10 ms·

See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments

Insanity 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  I think dragonwriter only comments on politics.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
tombert 9mo ago
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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- jedberg 9mo ago
  I think the word for us is "terminally online" :) (I'm #174)
  - tombert 9mo ago
    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-bible.html https://wordcounter.net/blog/2015/12/08/10975_how-many-words...
    - jedberg 9mo ago
      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 9mo ago
        Stop training AI slop! /s XD
      - tombert 9mo ago
        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.
        jedberg 9mo ago
        > so I believe you when you say you’re not AI You're absolutely right! Actually, I use em dashes a lot in my longer form writing -- and have been for years. I've had to do it less to avoid accusations of being an AI.
Apreche 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    Funny to see a reply from one of the ~10 usernames I recognize on here.
    - jedberg 9mo ago
      Haha right back at ya buddy.
  - oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
    This is how I find out that reddit is older than Hacker News. Mind blown!
    - rayiner 9mo ago
      Wait until you find out about Slashdot.
      - oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
        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.
verisimi 9mo ago
It would be fascinating to see a word to karma ratio. (Mine would be incredibly low).
- tzs 9mo ago
  You can see the karma of the people with the 11th-100th highest karma at https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders 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 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
I'm genuinely concerned not finding my handle in the leaderboard will subconsciously have me believing I don't have an HN problem.
- krick 9mo ago
  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 https://pastes.io/name-words
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
      You are in the data I attached. #43.
      - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        Oh LOL. #43'rd nice. I would've preferred #42 tho just because the meaning of life but I will take #43th :D
  - pengaru 9mo ago
    thank you closes tab
bilekas 9mo ago
> 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 9mo ago
  > If only any of that was useful! I'm apparently in the top 500... I really should get a better hobby.
jmward01 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  this is basic stylometry? Can probably tell forgery against the corpus, attempts to clone.
mleonhard 9mo ago
s/Prolificacy/Verbosity/
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 9mo ago
needs a 1/(words/comment-karma) metric!
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    What were the main attributes that led to varying states of whelmed? One reason I love text discourse is that it gives me time to thoughtfully respond. My wife is super witty and can be instantly funny and social when she wants. It takes me more time to match that sociable wit. My hunch is that wit-rate would be a contributing whelm factor.
    - ggm 9mo ago
      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 9mo ago
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.
mrandish 9mo ago
Neat! Over 300,000, putting me in the top 1,000.
- tombert 9mo ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I love HN but maybe I need another hobby or three.
  - japhyr 9mo ago
    Can you expand a bit on how you feel about it? :)
    - tombert 9mo ago
      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 https://howlongtoread.com/books/779942/The-GoBetween
      - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        > 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 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)
MBCook 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  top 438, I had no idea
  - MBCook 9mo ago
    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_ 9mo ago
  #397, dear lord what have I done with my life...
Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
Hey Hackernews, You can read my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827731#46828331 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!)
- japhyr 9mo ago
  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. :)
PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
Click [here] to train a 6B model with just your words ...
- visarga 9mo ago
  I am thinking you need the parent comment(s) as well to do that
ggm 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
It's very useful project.
davidw 9mo ago
"No, I don't think I will" - I already have a sense of how much time I've spent here.
- krick 9mo ago
  Yeah, that was my reaction as well. Not sure what other people are so happy about. (But of course I did.)
bsoles 9mo ago
I feel like a perfect realization Goodhart's Law is about to happen to move up our rankings.
userbinator 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  Or just redis cache?
  - nickvec 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
      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 9mo ago
        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 9mo ago
        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 9mo ago
Look on my [prolix] words, ye Mighty, and despair!
macintux 9mo ago
I miss DoreenMichele. She always added thoughtful perspectives. Looks like she’s actively writing at https://califmichele.blogspot.com/ https://califmichele.blogspot.com/ and https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/ https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/ but has departed HN.
- lostlogin 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
      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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play https://clickhouse.com/docs/getting-started/playground https://clickhouse.com/docs/getting-started/playground https://clickhouse.com/blog/announcing-the-new-sql-playground https://clickhouse.com/blog/announcing-the-new-sql-playgroun...
