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Who posts on Hacker News?
- crazygringo 13y agoVery interesting. It would be cool to have the HN handles, with links to their profiles, next to each bio blub. Would also be cool to have lists of the people in each location -- I'd be curious to see who the 7 in NYC are, or the 2 in Berlin.
- mjn 13y agoI thought about listing usernames with the bios, but I thought it might be unwelcome for some people. Of course they're all people who are public in a sense anyway, but not all of them are trivially linked in the realname->username direction if you Google. For example some people's HN profile just has a URL, and then their real name is at the URL. Others post under a well-known real name but don't directly link their RL identity in the profile. That setup means people who know their RL identity don't as easily stumble across their HN profile: the HN profile doesn't list their real name verbatim, or come up in a search for the real name, which would change if I put up an googleable index of username/real-name pairs. Maybe I'm being too cautious, though.
- onedev 13y agoNo, I think you're doing the right thing.
- danso 13y agoWe've had discussions on HN about real names and handles...I think the consensus is that most everyone who has their real name or bio linked into their profile are OK with people knowing it, and the welcome side effect for some such persons is that they have another incentive to stay civil.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- greenyoda 13y agoThanks, I enjoyed reading the bios, but I know many of these people only by their HN user IDs rather than their real names. Could you possibly add their user IDs to the bios?
- jdp23 13y agoVery interesting, thanks for taking the time to do this. The top 20 are all guys. How many women are in the top 100?
- mjn 13y agoOf the people who link a real identity (~70), I think none, though I was mostly just scanning for locations past the top-20, so I might've missed someone. It's possible women are more likely to stay pseudonymous than men, and also possible that there are just few to no women who post a lot here.
- Systemic33 13y agoI'm quite surprised that there are that many Danish people on HN.
- reinhardt 13y ago"that many" = 2? Not exactly an adequate sample to draw general conclusions from.
- Systemic33 13y agoCompared to population, and compared to other European countries. Denmark has 5M, compared to US 300M
- mixmax 13y agoThere are 2 on the list, and if it is from the leaderboard (which I presume it is) I'm one of them. I think Denmark is quite an interesting case. Unknown to most people a lot of great technology is written by Danes (The V8 javascript engine in Google Chrome, Google maps, Google wave, Ruby on Rails, C#, Varnish, PHP, Turbo pascal, Delphi, C++, and probably more that I can't think of right now) yet we don't really have much to show for it in terms of entrepreneurial success, large technology companies or worldwide esteem. Obviously there are some fairly tech-savvy Danes around, so it would only be natural that a few of them hang out on HN. Maybe we're just bad at marketing...
- Major_Grooves 13y agoWell I never knew till the other day that Zendesk started off in Denmark. Also Podio. Probably by the time a Danish company becomes successful they've already moved part of their business to Silicon Valley and everyone thinks they are a US company, like I did with Zendesk.
- mixmax 13y agoThat's probably a correct observation. DHH, Bjarne Stroustrup, Rasmus Lerdorff and Anders Hejlsberg all moved to the US. Seems like all we have left is Poul Henninng Kamp (Varnish and BSD)
- xivzgrev 13y agoVery cool. It'd be interesting to see some kind of influence ratio, such as karma / # of posts, or date joined. Wonder if the pool is made most of older loyalists or newer upstarts? Seems like people who have been hanging around for awhile, both due to their usual heavy involvement in tech industry as well as if you're around longer, you can make more posts :)
- mjn 13y agoSome of that kind of data (account age, karma-per-day, newer vs. older users in the top-100, etc.) can be found by digging around here: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/ http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/ That's the site I used to grab the top-100 list, because the 'leaders' list on HN itself is wonky: https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49 https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49
- DanBC 13y agoI'm currently in the top 100[1]. I'm easy to find on the Internet, but I don't know if you bothered or not. So: I'm 44, and in the UK, and male. [1] proof that HN is in decline.
- mjn 13y agoI did include you as one of the UK people, fwiw.
- tokenadult 13y agoI was astonished to discover once, from another site, that patio11 and tokenadult have the same join date on HN. I'm glad to observe that patio11 (deservedly) has a lot more karma.
- casca 13y agoWhile patio11 has undoubtedly made a vast contribution to HN, your posts are consistently exceptional and always worth the time taken to digest.
- mixmax 13y agoI think you're being a bit hard on yourself here. While patio11's post are certainly worth reading your posts are more like essays. Complete with references and all. They have obviously taken some time and thought to compose, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that appreciate them.
- jhh 13y agoDo you know what portion of total "link karma" on HN has been "gathered" by the top 100 contributors?
- crazygringo 13y agoThat's a fantastic question. Is there a "long tail" of valuable contributions, or do most of the really-valuable and highly upvoted comments/posts come from a small group? If pg could shed any light on this, it would be very interesting to see.
- nextstep 13y agoIs there a single woman on this list?
- lauradhamilton 13y agoIt doesn't look like it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- shawndumas 13y agoWow weird. I have never been even a partial subject of a blog post: Cool! But I've also relocated to the Bay Area in the last 6 months so I guess I am conforming to the hive mind... Oh and I am 42.
- joshfraser 13y agoHere's the list of top usernames for anyone trying to figure out who's who: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
- igravious 13y agoBut the author of the article advises against this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6957171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6957171
- shaunyi 13y agoGreat job,man!! I noticed that 2 top100 users are located in china.As a Chinese,I am eager to know who they are.Could you tell me?
- loomio 13y agoI am shocked, and yet somehow not surprised, that there are exactly no women on the list. Sigh. I love the comments posted here.... just imagine the insightful commentary we'd all be benefiting from if half the population wasn't excluded! Hope to see this changing in the future. Thanks for your work putting this together.