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Github users are tied to social interaction, job hiring, integration with multiple version control systems, and a pile of other crap, including systems not part

Github users are tied to social interaction, job hiring, integration with multiple version control systems, and a pile of other crap, including systems not part of the website itself. Hacker News users are pretty much just tied to posts and comments on the site. The only piece of data that seems in common is that they both have user names. There is no reason user data should be similar across different systems. Products are generally unique, or they don't have much value. That means the data tied to a user is often also unique.

icebraining 11y ago
Each site has a set of attributes, which partially overlaps. The data formats should reflect this, allowing for software clients that know the base attributes to interact with both, while still having their non-overlapping attributes. Why can't I add both profiles to my PIM software without special adapters? This is what RDF allows you to do: instead of designing a custom format, or being tied to a rigid standard one, you can simply add standard attributes to the element in an ad-hoc fashion, so the client can use whatever attributes it supports while allowing for the ones it doesn't. And if there is no standard attribute, fine, you can add custom ones as well. There's no reason the same code shouldn't be able to process HN, Slashdot and Reddit threads, for example - and even a Github issue.