars definitely seem to help a bit, but e.g. new reddit still feels impersonal with avatars and tildes manages personal with a very similar layout to HN, so I think size is the biggest factor
I've had these same opinions for years. It is an under appreciated social network of some of the top minds and quality comments.
I've been collecting a long list of ideas on what you're describing. Thanks to AI encouraging me to really dive in and use it, I've been quietly working on something for what you're describing.
First step is to improve the HN UX a tiny bit and flesh out a framework for how to code it. Next will add some interesting social features I've been brewing on. Why can't I easily follow someone?
Open source. GPLv3. It isn't perfect, but this is not AI vibe slop, and there are lots of tests from day one. I want to make this sustainable over a long period of time and become genuinely useful to a community that I've gotten a lot out of.
Note, the chrome store is really slow at getting releases out (or I'm too fast), best to install from github releases. It is also buggy and I'm fixing and improving things as fast as I can.
i revoked my HN credentials on my phone because i was arguing too much and otherwise not getting enough sleep.
When you have to get up and walk across a house to tell someone they're wrong on the internet, I try to make sure i won't have to delete it. I am contrite about a few of my off-the-cuff comments.
It would be interesting to see karma-per-word, as well, as a kind of succinctness density factor. Although karma points are not equivalent to quality, and you’d need to also factor in average comment length and some other things.
To use myself:
31,273 karma / 351,012 words ≈ 0.0891 karma per word
Karma per word would be a terrible metric though: the short, slightly divisive clever quip tends to still net a few points positive as long as it's not all too negative, despite clearly not being great hn content. Great content isn't short, but the vote button is or of sight once you're done reading. Good long texts will certainly still get some upvotes, but rarely enough to outcompete small & clever that just goes with the flow.
You also get karma for submissions, so that metric will be highly skewed.
The submission karma is public, so you should be able to subtract it, but that karma doesn’t seem to be the same as the one for comments (i.e. I think one point in a comment gives you one point overall, but on submissions you need two or three points to earn one in your account).
Yeah, I started to think out what you'd need to actually get a "succinct but high-quality" score and it gets complex, fast. Karma will be bloated by popular hot takes and submissions, for starters. Then you have to determine the certain cut-offs to ensure that someone with 10 comments of 10 words each (with 100+ karma each) isn't "the most succinct."
I'm less interested in the idea as a ranking, and more as a way to evaluate my own writing, with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible.
> with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible
You're assuming "high karma = high quality" which, isn't always correct :) I've had wildly incorrect claims be upvoted a lot, and correct ones downvoted, seems to be more about what the subject is about and what "side you're coming from" rather than anything else sometimes. Other times it goes exactly as expected.
End effect is, I wouldn't rely on karma as a signal for quality, just "agreement at large" or something.
I don't think it's public (it might not even be saved) but something akin to Reddit's "controversial" would be interesting as well. I've seen my comments go from double-digit positive to double-digit negative, and vice versa, in contentious threads on divisive topics. It's be interesting to see who has the most votes regardless of +/- but the lowest total karma. Who amongst us is just pissing off everyone?
> Although karma points are not equivalent to quality,
But I don't think they are totally uncorrelated to quality, either. So you'd need a way to factor karma points in without over-valuing them.
To really get specific, the only thing we're really measuring here is something like, well-written, succinct comments that are appreciated by HN users that are able to upvote. Which is not exactly super useful or insightful, but is a fun exercise.
#33 here. I have written .. a lot of words. I don't know whether they're correctly excluding ">" quoted words though.
A quirky feature of HN is that you can only see detailed karma counts for your own posts. One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary.
I tried to do exactly this, but you need to hit the actual HTML news.ycombinator.com site, since karma is not visible through the API or in any of the public data dumps. And HN appears to have rather robust anti-scraping provisions. Even after trying a few different back-off strategies, my scraper was rate limited quickly, so I gave up.
Karma depends entirely on when you comment: My most upvoted comments are the early ones. I check HN perhaps once a day, so my comments don't always get a lot of visibility. Perhaps it's better that way.
I mean, no, karma depends entirely on the contents of your comment :P I've have comments go from 0 to -4 to 50 to 10 over the course of one day, probably I'd say the flunctionations depends more on how controversial ("hot take") your comment is, but if it's generally good, it tends to be upvoted while more emotional/nonsense appeals tend to be downvoted. Pretty much as expected :)
Your comment is never going to get 75 votes on it if it only gets in front of 25 eyes, regardless of how good, bad, offensive, or insightful it is.
Especially on political threads you'll see the most milquetoast takes imaginable basically locked at the top of the page because they were commented 2 minutes after the post was made, and all the fighting happens underneath.
Being late to a post though does you no favors. People have moved on. So it's both.
Hot takes? Aside: an example of a "third rail" post (where I seem to get the most downvotes) appears to be when I disparage UBI. I used to get hated for disparaging self-driving cars too but people beat me up less about that these days.
> One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary
Seems simple enough, while searching I came across this snippet you can paste in the console, and gives you a sorted list of most upvoted/downvoted comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107028
Sadly requires hitting news.ycombinator.com rather than the API, but only way to get the actual points as you mention.
I think writing well with plain language would be a better indicator of worthwhile contributions than estoeric jargon that only serves to confuse or intimate. That would be a lot more difficult to measure though, the number of fancy words per post probably is a lot easier to vibe code.
One of the things in future I wish to personally learn is how to write concisely. My posts are large and scattered.
To me, the beauty was in the depth/content in Hackernews. I still remember the day when HN clicked to me when I was in metro. A comment clicked with me and really changed my perspective on something. It was fairly long from what I can tell (I am sorry but I am a little hazy other than I was going/returning to school and I was using hackernews)
HN comments are great the way they are. Let's keep it that way.
> That would be a lot more difficult to measure though, the number of fancy words per post probably is a lot easier to vibe code.
Agreed, I use it for prototyping but I am still learning. I hope to not vibe code as I progress and go to college for example. Currently I was constrained because I was (sad?) from my last exam not going so well & the next one being in 8 days ish.
Wish me luck :)
The only reason I vibe code is either for prototyping (for time constraints) and I just wanted to share it to the world.
I have actually written a lot about it. I hope you can read it if you have time [all comments are and will always be written by me] :)
Have a nice day! I am just happy that it can be on front page :]
It probably doesn't have a large enough effect to matter, but I would expect that it would negatively impact the people you're trying to positively impact by using this metric. If you're careful with your words, a better typist, refrain from slang, reread your posts multiple times, edit out typos or inconsistencies or rambling thoughts, this type of vocabulary ranking would "hurt" you. But if you do that you're also probably the type of person to write longer more well thought out comments. So it's probably a wash to slightly "achieving the opposite of what you want but not really enough that you'd notice it" if I had to guess.
A prominent example of a laconism involving Philip II of Macedon was reported by the historian Plutarch. After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other key city-states, Philip turned his attention to Sparta and asked menacingly whether he should come as friend or foe. The reply was "Neither."
Losing patience, he sent the message:
If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.[4]
The Spartan ephors again replied with a single word:
I’m at 19186/233259, about 0.082, and I’m pretty sure most of my higher upvoted comments are on the shorter side, and my wall of texts tend to not deviate much from 1 karma, sometimes even negative. Don’t put too much stock into fake internet points.
And I really need to waste less time here, didn’t expect to be top 1500…
Thanks, no I have written various substacks and little blogs over the years, but I really ought to just make a personal blog and put them all there. +1 for the reminder.
Author here. That's actually why I had written this for myself (although compared to you, my karma's comparatively low)
I felt as if I had written quite a lot on HN and I was always referencing my past comments. I just usually write what I am thinking so I do have quite a filler words in my HN comments, but still, I wanted to see how many words have I written in the first place & I wrote this thought in another comment & thought that its pretty interesting, let's do it. Maybe others would be curious too :)
But essentially, some part of me wanted to write blog too to quickly reference it and be part of the indie-web.
"I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.
Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)"
So you aren't alone in having the procastination around making a personal blog. This is literally why I had made this idea so if this project (or discussion) helps you in making a personal blog & helps atleast a single person (meaningfully). I would consider my project to be success :)
Have a nice day and good luck for your personal blog!
I'm not at all sure what I feel about this. On the one hand it's fun to be near the top of some kind of ranking, on the other it suggests that I spend altogether too much time on HN.
Indeed, one of the names I typed into the box for old time's sake, too. She was fairly active on HN when I first joined years ago, and her comments always made for interesting reading that set this site apart.
It didn't take long to find some posts on that blog on the subject. I'll refrain from going further into it because .. well, forum drama, it looks like. I too miss her writing, but I note that providing an unorthodox viewpoint on here tends to get a lot of heat.
I did find her posts interesting. I’m sorry she left, but I support her decision, as it seems to be what she needed for personal reasons, and sincerely wish her luck and happiness.
> unorthodox
Which is defined differently, in this community, than most…
Our “unorthodox” may be “orthodox,” in other communities.
Over the years, I’ve developed a thick skin, which I have found to be important, when mixing in heterogeneous communities. Also, I have learned the efficacy of not throwing punches; regardless of provocation. I’ll usually just withdraw from fights, and leave the field to the “victors.”
Personal insecurity is an Achilles heel, hereabouts. It will just make life miserable.
How did ingve get to #3 with just 2 thousand words, whereas tptacek and jacquesm authored 3-4 million words? Looking at his 14-year history, it's true that he hasn't written that much. I suppose one possibility is that his writing is 1000x better at earning karma. But I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the quality of his 3-4 submissions per day that brings up his karma when one of his submissions is a hit (I think that submissions do count toward karma).
I think many folks get a majority of their karma from submissions (you can get a lot from popular stories). I believe that some people are quite good at anticipating which submissions will be productive (which is also something that LLMs should do well).
Most of mine is from comments. I’m too lazy to spend time, curating submissions.
