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Mapping Hacker News to find who knows what in the HN community
- robg 2y agoAs Wilson and I are working on this project, we'd love to hear your thoughts!
- ipnon 2y agoThe visualization of the space is excellent.
- robg 2y agoThank you!
- thomasfromcdnjs 2y agoIt's very fun to play around with, there seems to be value somewhere. I wonder if you could make a video of how an individual could use it effectively in a pragmatic sense e.g. networking, research (after more playing around I get the UX, very powerful indeed) (feedback: add some controls for filtering (dates etc), relevancy, color islands slightly, just general UX improvements and I would probably pay a few dollars a month for this) (feedback: when looking at a user, you have to zoom really far in before results start appearing. it should probably show labels/results if less than X amount of data points are in your viewport.) (feedback: Is there "Explore more users" section the more related users to the current profile? It would seem so, but not immediately clear. And if it is, none of my related users have me as a related user in their profile. === This is really inspiring work, hats off!
- robg 2y agoThanks so much and for the great feedback!
- disqard 2y agoThanks for making and sharing! Could you share some info about how you generated the 2D space embedding/visualization?
- robg 2y agoThanks! I'll ask Wilson to say more in our next update.
- JohnFen 2y agoOK, I'm going to just be upfront here and admit that I'm an idiot. This is the third time I've seen this link come up on HN, and each time I've checked it out, but I can't really figure out how to interpret what I'm seeing there in a way that is useful. How can that map be used to determine who is knowledgeable about what? Looking up myself, I can't connect what I see with my own areas of knowledge. I think I need an ELI5 for this. Again, this isn't a criticism of the effort at all, it's a public admission of my own ignorance.
- djoldman 2y agoTake everything a user says and encode it into some vector. That's "embedding." Then you encode a search query the same way and return the nearest N vectors/users. That's vector search. It seems they did the above for HN comments.
- JohnFen 2y agoRight, I understand all that. I just don't understand how to interpret the resulting map (or how to formulate a search) to provide useful information, specifically "who knows what".
- robg 2y agoThank you for being so clear on where we are failing you. We're basically computing your semantic space as compared to the whole community. The map shows the relevant instances in that space. As you browse your concepts the space changes and we link to the relevant comments from the associated threads. Who knows what is prioritizing the user and the semantics / voice of that user amidst the noise of the whole community speaking at once. We'd love to hear your feedback as you play with it more and we improve all of the above.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoIt obviously isnt intuitive, but I suppose one could learn to read it over time. For example, there is a lobe at (5, 10) that lights up like a Christmas tree if a user was engaged with Covid vaccines and mandate discussion. Of course, it seems like there is no discrimination between the different stances a user took, or the veracity of their commentary.
- toast0 2y agoI feel targeted when you call me a "system server user network number service code issue" ... not that it's inaccurate ;)
- robg 2y agoHa, exactly!
- jmuguy 2y agoLooking at my own profile the words (topics i know about?) seem sort of generic. "issue", "company" - not sure what to make of that other than I assume those are words I use a lot in comments?
- robg 2y agoWe'll take a look at how to do better, thanks!
- pedalpete 2y agoIs the knowledge graph weighted more to submissions than comments? I'm surprised to see how generalized the keywords associated with my user are "Company, Product, Market, Part, Article, Issue, Bit". I'll admit, I am a generalist, and I comment more than I post, but I would have thought/hoped my knowledge base would trend towards neurotech, sleep, mental health, health, wellness, etc, as I feel that is the "less general" stuff I comment on. Though I recognize this is how I like to see myself, I do often comment on business models, branding, etc etc, which are areas I have interest in. I wonder if topics that have more activity from a user, but are in a less popular topic area would improve this?
- robg 2y agoRight now it does end up representing quantity + quality than just quantity alone. How can we do better?
- freedomben 2y agoHow are you measuring quality?
