[HN Gopher] See how many words you have written in Hacker News c...
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See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments
Author : Imustaskforhelp
Score : 131 points
Date : 2026-01-30 19:54 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (serjaimelannister.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (serjaimelannister.github.io)
| mrandish wrote:
| Neat! Over 300,000, putting me in the top 1,000.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I love HN but maybe I
| need another hobby or three.
| japhyr wrote:
| Can you expand a bit on how you feel about it? :)
| tombert wrote:
| 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
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > 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)
| japhyr wrote:
| > 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/
| onion2k wrote:
| I regret not actually writing several books.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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 :)
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I was probably right when I said that I was thinking too
| deeply LOL.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| 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.)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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!)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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)
| japhyr wrote:
| 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. :)
| Insanity wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think dragonwriter only comments on politics.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think the word for us is "terminally online" :)
|
| (I'm #174)
| tombert wrote:
| 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...
| jedberg wrote:
| 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!
| djmips wrote:
| Stop training AI slop! /s XD
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| Apreche wrote:
| 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.
| incompatible wrote:
| 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%
| jader201 wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Funny to see a reply from one of the ~10 usernames I
| recognize on here.
| jedberg wrote:
| Haha right back at ya buddy.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| This is how I find out that reddit is _older_ than Hacker
| News. Mind blown!
| rayiner wrote:
| Wait until you find out about Slashdot.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| If you tell me that slashdot is also younger than reddit,
| I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself. I _swear_
| it was around in the early 00s, if not before.
| rayiner wrote:
| Haha, no. Slashdot was from 1997. Reddit was 2005.
| leoc wrote:
| 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.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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.
| genewitch wrote:
| 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.
| latchkey wrote:
| 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/
| fragmede wrote:
| Inline reply is great (wrote my own extension pre-for that,
| even!), but what's wrong with the built in favorites feature?
| latchkey wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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
| Magi604 wrote:
| You're kind of describing old school forums. Man I miss those.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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.
| verisimi wrote:
| It would be fascinating to see a word to karma ratio. (Mine would
| be incredibly low).
| tzs wrote:
| 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.
| 3.5 308431 88008 mooreds 4.1 307127 75567 stavros
| 4.3 314850 73503 minimaxir 4.3 575909 133629
| ColinWright 4.5 429663 96135 walterbell 5.5
| 320283 58461 wallflower 5.9 463540 78823 paxys
| 6.1 298839 49063 paulpauper 7.1 450573 63823
| cperciva 7.1 685484 97028 simonw 7.2 415385
| 57466 mpweiher 8.8 435188 49452 Waterluvian 9.4
| 912601 97058 steveklabnik 9.5 484782 51089 pavlov
| 9.5 514233 54028 nkurz 9.6 738986 76912 jedberg
| 9.9 538580 54533 pavel_lishin 10.5 523765 50113 wmf
| 10.5 562066 53697 kibwen 11.1 649587 58521 pmoriarty
| 11.2 554531 49316 petercooper 11.3 626706 55613 sp332
| 11.3 674598 59635 tyingq 11.3 997305 88154 ceejayoz
| 11.4 774926 67711 davidw 11.8 892827 75358
| hn_throwaway_99 12.5 652216 52309 duxup 12.5
| 627078 49987 Someone1234 12.6 1999366 159310 Animats
| 13.3 1168121 87843 userbinator 13.5 1425286 105817 pjc50
| 13.5 771686 56994 lisper 14.1 1143293 81306
| crazygringo 14.2 698215 49002 JoshTriplett 14.3
| 867103 60494 saagarjha 15.4 1628467 105619 toomuchtodo
| 16.2 787659 48722 amelius 16.3 1285245 78792
| WalterBright 16.5 1058282 64324 ryandrake 16.6
| 892312 53904 ksec 18.8 1038783 55136 bane 19.8
| 1950935 98675 anigbrowl 19.9 1355066 67997 masklinn
| 20.0 2510303 125350 pjmlp 20.2 2110424 104359 PaulHoule
| 20.3 2251499 110917 ChuckMcM 20.5 1497782 73213 jrockway
| 21.0 1168930 55722 btilly 21.9 2747766 125470 rayiner
| 22.2 1822427 82045 nostrademons 22.4 1319812 58825
| wpietri 24.7 1275113 51702 brudgers 27.6 3131449
| 113256 TeMPOraL 29.7 2701314 90987 jerf 30.1
| 2696913 89718 coldtea 31.7 1911252 60198 Retric
| 37.6 4785959 127149 dragonwriter 38.5 2130838 55318
| derefr 39.3 2583878 65748 dredmorbius 42.5 2141376
| 50383 tzs
| verisimi wrote:
| 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
| pengaru wrote:
| I'm genuinely concerned not finding my handle in the leaderboard
| will subconsciously have me believing I don't have an HN problem.
