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Similar Hacker News Users
- riffer 17y agoPeople asked for a similar users tool back in the early days of HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=701 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=701 And recently, too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036247 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036247 How does this particular tool work? It's based on the threads a given person comments on, who else comments on those threads, and how the topics and terminology of threads and comments relate to each other. Karma on the relevant threads is used as a subtle authority metric. Incorporating voting relationship histories would almost certainly make the tool better. Particularly at finding interesting (and not merely similar) stuff. That said, it'll be interesting to hear what folks think.
- sarosh 17y agoI commend you on an elegant UI. Would you mind explaining a bit how exactly you anticipate using voting relationship histories in future revisions? Also, am I correct in assuming that there is some sort of distance function involved in computing 'similarity'?
- chaosmachine 17y agoBased on the default settings, I'm up there with PG and Patio11. I like your algorithm ;)
- onewland 17y agoI had the same reaction. A little flattering, but I think it has to do with brevity more than anything. edit: just realized that by default it's only returning the rockstars of the site (e.g. people high up on the leaderboard).
- CrazedGeek 17y agoI checked a few people, and it seems like patio11 is in all of their results. I wonder why?
- riffer 17y agoA big part of it is that the default settings reward comment karma fairly heavily. Try moving the sliders around. For example, with the defaults, patio11 is the top result for your username, but at the karma slider midpoint he's out of the top 12.
- riffer 17y agoEverybody here has somewhat similar interests to pg. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. ;)
- run4yourlives 17y agoI'm up there with patio11, but not pg. (I get nostradeamous) Not sure what that means though.
- mixmax 17y agoNostra who?
- nostrademons 17y agoMe, presumably.
- mixmax 17y agoObscure pun, it's meant to be flattering. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181868 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181868 :-)
- run4yourlives 17y agoYeah, sorry about the spelling.
- randallsquared 17y agoInterestingly, nostrademons and pg are the top two for me, so I wonder what would produce one but not the other. I'd love to see if comments could be separated into [user1]-like comments and [user2]-like comments.
- riffer 17y agoYeah, one potential solution is lists of users. Another route might be clustering ('technical', 'political', etc.)
- ax0n 17y agoAwesome! I knew SwellJoe and I seemed to end up in the same threads, and IIRC, agree on things. Even though I'm a relative neophyte. I love it!
- profquail 17y agoInterestingly, there seems to be a local minimum (or maximum) in your algorithm that I found when searching for myself: Start here: http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.5&weight2=-0.15 http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail... The next two 'clicks' to the left (towards co-commenting) don't have 'spolsky' in my list: http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.3&weight2=-0.15 http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail... But one more click to the left, and he reappears in the list: http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.2&weight2=-0.15 http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail...
- riffer 17y agoThis is interesting, thanks for pointing this out. The top result is actually getting filtered out from the displayed results (don't ask). spolsky is going from being the second result, to the first result, to the second result in your examples.
- po 17y agoYou keep mentioning filtering… are you sure we can't ask? I'm curious.
- idoh 17y agoI recently changed my user name from antiismist to idoh. When I moved the karma setting to Diamonds in the Rough, it listed idoh as the #2 most similar user to antiismist. Nice! http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=antiismist&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.4&weight2=0.2 http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=antiismis...
- rms 17y agoAww, I was hoping to get amichail.
- dbz 17y agoI just realized I have paid no attention at all to anyone's name. I know my brother's name when I see it, but that's it. Now I'm wondering if I am liked. Probably not >.<
- chrischen 17y agoDitto. I never pay attention to the name either. Usually it takes 30 levels of nesting before I realize that I'm conversing with the same person. The only name I recognize is pg, and since I save my username and password, sometimes I forget my own username too.
- greendestiny 17y agoAh rms right there in my list... how did I go so wrong... :)
- amichail 17y agoI think I was filtered out.
- riffer 17y agoYou're correct. I feel terrible. There is no question that you're the posterchild for controversial-interesting. I will fix this.
- rinich 17y agoI approve of all the people I've been grouped with, except that bizarre swombat fellow.
- alanthonyc 17y agoCool. Now we can play six degrees of hn.
- NathanKP 17y agoVery interesting. Depending on how I adjusted it I was judged similar to pg, unalone, and a couple other people on the leaderboard. I guess that means my comments are on the right track.... Are there any other details about the algorithm or how it works. I'm curious about what exactly the different weightings mean.