- mysore 2y ago[flagged]
- pedalpete 2y agoI'm thinking you'd have a huge volume of people with similar common attributes, and if these most common attributes/keywords suggest a more baseline understanding of the community as a whole. I'm not sure how you surface the more nuanced understanding of each users knowledge or interests. The few things I'm thinking are 1) more weight to more recent content than earlier. We change and grow as people. I used to be in the music industry, then 3d mapping, and now neurotech. My music experience is now old, but neuro is fresh. That may be more interesting/valuable. 2) commonality with the viewing user. Where do we overlap, and again, where do we overlap where others don't? How often would a person be searching for someone whom they don't have overlap with? We are likely interested in the same things. Though perhaps somebody who knows nothing about marketing, is looking for marketing help, so I'm not sure how you surface that. I guess I'm wondering what you imagine the ultimate use case being? Or the early adopter use case. You may be prioritizing the algorithm for uses I'm not expecting.
- severak_cz 2y agoWhen you click on some keyword it's actually to go back from that keyword. It would be nice if map showed titles of all articles on extreme close up. Overall it's interesting tool but I think for people with small amount of comments this is not much informative.
- wcedmisten 2y agoWow I really like the topographic visualization of the data, looks really slick!
- robg 2y agoThanks so much!
- causal 2y agoThis is really cool. Also a healthy reminder that anything we post publicly is likely to be analyzed. With a little analysis it's probably easy to know me better than I know myself.
- robg 2y agoMaybe also who you'd tend to get along with and your unique place in the community?
- junon 2y agoWould be interested in a study, unfeasible as it may be, on the social compatibility of people who have the strongest overlap between themselves and the next closest user. Cool visualization and analysis, really well made!
- robg 2y agoThanks so much! How do you see that study playing out in metrics that we can measure and examine?
- Aachen 2y agoEmail adjacent users with a chat room link, say what this is about (you were identified as being similar, maybe you have similar interests) Email random users (control group) the same Ask after a month who's still in touch I'd participate but please send me some of each group and don't tell me which is which :D
- junon 2y agoAbsolutely no idea :D but if you were able to quantify it somehow I think the results would be fascinating.
- mattdesl 2y agoFor the “terrain contours” is there something specific you’ve done to make it feel more cartographic? Or is it basically just marching cubes / iso lines on some data points? Looks fantastic. Very cool project.
- robg 2y agoI'll ask Wilson to chime in on the question; thanks so much!
- batch12 2y agoWhen I did this, I found it to also be an interesting way to fingerprint users and find alternate accounts. I was able to match an old account I used in a top 10 similarity match out of all users.
- rob 2y agohttps://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/rob https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/rob Seems pretty accurate. I do love me some PHP and WordPress.
- hu3 2y agoSearched for "dupe" and yes, it correctly pointed out the one user that takes it a hobby: https://hn2.wilsonl.in/search/dupe https://hn2.wilsonl.in/search/dupe
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoHN and other forums perpetuate a fallacy (that I assume isn't well known because nobody has published a research paper on it)... but "the wisdom of the crowd" isn't. "Trusted voices" on HN are often not experts, yet espouse views which are not what the larger body of experts would consider correct. In addition, actual expert voices are drowned out by whatever the popular position is. HN also provides its own cultural bias, in that everything spoken on HN has to follow a rigorous cultural sieve set down by the guidelines, such that a "negative" view, even if correct, is considered either wrong or distasteful and buried. This is exacerbated by banning the use of humor to disarm controversial or heated comments. And this is the comments that HN does get; many opinions are never entered as comments here, so there exists a large knowledge gap. Then there's the "taboo" subjects like race, gender, religion, politics, social justice, etc which get buried for fear of controversy, so you're definitely not gonna find any expert opinions on those, as the stories just aren't there for discussion. The end result is that often experts go unheeded or even downvoted, popular shallow opinions get upvoted, and substantive commentary based on evidence and experience is frequently missing. The fact is that we have no idea who knows what, or what's true or right. We just have "popularity" according to the particular cultural quirks of this site. So you can definitely find out "who thinks what", and who is considered to be more trustworthy to a HNer, but it has absolutely nothing to do with objective truth or the body of real knowledge that exists outside the world of HN comments. This is an echo chamber, but it's not a chamber of experts. It just seems that way because occasionally you see a minor tech celebrity, and people talk with absolute authority regardless of if they have any. You want to find out who knows what? Look at their diplomas and careers. If they've done 20 years in a single field, probably they're an expert. If they have a degree (or multiple) in a field, probably they're an expert. If they spent half their life working on a single hobby, they're at least very knowledgeable in that field. But you can't determine that just by looking at who's talking about what or how many completely subjective "points" they get for what they say. Determining real knowledge requires analysis of specific criteria, filtered to get a higher quality result.