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    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.
pinkmuffinere 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  Long tail. I wouldn't call them lurking they do what satisfies their itch.
  - serial_dev 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  Or 89 milikarma/word. That is pretty good. I only got 34 milikarma/word.
  - MrGilbert 9mo ago
    83 milikarma/word. That's interesting, though I'm not sure what to do with it.
- KolmogorovComp 9mo ago
  It would not make much sense to compute it, if you do not subtract the karma earned through submissions.
- latexr 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    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.
atoav 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
dang on position 4
fragmede 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
Top 1.55% with ~36000 words. I can be quite chatty in my comments, it seems.
weinzierl 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  I am in the top 0.15%. Crazy.
  - josephg 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
  > Then words could be color-coded by impact. Or by difficulty to make sense of them.
4ggr0 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
- sothatsit 9mo ago
  Could it be that ingve has submitted a lot of links, but has not made that many comments?
  - exagolo 9mo ago
    I believe Karma solely comes from upvotes for comments minus downvotes. Submissions don't count.
    - embedding-shape 9mo ago
      That might be in real life ("afk"), but on HN even submissions give you karma.
    - Bengalilol 9mo ago
      Have a look at your submissions, they brought you karma. <https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=exagolo 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 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)
- 9mo ago
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
iNic 9mo ago
Surprised that with ~6k words I am already in the top ~5%. I guess the old 90-9-1 rule roughly holds up.
lordnacho 9mo ago
Pretty amazed to be on the list at all.
PaulRobinson 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
One
forgotpwd16 9mo ago
@dragonwriter was meant for this. Has written ~16 volumes of GOT, +1.5 volume from 2nd.
dnpls 9mo ago
I like the game of thrones conversion.
Macha 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
  (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 :]
tasuki 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
NooneAtAll3 9mo ago
I'd love to see unique-word stats as well
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
Dear reader this person now have all your alt accounts linked to you?
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
Who else sighed in relief in seeing that they are not top 1000 ?
- layer8 9mo ago
  Given that 99.87% are not in the top 1000, probably the majority.
booleandilemma 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
[flagged]
raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
Funny enough I had another account that I hadn’t used in 2 years that is still in the top 100.
aoeCoder 9mo ago
628238 / 774235. If we were to gamify this I might as well be aiming for the bottom: https://xkcd.com/3110/ https://xkcd.com/3110/
Applejinx 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
Now please put in relation to up votes to identify frequent top commentors instead of plain spammers.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  Actually I have written a sql query for that which you can run. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829029#46875831 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 9mo ago
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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
      Update: The feature's live on the website now :D
      - DonHopkins 9mo ago
moralestapia 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    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.
    - greenie_beans 9mo ago
      *worth the agent's time
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
Well, 0.56% of a GoT volume... Not bad. Now I see why my keyboard is all blanked out :)
2Gkashmiri 9mo ago
It says user not found
- kergonath 9mo ago
  It is case-sensitive, that might be the problem.
ninalanyon 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  I was like "huh, I'm probably in the upper quarter too". 0.30% OMG. Still only half a book.
- Twisol 9mo ago
  Top 0.44% here. Hrm...
  - dhosek 9mo ago
    Top 0.21% Yikes
    - disgruntledphd2 9mo ago
      Top 0.81% and I really don't comment much. Mind you, the distribution is probably insanely skewed.
marginalia_nu 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
Good to know I am top 1% of something. You made my day bro!
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
> 357,191 words That's like, five novels. What I have been doing here, damn...
arjie 9mo ago
This is great. I found out about Clickhouse's Play interface[0] through this. I added the top 100 to a personal transient blacklist so that I can first view comments without them. I wonder if I should do it with the whole top 1000. One thing HN used to have was a karma/comment score on your profile. I'm currently at 3.68. Of course that includes stories as well but I have a small fraction of karma from there. Cool! 0: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIDU3OTYvQ09VTlQoKikgRlJPTSBoYWNrZXJuZXdzX2hpc3RvcnkgV0hFUkUgdHlwZT0nY29tbWVudCcgQU5EIGJ5ID0gJ2FyamllJyBMSU1JVCAxOw== https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIDU3OTYvQ...
deafpolygon 9mo ago
Top 0.69% percentile?
OJFord 9mo ago
Ok, this is horrifying. Doesn't feel like I've even been here much for the last ~year!
cyphar 9mo ago
I must admit it was a little surreal to check my own username out of curiosity, only to find that I'm in the top 500 commenters (0.06%) on HN by word count. The really surprising thing is that I stopped commenting regularly a few years ago so god knows where I would've ranked back in 2020. Then again, I always had a feeling I was too verbose when writing comments, so I guess this is all the proof I needed!