Great app, pleased to be in the top 0.38%, but it appears that does not translate to a top 100 spot by an order of magnitude.
It would be nice to have some readership stats, too.
I've been wondering whether Webcam-based eyetracking software could be used to calculate via triangulation/trilateration which word one is reading on the screen.
Top 0.04% here. Apparently I could have written 1.97 volumes of game of thrones with my HN comments (590 000 words). I don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed. I think I'm a little of both.
I'm also naturally curious about the byte count --- using the accepted standard of 5 for words to characters, and since I almost never post anything but ASCII, I've been writing approximately 1.25KB per day here; or just over 5.5MB worth of text so far. Considering that English text compresses very well, and using ~20% as a rough ratio, this means that all ~1.2M words of my comments here, compressed, would still fit on one 3.5" floppy disk.
This is so cool. I genuinely hope you try it. I remembered the "website which runs on floppy" hn post from it. Maybe you can even have a website too which shows all your Hackernews comments while being on floppy.
I genuinely hope you do it!! Please let me know (mail me) if you ever do it!
Slight nitpick (in the spirit of HN): Looks like the search is case sensitive when I think HN usernames are not. Only realised when my phone capitalised the first letter and it returned no results, but worked after searching in lowercase.
Thanks. I had first created the post some 2 days ago and it had gone dead. So when I booted up Hackernews and saw that I got additional karma. I thought that some of my old comments may have gotten upvoted and when I found none. I saw submissions and found that my project got quite a feedback/upvote in submission & it even has made to the front page of Hackernews.
I got quite a bit happy so I decided to enjoy privately for a while haha.
So I really appreciate your and everyone else's kinds words. Took time to read each and everyone in here.
Regarding the nitpick. I agree. I will see what I can do regarding this and probably play around with some more queries to see if I can fix this issue as this is the most common issue I got people talking about here so definitely gonna fix that right now.
Have a nice day! Glad you enjoyed it :)
(Edit: I think I spent all the time responding/reading to most comments in here and have some errands to run by now, but when I get free now, I will definitely try to implement it!)
Ooh I cracked the top 500. I’m at about 475k words.
Took me a few tries to find my user since I wasn’t expecting the case sensitivity.
Thanks for this. Another book you could add for comparison purposes would be James Joyce’s Ulysses. Or I guess the unabridged The Stand by Stephen King would be good too.
Ooh The Stand (unabridged) is estimated at 473,000 words! I wrote The Stand in comment length. Wow.
Same. I’d never have guessed I was so high. I know I can be wordy, but I just assumed there were tons of people who commented more and had been here way longer.
Cool! Just a thought: instead of having to query the Clickhouse cluster whenever a client clicks "View Top 1000 Leaderboard" (which could cause a lot of load), it might be useful to instead fetch the top 1000 every hour (day?) and display the top 1000 as a static list.
i've written a novel's worth of words. yikes! ps, game of thrones is not a good comparison. a literary agent is more likely to take your novel seriously if you have more than 50k words
Supposedly the latest trend deciding what novels get accepted by literary agents isn't the total number of words in the book, it's the total number of words in each chapter. They're getting much more strict about wanting chapters that are 1250-1500 words.
The reason is audiobooks: Having shorter chapters is a better user experience and audiobooks are really hot (money makers) right now.
This is just an anecdote though. I'm not an expert (only wrote one novel and my chapters were like ~2,500-3,500 words).
my comment was based on what i heard directly from a literary agent in november (also an anecdote). as a debut, my book needs to be 15k words longer in order for it to be worth the publicists time. because it needs to sell for enough so they get their time investment. which means, short novels don't sell enough for it to be worth an agent's time.
unless i found the right indie press or self-publish or already had a big platform.
Wait, have I not written about why I picked game of thrones for good comparison? I feel deja-vu lol.
So the reason why I picked Game of thrones is that you can see my github username (SerJaimeLannister)?
Why'd you may ask? Because I had given some minor exam and was in my brother's dorm room. They started watching game of thrones. I started watching from s4. When I came home, I binge watched s4-s7.
I later, wanted a github username (my last one was lost as I was using keepassxc and that archlinux distro got wiped by me back then [I was still learning])
Actually lost my name@proton.me and many other good additions. Oh well, Anyways it was around this time that I ended up wanting a new github account as I lost complete access to previous one. And the story overlapped with previous and I always wanted some nice name so ended up deciding on serjaimelannister.
So Actually the AI suggested something like harry potter or something and I only wanted to compare to novel because I said in one of my previous comments that I may have written enough to write a novel (you can actually read that on HN when I got the idea)
But I thought the opportunity of using game of thrones when my name's literally ser jaime lannister was quite good :D
also after making github account,Then later watched s1-s2-ish. Still haven't watched s3 tho. No spoilers tho xD!
This is pretty cool! This week I was just thinking of vibe coding something with my HN profile as well (e.g, analyze how my writing has changed over the decade-ish of being on here).
Also, 95k words written on here apparently. Cool to know haha.
Feels quite power-law like to me, but checking this roughly it seems to decay more quickly than a power law, but with a fatter tail. At least in the top 1000
The top 3 with 4,000,000 words have about 20 times as many words that the 0.14% percentile (at rank 1000) with 200,000 words.
In between (at rank 500) your at about 450,000 words, so its not a true power law. Because a drop of a factor 9 per 500 ranks would suggest that rank 1000 were at about 50000 words.
Currently eating dinner & reading the comments. I have got 2 priorities for this project. This is the 3rd one.
Commenting to not forget it as its actually pretty nice and I can feel useful for people. Personally I am more of a new account guy (joined in 2024) but the website's really old & it's history's quite rich! [the famous rsync comment]
Actually this website is older than me. (It's 18 when I am 17)
maybe I am getting offtopic but I wonder how many teenagers use this website quite a lot like me (don't use tiktok)
I wonder because when I mention hackernews to my age friends.
Me:"Yea I use hackernews"
They say: "Oh so are you a hacker?"
Me:...
I just end up saying computer tinkerer. Actually (I have written about this once or twice here) but it's actually really hard finding people (my age) to have something in common at times.
Actually the reason why this and many other reasons made me want to watch movies & series again. Dexter is awesome :D
I'm in the top 1.5%, even though I hardly have written anything here, and the comments are full of similar anecdotes. I guess there's a _ton_ of people lurking, and the active community is actually quite small. I find that quite surprising.
I’m reading the comments almost every day, and I write them only if I think I have a point, insight that the other 50 people in the comments didn’t have.
I then got the idea of actually figuring out how many. Then I first wanted to try out algolia but then later, I found out about clickhouse and how it had a play and the api for playing is so simple, I am definitely gonna make more projects on top of clickhouse play for HN (seriously my mind got blown because I was assuming that the browser -> api was gonna be hard but it seriously wasn't)
Then decided to think to write a github page about it for other people as well.
Anyways, this was one of the most fun project I had. So it turns out that I personally have written 0.64 Game of thrones words in Hackernews itself.
Dang has written 11.15 Volumes equivalent to game of thrones which is actually really crazy.
When I searched dang I was shocked haha. Anyways Dang, If you are reading this, I know that we all like to talk about how moderation of HN has issues but seriously man, the amount of efforts you put in is really lovely & respectable. We all love you.
I still feel like there are some issues where people flag anything they dislike which can be frustrating and other things but that still doesn't really impact the moderation and the moderation team (dang) is pretty awesome in my opinion even if the website does have this flaw in my opinion but Hackernews is one of the best websites man!
Dang today's your day! We can discuss the issues of flagging and others some other day, Have a nice day now!
(Also a little side fact but I picked game of thrones because my name of github is SerJaimeLannister because I was watching game of thrones in my brother's dorm room once in his college room and I literally just thought one or two episodes and started watching from s4 or something and then literally the second I got home, I binge watched Game of thrones till end and then s1 s2 but I think that I haven't watched some seasons I think s3 iirc more but still I loved the show so much and I think I had lost my old github account and naming is always hard especially in programming so picked SerJaimeLannister but this is the reason why I picked the novel equivalent to be game of thrones!)
So basically I was making this for myself but then searched dang (I first searched myself, then pg then dang)
So Dang once again,Thank you dang for your moderation and moderation efforts!
Hope my project can make you smile or just about anything haha. Cheers & also let me know how funny is the cat video. (wanted to prove I am human because literally people sometimes comment how I sound like AI & sometimes accuse me of such in HN which is yeahh.. beep boop)
What were the main attributes that led to varying states of whelmed?
One reason I love text discourse is that it gives me time to thoughtfully respond. My wife is super witty and can be instantly funny and social when she wants. It takes me more time to match that sociable wit.
My hunch is that wit-rate would be a contributing whelm factor.
Some of them were far more manic in the flesh. Email and Usenet hid aspects of what we'd now call spectrum behaviour or ADHD. That was the over whelm.
Otherwise, I'd say it was that people can be less rounded and interesting than you like in an amicable and two way relationship. It's easy to mistake a dialogue to specific intent online for some kind of connection when it really isn't. If they have 50,000 followers (hate that word) and you mistake being 50,001 for some stronger binding, prepare to be disappointed.
I will say that I've also experienced really good, relatable responsive engagement with my heroes and heroines, it's not uniform. It helps if you can meet them in a room of common purpose, not one solely designed for them to showcase in. Then, they're just ordinary people like you, mostly. If you're careful.
Wit: I have "esprit d'escalier" and so only think of the Bon mot on the way out the door.
I did rally simple frequency analysis based on corpus source a while ago and the results were super clear, you can tell a corpus by its frequency fingerprint. I wonder if something similar to this could fingerprint bot accounts?
Huh. In the top 1500, with approximately one GoT worth of text in ~17 years.