- saagarjha 2y agoHumor is not banned on Hacker News. Bad attempts at it are penalized, though.
- wonger_ 2y agoPersonally, I like how HN focuses on content and discussions rather than individual users. If I wanted to follow experts, I'd probably curate a selection on a social network like Mastodon, or kludge together some RSS feeds. Also, I feel like this tool selects for active commenters, not for knowledgeable experts. Not to mention throwaway accounts. Still a cool project.
- robg 2y agoThanks! Those are fair points. We're thinking we could uplevel the social layer so you can connect with people of similar interests for deeper connections. In this way we compute not just your contributions but how they relate to others.
- HenryBemis 2y agoWith such efforts I think it is time for people start deleting their accounts, not because they want/need to hide anything, but some people may want to stay semi-anonymous by using aliases and data mining everything and correlating it with other sources (e.g. LinkedIn) may help identify them and cause trouble (e.g. someone wrote something about their workplace without naming it, but hey, it is "John Doe that works in MegaCorp".
- codetrotter 2y ago> it is time for people start deleting their accounts HN does not let you do that though. At least last time I asked about it, they sent me a response saying that they’d notify me when it became possible to delete an account. And they provided some reasons for why they don’t delete comments and accounts.
- lukan 2y agoIt would destroy older comment threads. There are quite some gold nuggets to be found there.
- photochemsyn 2y ago> "Despite the intervening 16 years, we're amazed that social networks, even Hacker News, don't compute and display the trusted voices across topics. Instead of prioritizing pages based on content, social networks could prioritize the people behind the content." Fallacy: appeal to authority. Practically, just because someone generates great content on subject A doesn't mean their take on subject B is any better than random. A well-reasoned self-consistent argument informed by accurate data is far more valuble than 'trust this expert opinion because this expert can be trusted' approaches - although it may require more work on the part of the reader. Don't get lazy.
- robg 2y agoWe're trying to stay away from authority and just compute based on what you say then transparently show where that information came from. How do you think we can do better?
- rpmisms 2y agoI wonder how high I am on the guns knowledge list?
- simonw 2y agohttps://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/simonw https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/simonw includes "Risk of COVID from pianos" down at the bottom of the map. I'd love to know where that came from!
- m463 2y agoI wonder if there's a risk of pianos from COVID? Kind of like how when the pandemic started, sales of guitars and home gym equipment went up as people worked on at-home hobbies.
- wonger_ 2y agoAppears to be a summary of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30105274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30105274 If you zoom and pan the red cursor over that map location/text, your source comment will appear underneath the map.
- robg 2y agoGreat call out! Would it help to make the points more interactive?
- bloopernova 2y agoCan you please remove the email address from the user profile page?
- rcarmo 2y agoMine seems fairly accurate - accelerating RDP, 3d printer firmware, touchscreen Graffiti gestures (which kind of dates me) and mainline Linux in SBCs, all of which are my hobbies (I seldom, if ever, comment on actual work, like cloud architecture, networking or... AI, which is too crowded a field). Weirdly, almost no mentions of Apple stuff (which is supremely ironic given my blog). So you get an impression of what people discuss here, but not necessarily what they know :)
- DoreenMichele 2y agoJust curious what the mechanism is for adding a bio to individual users. Your sample -- robg -- has the same bio on your stuff as on HN but others have stuff on HN and "No bio provided" on your thing.
- robg 2y agoRight now if you add it to your HN profile we'll be able to include it.
- DoreenMichele 2y agoOne data point: I checked my profile earlier and there was none, though my HN profile has scads of info. That's why I was curious. Totally fair to say "Word limit!" or something, but it means your reply doesn't seem to jibe with my observation.
- robg 2y agoThanks, we’ll take a look!
- zamalek 2y agoSome sentiment analysis might help? Apple is one of my keywords, but you'd pretty-much only get an "avoid" response from me (to a degree, I have recommended their phones to a very specific demographic). Awesome project, fantastic UI.