- laktek 17y agoSame story here..Is pg is added to all users by default?
- pclark 17y agogot swombat. lame. :)
- SapphireSun 17y agoHmm, small bug(?) When I typed my name in all lowercase it didn't come up. That might be by design though. Cool tool ;-)
- riffer 17y agoThat's a good point. Let me see what I can do. The catch is that HN is case sensitive as well. works: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SapphireSun http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SapphireSun doesn't work: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sapphiresun http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sapphiresun
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Vivtek 17y agoHa, yes, that confused me, too.
- tokenadult 17y agoI like my company. I don't know if they feel the same way about me. One newer participant whose posts make me think "I wish I had posted that" doesn't show up on my list of associated participants. But I show up on his. Maybe that is because of the karma setting in the default operation of the search. Interesting.
- riffer 17y agoIf you don't mind telling me the user you're thinking of, I can take a look as well.
- Zak 17y agoDoes moving the karma slider to the right look for people with low karma, or does it ignore karma? I want the option to ignore karma.
- riffer 17y agoExcellent question. Middle ignores karma in the quantitative ranking. Far to the right gets lower karma users. Users who consistently get almost all 1s and/or negative points are separately filtered out since they generally don't make for interesting recommendations. Users who sometimes have negative comment scores but also make lots of 2+ comments are included (these users are rare but are arguably the most interesting).
- silentbicycle 17y agoA few weeks ago, I tried searching through old threads to find where PG had an archive of old comments and server stats. Does anybody have link(s)? Thanks in advance. (This post is meta enough that it's probably as good a time as any.) I'm guessing either such a corpus was used here, or it's based on a cache of recent comments.
- dolinsky 17y agoAm I missing something or does this not work for the majority of us who are casual commentators on here?
- silentbicycle 17y agoIt probably needs more data points.
- riffer 17y agoYeah, there's really two issues here. Most of the techniques for this sort of thing don't work that well for sparse datasets. So given a choice between showing bad results for users with relatively few comments, and not showing any results ... especially when users can search not just for themselves but also for folks they know and enjoy ... Also, scraping the full history of HN is not cool.
- silentbicycle 17y agoA while ago, pg posted an archive of HN comments, specifically so that nobody would have to scrape them. (It was coupled with comments on how the arc server was holding up, IIRC.) I haven't had any luck searching for it, though - there are too many discussions about the ethics of scraping comments, archive file formats, and the like.
- slackenerny 17y agoI remember that too. It was, as you say, a while ago, meaning long time outdated. And I indeed recall it to be pg-posted, but instead all I can find is this non-pg release with all links broken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173045 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173045. I looked for in all links to tar and zip archives, could've missed something.
- silentbicycle 17y agoYeah, they're 404. Thanks for looking!
- mgrouchy 17y agohrm, I seem to have gotten tptacek as my top result, if the results are so ordered. Id say thats a good thing. In general the whole list is people I would happen to be even somewhat similar to.
- auston 17y agohttp://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=auston&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.9&weight2=-0.2 http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=auston...
- mixmax 17y agoInteresting. After the obligatory vanity search I tried searching for people I know have different (more technical, less startup/strategy(marketing) taste than me. And it seems to work quite well. I have nothing in common with those guys :-) For instance the top pick for tptacek is cperciva, which seems natural. Doesn't work the other way around though, so there's still some work to be done...
- riffer 17y agoThanks for the feedback, you bring up a very interesting point: reciprocity. If I am closer to you than anyone else, does it follow that you are closer to me than anybody else? I'm not sure the right answer to that is yes ...
- sparky 17y agoDefinitely not in the general case of points in n-dimensional Cartesian space. For instance, in the 1-d case, consider points at 0, 10, and 12. 10 is the closest point to 0, but not vice-versa. Put another way, it seems as though the algorithm considers tptacek more distinct (from all other HN users) than cperciva.
- mixmax 17y agowhich is in tune with tptacek being no. 3 on the leaderboard and cperciva being no.34.
- Xichekolas 17y agoI was wondering the same thing. I don't show up in the lists of any of the people that show up in my list. I take it that means I am the cheese.