| krick wrote:
| Let me help you. Words / [days since account creation] would be
| a far better metric to decide if you have an HN problem, and by
| that metric you easily surpass current account #1000.
|
| In fact, if I make a proper leaderboard by that metric, you are
| #914. And #731 if we only consider accounts older than 60 days.
|
| Here's the data: https://pastes.io/name-words
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Would you be interested to measure me? Because I do indeed
| have an almost certified HN problem (I contacted the
| moderators once and they said that I was posting quite a lot
| when I might be posting quite a lot of comments)
|
| Not sure if I would be happy or sad if I would have a HN
| problem tho. LOL. so maybe let's just have it in mystery :)
|
| Alright time to really sleep now..... (have said this for an
| hour but the comments here had me hooked on them haha
| commenting to many/ (almost all?) of them)
|
| Good night!
| krick wrote:
| You are in the data I attached. #43.
| bilekas wrote:
| > 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > If only any of that was useful!
|
| I'm apparently in the top 500... I really should get a better
| hobby.
| jmward01 wrote:
| 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?
| ggm wrote:
| this is basic stylometry? Can probably tell forgery against the
| corpus, attempts to clone.
| mleonhard wrote:
| s/Prolificacy/Verbosity/
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| needs a 1/(words/comment-karma) metric!
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Was curious yet again (Please note once again that the sql
| query is LLM generated)
|
| WITH -- 1. Find the latest karma for the user latest_user_data
| AS ( SELECT id, argMax(karma, update_time) AS current_karma
| FROM hackernews_changes_profiles WHERE lower(id) =
| lower('6LLvveMx2koXfwn') -- Put the username here GROUP BY id
| ), -- 2. Calculate their total word count total_word_stats AS (
| SELECT by, sum(length(splitByWhitespace(text))) AS total_words
| FROM hackernews_history WHERE lower(by) =
| lower('6LLvveMx2koXfwn') -- Put the username here AND type =
| 'comment' AND deleted = 0 GROUP BY by ) -- 3. Join them and
| calculate the ratio SELECT k.id AS user, k.current_karma AS
| karma, w.total_words, -- Ratio: How much karma they get for
| every 100 words they write round((k.current_karma /
| w.total_words) * 100, 2) AS karma_per_100_words, -- Raw Ratio
| round(k.current_karma / w.total_words, 4) AS raw_ratio FROM
| latest_user_data k JOIN total_word_stats w ON lower(k.id) =
| lower(w.by)
|
| user 6LLvveMx2koXfwn karma 1288 total_words 6696
| karma_per_100_words 19.24 raw_ratio 0.1924
|
| The difference between the fact that your karma's lower/words
| different is that the database behind it is old from
| clickhouse.
|
| Ran it on my own it's 0.0063 which makes sense because much of
| what I write isn't intended for pure comment-karma but rather
| just whatever I am thinking actually. I am still honestly just
| happy that this post had reached the front page of HN (looks
| like now its on the second page)
|
| Finally going to sleep now. I have tried to answer to many
| queries/interesting things that people wanted something for. I
| will still see if I may have missed any & respond to them
| tomorrow if I might have the time tomorrow.
| keyle wrote:
| 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'!
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| j_bum wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| karim79 wrote:
| 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.
| MBCook wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| top 438, I had no idea
| MBCook wrote:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| #397, dear lord what have I done with my life...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Click [here] to train a 6B model with just your words ...
| visarga wrote:
| I am thinking you need the parent comment(s) as well to do that
| ggm wrote:
| 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?
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| 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! :)
| 0xanand wrote:
| It's very useful project.
| davidw wrote:
| "No, I don't think I will" - I already have a sense of how much
| time I've spent here.
| krick wrote:
| Yeah, that was my reaction as well. Not sure what other people
| are so happy about. (But of course I did.)
| bsoles wrote:
| I feel like a perfect realization Goodhart's Law is about to
| happen to move up our rankings.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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!
| nickvec wrote:
| 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.
| system2 wrote:
| Or just redis cache?
| nickvec wrote:
| 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
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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!