- hu3 2y agoSame. I think a sentiment analysis could be helpfull. I find myself dragged to Apple discusions more than I would like to admit, but they are generally negative in the last years.
- robg 2y agoIt's a topic we keep coming back to, seems like we can do better than sentiment analysis to show the semantic space of the sentiment(s) and how those breakdown by users and groups. For instance assuming a large discussion set of apples, different types of apples, and other types of fruits, we'd discover the patterns among users. Have you seen folks doing that type of semantic sentiment analytics?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kaycebasques 2y agoSuper cool! Happy to see that I show up under documentation-related stuff, considering how frequently I mention that I'm a technical writer in my comments. Also pretty excited to connect with the other people that show up related to docs / technical writing / etc.
- nadermx 2y agoAs opposed to me not showing up at all for things I comment on. Guess I'm not knowledgeable enough.
- layer8 2y agoThe results are biased towards users with high post count. It doesn’t matter how knowledgeable you are about a topic, only how much you comment on it.
- kaycebasques 2y agoAnd using the correct keywords. SEO is dead, long live SEO! Also I imagine that my area is pretty niche (not many people talking about documentation on HN) so I may have less competition
- robg 2y agoWe'll take a look!
- pcthrowaway 2y agoHow does determine which comments are valuable ("trusted") without access to the vote count of comments?
- robg 2y agoWe're trying to stay away from karma and focus on what people are saying within the community, rank orders, overall semantics, and more. How do you think we can do better?
- freedomben 2y agoI'm ignorant on how you are measuring quality, but I think an interesting blend of karma with whether or not there are replies that argue. If the replies are generally positive, that may indicate quality. If the karma is below 1, and the replies include a number of refutations, that can indicate low quality.
- ffgjgf1 2y agoI don’t think comment “score” is available in the api.
- freedomben 2y agoCorrect it's not (at least that I can tell), but there are some (indirect) ways to approximate that number based on order, time, and/or color
- pcthrowaway 2y agoYeah I was thinking this as well, though the indications of color (maybe dead-ness also) would probably have to be scraped from the front-end.
- dang 2y agoRecent and related: Show HN: Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307519 - May 2024 (159 comments)
- robg 2y agoThanks dang! Amazing to me how much HN brought Wilson and I together after 16 years and across the world. We're hopeful about the future of trust on the internet exactly because of communities like HN.
- neilv 2y ago> Mapping Hacker News to find who knows what in the HN community Would things like this create/increase incentives to game the metrics?
- gradyfps 2y agoIn my limited experience, people tend to gamify any numeric metric readily apparent to them. Anecdotally, total game time (in hours, usually) is used to convey experience in video games (WoW, CS:GO, PUBG). I've seen people create & run 3rd-party software to artificially inflate these types of metrics.
- neilv 2y agoAnd some metrics aren't just a "game", but are gamed for very real benefit (e.g., gaining admission to a college, getting a promotion, being more employable) in ways that are counterproductive to pretty much all other goals. So, when something like HN has goals, and you create, say, something akin to a contest and link it to real-world benefits (e.g., people expect a recruiter or hiring to use that "who knows what" info), then many people will modify their behavior, probably to the detriment of original goals.
- robg 2y agoWe're trying to stay away from karma for that reason and focus on what people are saying within the community to find trusted voices. How can we do better?
- neilv 2y agoHow can Web sites do better at producing valuable and trustworthy content, when what everyone cares about now comes down to SEO?
- nottorp 2y agoWhy? All my game times are inflated because I either don't shut it down when i go away or I alt tab out of it, do something productive and forget about it :)
- asp_hornet 2y agoI hate this. If i used my real name id have some pleb website on the internet making chump guesses at what i know based on what i was prepared to share. Thanks for reminding me to use anonymous burner accounts on everything app i use.
- robg 2y agoThanks for the feedback. How can we better support authenticity and trusted voices, where you fit in, and others like you?