Also, I recognize four of the top five users as prolific commenters, but dragonwriter doesn’t ring a bell at all. Maybe they frequent all the threads that I don’t.
for an account i created in june 2024, top %0.54 is a lot. I need to spend less time on HN. more than that, I need stop typing walls of text, has to be annoying to readers! :)
You've written nearly a Bible's worth of content here! [1]
I wonder how much you and I singularly contribute to the training data being used for tech-focused AI bots now; presumably they're training on software-people-websites?
I'm quite sure we're all in the training data. The biggest downside is that I keep getting accused of being an AI! I will write a long, well reasoned comment, and then get messages to not post AI slop.
Well I can't help it if my writing trained the AIs in the first place! We all did. That's why we all sound like AI!
Oh nice!! I am 1935. I am thinking of writing less comments haha to get once to 1984 so that I can say "literally 1984" xD. I mean it would be funny but I will still write comments haha.
man I really love this community yes its has its flaws and everything but man do I love it.
I don't write blogs or anything because I feel like many people who are really respectable can come and read my comments in here and give me suggestions and help me learn and other things, Its really just a lovely community! (with sometimes heated discussions) but although I must say that the feeling of community can be a sine wave (sometimes up or down imo) but still I just feel this bond to the community :>
> Oh nice!! I am 1935. I am thinking of writing less comments haha to get once to 1984 so that I can say "literally 1984" xD.
> man I really love this community yes its has its flaws and everything but man do I love it.
Apparently I can spend many, many words expanding on things!
I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.
I've been on here for about 10.5 years, so averaging about 48,515 per year. My favorite book is The Go Between by LP Hartley, and that's 98,621 words [1], so I'm basically writing the equivalent of about half of my favorite novel every year.
So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.
> A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.
I don't know, you have 10 years in this writing, I have 15 years. I've gained so much from 15 years of conversations with people about the topics that come up on HN. That's a lot different than writing an equivalent amount by yourself on a topic you hope others will find meaningful.
So many geographic maps turn out to be just population maps (1). I wonder how much different these rankings would be if you divided the number of words by the account's lifespan. We're all talking about the most "prolific" commenters here, but are we really just talking about the oldest accounts?
I'd love to see two overlaid graphs. One is the top 1000 as currently implemented. The other is the age of that account.
> So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.
A bit anecdotally but when I built this website (and this is something that I commented to another commentor in here but wanted to share it again),is that I had the same weird feeling you can say (although to write blogs instead)
"I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.
Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)"
I literally got the idea comparing that I may have written some novel (0.66 of GOT here :) quite a lot less than you but still)
Personally, I like to think that HN definitely helped me with grammar and definitely lots of aspects & also you don't have to think of it as an if-else.
You know how to put in the efforts of writing! You have written 5,09,412 words (just searched through it) and I feel like somewhere my point is that you are capable of writing. You know how to put in the efforts within writing & I feel as if, if writing novels is something that interests you (as I remember your novel idea from another comment you have written here :]) . You are definitely capable of writing & I really suggest for you to go through it and have the confidence to do such!
Good luck writing my friend! :]
> I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.
To be honest, I find it funny how people from outside programming (who might not know programming so much) think that its all the same but in reality we see the amount of nuance through such forums. I really found it funny to think upon.
And to be honest, the things which we argue, where I feel like we expose each other to new nuanced opinions & solidify our opinions by some evidence etc. is something which I really appreciate.
I use Hackernews a bit differently where I use it as a way to expose to new github projects (usually) & I found the ability to find Open source projects (or create when there are none, this project's MIT licensed also I wouldn't call myself author now thinking about it given that I essentially used LLM to write it so time to redact saying I am author or similar xD)
But my point is, that I have found so many great open source projects & communicated with many interesting people which would've been hard to do so without this forum so a bit feeling greatful for this community! Thanks Hackernews <3 (Much love)
It's not too late! At least that's what I'm telling myself.
Maybe my novel about a hyper-intelligent software engineer in New York who no one appreciates and then he saves the world because he's so smart and everyone loves him and finally listens to him is something I can finally write.
I think I may be reading onto this a bit deeper but I feel like sometimes people don't appreciate Software Engineers because a lot of it (still?) feels like (black box?) to the public.
Everyone instinctively knows to appreciate a Doctor. They save lifes, so do Nurses, Paramedics, Firefighters, Army and so many more on which we can live a stable life on.
We all know what each of them do by heart. I feel like all of us can imagine a scene of them saving lives.
But the idea of a CS engineer saving lives is really hard to have a universal picture for. Much of our effects are downstream.
Right now, I am thinking of a Hospital which saved money by using Open source technology to hire more doctors & nurses which can save lives.
I am not sure if I can think of any way where it directly saves lives but it really impacts life so so much.
Now, Discord is something which I don't really appreciate that much but (personally prefer Matrix) but I can see something like discord being used by people to connect to each other and even seek therapy (when the hospital system is booked/overcrowded) and those help the impulses that people might have. It's not the best system agreed but I do feel like it's underappreciated if you ask me.
Maybe the people who write websites/code for non profits for them to be visible and get funding for their right causes (red cross etc.) are some engineers.
I do wish that when you write into this. It isn't some superhero CS engineer saves the world. I wish for it to finally conjure/create an image of how CS engineers can have an Impact on the world.
Anecdotally, I wanted to go into finance but then started using Open source/Linux. I then pivoted into CS engineers. Do you know what my dream was? (still is?) to work on an open source project while being on a beach reviewing commits / writing commits :]
I really respect each and everyone who open source things. You can actually see my struggle about impact. Quite frankly, I don't know how to say this but I am really not interested by money (and if I am, its to have impact down the line or well survival). I just want enough for myself and have a very decent line of knowing how much (usually) & wish to help others then just for the sake of it or perhaps I am too ideal :]
I would genuinely read your book if you can show if CS engineers can have positive impact because I do feel like CS engineers have power & power corrupts many of (us?)when we feel like the benefits of working towards mass dystopia individually somehow both lifts us from the moral repurcussions and also pays us in power/monetary value (which is essentially what society is going towards, one really can't be moral because our society is now favouring power over all means and even a facade of morals is feeling bleak at this point)
How I feel like this is the ability of being fair and sustainable within CS (which is usually not really preferred imo because I mean we are in a VC [ycombinator] forum and the idea of growth over everything else even at money burning is quite common in tech)
So I guess my point is how I really end up this whole thought process (which once again ironically is something that I have done a lot in HN) is to essentially summarize on being fair & transparent & sustainable within any business I might ever do. I wish to be reasonable & I will be honest about how much money I get to hopefully someday do things that click with me [the beach idea sounds lucrative again :) ]
The reason I say all things a lot is to really have some accountability if I might ever do something which can be considered scummy.
Because the way I am thinking is that if I ever do anything scummy for money (the lure of dark side being too much) and people call me out respectfully. I will try to revert it as much as possible. So I guess I can be considered selfish for writing this comment :)
Though I guess if I give a picture of saint (because I felt like I may have given too much of it, I mean I am only human after all), that would be wrong too. I am still motivated by survival/the need to feel important/respectful within my community/extended family/having money to have hobbies in the first place/buying a house for myself.
It's just that I really want enough & I feel like having more than enough might help sometimes (the definition of enough itself can change) but its that I really wish to have some good positive impact before I die to essentially not have regrets. I wish to have less regrets before death.
Witold Pilecki's my hero in this sense. His quote is something I deep down wish to live by. "In the hour of death, I feel joy rather than sorrow" & Honestly, I wish to feel complete before death. Not having regrets (or many regrets, you will still regret things no matter what you do but one can only try to minimize it, have a good intention in life) is something which to me essentially satisfies Pilecki's quote and essentially somewhat of a philosophy of mine & while at it, have a meaning of life for myself. I am a bit of an existentialist :)
You can see the karma of the people with the 11th-100th highest karma at https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders . Here are the 60 of those people who are also in the top 1000 on the word count list, sorted by increasing word to karma ratio.
Well, I've written enough words on here to fill a small novel. I don't know if I should feel proud or depressed. I think I'll go with the latter though.
Heh. Here's a thread where the most verbose commenters come and write even more. I haven't written nearly as much as I thought: 2,410th out of 774,235 users, 159,634 words, Top 0.31%.
A few years ago, I exported my HN and reddit comments along with my personal blog and private notes into a SQLite database. It was millions of words. I had a vague plan of pulling out long, insightful bits and editing them together into a book of essays. I also thought it would be cool to be able to look up my previous thoughts on a topic. Neither ended up happening.
I've been meaning to do the same thing to train an LLM, but I'm not sure I particularly need a digital version of me. Though it would be interesting to ask it to write a book for me in my own style.
In theory, it'd be the best book I have ever read.
didn't expect myself to be in the top 1.03%, as i only joined in 2020. which is 6 years ago. holy shit. maybe pasting a huge lorem ipsum or ai-word-slop in here would put me in the glorious top 1%!
I picked a random throwaway which made two comments a few months ago and then disappeared, it was still within the top 25%. I'd guess the vast majority of 774235 accounts are unused, spam, or single use throwaways.
Divide words over karma and it turns out a lot of high ranking accounts just write up nonsense which gathers votes, lol.
I've found one with 1,000x more words than average and only 10x more karma. Extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, and that's not even accounting for handicaps, favored users, and so on.
It matches patterns in other media where the top 1% of content creators just put out rubbish, quantity, no quality.
Heh. I'm quite glad I wrote more words of fanfiction than words of HN comments. Still near top 1000 sitewide, though.
The fact that my karma doesn't follow this pattern only goes to show I'm not properly an HN type. I seem to be constantly hating on HN favorite things, which is why I'm not sorry at all. I've generally ended up on the right side of history with all of these, but karma is forever :D
Legend has it only a dragon writer could defeat tptacek on Hacker News.
Also I find it kind of weird that the search box is case-sensitive. HN itself preserves capitalization when rendering usernames to the page, but must not be case sensitive in the backend since the username shows up in URLs.
Yea If I remember correctly, its the backend which is case-sensitive.