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Update: Done! [Most likely, If I find the time to do so,I
| will keep an eye on it for a few days to see if its
| computed daily or not but I am most likely sure that it
| might be the case]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Look on my _[prolix]_ words, ye Mighty, and despair!
| macintux wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Any idea what happened? I can't see any account anymore.
|
| I hadn't realised I was missing the account until you mentioned
| it.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| 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.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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.
| metadat wrote:
| 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.
| guessmyname wrote:
| 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: 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
|
| Response: This message is too large to display
| usefulposter wrote:
| 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...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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!
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > 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!
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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? :)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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]
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| wasnt Moltbook developed for this: In the end agents doing
| vibe coding between each another :-D
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Honestly? I don't know. I've tried a bunch of time to
| "browse" the website, opening posts like https://www.molt
| book.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?
| GaryBluto wrote:
| 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!
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Did you miss the satire?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Can I get you to whitelist my account? I use emdashes a
| LOT, but I'm very human.
| dirkc wrote:
| And how do we know you won't go and rent out your account
| to some AI once it's been white-listed ([?]_[?] )
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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))
| tracker1 wrote:
| Like MoltBook? (or whatever it's called now)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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])
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| Long tail. I wouldn't call them lurking they do what satisfies
| their itch.
| serial_dev wrote:
| 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.
| smusamashah wrote:
| 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?
| keiferski wrote:
| 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
| atoav wrote:
| Or 89 milikarma/word. That is pretty good. I only got 34
| milikarma/word.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| 83 milikarma/word. That's interesting, though I'm not sure
| what to do with it.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| It would not make much sense to compute it, if you do not
| subtract the karma earned through submissions.
| latexr wrote:
| 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).
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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'd be
| interesting to see who has the most votes regardless of
| +/- but the lowest total karma. Who amongst us is just
| pissing off everyone?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=proven
|
| Here's the Query that I ran on play.clickhouse.com
| (Please note that both the queries that I am about to
| give are AI generated)
|
| SELECT id, argMax(karma, update_time) AS current_karma
| FROM hackernews_changes_profiles GROUP BY id ORDER BY
| current_karma ASC LIMIT 5
|
| id current_karma1 1 Proven -247
|
| 2 VentureHawk -89
|
| 3 adamyormark -50
|
| 4 oldpersonintx2 -45
|
| 5 sevenstar -35
|
| So proven has the lowest karma.
|
| While at it, Here's the query for the most upvoted
| (karma) people on hackernews
|
| SELECT id, argMax(karma, update_time) AS current_karma
| FROM hackernews_changes_profiles GROUP BY id ORDER BY
| current_karma DESC LIMIT 5
|
| id current_karma 1 tptacek 414947
|
| 2 jacquesm 235042
|
| 3 ingve 214146
|
| 4 todsacerdoti 204814
|
| 5 rbanffy 184030
|
| I remember tptacek because he is the second person of all
| the people (behind dragonwriter) and he has written 14.37
| Volumes worth of game of thrones.
|
| Hope this helps. I just ran the query because I was
| curious to find the results :D
|
| I can add this query to the website, but one of my
| worries (even with this post) is that people might try to
| now benchmark it which wasn't my intention & it will fail
| to be a good measure (someone mentioned the goodhart's
| law which is correct/apt here)
| morkalork wrote:
| I always wondered about metrics to measure things like:
| does the commenter generate positive discussion, flame
| wars, or plain old dead threads?
| kqr wrote:
| 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?
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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!
| keiferski wrote:
| 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!
| oefrha wrote:
| 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...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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=c
| hat...
| genewitch wrote:
| 1500s with 221k, so there's a _real_ long tail
| pjc50 wrote:
| #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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > 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.
| tasuki wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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 :)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| What about having a browser and having a tampermonkey
| script which can do that? I have found that works really
| great. Ooh this is giving me some ideas.
|
| A lot of people have given me some really great ideas.
| Commenting to have them in backlog whenever I get bored and
| think to add addition. I would just be interested in having
| a dump/export of my comments personally as well (someone
| else wanted to/analyze all of their comments and have them
| in a floppy disk, maybe this can help their idea too!)
| ryandrake wrote:
| It would be better if HN simply made karma scores
| available through the API. Such a strange omission--they
| obviously have the data.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| +1 and also add a feature for unique words to show how you
| vocab ranks
| s_dev wrote:
| > 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.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| intimidate
|
| ;)
| s_dev wrote:
| Yes, that is a typo!
| pc86 wrote:
| You get double points for that one
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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 :]
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Please don't start subtracting for em-dashes though. ;-)
| Yizahi wrote:
| It will be skewed due to all the jargon, slang and grammar
| errors.
| kqr wrote:
| But if it is equally skewed for everyone, does it really
| matter?
