31 comments

  • guessmyname59 minutes ago
    Nice SQLi vulnerability you got there ;-)<p>&gt; <i>making this project was the most fun I have had in some time haha!</i><p>&gt; <i>sorryyyyy for vibe coding it though. Peace. I am only human after all […]</i><p>Well, yes, of course the whole app was written by an LLM. I’m not surprised at all.<p>---<p>Request:<p><pre><code> POST &#x2F;?user=play&amp;add_http_cors_header=1 HTTP&#x2F;1.1 Host: play.clickhouse.com Content-Type: text&#x2F;plain;charset=UTF-8 User-Agent: Mozilla&#x2F;5.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome&#x2F;109.0.5414.120 Accept: *&#x2F;* Origin: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serjaimelannister.github.io Referer: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serjaimelannister.github.io&#x2F; SELECT username, total_words, global_rank, total_active_users, concat(toString(global_rank), &#x27; &#x2F; &#x27;, toString(total_active_users)) AS placement, round(100 * (1 - (global_rank &#x2F; 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 = &#x27;comment&#x27; AND deleted = 0 AND notEmpty(by) GROUP BY by ) WHERE username = &#x27;&#x27; OR 1=1;--&#x27; FORMAT JSON </code></pre> Response:<p><pre><code> This message is too large to display</code></pre>
  • jader2013 hours 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.<p>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.<p>I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I definitely think it’s intentional.
    • jedberg3 hours ago
      Reddit was originally designed this way, and HN sort of accidentally copied it. Back then, we always said, &quot;content is first&quot;. We wanted people to get upvotes for their content, not for who they were.<p>I prefer it that way.
      • bsimpson2 hours ago
        Funny to see a reply from one of the ~10 usernames I recognize on here.
        • jedberg2 hours ago
          Haha right back at ya buddy.
    • leoc3 hours ago
      As an old lag there is a fairly large number of names which I recognise on sight, quite a few of them from the old days of &#x2F;r&#x2F;programming and even the main reddit. I&#x27;d have trouble listing many of them completely unprompted though.
    • latchkey2 hours ago
      I&#x27;ve had these same opinions for years. It is an under appreciated social network of some of the top minds and quality comments.<p>I&#x27;ve been collecting a long list of ideas on what you&#x27;re describing. Thanks to AI encouraging me to really dive in and use it, I&#x27;ve been quietly working on something for what you&#x27;re describing.<p>First step is to improve the HN UX a tiny bit and flesh out a framework for how to code it. Next will add some interesting social features I&#x27;ve been brewing on. Why can&#x27;t I easily follow someone?<p>Open source. GPLv3. It isn&#x27;t perfect, but this is not AI vibe slop, and there are lots of tests from day one. I want to make this sustainable over a long period of time and become genuinely useful to a community that I&#x27;ve gotten a lot out of.<p>Note, the chrome store is really slow at getting releases out (or I&#x27;m too fast), best to install from github releases. It is also buggy and I&#x27;m fixing and improving things as fast as I can.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;orangejuiceextension.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;orangejuiceextension.github.io&#x2F;</a>
    • add-sub-mul-div3 hours ago
      Another thing is that lacking the freedom to delete our own comments here, I assume many people treat their account as only a throwaway identity.
  • macintux1 hour ago
    I miss DoreenMichele. She always added thoughtful perspectives.<p>Looks like she’s actively writing at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;califmichele.blogspot.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;califmichele.blogspot.com&#x2F;</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doreenmichele.blogspot.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doreenmichele.blogspot.com&#x2F;</a> but has departed HN.
  • pinkmuffinere34 minutes ago
    I&#x27;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&#x27;s a _ton_ of people lurking, and the active community is actually quite small. I find that quite surprising.
    • smusamashah30 minutes 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?
    • ggm32 minutes ago
      Long tail. I wouldn&#x27;t call them lurking they do what satisfies their itch.
      • serial_dev1 minute ago
        I prefer the word “reading”, too.<p>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.
  • userbinator2 hours ago
    I&#x27;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&#x27;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&quot; floppy disk.
  • metadat1 hour ago
    How does it count so fast? Clickhaus preloaded dataset?<p>Top 0.023%, I was surprised! I usually keep it pretty short here, and my account isn&#x27;t old.
  • nickvec1 hour ago
    Cool! Just a thought: instead of having to query the Clickhouse cluster whenever a client clicks &quot;View Top 1000 Leaderboard&quot; (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.
    • system21 hour ago
      Or just redis cache?
  • MBCook2 hours ago
    Ooh I cracked the top 500. I’m at about 475k words.<p>Took me a few tries to find my user since I wasn’t expecting the case sensitivity.<p>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.<p>Ooh The Stand (unabridged) is estimated at 473,000 words! I wrote The Stand in comment length. Wow.