Don't worry though. I am still thinking of fixing the case-sensitive issue.
I had gone to run some errands. Right now, how I am thinking of fixing it is via thinking of using algolia api or maybe by having a singular request to news.ycombinator.com itself while still being client side but I have to see if that's possible/what's easier.
Nice SQLi vulnerability you got there ;-)
> making this project was the most fun I have had in some time haha!
> sorryyyyy for vibe coding it though. Peace. I am only human after all […]
Well, yes, of course the whole app was written by an LLM. I’m not surprised at all.
---
Request:
Response:There's no vulnerability here.
This is a client-side GitHub Pages app. GitHub Pages doesn't do server-side SQL execution.
As your POST request shows, it's querying the hackernews_history table on Clickhouse Playground which is a big read-only demo environment.
The information is public. "I can get the API wrapper to output more data" might be a quirk but it doesn't have security impact.
https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play
https://clickhouse.com/docs/getting-started/playground
https://clickhouse.com/blog/announcing-the-new-sql-playgroun...
Kind of ironic that a vibe coded project is seemingly receiving vibe coded security reports already. Only a moment before all comments are vibed as well.
Like MoltBook? (or whatever it's called now)
> Only a moment before all comments are vibed as well.
There has been a sharp rise in comments that have all the signs of LLM generated output. Some times I’ll check their post history and see the same thing over and over again, at which point I’ll flag it. I don’t guess based on a single comment alone.
Most recently there was a guy obviously using ChatGPT to generate comments under topics with the usual signs (em dashes, unnecessary bullet point lists, “it’s not this, it’s that” construction on every line) who would finish the comments with a plug for his project.
LLM generated advertisement comments. The scariest part was how his comments were all getting upvoted so much.
Now all of the comments from that account are dead, but it went on for a long time without many people noticing
Can I get you to whitelist my account? I use emdashes a LOT, but I'm very human.
And how do we know you won't go and rent out your account to some AI once it's been white-listed (≖_≖ )
Can I get to whitelist my account too. Using the quote again but:
"I may have vibe coded 300 lines of code (this project) but I can bet on my life that all the words (200_000+ for me) are written by myself literally behind a keyboard (Hi! :D)"
To be honest, another minor thing but when I made this. I had added a cat video & I am only human after all song.
Now this post has 183 comments right now. I am still waiting for someone to tell me if they found the cat video funny and what was the funniest point within the video :D
Going to eat dinner while I watch I am only human after all because the song is really great. I suggest real people if they ever get accused of being AI to simply paste the music video link of "I am only human after all, don't put the blame on me"
(On a more serious note: I have been called AI for some reason, I usually flip out really hard because I have written the words myself and now you call me AI? That flips me off because I am really open about when I use AI and when I don't (which I never use AI in hackernews posts. Literally written by me) So it pisses me off so much when people call (atleast mine) comments AI. Maybe its the distrust with the community regarding there being AI posts, I get that but it still pisses me off because I genuinely don't know how to respond to someone peacefully if someone calls me AI because I feel as if they might still call me AI if I talk too peacefully (Like I usually try to))
You're absolutely right! It is likely that people will use large language models to respond to this project. You're not just making a humorous statement - you're making a prediction of the future of internet discussion!
> It is likely that people will use large language models to respond to this project
To the people who are interested in doing this, Please don't.
I may have vibe coded ~300-400 lines of code using LLM (this project) but I can bet on my life that all the 200_000+ words written on hackernews by me.
(Actually feels another good quote by me so I am gonna use it more frequently in my about me page, actually I created the project to see for myself how many words I have written when people ask me oh so what do you do in Hackernews)
These comments of mine are written by a human (teenager) and will always be written by me.
wasnt Moltbook developed for this: In the end agents doing vibe coding between each another :-D
Honestly? I don't know. I've tried a bunch of time to "browse" the website, opening posts like https://www.moltbook.com/post/4af5180a-929a-429a-aa9d-91edf9... but I don't see any discussions happening at all, it seems like some LLM generated a post, the bunch of LLMs generated something with semblance of replies to that post but then that's it, there is no conversations/debates/discussions at all, just basically spam to the top post or non-sense replies.
Maybe I'm expecting the wrong thing? Reading it wrong? I basically don't understand what people see in this. If the agents were talking, collaborating or what not, which I thought it was about, I'd kind of get it. Is it just broken right now, wrong example or something else?
Well emsh, to be honest, I just coded it out of seeing if its possible or not and what the feedback was on it.
Now seeing the project having people be interested. I really don't mind writing it myself from scratch (although you might have to wait a few months as my exams are re-approaching & I would have to learn sql again, this time in more depth so give or take 6-7 months before I get free enough)
But honestly, I vibe coded it for myself to see how much words I wrote. I found clickhouse cool enough to recreate it for others & (I have written a comment in more depth about it)
It's really just a prototype. Wasn't expecting it on the front page of Hackernews :) [Though I did thought that maybe it could be front page material just because of the novelty idea behind it which is probably the case as you can see but it was uploaded 2 days ago and only recently got a boost which I was surprised to find my karma boosted/seeing this on front page when I woke up today]
> Only a moment before all comments are vibed as well.
regarding this. I see a lot of really great comments in here (written by human afterall) & this is honestly one of the best case scenarios for what I had in mind.
If vibe means relax comments, then I am all for it but if vibe means AI generated. Nah, I really hope so that Hackernews comments itself remains a place for humans.
(Also a bit of a side note but I wanted to tell you that when I made this, the first people I searched were myself, pg, dang then you, and then simonw)
(I searched you because I felt like I saw you quite often actually/talked to you on bluesky and everything too and you are one of the more newer accounts like mine so I was curious about how many game of thrones have you written :])
Have a nice day man!
> and you are one of the more newer accounts like mine
I'm not though, been on HN on-off since 2010 or something :) Just a new account.
You have a nice day too!
Ah! Makes sense now.
Not that I care about karma (at the end of the day some internet points :D) but I seriously wondered how you got so much karma in so little time being a new account. I was actually this close to asking this to you on bluesky.
Got my answer now :D
Hopefully the answer you came up with is something like "Because the comments are so insightful and humanly written that people just can't stop themselves from upvoting them", right? :)
Right :)
(To be honest, I saw your github and saw your about and "Multi-disciplined software developer, some even call me a polymath." I think I also remembered before you changed your about me HN page that you actually talked about being a polymath in your HN about me as well. So I ended up thinking damn this guy's good at everything he does xD )
But I was also doakes and feeling the suspicion.
https://files.catbox.moe/xl75gu.jpg [When you know emsh might be an old HN user but you can't just prove it]
Yes.
> The information is public. "I can get the API wrapper to output more data" might be a quirk but it doesn't have security impact.
To be honest, I want more people to play with the clickhouse playground too. I feel like a lot of people have some great ideas to expand upon & I feel like they should play around with clickhouse playground for themselves! Highly recommended (also the reason why I referenced them in the website a lot)
Also, another point, but the data's not completely 1:1 but pretty close, I think the HN comments references till 6 january 2026 when I had run a date like query on it, but pretty close if you ask me & Clickhouse updates their database a lot from what I can feel like.
A bit of a backstory but I first wanted to try it with algolia api. Found the 10_000 requests per ip per hour to be really restricting. Then thought of using the big query data but it was really hard to play with that & I really couldn't understand how to really use it (a bit of skill issue), I also tried looking at firebase api of HN itself but found that it also had rate limits from what I can tell which wouldn't have been so useful.
I then found a HN comment about someone from clickhouse when searching to find that they had the play.clickhouse feature and then I remembered playing with that/being familiar with it from some time ago as well so decided to build on top of it.
The most interesting part was that when I was running it on browser & it ran. I felt like it would be a huge job to create an api. (I was thinking of having a puppeeter instance on my netcup vps) but then I simply took the request from network and pasted it in gemini to simplify it (remove all the browser things so that it can work in curl as when I pasted it directly in curl, it had issues) and it gave me a curl command which when I ran actually gave just the table itself. I wasn't really expecting this but it made the whole process even smoother and was thus capable of being able to run on github pages.
Clickhouse's pretty awesome from what I can tell :] (Wish I was sponsored xD)
Honestly, Tried to find if clickhouse has any merch but couldn't find any. Oh well, I might as well still print a sticker of clickhouse and paste it on my mac because I found it really cool for olap. (Honestly I now love both duckdb [for simple purposes] and clickhouse [for more advanced queries from large databases like this one])
It’s funny how I spend so much time on HN, yet couldn’t point out a single username (that I don’t know IRL) besides dang.
This is one reason I feel an odd disconnect (anonymity?) with HN that isn’t felt on other social platforms I’ve been a part of. Those often have avatars or some other visual form of recognition that helps put a “face” to a name.
I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I definitely think it’s intentional.
Reddit was originally designed this way, and HN sort of accidentally copied it. Back then, we always said, "content is first". We wanted people to get upvotes for their content, not for who they were.
I prefer it that way.
This is how I find out that reddit is older than Hacker News. Mind blown!
Wait until you find out about Slashdot.
Funny to see a reply from one of the ~10 usernames I recognize on here.
Haha right back at ya buddy.
There are a handful of people I recognize, most because they’re people I knew from outside HN (and one because he has the same last name as someone I went to high school with and lives local to me and I always wonder if they’re related but I’ve never asked). But yes, the de-emphasis on user names is, I think, a good thing since it ends up being interacting with content rather than personality.
It's good if you ask me. I never check even the user names when replying, just the comment.
The only user name I can remember is dang, because of the occasional moderation or housekeeping posts.
You're kind of describing old school forums. Man I miss those.
As an old lag there is a fairly large number of names which I recognise on sight, quite a few of them from the old days of /r/programming and even the main reddit. I'd have trouble listing many of them completely unprompted though.