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Showoff. (I'm at 0.06).
| usrusr wrote:
| 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.
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| ensocode wrote:
| dang on position 4
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| Top 1.55% with ~36000 words. I can be quite chatty in my
| comments, it seems.
| weinzierl wrote:
| The four most prolific writers are: 1 15.95
| dragonwriter 2 14.37 tptacek 3 12.80 jacquesm
| 4 11.15 dang
|
| 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.
| yaseer wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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!)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Hey just wanted to share that I have now fixed this. A lot of
| people actually wanted this. I wish to write to each and
| everyone of them but I feel as if but I feel as if it might
| (degrade?) some conversations happening here which I don't
| intend to degrade if I write the same comment essentially many
| times but just wanted to say it to you as well & if anyone else
| who wanted me to fix the case sensitive issue that It's finally
| fixed now :D.
|
| Have a nice day once again (although its night for me, going to
| add a few more things / maybe one thing right now in the
| website before I go to bed)
| jll29 wrote:
| 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_.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I am in the top 0.15%. Crazy.
| josephg wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Then words could be color-coded by _impact_.
|
| Or by difficulty to make sense of them.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| 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%!
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| krick wrote:
| You are largely right. In fact, only 444 710 of those
| accounts have more than 1 post, and only 229 920 have more
| than 5.
| mysterypie wrote:
| There's something about the numbers I can't figure out. Look at
| the top three HN contributors by karma[1]:
| username words karma 1. tptacek 4,310,896
| 416351 2. jacquesm 3,841,209 237961 3. ingve
| 2,273 215283
|
| 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
| sothatsit wrote:
| Could it be that ingve has submitted a lot of links, but has
| not made that many comments?
| exagolo wrote:
| I believe Karma solely comes from upvotes for comments minus
| downvotes. Submissions don't count.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| That might be in real life ("afk"), but on HN even
| submissions give you karma.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| 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>
| Comment upvote +1 Comment downvote -1
| Submission upvote >0 && <1 (not documented to prevent
| abuses) Submission downvote not possible (only
| flagging is allowed)
| Bengalilol wrote:
| Globally, karma comes from submissions and writing comments.
|
| 4 minutes later ... 1. dragonwriter 4 785 959
| words 2. tptacek 4 310 896 words 3.
| jacquesm 3 841 209 words
|
| I don't know why you got ingve, their global rank is now 79469
| / 774235
| mysterypie wrote:
| I was looking at rank by karma (not rank by word count):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
| Bengalilol wrote:
| Sorry for my confusion.
|
| On average (as of last 6 months, didn't check further), he
| has roundly been submitting 100 links per month.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| iNic wrote:
| Surprised that with ~6k words I am already in the top ~5%. I
| guess the old 90-9-1 rule roughly holds up.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Pretty amazed to be on the list at all.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Paul I have a 200_000+ word counter with maybe 4-5x ish less
| karma than you. So I know my karma/word counter would come out
| even lower.
|
| That's really not why I created it. A bit of it is if you might
| feel competent that you have written so many words in a single
| place. You know how to put in the efforts so you can have a
| blog post and create it there and create absolute gems too :D
|
| And also Hackernews is pretty chill community. This is probably
| the reason why some of us are able to write so much in the
| first place. Personally, Hackernews has improved my grammar &
| gave me confidence (sort of) with interesting people to
| follow/learn from. I do feel like its one of the most fine
| places to spend time on (atleast on the internet) usually/for
| the most part.
|
| I really love HN :D
|
| Have a nice day!
| youdots wrote:
| One
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| @dragonwriter was meant for this. Has written ~16 volumes of GOT,
| +1.5 volume from 2nd.