- asp_hornet 2y agoDont bother. Im never going to be your demographic. I don't want to be profiled by anything for any purpose especially when 1. that profile is then shared publicly 2. I never got consent. I don’t need tailored recommendations and im not going to assess people based on a third party’s black box interpretation that cant possibly have appropriate context.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoI'm not quite as extreme as OC, but value privacy enough to not carry a cell phone and always pay cash; my suggestion would be to allow an ability to opt-out, which would unfortunately probably require you to retrain your entire model (i.e. to destroy all connections/weighting to the opt-outs). An example would be that users place a small opt-out snipped within their user profile, e.g. [no-robots] ? Perhaps OC might consider never commenting outside of 4ch..? Except even glowies train LLMs =D
- colinwilyb 2y agoI share on hacker news because: 1. I want the knowledge/experience/anecdotes/opinions of others. 2. I want to share my own knowledge/experience/anecdotes/opinions with others. 3. Contributing low-bandwidth, high-quality* content is (hopefully) doing my small part in encouraging others to do the same. My primary concern: You are providing a map of individual user interests over a period of time. This is feels like a violation of privacy to some and is outright dangerous to others. Why? 1. People have many interests. The Marketing Manager likes birdwatching, Bollywood, hacking podcasts, amateur chemistry, traditional Ukrainian breadmaking, ASMR, erotic independent film, rock climbing, pole-dancing, gunsmithing, and horse racing. 2. People are public with some interests, and private with others. The degree of public vs. private disclosure can come from external pressure (ie: political oppression, public servant expectations) or internal motivation (ie: embarrassment, pride). 3. People change over time. The 27 year old Marketing Manager may want to distance themselves from their poor political comments as a student. Where to now? If you stop work now, someone else will pick up where you left off. So how do make a system which balances the user AND allows you to continue? 1. Easy and simple opt-out option. 2. User profiles. Allow me to share /which/ interests are associated with me. I am a nuclear engineer by trade, but I'll be damned if I want to talk about it in my spare time. Let me opt-in to Birdwatching, and opt-out of nuclear engineering so those weirdos at work don't find me. 3. Limit the Time for association. Maybe that means you only 'connect' people with their comments in the past year as the Public default. Once the user connects with your system and has control over their online persona, then the user can decide what to show and for how long. Future use? 1. Push this tool as an anonymity improvement tool, which also encourages meaningful conversations with people you want to connect with. 2. Feature: "We notice you posted for the first time to /r/bsdm with your /u/PepsiOfficialMarketing. Was this a mistake?" 3. Feature: "Our AI has scanned your recent posts. We have connected your writing style across two accounts and this may compromise the seperation of accounts. The following phrase: 'Do what thou does MFK!' was used to connect these accounts by our AI." (*Compared to current internet gasoline fire of ad-infested, algorithm targeted, Top-10 lists of Top Ten Lists.)
- motohagiography 2y agoGood God I am a bore. May track some people down in my niche interest areas though, thank you for this.
- SCUSKU 2y agoOi! Watch it! Our distance in embedding space is small. Then again, maybe I am a bore...
- mmastrac 2y agoI found it a bit challenging to actually drill down into my own username, but it doesn't seem to offer much other than throwing a lot of dots all over the map. I'm trying to understand what the overall clusters might be, but most of them are just android/apple/google? https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/mmastrac https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/mmastrac
- qdot76367 2y agoSearched for "Buttplugs". My name pops up. Hell yeah. A++++ completely accurate would use again.
- robg 2y agoHaha, now I must track down the contexts of buttplug conversations on HN.
- gnicholas 2y agoInteresting. I have noticed that my most-upvoted comments relate to legal questions, which I have relatively more expertise than most HNers (I used to be a lawyer). Although I'm not among the top commenters for law/legal/lawyer according to this tool, I definitely recognize some of the top names and can recall seeing their comments in legal threads. Pretty cool tool!
- dmurray 2y agoThings I thought I had expertise in and have posted about disproportionately on HN: chess, Python, HFT, Fermi estimation, Ireland. Keywords the site actually associates with me: language, English, article, team, book. To be fair, at some zoom levels I do get "chess".
- solardev 2y agoIn your avatar, what do the size and positions of the circles represent? It's not super obvious to me how that correlates to the word cloud on the map (if it does).