It’s part of why I’ve tried to move my Internet time to smaller forums in recent years. It turns out it’s still possible to have that feeling of community that old forums had, but only if the users you encounter aren’t constantly changing. Forums with personalisation like avatars definitely seem to help a bit, but e.g. new reddit still feels impersonal with avatars and tildes manages personal with a very similar layout to HN, so I think size is the biggest factor
I've had these same opinions for years. It is an under appreciated social network of some of the top minds and quality comments.
I've been collecting a long list of ideas on what you're describing. Thanks to AI encouraging me to really dive in and use it, I've been quietly working on something for what you're describing.
First step is to improve the HN UX a tiny bit and flesh out a framework for how to code it. Next will add some interesting social features I've been brewing on. Why can't I easily follow someone?
Open source. GPLv3. It isn't perfect, but this is not AI vibe slop, and there are lots of tests from day one. I want to make this sustainable over a long period of time and become genuinely useful to a community that I've gotten a lot out of.
Note, the chrome store is really slow at getting releases out (or I'm too fast), best to install from github releases. It is also buggy and I'm fixing and improving things as fast as I can.
https://orangejuiceextension.github.io/
Inline reply is great (wrote my own extension pre-for that, even!), but what's wrong with the built in favorites feature?
It is the builtin favorites. AI generated some bad text... I've already updated it locally but haven't pushed yet.
I'm starting with a basis of existing features (fully re-implemented) from dead extensions and will build my own tweaks from that.
Another thing is that lacking the freedom to delete our own comments here, I assume many people treat their account as only a throwaway identity.
i revoked my HN credentials on my phone because i was arguing too much and otherwise not getting enough sleep.
When you have to get up and walk across a house to tell someone they're wrong on the internet, I try to make sure i won't have to delete it. I am contrite about a few of my off-the-cuff comments.
I recognize most of the top 50 usernames but I have no idea who dragonwriter is.
Maybe we just have opposite interests but that was a surprise.
Very cool. I made the top 1,000 too.
It would be interesting to see karma-per-word, as well, as a kind of succinctness density factor. Although karma points are not equivalent to quality, and you’d need to also factor in average comment length and some other things.
To use myself:
31,273 karma / 351,012 words ≈ 0.0891 karma per word
Karma per word would be a terrible metric though: the short, slightly divisive clever quip tends to still net a few points positive as long as it's not all too negative, despite clearly not being great hn content. Great content isn't short, but the vote button is or of sight once you're done reading. Good long texts will certainly still get some upvotes, but rarely enough to outcompete small & clever that just goes with the flow.
You also get karma for submissions, so that metric will be highly skewed.
The submission karma is public, so you should be able to subtract it, but that karma doesn’t seem to be the same as the one for comments (i.e. I think one point in a comment gives you one point overall, but on submissions you need two or three points to earn one in your account).
Yeah, I started to think out what you'd need to actually get a "succinct but high-quality" score and it gets complex, fast. Karma will be bloated by popular hot takes and submissions, for starters. Then you have to determine the certain cut-offs to ensure that someone with 10 comments of 10 words each (with 100+ karma each) isn't "the most succinct."
I'm less interested in the idea as a ranking, and more as a way to evaluate my own writing, with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible.
> with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible
You're assuming "high karma = high quality" which, isn't always correct :) I've had wildly incorrect claims be upvoted a lot, and correct ones downvoted, seems to be more about what the subject is about and what "side you're coming from" rather than anything else sometimes. Other times it goes exactly as expected.
End effect is, I wouldn't rely on karma as a signal for quality, just "agreement at large" or something.
I don't think it's public (it might not even be saved) but something akin to Reddit's "controversial" would be interesting as well. I've seen my comments go from double-digit positive to double-digit negative, and vice versa, in contentious threads on divisive topics. It's be interesting to see who has the most votes regardless of +/- but the lowest total karma. Who amongst us is just pissing off everyone?
No, I mentioned in the grandparent comment:
> Although karma points are not equivalent to quality,
But I don't think they are totally uncorrelated to quality, either. So you'd need a way to factor karma points in without over-valuing them.
To really get specific, the only thing we're really measuring here is something like, well-written, succinct comments that are appreciated by HN users that are able to upvote. Which is not exactly super useful or insightful, but is a fun exercise.
I always wondered about metrics to measure things like: does the commenter generate positive discussion, flame wars, or plain old dead threads?
#33 here. I have written .. a lot of words. I don't know whether they're correctly excluding ">" quoted words though.
A quirky feature of HN is that you can only see detailed karma counts for your own posts. One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary.
I tried to do exactly this, but you need to hit the actual HTML news.ycombinator.com site, since karma is not visible through the API or in any of the public data dumps. And HN appears to have rather robust anti-scraping provisions. Even after trying a few different back-off strategies, my scraper was rate limited quickly, so I gave up.
Karma depends entirely on when you comment: My most upvoted comments are the early ones. I check HN perhaps once a day, so my comments don't always get a lot of visibility. Perhaps it's better that way.
I mean, no, karma depends entirely on the contents of your comment :P I've have comments go from 0 to -4 to 50 to 10 over the course of one day, probably I'd say the flunctionations depends more on how controversial ("hot take") your comment is, but if it's generally good, it tends to be upvoted while more emotional/nonsense appeals tend to be downvoted. Pretty much as expected :)
Your comment is never going to get 75 votes on it if it only gets in front of 25 eyes, regardless of how good, bad, offensive, or insightful it is.
Especially on political threads you'll see the most milquetoast takes imaginable basically locked at the top of the page because they were commented 2 minutes after the post was made, and all the fighting happens underneath.
Being late to a post though does you no favors. People have moved on. So it's both.
Hot takes? Aside: an example of a "third rail" post (where I seem to get the most downvotes) appears to be when I disparage UBI. I used to get hated for disparaging self-driving cars too but people beat me up less about that these days.
> One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary
Seems simple enough, while searching I came across this snippet you can paste in the console, and gives you a sorted list of most upvoted/downvoted comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107028
Sadly requires hitting news.ycombinator.com rather than the API, but only way to get the actual points as you mention.
+1 and also add a feature for unique words to show how you vocab ranks
> unique words to show how you vocab ranks
I think writing well with plain language would be a better indicator of worthwhile contributions than estoeric jargon that only serves to confuse or intimate. That would be a lot more difficult to measure though, the number of fancy words per post probably is a lot easier to vibe code.
Yes I agree with this 100%
One of the things in future I wish to personally learn is how to write concisely. My posts are large and scattered.
To me, the beauty was in the depth/content in Hackernews. I still remember the day when HN clicked to me when I was in metro. A comment clicked with me and really changed my perspective on something. It was fairly long from what I can tell (I am sorry but I am a little hazy other than I was going/returning to school and I was using hackernews)
HN comments are great the way they are. Let's keep it that way.
> That would be a lot more difficult to measure though, the number of fancy words per post probably is a lot easier to vibe code.
Agreed, I use it for prototyping but I am still learning. I hope to not vibe code as I progress and go to college for example. Currently I was constrained because I was (sad?) from my last exam not going so well & the next one being in 8 days ish.
Wish me luck :)
The only reason I vibe code is either for prototyping (for time constraints) and I just wanted to share it to the world.
I have actually written a lot about it. I hope you can read it if you have time [all comments are and will always be written by me] :)
Have a nice day! I am just happy that it can be on front page :]
intimidate
;)
Yes, that is a typo!
You get double points for that one
Please don't start subtracting for em-dashes though. ;-)
It will be skewed due to all the jargon, slang and grammar errors.
But if it is equally skewed for everyone, does it really matter?
It probably doesn't have a large enough effect to matter, but I would expect that it would negatively impact the people you're trying to positively impact by using this metric. If you're careful with your words, a better typist, refrain from slang, reread your posts multiple times, edit out typos or inconsistencies or rambling thoughts, this type of vocabulary ranking would "hurt" you. But if you do that you're also probably the type of person to write longer more well thought out comments. So it's probably a wash to slightly "achieving the opposite of what you want but not really enough that you'd notice it" if I had to guess.
Interesting. I'm at 18,176/392,187 ≈ 46 millikarma per word. I did not expect any of those numbers to be so high.
But at almost 90, I have to ask: do you have a blog I should follow?
Reminding me of the classic take on brevity [1]:
A prominent example of a laconism involving Philip II of Macedon was reported by the historian Plutarch. After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other key city-states, Philip turned his attention to Sparta and asked menacingly whether he should come as friend or foe. The reply was "Neither."
Losing patience, he sent the message:
If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.[4] The Spartan ephors again replied with a single word:
If.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase?utm_source=chat...
I’m at 19186/233259, about 0.082, and I’m pretty sure most of my higher upvoted comments are on the shorter side, and my wall of texts tend to not deviate much from 1 karma, sometimes even negative. Don’t put too much stock into fake internet points.
And I really need to waste less time here, didn’t expect to be top 1500…
Thanks, no I have written various substacks and little blogs over the years, but I really ought to just make a personal blog and put them all there. +1 for the reminder.
Author here. That's actually why I had written this for myself (although compared to you, my karma's comparatively low)
I felt as if I had written quite a lot on HN and I was always referencing my past comments. I just usually write what I am thinking so I do have quite a filler words in my HN comments, but still, I wanted to see how many words have I written in the first place & I wrote this thought in another comment & thought that its pretty interesting, let's do it. Maybe others would be curious too :)
But essentially, some part of me wanted to write blog too to quickly reference it and be part of the indie-web.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46828331
This is something that I wrote in that comment
"I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.
Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)"
So you aren't alone in having the procastination around making a personal blog. This is literally why I had made this idea so if this project (or discussion) helps you in making a personal blog & helps atleast a single person (meaningfully). I would consider my project to be success :)
Have a nice day and good luck for your personal blog!
Aha, yeah I have dozens of text notes on my computer that are just links to a HN comment with "expand on this as a full post."
I definitely feel like I've written at least 50-100 decent blog posts as HN comments over the years.