| Macha wrote:
| 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
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| (Fair disclosure this prompt is generated with AI, not sure if
| I should add this to the website, but I definitely can. but I
| was really curious and so I am gonna run it on you but anyone
| else whose interested can simply go to the clickhouse
| playground and run it with their own username as well, where
| changing Macha to their username if they are interested )
|
| SELECT year, yearly_words, concat(toString(yearly_rank), ' / ',
| toString(total_active_in_year)) AS yearly_placement, round(100
| * (1 - (yearly_rank / total_active_in_year)), 2) AS
| yearly_percentile FROM ( SELECT toYear(time) AS year, -- Simply
| use toYear(time) by AS username,
| sum(length(splitByWhitespace(text))) AS yearly_words, rank()
| OVER (PARTITION BY toYear(time) ORDER BY
| sum(length(splitByWhitespace(text))) DESC) AS yearly_rank,
| count(*) OVER (PARTITION BY toYear(time)) AS
| total_active_in_year FROM hackernews_history WHERE type =
| 'comment' AND deleted = 0 AND notEmpty(by) GROUP BY year, by )
| WHERE lower(username) = lower('Macha') ORDER BY year DESC
|
| (Ctrl/Cmd+Enter)
|
| 16 rows in result, 1.38 sec. 100.0%, Read 46.73 million rows,
| 16.18 GB (33.80 million/sec, 11.70 GB/sec)
|
| year yearly_words yearly_placement yearly_percentile1
|
| 1 2025 26600 1248 / 140446 99.11
|
| 2 2024 29340 1056 / 141890 99.26
|
| 3 2023 54156 617 / 148623 99.58
|
| 4 2022 71330 377 / 138716 99.73
|
| 5 2021 70545 356 / 134766 99.74
|
| 6 2020 35551 849 / 130741 99.35
|
| 7 2019 13469 2398 / 117185 97.95
|
| 8 2018 7156 3924 / 109038 96.4
|
| 9 2017 8856 3137 / 109525 97.14
|
| 10 2016 3455 6487 / 99553 93.48
|
| 11 2015 3275 5463 / 91696 94.04
|
| 12 2014 2419 6601 / 85558 92.28
|
| 13 2013 3576 5021 / 79256 93.66
|
| 14 2012 3313 4287 / 65485 93.45
|
| 15 2011 5402 2245 / 51443 95.64
|
| 16 2010 1370 5357 / 32197 83.36
|
| Hope this helps you :)
|
| Have a nice day :]
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Maybe if other people are interested. I can add it to the
| website as well! I really don't mind just let me know tho
| everyone :D
| Macha wrote:
| Thanks! Would not have guessed 2025 was more than 2019. Much
| to think about.
| dnpls wrote:
| I like the game of thrones conversion.
| tasuki wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I'd love to see unique-word stats as well
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Hey website creator here! Can you elaborate? Do you mean like
| going through only the specific unique-words?
|
| That would be interesting. This might be more helpful to the
| people who are interested in finding people's the unique
| grammatical words they used
|
| So do note that this comment is written by me (a human hi!:D)
| but the following sql query isn't.
|
| SELECT by AS username, sum(length(splitByWhitespace(text))) AS
| total_words, -- Extract words, clean punctuation, and count
| distinct values uniqExact( arrayJoin( arrayFilter( x -> x !=
| '', arrayMap(x -> lower(replaceRegexpAll(x, '[^a-zA-Z]', '')),
| splitByWhitespace(text)) ) ) ) AS unique_words, -- Calculate
| diversity: What percentage of their vocabulary is unique
| round((unique_words / total_words) * 100, 2) AS diversity_score
| FROM hackernews_history WHERE type = 'comment' AND deleted = 0
| AND lower(by) = lower('NooneAtAll3') GROUP BY by
|
| username total_words unique_words diversity_score1
|
| NooneAtAll3 942372 4752 0.5
|
| Hope it helps :D Have a nice day (still written by human,
| alright I am going to sleep right now. Had a lot of fun today
| with this posts/running random sql queries :D)
|
| Good night! This might be my last comment today before sleep! I
| will be busy tomorrow so I might not be able to see any
| interesting ideas that people might have here to run it.