- SushiHippie 2y agoWhat's up with dangs profile? https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/dang https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/dang Why does it say "Marion Milner" and why are there only so few posts on the map?
- chatmasta 2y agoI remember there was a (rather controversial) tool posted here a few years ago, which used textual analysis and stylometry to find “similar users.” So you could type in someone’s username and find their likely alt accounts. It was creepily accurate - or at least that’s what I heard from a friend who has an alt :) Could this tool be repurposed for that? Presumably the “map” rendered in each user’s avatar could be encoded as a vector and then compared to that of another user. EDIT: Wait, I just realized it already does this… (or at least I think so - it’s not immediately obvious if “Explore More Users” is ranked by similarity.)
- robg 2y agoInteresting! Seems creepy to me too, as you can find it would love to understand how we can do better.
- lolinder 2y ago> Could this tool be repurposed for that? Presumably the “map” rendered in each user’s avatar could be encoded as a vector and then compared to that of another user. It's probably less likely to work because people often use alts to participate in discussions that they wouldn't want to associate the primary identity with. Whether that be discussions about their employer, about politics, or something else, the subjects an alt particulates in will likely be different. Style works because few people are capable of fundamentally altering their style even if they tried.
- nstart 2y agoMy final year project in uni was a tool to detect plagiarism by analyzing whether parts of an assignment had been outsourced to anyone else (basically did one author write the document on their own). Or if two projects by the same student were actually written by one person. For what was at the time an extremely naive implementation of various stylometric methods it worked surprisingly well. Even I was shocked when I managed to demonstrate the tool working. People should read about this branch of studies if they care at all about anonymity online.
- 2y ago
- robwwilliams 2y agoSo cool. Love seeing this novel pivot of HN data. Just confirmed that my comments are well embedded by testing a few topics (longevity and mouse biology). Privacy issues not a concern for most academic researchers (we typically beg for PR), but I can see that this might contribute to more cautious wording. I left Twitter right before it became X, and focused on HN as a “breaking news and commentary” that is mercifully free of politics. This tool fills a discovery gap.
- robg 2y agoThanks so much, this is exactly how we feel!
- ajkjk 2y ago> Despite the intervening 16 years, we're amazed that social networks, even Hacker News, don't compute and display the trusted voices across topics Please no. That sounds dystopian. We should not prefer having algorithms meddling with social interaction. We should not want things better designed to manipulate us.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tzury 2y agoLooked at mine. Says not much at all about “what I know”. Checked RIP Aaron Swartz. Nothing meaningful. What am I missing? https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/aaronsw https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/aaronsw
- robg 2y agoWe'll look into this, thanks!
- benreesman 2y agoThis implementation doesn’t really get there, but… I think this is an extremely cool idea both on HN specifically and generally on the Internet. Bluesky does a bit of the thing where you can mix and match your content to your ranker/recommender system. I hope you folks keep working on it, this is a refreshingly cool hack in the space.
- rbanffy 2y agoI find it surprising that I talk more about my hobbies than my work. I guess I should apply for a job at ESA.
- Daub 2y agoSeeing my domain knowledge mapped out so honestly, I am reminded of the line in Robert Burns's poem "To a Louse": Oh, would some Power the gift give us / To see ourselves as others see us!
- dechenham 2y agoThis vindicates my decision to comment using only short-lived burner accounts.
- fabianholzer 2y agoSo, you I assume you extracted my mail out of the profile text (which admittedly was not obscured enough for the LLMs of today), to put it into a mailto: link - Well, many thanks on behalf of the low-effort spammers for making harvesting easier, I guess...
- lainga 2y agolol, it failed at decoding base64 in my case
- bawolff 2y agoI do wonder if low effort spam bots scraping mailto links are still a thing or if we are all just cargo culting obfuscations of emails. Spam has changed so much from those days, is it a strategy that is still used?
- 8organicbits 2y agoI usually don't mind these things, but that's not OK, did the same to mine. Is there an opt-out of this thing?
- sebastiennight 2y agoI think even basic LLMs are able to de-obfuscate our 2000s-style attempts at hiding emails (eg. one of my friends writing: "firstname [cute arobase sign] domain.com" on the contact page of his super-popular blog)
- tgv 2y agoI tried a few topics, e.g. neuroscience and language (a minor variation of the query in the blog), and the results are rather useless. It certainly doesn't show users with knowledge of the topic. Perhaps too fringe?