- alex_c 17y agoQuite flattering - no matter what I set the sliders to, the names I recognize are people I respect. I think that only really says something about HN, not about my comments :)
- randallsquared 17y agoI had the same result. Perhaps this is not measuring similarity after all. :)
- brk 17y agoI got quite a few people I respect (mixmax, edw519, mattmaroon) and one I consider a personal friend, dennykmiu. Neat little utility, thanks.
- mixmax 17y agohey thanks!
- edw519 17y agoI love it! My results were very encouraging: S W G W einstein newton +------------------------+ | edw519 | liebniz +------------------------+ turing ===========||============= carnegie Co-Commenting..SEMANTICS.. Word Choice tesla godel =====||=================== escher Leaderboard.....KARMA..... Diamonds in the Rough..... bach edison This site has no affiliation with Hacker galois News or Y Combinator patio11
- bugs 17y agoI think your leaderboard dial was set to 11.
- csuper 17y agoYeah - he should just make 10 louder.
- josefresco 17y agoI don't understand why ... his goes to 11
- brettnak 17y agoFor $2,000 I'll build you one that goes to 12.
- riffer 17y agoThanks for the positive response. If three things were to get added to this, what should they be?
- adrianwaj 17y ago- explanation about what it does and how - username has period afterward, for self-linking back to site - various ratios next to each user name in a table, maybe linking to searchyc ie http://searchyc.com/user/riffer http://searchyc.com/user/riffer
- ratsbane 17y ago1) If I understand correctly the first slider ranks greater similarity in commenting on the same threads the farther left you go and similar word choice the farther right you go. Why not make this two separate sliders? 2) For each of the matches could you show some of the data used to compute the matches... e.g., for semantic matches, show the top X (maybe five?) common words or phrases you matched on. For threads, show the parent or OP of the five most recent threads... something like that. 3) Really neat. I like this. It's quick too. How did you do it? Did you replicate the entire HN database? Third suggestion: post the source or just post an explanation of how it works.
- ratsbane 17y ago... and 4: apply the same thing to twitter (!)
- riffer 17y agoYeah, that's one of things to consider. All of the logic for this was originally developed for another purpose, and it got applied to HN for fun. The human connection element makes it very cool, and so do the possiblities for applying it to so many different applications.
- rms 17y agoLeast similar users
- andrewljohnson 17y agoMy girlfriend and I have almost the exact same lists... smokey_the_bear and andrewljohnson.
- Vivtek 17y agoApparently tumult is most similar to me no matter what I select, so clearly I can just stop posting entirely. (Thanks, tumult - more time in the day!)
- llimllib 17y agoexcellent choice setting the defaults to give very flattering results... there's a lesson in that.
- patio11 17y agoI could probably turn this into a blog post (and will later), but there are a lot of microoptimizations of default settings for B2C apps that make huge differences in conversion: - Defaults should be almost sufficient to use the app. (i.e. if it has some workflow, you should be able to pretty much hit "Next next next" and get it to work. Bonus points for making the number of nexts as low as possible.) - Pick something that results in visually impressive output rather than a blank page. See Balsamiq for inspiration here -- they start you with a mockup in progress that demonstrates most of the highlights of the software. - Ever seen Firefly? I really like how they use the word "shiny". Ideally, your defaults should show the shiny in your app. In Hollywood they have a saying: make sure your budget makes it onto the screen. In B2C apps, make sure the stuff you did all the work on makes it into the user experience most of your users will see. - Assume your user is a novice at both your software and the problem domain until you have evidence otherwise. A lot of people ask the user "Hey, are you a novice?" That is one way to do things, but it makes your core workflow one stage longer and every stage costs you conversion. I prefer "Assume they are and give them a discrete 'skip ahead' button" or "Assume they are and watch them for evidence that they are not". - If your app is supposed to make the user feel like they just killed an effing lion, then your default settings better have a lion bound and gagged sitting under a forty-ton weight suspended by a weak string which passes through an open pair of scissors next to a sign saying "Snip this." - (Do this if nothing else.) Track actual usage of the app and modify your defaults based on actual usage. Bonus points if you can do it dynamically, if that makes sense for your app. For example, if you pick A as the default and 25% of your users go out of their way to change it to B, then that probably should have been B. (You can split test and see how many people would have changed it to A if it had defaulted to B.)