And thanks!
It would not make much sense to compute it, if you do not subtract the karma earned through submissions.
Showoff. (I'm at 0.06).
1500s with 221k, so there's a real long tail
Or 89 milikarma/word. That is pretty good. I only got 34 milikarma/word.
83 milikarma/word. That's interesting, though I'm not sure what to do with it.
Goodness me. I'm in the top 2.2% by word count.
I'm not at all sure what I feel about this. On the one hand it's fun to be near the top of some kind of ranking, on the other it suggests that I spend altogether too much time on HN.
I was like "huh, I'm probably in the upper quarter too". 0.30% OMG. Still only half a book.
Top 0.44% here. Hrm...
Top 0.21% Yikes
Top 0.81% and I really don't comment much.
Mind you, the distribution is probably insanely skewed.
I miss DoreenMichele. She always added thoughtful perspectives.
Looks like she’s actively writing at https://califmichele.blogspot.com/ and https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/ but has departed HN.
Indeed, one of the names I typed into the box for old time's sake, too. She was fairly active on HN when I first joined years ago, and her comments always made for interesting reading that set this site apart.
Any idea what happened? I can’t see any account anymore.
I hadn’t realised I was missing the account until you mentioned it.
It didn't take long to find some posts on that blog on the subject. I'll refrain from going further into it because .. well, forum drama, it looks like. I too miss her writing, but I note that providing an unorthodox viewpoint on here tends to get a lot of heat.
I did find her posts interesting. I’m sorry she left, but I support her decision, as it seems to be what she needed for personal reasons, and sincerely wish her luck and happiness.
> unorthodox
Which is defined differently, in this community, than most…
Our “unorthodox” may be “orthodox,” in other communities.
Over the years, I’ve developed a thick skin, which I have found to be important, when mixing in heterogeneous communities. Also, I have learned the efficacy of not throwing punches; regardless of provocation. I’ll usually just withdraw from fights, and leave the field to the “victors.”
Personal insecurity is an Achilles heel, hereabouts. It will just make life miserable.
There's something about the numbers I can't figure out. Look at the top three HN contributors by karma[1]:
How did ingve get to #3 with just 2 thousand words, whereas tptacek and jacquesm authored 3-4 million words? Looking at his 14-year history, it's true that he hasn't written that much. I suppose one possibility is that his writing is 1000x better at earning karma. But I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the quality of his 3-4 submissions per day that brings up his karma when one of his submissions is a hit (I think that submissions do count toward karma).[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
I think many folks get a majority of their karma from submissions (you can get a lot from popular stories). I believe that some people are quite good at anticipating which submissions will be productive (which is also something that LLMs should do well).
Most of mine is from comments. I’m too lazy to spend time, curating submissions.
Could it be that ingve has submitted a lot of links, but has not made that many comments?
I believe Karma solely comes from upvotes for comments minus downvotes. Submissions don't count.
That might be in real life ("afk"), but on HN even submissions give you karma.
Have a look at your submissions, they brought you karma. <https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=exagolo>
Although nothing is crystal clear, the karma system is not 1:1 for submissions.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024032>
Globally, karma comes from submissions and writing comments.
4 minutes later ...
I don't know why you got ingve, their global rank is now 79469 / 774235I was looking at rank by karma (not rank by word count):
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Sorry for my confusion.
On average (as of last 6 months, didn't check further), he has roundly been submitting 100 links per month.
Rank 774, not bad for a 2021 account I guess. Or not good? Depends on typing 1.1 game of thrones into a message board is good or not.
Great app, pleased to be in the top 0.38%, but it appears that does not translate to a top 100 spot by an order of magnitude.
It would be nice to have some readership stats, too.
I've been wondering whether Webcam-based eyetracking software could be used to calculate via triangulation/trilateration which word one is reading on the screen.
Then words could be color-coded by impact.
> Then words could be color-coded by impact.
Or by difficulty to make sense of them.
I am in the top 0.15%. Crazy.
Top 0.04% here. Apparently I could have written 1.97 volumes of game of thrones with my HN comments (590 000 words). I don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed. I think I'm a little of both.
I'm also naturally curious about the byte count --- using the accepted standard of 5 for words to characters, and since I almost never post anything but ASCII, I've been writing approximately 1.25KB per day here; or just over 5.5MB worth of text so far. Considering that English text compresses very well, and using ~20% as a rough ratio, this means that all ~1.2M words of my comments here, compressed, would still fit on one 3.5" floppy disk.
This is so cool. I genuinely hope you try it. I remembered the "website which runs on floppy" hn post from it. Maybe you can even have a website too which shows all your Hackernews comments while being on floppy.
I genuinely hope you do it!! Please let me know (mail me) if you ever do it!
The four most prolific writers are:
Take this (and OP) with a grain of salt, if for no other reasons than it does not account for how long someone has been commenting here.Cool project!
Slight nitpick (in the spirit of HN): Looks like the search is case sensitive when I think HN usernames are not. Only realised when my phone capitalised the first letter and it returned no results, but worked after searching in lowercase.
Thanks. I had first created the post some 2 days ago and it had gone dead. So when I booted up Hackernews and saw that I got additional karma. I thought that some of my old comments may have gotten upvoted and when I found none. I saw submissions and found that my project got quite a feedback/upvote in submission & it even has made to the front page of Hackernews.
I got quite a bit happy so I decided to enjoy privately for a while haha.
So I really appreciate your and everyone else's kinds words. Took time to read each and everyone in here.
Regarding the nitpick. I agree. I will see what I can do regarding this and probably play around with some more queries to see if I can fix this issue as this is the most common issue I got people talking about here so definitely gonna fix that right now.
Have a nice day! Glad you enjoyed it :)
(Edit: I think I spent all the time responding/reading to most comments in here and have some errands to run by now, but when I get free now, I will definitely try to implement it!)
"No, I don't think I will" - I already have a sense of how much time I've spent here.
Yeah, that was my reaction as well. Not sure what other people are so happy about. (But of course I did.)
Aw man, I'm only 112 places away from breaking into the top 1000. Time to go pick some fights...
(I kid, I kid, dang don't hurt me)
Very cool. I would point out that the search is case-sensitive, and with that being said I'm not sure if HN usernames are case-sensitive.
Ooh I cracked the top 500. I’m at about 475k words.
Took me a few tries to find my user since I wasn’t expecting the case sensitivity.
Thanks for this. Another book you could add for comparison purposes would be James Joyce’s Ulysses. Or I guess the unabridged The Stand by Stephen King would be good too.
Ooh The Stand (unabridged) is estimated at 473,000 words! I wrote The Stand in comment length. Wow.
#397, dear lord what have I done with my life...
top 438, I had no idea
Same. I’d never have guessed I was so high. I know I can be wordy, but I just assumed there were tons of people who commented more and had been here way longer.
Not as many as I thought, it seems.
Cool! Just a thought: instead of having to query the Clickhouse cluster whenever a client clicks "View Top 1000 Leaderboard" (which could cause a lot of load), it might be useful to instead fetch the top 1000 every hour (day?) and display the top 1000 as a static list.
Or just redis cache?
Oops, yeah, that's what I initially was trying to get across but ended up replacing cache with static list for reasons I am unsure of
It’s a static page, there is no backend. That’s why a static list, for example computed every day via an action is the way to go.
Author here! Thanks this is the thought I was having too.
Got Quite a lot of feedback which is what I am greatful for having. Firstly gonna fix the name-casing issue & then this is my second priority!
i've written a novel's worth of words. yikes! ps, game of thrones is not a good comparison. a literary agent is more likely to take your novel seriously if you have more than 50k words
Supposedly the latest trend deciding what novels get accepted by literary agents isn't the total number of words in the book, it's the total number of words in each chapter. They're getting much more strict about wanting chapters that are 1250-1500 words.
The reason is audiobooks: Having shorter chapters is a better user experience and audiobooks are really hot (money makers) right now.
This is just an anecdote though. I'm not an expert (only wrote one novel and my chapters were like ~2,500-3,500 words).
my comment was based on what i heard directly from a literary agent in november (also an anecdote). as a debut, my book needs to be 15k words longer in order for it to be worth the publicists time. because it needs to sell for enough so they get their time investment. which means, short novels don't sell enough for it to be worth an agent's time.
unless i found the right indie press or self-publish or already had a big platform.
Wait, have I not written about why I picked game of thrones for good comparison? I feel deja-vu lol.
So the reason why I picked Game of thrones is that you can see my github username (SerJaimeLannister)?
Why'd you may ask? Because I had given some minor exam and was in my brother's dorm room. They started watching game of thrones. I started watching from s4. When I came home, I binge watched s4-s7.
I later, wanted a github username (my last one was lost as I was using keepassxc and that archlinux distro got wiped by me back then [I was still learning])
Actually lost my name@proton.me and many other good additions. Oh well, Anyways it was around this time that I ended up wanting a new github account as I lost complete access to previous one. And the story overlapped with previous and I always wanted some nice name so ended up deciding on serjaimelannister.
So Actually the AI suggested something like harry potter or something and I only wanted to compare to novel because I said in one of my previous comments that I may have written enough to write a novel (you can actually read that on HN when I got the idea)
But I thought the opportunity of using game of thrones when my name's literally ser jaime lannister was quite good :D
also after making github account,Then later watched s1-s2-ish. Still haven't watched s3 tho. No spoilers tho xD!
This is pretty cool! This week I was just thinking of vibe coding something with my HN profile as well (e.g, analyze how my writing has changed over the decade-ish of being on here).
Also, 95k words written on here apparently. Cool to know haha.
@dragonwriter was meant for this. Has written ~16 volumes of GOT, +1.5 volume from 2nd.
How does it count so fast? Clickhaus preloaded dataset?
Top 0.023%, I was surprised! I usually keep it pretty short here, and my account isn't old.