| le-mark wrote:
| Dear reader this person now have all your alt accounts linked to
| you?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Hey creator here! I have responded on this thread a lot and you
| can read them but essentially it runs in github actions (you
| can even read the index.html which has what the api query is,
| and someone supposed it to be security issue but that's fine as
| well)
|
| If "this person" refers to me. I would love to say the
| following my friend :-
|
| The idea is that it runs on github actions and the api behind
| it is actually play.clickhouse.com which I suppose _shouldn 't_
| have the reasons to do linking or any such tasks given that
| well they are a company making database (not affiliated)
|
| I really don't even know how many people have used the website.
| There's no statistic. zero nada.
|
| Hope this helps :D Your alt accounts are safe don't worry!
|
| Have a nice day! (Yes still written by human & always will be,
| even the Have a nice day line which I write/wrote in almost
| every comment but I truly want everyone to genuinely have a
| nice day haha, I think Have a nice day is essentially my
| personal tagline now :D)
| nurettin wrote:
| Who else sighed in relief in seeing that they are not top 1000 ?
| layer8 wrote:
| Given that 99.87% are not in the top 1000, probably the
| majority.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Oh Cm'on, Let's go with the former :D
|
| To be honest a bit sad seeing my karma: word ratio but hey I
| feel as if its okay.
|
| Afterall a lot of its just internet points. I just wanted to do
| something fun and I did have fun and that's probably it! :D
|
| To be honest, Life is pretty short to be depressed over such
| now that I am thinking about it. Anyways, Watch the funny cat
| video/listen to the I am only human song (linked to both in the
| website) which is pretty funny/enjoyable imo.
|
| Have a nice day!
| ValveFan6969 wrote:
| Ycombinator is a censorship machine ran by anti-democratic, anti-
| freedom fascists that are slowly rotting the core of our society
| to its knees.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Funny enough I had another account that I hadn't used in 2 years
| that is still in the top 100.
| aoeCoder wrote:
| 628238 / 774235. If we were to gamify this I might as well be
| aiming for the bottom: https://xkcd.com/3110/
| Applejinx wrote:
| 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
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Now please put in relation to up votes to identify frequent top
| commentors instead of plain spammers.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Actually I have written a sql query for that which you can run.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829029#46875831
|
| It's essentially comment karma (total up votes)/words ratio. I
| do think that I have a less karma ratio but that's probably
| because I write a lot of words which sometimes not even land a
| single +1 but I don't think that I would be a plain spammer. If
| you want I can try to find the highest ratios if that's what
| you like but I feel like that might have the issue where people
| with less words but with very high upvotes might have the
| likelihood of being spam/scam too when you think about it?
| Essentially, I feel like I can provide the query & then you can
| run it/modify it on the things that you might be interested to
| find.
|
| Hope it helps!
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Edit: Almost done. I just wanted to see what LLM's might
| think of it. So wanted to see them (go wild?) [ie. without my
| bias of algolia api because I was (thinking?) of other ways
| too also a better thing was that I was procastinating with
| the implementation a bit] so pasted it.
|
| It* decided that a better response was to lowercase the
| username fields and then lowercase the input.
|
| I think I had overarchitected a solution and in hindsight, I
| thought that the idea of lowercasing usernames would've been
| slow but clickhouse is a beast too.
|
| I think I was almost thinking the same thing too. Going to
| update the website with case sensitivity pretty quick.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Update: The feature's live on the website now :D
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| 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
| riskable wrote:
| 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).
| greenie_beans wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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!
| imgabe wrote:
| 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)
| wazoox wrote:
| Well, 0.56% of a GoT volume... Not bad. Now I see why my keyboard
| is all blanked out :)
| ninalanyon wrote:
| 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.
| lostmsu wrote:
| I was like "huh, I'm probably in the upper quarter too". 0.30%
| OMG. Still only half a book.
| Twisol wrote:
| Top 0.44% here. Hrm...
| dhosek wrote:
| Top 0.21% Yikes
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Top 0.81% and I really don't comment much.
|
| Mind you, the distribution is probably _insanely_ skewed.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| It says user not found
| kergonath wrote:
| It is case-sensitive, that might be the problem.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| iambateman wrote:
| 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.
| sremani wrote:
| Good to know I am top 1% of something. You made my day bro!
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Thanks man! This is the comment I am gonna go ahead and sleep
| now. I have tried to respond to many comments in here.
|
| I really appreciate you saying kind words to me. It means a lot
| to me!
|
| You made my night bro!
|
| Have a nice day man!!
| titzer wrote:
| > 357,191 words
|
| That's like, five novels. What I have been doing here, damn...
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