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
I think dragonwriter only comments on politics.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

tombert 9mo ago

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.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
jedberg 9mo ago
I think the word for us is "terminally online" :) (I'm #174)
- tombert 9mo ago
  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-bible.html https://wordcounter.net/blog/2015/12/08/10975_how-many-words...
  - jedberg 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
      Stop training AI slop! /s XD
    - tombert 9mo ago
      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.
      - jedberg 9mo ago
        > so I believe you when you say you’re not AI You're absolutely right! Actually, I use em dashes a lot in my longer form writing -- and have been for years. I've had to do it less to avoid accusations of being an AI.

Apreche 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  Funny to see a reply from one of the ~10 usernames I recognize on here.
  - jedberg 9mo ago
    Haha right back at ya buddy.
- oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
  This is how I find out that reddit is older than Hacker News. Mind blown!
  - rayiner 9mo ago
    Wait until you find out about Slashdot.
    - oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
      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.

verisimi 9mo ago

It would be fascinating to see a word to karma ratio. (Mine would be incredibly low).

tzs 9mo ago
You can see the karma of the people with the 11th-100th highest karma at https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders 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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago

I'm genuinely concerned not finding my handle in the leaderboard will subconsciously have me believing I don't have an HN problem.

krick 9mo ago
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 https://pastes.io/name-words
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    You are in the data I attached. #43.
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      Oh LOL. #43'rd nice. I would've preferred #42 tho just because the meaning of life but I will take #43th :D
- pengaru 9mo ago
  thank you closes tab

bilekas 9mo ago

> 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 9mo ago
> If only any of that was useful! I'm apparently in the top 500... I really should get a better hobby.

jmward01 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
this is basic stylometry? Can probably tell forgery against the corpus, attempts to clone.

mleonhard 9mo ago

s/Prolificacy/Verbosity/

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 9mo ago

needs a 1/(words/comment-karma) metric!

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  What were the main attributes that led to varying states of whelmed? One reason I love text discourse is that it gives me time to thoughtfully respond. My wife is super witty and can be instantly funny and social when she wants. It takes me more time to match that sociable wit. My hunch is that wit-rate would be a contributing whelm factor.
  - ggm 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago

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.

mrandish 9mo ago

Neat! Over 300,000, putting me in the top 1,000.

tombert 9mo ago
Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I love HN but maybe I need another hobby or three.
- japhyr 9mo ago
  Can you expand a bit on how you feel about it? :)
  - tombert 9mo ago
    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 https://howlongtoread.com/books/779942/The-GoBetween
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      > 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 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)

MBCook 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
top 438, I had no idea
- MBCook 9mo ago
  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_ 9mo ago
#397, dear lord what have I done with my life...

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago

Hey Hackernews, You can read my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827731#46828331 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!)

japhyr 9mo ago
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. :)

PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago

Click [here] to train a 6B model with just your words ...

visarga 9mo ago
I am thinking you need the parent comment(s) as well to do that

ggm 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

It's very useful project.

davidw 9mo ago

"No, I don't think I will" - I already have a sense of how much time I've spent here.

krick 9mo ago
Yeah, that was my reaction as well. Not sure what other people are so happy about. (But of course I did.)

bsoles 9mo ago

I feel like a perfect realization Goodhart's Law is about to happen to move up our rankings.

userbinator 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
Or just redis cache?
- nickvec 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
      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 9mo ago
      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 9mo ago

Look on my [prolix] words, ye Mighty, and despair!

macintux 9mo ago

I miss DoreenMichele. She always added thoughtful perspectives. Looks like she’s actively writing at https://califmichele.blogspot.com/ https://califmichele.blogspot.com/ and https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/ https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/ but has departed HN.

lostlogin 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play https://clickhouse.com/docs/getting-started/playground https://clickhouse.com/docs/getting-started/playground https://clickhouse.com/blog/announcing-the-new-sql-playground https://clickhouse.com/blog/announcing-the-new-sql-playgroun...
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  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.

pinkmuffinere 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
Long tail. I wouldn't call them lurking they do what satisfies their itch.
- serial_dev 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
Or 89 milikarma/word. That is pretty good. I only got 34 milikarma/word.
- MrGilbert 9mo ago
  83 milikarma/word. That's interesting, though I'm not sure what to do with it.
KolmogorovComp 9mo ago
It would not make much sense to compute it, if you do not subtract the karma earned through submissions.
latexr 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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.

atoav 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

dang on position 4

fragmede 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

Top 1.55% with ~36000 words. I can be quite chatty in my comments, it seems.

weinzierl 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
I am in the top 0.15%. Crazy.
- josephg 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
> Then words could be color-coded by impact. Or by difficulty to make sense of them.