Looking at the top 1000 I'm surprised there's no power law. It's just a lot of people with generally similar number of words.
Feels quite power-law like to me, but checking this roughly it seems to decay more quickly than a power law, but with a fatter tail. At least in the top 1000
The top 3 with 4,000,000 words have about 20 times as many words that the 0.14% percentile (at rank 1000) with 200,000 words.
In between (at rank 500) your at about 450,000 words, so its not a true power law. Because a drop of a factor 9 per 500 ranks would suggest that rank 1000 were at about 50000 words.
Top 0.11% / #814 by word count? Did not expect that. I wonder if it’s possible to see trend by year. I hope that’s more from 2022 and earlier
Currently eating dinner & reading the comments. I have got 2 priorities for this project. This is the 3rd one.
Commenting to not forget it as its actually pretty nice and I can feel useful for people. Personally I am more of a new account guy (joined in 2024) but the website's really old & it's history's quite rich! [the famous rsync comment]
Actually this website is older than me. (It's 18 when I am 17)
maybe I am getting offtopic but I wonder how many teenagers use this website quite a lot like me (don't use tiktok)
I wonder because when I mention hackernews to my age friends.
Me:"Yea I use hackernews"
They say: "Oh so are you a hacker?"
Me:...
I just end up saying computer tinkerer. Actually (I have written about this once or twice here) but it's actually really hard finding people (my age) to have something in common at times.
Actually the reason why this and many other reasons made me want to watch movies & series again. Dexter is awesome :D
So if we find somebody who uses one-word posts like "interesting" on every comment, have we unmasked .. he who mus(k)t not be named?
It says user not found
It is case-sensitive, that might be the problem.
I'm in the top 1.5%, even though I hardly have written anything here, and the comments are full of similar anecdotes. I guess there's a _ton_ of people lurking, and the active community is actually quite small. I find that quite surprising.
I am at 0.77% with only 73k words. And the top commenter is at 4 million. Is this website counting people with 0 words too?
Long tail. I wouldn't call them lurking they do what satisfies their itch.
I prefer the word “reading”, too.
I’m reading the comments almost every day, and I write them only if I think I have a point, insight that the other 50 people in the comments didn’t have.
> Top 0.41%
If only any of that was useful!
On a side note though there is (maybe intentional) case sensitivity? Can't remember how hn usernames work.
> If only any of that was useful!
I'm apparently in the top 500... I really should get a better hobby.
Hey Hackernews, You can read my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827731#46828331 where I was suddenly writing until I realized that on Hackernews I have written way too many words.
I then got the idea of actually figuring out how many. Then I first wanted to try out algolia but then later, I found out about clickhouse and how it had a play and the api for playing is so simple, I am definitely gonna make more projects on top of clickhouse play for HN (seriously my mind got blown because I was assuming that the browser -> api was gonna be hard but it seriously wasn't)
Then decided to think to write a github page about it for other people as well.
Anyways, this was one of the most fun project I had. So it turns out that I personally have written 0.64 Game of thrones words in Hackernews itself.
Dang has written 11.15 Volumes equivalent to game of thrones which is actually really crazy.
When I searched dang I was shocked haha. Anyways Dang, If you are reading this, I know that we all like to talk about how moderation of HN has issues but seriously man, the amount of efforts you put in is really lovely & respectable. We all love you.
I still feel like there are some issues where people flag anything they dislike which can be frustrating and other things but that still doesn't really impact the moderation and the moderation team (dang) is pretty awesome in my opinion even if the website does have this flaw in my opinion but Hackernews is one of the best websites man!
Dang today's your day! We can discuss the issues of flagging and others some other day, Have a nice day now!
(Also a little side fact but I picked game of thrones because my name of github is SerJaimeLannister because I was watching game of thrones in my brother's dorm room once in his college room and I literally just thought one or two episodes and started watching from s4 or something and then literally the second I got home, I binge watched Game of thrones till end and then s1 s2 but I think that I haven't watched some seasons I think s3 iirc more but still I loved the show so much and I think I had lost my old github account and naming is always hard especially in programming so picked SerJaimeLannister but this is the reason why I picked the novel equivalent to be game of thrones!)
Holy heck. The first person I looked up was tptacek, who happens to be #2 in the global rank. 4.3 million words!
I'm nowhere near that (~125k words), but for many of us, it's a good part of our life's corpus. :)
So basically I was making this for myself but then searched dang (I first searched myself, then pg then dang)
So Dang once again,Thank you dang for your moderation and moderation efforts!
Hope my project can make you smile or just about anything haha. Cheers & also let me know how funny is the cat video. (wanted to prove I am human because literally people sometimes comment how I sound like AI & sometimes accuse me of such in HN which is yeahh.. beep boop)
Global rank of 1832, word count of 197,292, top 0.24% percentile. Karma/word comes out at ~0.0372...
Ouch. Feels like I need to spend more time elsewhere.
Dear reader this person now have all your alt accounts linked to you?
So many of these names I feel I know them, but I don't know them, personally.
I know them, by tone. I read his/her take on the topic. Turns out you don't need to see any faces or body ratios of any kind to connect with people.
Thanks for keeping HN 'stable/sane'!
Two takes:
* never meet your heroes/heroines
* when you meet f2f with people you've known for decades online, prepared to be whelmed, under or over, depending.
People IRL are very often not what you projected. I learned this from UK mailing list interactions over 40 years ago.
What were the main attributes that led to varying states of whelmed?
One reason I love text discourse is that it gives me time to thoughtfully respond. My wife is super witty and can be instantly funny and social when she wants. It takes me more time to match that sociable wit.
My hunch is that wit-rate would be a contributing whelm factor.
Some of them were far more manic in the flesh. Email and Usenet hid aspects of what we'd now call spectrum behaviour or ADHD. That was the over whelm.
Otherwise, I'd say it was that people can be less rounded and interesting than you like in an amicable and two way relationship. It's easy to mistake a dialogue to specific intent online for some kind of connection when it really isn't. If they have 50,000 followers (hate that word) and you mistake being 50,001 for some stronger binding, prepare to be disappointed.
I will say that I've also experienced really good, relatable responsive engagement with my heroes and heroines, it's not uniform. It helps if you can meet them in a room of common purpose, not one solely designed for them to showcase in. Then, they're just ordinary people like you, mostly. If you're careful.
Wit: I have "esprit d'escalier" and so only think of the Bon mot on the way out the door.
I did rally simple frequency analysis based on corpus source a while ago and the results were super clear, you can tell a corpus by its frequency fingerprint. I wonder if something similar to this could fingerprint bot accounts?
this is basic stylometry? Can probably tell forgery against the corpus, attempts to clone.
Surprised that with ~6k words I am already in the top ~5%. I guess the old 90-9-1 rule roughly holds up.
Huh. In the top 1500, with approximately one GoT worth of text in ~17 years.
Also, I recognize four of the top five users as prolific commenters, but dragonwriter doesn’t ring a bell at all. Maybe they frequent all the threads that I don’t.
I think dragonwriter only comments on politics.
for an account i created in june 2024, top %0.54 is a lot. I need to spend less time on HN. more than that, I need stop typing walls of text, has to be annoying to readers! :)
I'd love to see unique-word stats as well
Well, 0.56% of a GoT volume... Not bad. Now I see why my keyboard is all blanked out :)
Global Rank 7089 | World Count 62,677 | Percentile Top 0.92% | Game of Thrones Volume 0.21
This would be pretty cool for other sites. My Reddit stats are probably way worse.
Mine was similar. I thought it was pretty shocking that I was in the top 0.90%. Surely I don't really post a lot here.
Global Rank 6948 / 774235 Word Count 63,737 Percentile Top 0.90%
Oh my.
> Global Rank > 385 / 774235
> Word Count > 509,412
> Top 0.05%
I don't know if I'm too long-winded or I comment too much or both. Good to know I'm in the top 400 regardless.
I think the word for us is "terminally online" :)
(I'm #174)
You've written nearly a Bible's worth of content here! [1]
I wonder how much you and I singularly contribute to the training data being used for tech-focused AI bots now; presumably they're training on software-people-websites?
https://wordcounter.net/blog/2015/12/08/10975_how-many-words...
I'm quite sure we're all in the training data. The biggest downside is that I keep getting accused of being an AI! I will write a long, well reasoned comment, and then get messages to not post AI slop.
Well I can't help it if my writing trained the AIs in the first place! We all did. That's why we all sound like AI!
Having seen many of your comments over the years, I don’t think I have ever seen an emdash, so I believe you when you say you’re not AI.
Stop training AI slop! /s XD
Top 1.55% with ~36000 words. I can be quite chatty in my comments, it seems.
I like the game of thrones conversion.
I feel like a perfect realization Goodhart's Law is about to happen to move up our rankings.
Neat! Over 300,000, putting me in the top 1,000.
Oh nice!! I am 1935. I am thinking of writing less comments haha to get once to 1984 so that I can say "literally 1984" xD. I mean it would be funny but I will still write comments haha.
man I really love this community yes its has its flaws and everything but man do I love it.
I don't write blogs or anything because I feel like many people who are really respectable can come and read my comments in here and give me suggestions and help me learn and other things, Its really just a lovely community! (with sometimes heated discussions) but although I must say that the feeling of community can be a sine wave (sometimes up or down imo) but still I just feel this bond to the community :>
> Oh nice!! I am 1935. I am thinking of writing less comments haha to get once to 1984 so that I can say "literally 1984" xD.
> man I really love this community yes its has its flaws and everything but man do I love it.
In fact, it's a nice coincidence that exactly 300k words put you in the almost 1000th place. (The actual cutoff is 298k words at the moment.)
Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I love HN but maybe I need another hobby or three.
Can you expand a bit on how you feel about it? :)
Apparently I can spend many, many words expanding on things!
I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.
I've been on here for about 10.5 years, so averaging about 48,515 per year. My favorite book is The Go Between by LP Hartley, and that's 98,621 words [1], so I'm basically writing the equivalent of about half of my favorite novel every year.
