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Show HN: Hacker News Git Blame
One night I was deep in a rabbit hole, reading old HN comments. I eventually ended up scraping a bunch of usernames and building a game!
Please suggest any other users who you'd want to see/upstanding members of the community who deserve to be featured.
- ShamelessC 3y agoIs this just a guessing game basically? edit: Oh, I see it loads the comment. On first viewing it just showed the url of the comment.
- MovingTheLimit 3y agoYup! It's a game.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- orng 3y agoI got 10/10 without having any idea who any of the people (except pg) were. The comments always made it possible to link to the companies of the posters somehow. Interesting experiment to try to figure that out but I'm left wondering if I should be familiar with all those people and what they do.
- MovingTheLimit 3y agoYou might've gotten a lucky roll haha, I'm currently adding more prominent community members (thanks, dang!) that should make it harder to guess. Thanks for playing though :)
- zamadatix 3y agoFun! It runs into a bit of a problem that a lot of of these comments are in threads where they feel the need to disclose who the are so the comment starts "Cruise CEO here" and the answers list only has one option for someone from Cruise.
- MovingTheLimit 3y agoHahaha yes for sure, but you can count those as free points for now. If people end up loving this project I'll think about adding obfuscation
- toomuchtodo 3y agoThis is very cool! Thank you for sharing!
- MovingTheLimit 3y agothanks! based on your karma, will add you to the game as well :) please LMK if you have other recommendations
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoThat was quick. I just played and one of my last questions had your parent commenter, toomuchtodo (who I hadn't heard of, sorry) as an answer. Personally, I can't say I spend much time looking at commenters names. One of the answers for me was someone called Daniel G... (can't recall). Is that "dang", the moderator? Might be useful to have their real names: ie their HN usernames!! The name suggested to me something like unedit-reddit, fwiw.
- MovingTheLimit 3y agoAh good point, will make it more clear that it's dang, the moderator. And will add an "HN: " tag to everyone's usernames (if available).
- jedberg 3y ago> based on your karma Haha I guess I might get in there too then. How embarrassing would it be to guess my own comments wrong!
- MovingTheLimit 3y agoYou're in the game! dang recommended you earlier
- andrelaszlo 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
- atherton33 3y agoIf you were trying to convince me that hacker news is extensively astroturfed by companies to support their viewpoint, you did that. Ouch.
- quickthrower2 3y agoBig (well written) wall of text about payments => patio11
- throwup238 3y agoI saw "sex video" in the quote [1] and I just knew it was going to be tptacek :) I got every other choice wrong though, which is impressively bad. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997964
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI mean, I read HN, and I deep dive the comments, but my special ability to fully recollect conversations even online ones went away with age. If I could recover this skill I'd be insanely productive. This is alas why we bikeshed so many different tools to track software development (not a jab at the usefulness, just a jab at how some people over complicate simple tools which causes more work than its worth).
- globular-toast 3y agoI can't do it on HN. Other forums I use have sigs and avatars etc and I get quickly "get to know" the regular posters. I don't "know" a single poster on HN apart from dang.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoThats a good call out. HN with avatars would be weird.
- nvy 3y agoHis comments have a very distinct style, for sure.
- quickthrower2 3y agoFun extension to this idea: enter your username. use vector search to find most similar user to you. Now show comments from them and you, and you have to guess if you made them :-)
- MovingTheLimit 3y agohahaha that would be insane
- thomasfromcdnjs 3y agobleh i kind of need to build this now
- paradite 3y agoThere was a project that does exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 But now it's offline.
- idiotsecant 3y agoYep. Really opened up my eyes to how simple it would be to follow a user across sites and usernames. Our ideas are biometrics just as much as anything else.
- jefftk 3y ago9/10; fun game!
- ofrzeta 3y agoIs it also a vehicle to promote Zero Gravity Factory?
- self_awareness 3y agoDo people really remember authors of such generic comments? Is it only because they were heavily upvoted because of the popularity of the commenter? I think that upvoting mechanism on sites like HN/Reddit/Lobsters really hurt the idea of free idea flow. People focus on the author too much, not the idea.
- Uptrenda 3y agoNow you can turn circle jerking into a game! Great work, op.
- saagarjha 3y ago9/10. I guess I spend too much time on this site? (Didn’t figure out the one I missed, it seemed to be a temp account?)
- MovingTheLimit 3y agoThe accounts all should be either a prominent tech company founder, or among the top HN posters of all time! https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
- saagarjha 3y agoHmm it definitely linked me to a temp account with a green username. Unfortunately I don’t quite remember what the post was :(
- Karellen 3y agoSeems like fun. I was a bit confused by "git blame" at first. I kinda see how the name fits ("Who wrote this?"), but the point of "git blame" is to figure that out for you so you don't have to guess.
- MovingTheLimit 3y agoYou're totally right. Naming this was a bit difficult — was afraid of calling it something like Guess Who? in case I got sued.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoIt looks very good! I am surprised people recognize the authors of HN comments. I could maybe recognize a pg's comment. Very interesting - thanks!