- llimllib 17y agoWhile all of these are true, I find that they usually derive from a simpler rule: Have a laser focus on the users you're trying to reach, and everything you do should make their lives easier in some way. When I find people breaking these sorts of rules, it's usually because they're thinking of themselves or some non-customer stakeholder. edited to add a corollary: until you've done the sort of testing patio11 advocates, you don't know who that customer is.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- peregrine 17y agoI got a great list. Neat.
- matt1 17y agoVery cool. My matches using the default settings: pg, swombat, mahmud, wheels, SwellJoe, edw519, mattmaroon, gojomo, davidw, mixmax, unalone, tptacek Did you get permission to scrape the data? (I tried once without asking with mediocre results: http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/08/the-wrong-way-to-get-noticed-by-yc/ http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/08/the-wrong-way-to-get-notice...)
- jacquesm 17y agoAs someone in the comments on your pages also notes, you could use the google cache. But it would still be nicer to ask first.
- rdtsc 17y agoInteresting, similar to: edw519 btilly patio11 pg tptacek
- whalesalad 17y agopg was number one for me :D
- jacquesm 17y agoI think there is still a subtle bug in there somewhere. When I set the sliders 'semantics' all the way to the right ('word choice') and leaderboard all the way to the left, then check I get this: - patio11 - mahmud - nostrademons - tptacek - mahmud - edw519 - swelljoe - davidw Shouldn't the relationships be symmetrical, so 'edw519' would get 'mahmud' as the first match and 'mahmud' would get 'edw519' ? edit: also, your 'match' is case sensitive, so 'riderofgiraffes' won't work but 'RiderOfGiraffes' does.
- astine 17y agoIt filters on karma as well. All of those guys showup in my default results, but I can't get any of them to pick me up. Clearly I don't post enough.
- jacquesm 17y agoIf that were the case then I would show up, and I don't either. I've received some email from David (the guy that built it), he's going to fix this and the lowercase issue as soon as things quiet down a bit.
- apu 17y agoBased on what other people here are reporting, I wonder if there's a bias towards matches with a large number of comments (e.g., pg, patio11, edw519, etc.). Perhaps there's some normalization needed?
- silentbicycle 17y agoThere's a bias towards people on the leaderboard, though one of the knobs adjusts it.
- mahmud 17y agoI was happy to see you in my list, silentbicyle :-)
- silentbicycle 17y ago:)
- adrianwaj 17y agoHow does colins_pride compare with riffer? Aren't they the same person?!?
- riffer 17y agoThis is a cool question. Two things: the first is that I stopped using the colins_pride account and subsequently started using the riffer account, so the co-commenting commonality is not particularly high. The terminology score is substantially closer. The other thing is that because the dataset is tilted towards the recent, the colins_pride user is only lightly represented.
- ambition 17y agoThis is awesome. Having computed a reasonable distance function between users, you should be able to use this distance function as edge weights in a big graph. Rendering this graph with a force-directed layout algorithm like Fruchtermann-Reingold might create visually appealing results by clustering related users. I've done this before on different datasets and would love to cooperate with you on it...
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- ramidarigaz 17y agoReally fun app! Great for boosting one's ego. Slight note about the page formatting: My screen resolution is 800x480, and the text by the sliders wraps in a very confusing manner. It looks like this to me ===============||=================== co-commenting......SEMANTICS.....word choice A little confusing at first, until I realized that it was wrapping. It's the same for the other slider. Great app though!
- 10ren 17y agoSo, some great users are on your similarity list... but are you on their similarity list?
- trunnell 17y agoFor exactly zero of the twelve users listed, no.
- tlrobinson 17y agoInteresting both of my co-founders (tolmasky and boucher) showed up on most of my lists. I guess that means it works, since we tend to talk about similar things.
- MikeTLive 17y agowebsense doesnt like you. Security risk blocked for your protection Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Potentially Damaging Content. URL: http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/ http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/
- jcl 17y agoHow is "word choice" similarity calculated? If you have a high similarity with someone, does that mean your range of words is the same (perhaps because you write on the same topics) or that your word frequency is the same (because you have similar patterns of speech)? Are quoted sections filtered out? URLs?
- Sukotto 17y agoI don't show. Guess I'm not "one of us" yet :-/
- PebblesRox 17y agoDid you capitalize your name? It seems to be case-sensitive... http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=Sukotto&btn=Search+for+this+HN+User&weight1=0.4&weight2=-0.15 http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=Sukotto&#...
- tibbon 17y agoIt didn't return any results when I tried from the iPhone