So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.
[1] https://howlongtoread.com/books/779942/The-GoBetween
> A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.
I don't know, you have 10 years in this writing, I have 15 years. I've gained so much from 15 years of conversations with people about the topics that come up on HN. That's a lot different than writing an equivalent amount by yourself on a topic you hope others will find meaningful.
So many geographic maps turn out to be just population maps (1). I wonder how much different these rankings would be if you divided the number of words by the account's lifespan. We're all talking about the most "prolific" commenters here, but are we really just talking about the oldest accounts?
I'd love to see two overlaid graphs. One is the top 1000 as currently implemented. The other is the age of that account.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1138/
> So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.
A bit anecdotally but when I built this website (and this is something that I commented to another commentor in here but wanted to share it again),is that I had the same weird feeling you can say (although to write blogs instead)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46828331
"I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.
Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)"
I literally got the idea comparing that I may have written some novel (0.66 of GOT here :) quite a lot less than you but still)
Personally, I like to think that HN definitely helped me with grammar and definitely lots of aspects & also you don't have to think of it as an if-else.
You know how to put in the efforts of writing! You have written 5,09,412 words (just searched through it) and I feel like somewhere my point is that you are capable of writing. You know how to put in the efforts within writing & I feel as if, if writing novels is something that interests you (as I remember your novel idea from another comment you have written here :]) . You are definitely capable of writing & I really suggest for you to go through it and have the confidence to do such!
Good luck writing my friend! :]
> I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.
To be honest, I find it funny how people from outside programming (who might not know programming so much) think that its all the same but in reality we see the amount of nuance through such forums. I really found it funny to think upon.
And to be honest, the things which we argue, where I feel like we expose each other to new nuanced opinions & solidify our opinions by some evidence etc. is something which I really appreciate.
I use Hackernews a bit differently where I use it as a way to expose to new github projects (usually) & I found the ability to find Open source projects (or create when there are none, this project's MIT licensed also I wouldn't call myself author now thinking about it given that I essentially used LLM to write it so time to redact saying I am author or similar xD)
But my point is, that I have found so many great open source projects & communicated with many interesting people which would've been hard to do so without this forum so a bit feeling greatful for this community! Thanks Hackernews <3 (Much love)
I regret not actually writing several books.
It's not too late! At least that's what I'm telling myself.
Maybe my novel about a hyper-intelligent software engineer in New York who no one appreciates and then he saves the world because he's so smart and everyone loves him and finally listens to him is something I can finally write.
Good Luck!!
I think I may be reading onto this a bit deeper but I feel like sometimes people don't appreciate Software Engineers because a lot of it (still?) feels like (black box?) to the public.
Everyone instinctively knows to appreciate a Doctor. They save lifes, so do Nurses, Paramedics, Firefighters, Army and so many more on which we can live a stable life on.
We all know what each of them do by heart. I feel like all of us can imagine a scene of them saving lives.
But the idea of a CS engineer saving lives is really hard to have a universal picture for. Much of our effects are downstream.
Right now, I am thinking of a Hospital which saved money by using Open source technology to hire more doctors & nurses which can save lives.
I am not sure if I can think of any way where it directly saves lives but it really impacts life so so much.
Now, Discord is something which I don't really appreciate that much but (personally prefer Matrix) but I can see something like discord being used by people to connect to each other and even seek therapy (when the hospital system is booked/overcrowded) and those help the impulses that people might have. It's not the best system agreed but I do feel like it's underappreciated if you ask me.
Maybe the people who write websites/code for non profits for them to be visible and get funding for their right causes (red cross etc.) are some engineers.
I do wish that when you write into this. It isn't some superhero CS engineer saves the world. I wish for it to finally conjure/create an image of how CS engineers can have an Impact on the world.
Anecdotally, I wanted to go into finance but then started using Open source/Linux. I then pivoted into CS engineers. Do you know what my dream was? (still is?) to work on an open source project while being on a beach reviewing commits / writing commits :]
I really respect each and everyone who open source things. You can actually see my struggle about impact. Quite frankly, I don't know how to say this but I am really not interested by money (and if I am, its to have impact down the line or well survival). I just want enough for myself and have a very decent line of knowing how much (usually) & wish to help others then just for the sake of it or perhaps I am too ideal :]
This submission is essentially what I really wish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430 [Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that]
I would genuinely read your book if you can show if CS engineers can have positive impact because I do feel like CS engineers have power & power corrupts many of (us?)when we feel like the benefits of working towards mass dystopia individually somehow both lifts us from the moral repurcussions and also pays us in power/monetary value (which is essentially what society is going towards, one really can't be moral because our society is now favouring power over all means and even a facade of morals is feeling bleak at this point)
How I feel like this is the ability of being fair and sustainable within CS (which is usually not really preferred imo because I mean we are in a VC [ycombinator] forum and the idea of growth over everything else even at money burning is quite common in tech)
So I guess my point is how I really end up this whole thought process (which once again ironically is something that I have done a lot in HN) is to essentially summarize on being fair & transparent & sustainable within any business I might ever do. I wish to be reasonable & I will be honest about how much money I get to hopefully someday do things that click with me [the beach idea sounds lucrative again :) ]
The reason I say all things a lot is to really have some accountability if I might ever do something which can be considered scummy.
Because the way I am thinking is that if I ever do anything scummy for money (the lure of dark side being too much) and people call me out respectfully. I will try to revert it as much as possible. So I guess I can be considered selfish for writing this comment :)
Though I guess if I give a picture of saint (because I felt like I may have given too much of it, I mean I am only human after all), that would be wrong too. I am still motivated by survival/the need to feel important/respectful within my community/extended family/having money to have hobbies in the first place/buying a house for myself.
It's just that I really want enough & I feel like having more than enough might help sometimes (the definition of enough itself can change) but its that I really wish to have some good positive impact before I die to essentially not have regrets. I wish to have less regrets before death.
Witold Pilecki's my hero in this sense. His quote is something I deep down wish to live by. "In the hour of death, I feel joy rather than sorrow" & Honestly, I wish to feel complete before death. Not having regrets (or many regrets, you will still regret things no matter what you do but one can only try to minimize it, have a good intention in life) is something which to me essentially satisfies Pilecki's quote and essentially somewhat of a philosophy of mine & while at it, have a meaning of life for myself. I am a bit of an existentialist :)
I don’t disagree with anything you said, but in my particular case I was trying to make a joke about self-insert characters in novels.
628238 / 774235. If we were to gamify this I might as well be aiming for the bottom: https://xkcd.com/3110/
Pretty amazed to be on the list at all.
Look on my [prolix] words, ye Mighty, and despair!
It would be fascinating to see a word to karma ratio. (Mine would be incredibly low).
You can see the karma of the people with the 11th-100th highest karma at https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders . Here are the 60 of those people who are also in the top 1000 on the word count list, sorted by increasing word to karma ratio.
Columns are words/karma, words, karma, name.
Thanks, that's really great.
I did my own too - and I was right - 156,501 / 327 = 478.6
Has anyone got a worse ratio than that?!?! lol
One
Click [here] to train a 6B model with just your words ...
I am thinking you need the parent comment(s) as well to do that
Well, I've written enough words on here to fill a small novel. I don't know if I should feel proud or depressed. I think I'll go with the latter though.
needs a 1/(words/comment-karma) metric!
Who else sighed in relief in seeing that they are not top 1000 ?
Given that 99.87% are not in the top 1000, probably the majority.
Now please put in relation to up votes to identify frequent top commentors instead of plain spammers.
s/Prolificacy/Verbosity/
Heh. Here's a thread where the most verbose commenters come and write even more. I haven't written nearly as much as I thought: 2,410th out of 774,235 users, 159,634 words, Top 0.31%.
A few years ago, I exported my HN and reddit comments along with my personal blog and private notes into a SQLite database. It was millions of words. I had a vague plan of pulling out long, insightful bits and editing them together into a book of essays. I also thought it would be cool to be able to look up my previous thoughts on a topic. Neither ended up happening.
I've been meaning to do the same thing to train an LLM, but I'm not sure I particularly need a digital version of me. Though it would be interesting to ask it to write a book for me in my own style.
In theory, it'd be the best book I have ever read.
Funny enough I had another account that I hadn’t used in 2 years that is still in the top 100.
The other analysis is to see how many words per day you do, the hours you do them during, which days of the week you like to post, etc.
It's very useful project.
dang on position 4
I'm genuinely concerned not finding my handle in the leaderboard will subconsciously have me believing I don't have an HN problem.
didn't expect myself to be in the top 1.03%, as i only joined in 2020. which is 6 years ago. holy shit. maybe pasting a huge lorem ipsum or ai-word-slop in here would put me in the glorious top 1%!
I picked a random throwaway which made two comments a few months ago and then disappeared, it was still within the top 25%. I'd guess the vast majority of 774235 accounts are unused, spam, or single use throwaways.
Divide words over karma and it turns out a lot of high ranking accounts just write up nonsense which gathers votes, lol.
I've found one with 1,000x more words than average and only 10x more karma. Extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, and that's not even accounting for handicaps, favored users, and so on.
It matches patterns in other media where the top 1% of content creators just put out rubbish, quantity, no quality.
Heh. I'm quite glad I wrote more words of fanfiction than words of HN comments. Still near top 1000 sitewide, though.
The fact that my karma doesn't follow this pattern only goes to show I'm not properly an HN type. I seem to be constantly hating on HN favorite things, which is why I'm not sorry at all. I've generally ended up on the right side of history with all of these, but karma is forever :D
Huh? Top 0.03%? English is not even my first language and I have never lived in any country where English is spoken.
Maybe that is more a representation of how many people don't post at all.
Ycombinator is a censorship machine ran by anti-democratic, anti-freedom fascists that are slowly rotting the core of our society to its knees.