- SubiculumCode 2y agoI tried three searches'autism' 'episodic memory' and 'hippocampus' and I was pleased to see my account on each. I guess I have my niche :)
- yorwba 2y agoIf you select some of the keywords (e.g. "brain" and "linguistic") for a user, you get posts they made related to those keywords. I think the results are okay in terms of relevance to the query, but of course "posting about a topic" and "being knowledgeable about a topic" are different things. Now if this tool could distinguish posts that sound like they were written by a layman from those made by an expert...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dep_b 2y ago"Tax avoidance schemes in The Netherlands" https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/dep_b https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/dep_b I guess that's why I still like posting anonymously?
- wruza 2y agoMay talk about social connections and knowledge networks etc, but this will eventually end up as a saas for everyones future HR. Can’t see much amazing here, especially with this founder’s vibe in the replies. I guess it’s inevitable at this point, but how does it feel to be among the first who dumb down real people to a set of caricature keywords based on an ml method of the day?
- ignoramous 2y ago> dumb down real people to a set of caricature keywords based on an ml method of the day Better than at work where real people dumb down to a set of categories based on code, emails, age, gender, and projects?
- _ink_ 2y agoI like how I am all over the place, haha.
- itronitron 2y agowhile I can appreciate a fair amount of work went into this, it's not providing any useful information on users, or HN generally, that you couldn't more easily reach by searching by username on hn.algolia.com
- nottorp 2y agoIs it who knows what? Or is it what's pushing whose buttons? I looked myself up and "google" is proeminent. However I'm only posting anti google comments, nothing technical but on the privacy theme... I also looked up 'yocto', which is something i know something about and i mentioned in posts a couple times, and the first user returned has some very interesting tags: gur juvpu ohg guvax evtug qbrf And the only really related tag i see is 'buildroot'. I guess it's just not a popular enough tag for the machine to have enough data. Edit: and to join the choir of concerned voices: 1. It's not 'trusted'. It's at best 'popular'. 2. It reminds me of the main social networks and 'engagement'. Hope HN never becomes as predatory.
- card_zero 2y ago>gur juvpu ohg guvax evtug qbrf ROT13 for "the which but think right does". Not really any less cryptic even when decoded. I guess mundane words in a ROT13 conversation people had once have attracted the keyword detector.
- nottorp 2y agoI thought of rot13 but then i read them as separate keywords and just assumed a glitch in the "AI". I suppose yocto does sound a bit like rot13...
- shinryuu 2y agoSearching for neuropathy gives me results for psychopathy. Not exactly the same ...
- QuesnayJr 2y agoInteresting, but Rather than organizing the world's information, what if we could organize the world's people? I do not wish to be organized.
- ImageXav 2y agoAs a not so active user, this tool is rather inaccurate. It seems to have focussed on the one question I asked about jpeg xl, which is the topic I know the least about. I suspect a bias towards more common topics might be occurring.
- c0l0 2y agohttps://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/c0l0 https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/c0l0 - Apparently, I'm a (the?) leading expert on Optimizing Toilet Lid Design - AMA.
- tetris11 2y agoPuh, that's nothing. I'm world reknowned for my Fireplace Efficiency Comparison analytics. (I wonder if the embedding was generated using IDF, placing maybe too much emphasis on rare word tuples?)
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoMine is an absolute mess of nonsense. I suppose it makes sense, so am I. https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/SketchySeaBeast https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/SketchySeaBeast
- CamperBob2 2y ago"Dual Flush Toilet Button Design" authority here, so back the fuck up, I guess
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoHow are you determining what you’re specifically known for? Mine has a ton of stuff: https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/AndrewKemendo https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/AndrewKemendo
- smusamashah 2y agoWhy is dang empty https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/dang https://hn2.wilsonl.in/user/dang
- auggierose 2y agoIt puts me in the top three for "theorem proving", and at the top for "interactive theorem proving". I like it. I feel this tool is quite sophisticated and incredibly accurate.