4ggr0 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

sothatsit 9mo ago
Could it be that ingve has submitted a lot of links, but has not made that many comments?
- exagolo 9mo ago
  I believe Karma solely comes from upvotes for comments minus downvotes. Submissions don't count.
  - embedding-shape 9mo ago
    That might be in real life ("afk"), but on HN even submissions give you karma.
  - Bengalilol 9mo ago
    Have a look at your submissions, they brought you karma. <https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=exagolo 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 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)
9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

iNic 9mo ago

Surprised that with ~6k words I am already in the top ~5%. I guess the old 90-9-1 rule roughly holds up.

lordnacho 9mo ago

Pretty amazed to be on the list at all.

PaulRobinson 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

One

forgotpwd16 9mo ago

@dragonwriter was meant for this. Has written ~16 volumes of GOT, +1.5 volume from 2nd.

dnpls 9mo ago

I like the game of thrones conversion.

Macha 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
(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 :]

tasuki 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

NooneAtAll3 9mo ago

I'd love to see unique-word stats as well

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

Dear reader this person now have all your alt accounts linked to you?

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

Who else sighed in relief in seeing that they are not top 1000 ?

layer8 9mo ago
Given that 99.87% are not in the top 1000, probably the majority.

booleandilemma 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

[flagged]

raw_anon_1111 9mo ago

Funny enough I had another account that I hadn’t used in 2 years that is still in the top 100.

aoeCoder 9mo ago

628238 / 774235. If we were to gamify this I might as well be aiming for the bottom: https://xkcd.com/3110/ https://xkcd.com/3110/

Applejinx 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

Now please put in relation to up votes to identify frequent top commentors instead of plain spammers.

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
Actually I have written a sql query for that which you can run. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829029#46875831 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 9mo ago

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.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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 9mo ago
    Update: The feature's live on the website now :D
    - DonHopkins 9mo ago

moralestapia 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
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 9mo ago
  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.
  - greenie_beans 9mo ago
    *worth the agent's time
Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

Well, 0.56% of a GoT volume... Not bad. Now I see why my keyboard is all blanked out :)

2Gkashmiri 9mo ago

It says user not found

kergonath 9mo ago
It is case-sensitive, that might be the problem.

ninalanyon 9mo ago

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 9mo ago
I was like "huh, I'm probably in the upper quarter too". 0.30% OMG. Still only half a book.
Twisol 9mo ago
Top 0.44% here. Hrm...
- dhosek 9mo ago
  Top 0.21% Yikes
  - disgruntledphd2 9mo ago
    Top 0.81% and I really don't comment much. Mind you, the distribution is probably insanely skewed.

marginalia_nu 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

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 9mo ago

Good to know I am top 1% of something. You made my day bro!

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
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 9mo ago

> 357,191 words That's like, five novels. What I have been doing here, damn...

arjie 9mo ago

This is great. I found out about Clickhouse's Play interface[0] through this. I added the top 100 to a personal transient blacklist so that I can first view comments without them. I wonder if I should do it with the whole top 1000. One thing HN used to have was a karma/comment score on your profile. I'm currently at 3.68. Of course that includes stories as well but I have a small fraction of karma from there. Cool! 0: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIDU3OTYvQ09VTlQoKikgRlJPTSBoYWNrZXJuZXdzX2hpc3RvcnkgV0hFUkUgdHlwZT0nY29tbWVudCcgQU5EIGJ5ID0gJ2FyamllJyBMSU1JVCAxOw== https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIDU3OTYvQ...

deafpolygon 9mo ago

Top 0.69% percentile?

OJFord 9mo ago

Ok, this is horrifying. Doesn't feel like I've even been here much for the last ~year!

cyphar 9mo ago

I must admit it was a little surreal to check my own username out of curiosity, only to find that I'm in the top 500 commenters (0.06%) on HN by word count. The really surprising thing is that I stopped commenting regularly a few years ago so god knows where I would've ranked back in 2020. Then again, I always had a feeling I was too verbose when writing comments, so I guess this is all the proof I needed!