- bawolff 2y agoWhen i looked up my name, the word "argument" shows up...i was kind of hoping i knew more than just how to argue ;) In any case, interesting idea & project. Philosophically i'm not sure i like the idea of identifying experts - i'd much rather people's comments stand on their own instead of their clout, but nonetheless definitely interesting.
- Aachen 2y agoWhat instructions did you give it for the bio? It tries to decode a rot13 email address (and gets to a recognisable point) but then says "no bio provided". I can't figure out what it's trying to do Also, thanks a lot for attempting to put it in decoded form on another website. If I now get spam on that address, at least I know whose idea that was and that it's not yet spammers who got this clever, but rather it's due to well-meaning hackers with an idea: the most dangerous kind! :P
- moconnor 2y agoSearched for bingo and didn't see patio11 in the results; hmm...
- phaedrus 2y agoI chose my username from the narrator's alter ego in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In reference to the analytical knife: "Phædrus was a master with this knife, and used it with dexterity and a sense of power. With a single stroke of analytic thought he split the whole world into parts of his own choosing, split the parts and split the fragments of the parts, finer and finer and finer until he had reduced it to what he wanted it to be. Even the special use of the terms "classic" and "romantic" are examples of his knifemanship." In a bit of nominative determinism, or perhaps just having chosen the name because I know myself (or maybe I just over use these words), my keywords include: "part, system, level, language, article, object," etc.
- muzani 2y agoSomehow I'm #10 on startups. https://hn2.wilsonl.in/search/Startups https://hn2.wilsonl.in/search/Startups I guess having over a decade in startups counts for something, but it's crazy to score higher than sama or all the other founder/investors here who make 1000000x more from startups. My favourite terms here are apparently "inclusive pregnancy emoji proposal", "Controversial tweet on China issue", and "enhancing pasta flavor with salt". I do remember all of these conversations, it's interesting to see it brought up. Anyway, I'm gonna bookmark this for the next time I look for a job on HN lol
- haliskerbas 2y agoIt’s funny how the market works that way, right? The smartest engineers I know aren’t the ones making the most, and that carries for a lot of other things too.
- muzani 2y agoThough if someone were an expert in business or startups or sales, I'd say income from it is a good measurement stick.
- chirau 2y agoWhat does the solid red dot for a username mean? Some have a green one and some do not have anything.
- RamblingCTO 2y agoThe best thing about HN is that comments feel pretty temporary. I don't like the fact that I'm being analysed without my consent and put on public display. Not that there's anything remotely interesting about me on that page but it feels weird. Not everything needs to be analysed and we don't need to compete everywhere. What I'm saying is: I like the focus on the content and that it's not about who said it. It got me to remove my twitter handle from my bio though. If you could update that in your app I would be thankful.
- rkangel 2y ago> The best thing about HN is that comments feel pretty temporary I have a google chrome extension that lights up when there are HN comments for the page I'm on. If I organically discover a blog post and that lights up, then I will often read the comments even though it might have been posted years ago. There is often useful insight or context to be gained.
- polairscience 2y agoFYI to you and anyone reading this. Comments are the opposite of temporary. You can never delete them or edit them after a very brief initial window. So anything you say here can and might be associated with you forever. Either directly or nebulously as indicated by this tool.
- jvanderbot 2y agoI suppose the EU would like to have a word about being forgotten?
- elliotec 2y agoJust because an individual has the right, doesn't mean the other entities have the means or desire.
- jvanderbot 2y agoPithy! But I guess I'm still confused. If a vendor provides software that doesn't honor the right, how many times can they do that before they get in trouble? In HN case, I'm sure an email would sort it out, however.
- sebastiennight 2y agoI can already see the day coming when someone is going to make a phpBB-like HN skin which displays everyone's real name and LinkedIn picture along their comments. Why not add their Gmail signature as well?
- 6510 2y agoI was thinking to make that just now but as an opt in thing where you can upload your own avatar + banners + design your footer. I was also similarly worried about what is possible and what will be possible. With enough resources you can fingerprint writing styles and find who is who. That it can detect LLMs will be the excuse.
- precompute 2y agoLove it. Visited my profile, wasn't disappointed. 10/10
- uhjk 2y ago[dead]