    • visarga2 hours ago
      top 438, I had no idea
  • davidw2 hours ago
    &quot;No, I don&#x27;t think I will&quot; - I already have a sense of how much time I&#x27;ve spent here.
  • Insanity3 hours 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).<p>Also, 95k words written on here apparently. Cool to know haha.
  • bilekas3 hours ago
    &gt; Top 0.41%<p>If only any of that was useful!<p>On a side note though there is (maybe intentional) case sensitivity? Can&#x27;t remember how hn usernames work.
  • keyle3 hours ago
    So many of these names I feel I know them, but I don&#x27;t know them, personally.<p>I know them, by tone. I read his&#x2F;her take on the topic. Turns out you don&#x27;t need to see any faces or body ratios of any kind to connect with people.<p>Thanks for keeping HN &#x27;stable&#x2F;sane&#x27;!
    • ggm2 hours ago
      Two takes:<p>* never meet your heroes&#x2F;heroines<p>* when you meet f2f with people you&#x27;ve known for decades online, prepared to be whelmed, under or over, depending.<p>People IRL are very often not what you projected. I learned this from UK mailing list interactions over 40 years ago.
      • j_bum1 hour ago
        What were the main attributes that led to varying states of whelmed?<p>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.<p>My hunch is that wit-rate would be a contributing whelm factor.
        • ggm1 hour ago
          Some of them were far more manic in the flesh. Email and Usenet hid aspects of what we&#x27;d now call spectrum behaviour or ADHD. That was the over whelm.<p>Otherwise, I&#x27;d say it was that people can be less rounded and interesting than you like in an amicable and two way relationship. It&#x27;s easy to mistake a dialogue to specific intent online for some kind of connection when it really isn&#x27;t. If they have 50,000 followers (hate that word) and you mistake being 50,001 for some stronger binding, prepare to be disappointed.<p>I will say that I&#x27;ve also experienced really good, relatable responsive engagement with my heroes and heroines, it&#x27;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&#x27;re just ordinary people like you, mostly. If you&#x27;re careful.<p>Wit: I have &quot;esprit d&#x27;escalier&quot; and so only think of the Bon mot on the way out the door.
  • notepad0x902 hours 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! :)
  • jmward013 hours 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?
    • ggm2 hours ago
      this is basic stylometry? Can probably tell forgery against the corpus, attempts to clone.
  • ggm2 hours ago
    So if we find somebody who uses one-word posts like &quot;interesting&quot; on every comment, have we unmasked .. he who mus(k)t not be named?
  • ChrisMarshallNY1 hour ago
    Look on my <i>[prolix]</i> words, ye Mighty, and despair!
  • Sharlin3 hours ago
    Huh. In the top 1500, with approximately one GoT worth of text in ~17 years.<p>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.
    • jedberg3 hours ago
      I think dragonwriter only comments on politics.
  • bsoles2 hours ago
    I feel like a perfect realization Goodhart&#x27;s Law is about to happen to move up our rankings.
  • karim793 hours ago
    Very cool. I would point out that the search is case-sensitive, and with that being said I&#x27;m not sure if HN usernames are case-sensitive.
  • Apreche3 hours ago
    Global Rank 7089 | World Count 62,677 | Percentile Top 0.92% | Game of Thrones Volume 0.21<p>This would be pretty cool for other sites. My Reddit stats are probably way worse.
    • incompatible3 hours ago
      Mine was similar. I thought it was pretty shocking that I was in the top 0.90%. Surely I don&#x27;t really post a lot here.<p>Global Rank 6948 &#x2F; 774235 Word Count 63,737 Percentile Top 0.90%
  • tombert3 hours ago
    Oh my.<p>&gt; Global Rank &gt; 385 &#x2F; 774235<p>&gt; Word Count &gt; 509,412<p>&gt; Top 0.05%<p>I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m too long-winded or I comment too much or both. Good to know I&#x27;m in the top 400 regardless.
    • jedberg3 hours ago
      I think the word for us is &quot;terminally online&quot; :)<p>(I&#x27;m #174)
      • tombert2 hours ago
        You&#x27;ve written nearly a Bible&#x27;s worth of content here! [1]<p>I wonder how much you and I singularly contribute to the training data being used for tech-focused AI bots now; presumably they&#x27;re training on software-people-websites?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordcounter.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;08&#x2F;10975_how-many-words-bible.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordcounter.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;08&#x2F;10975_how-many-words...</a>
        • jedberg19 minutes ago
          I&#x27;m quite sure we&#x27;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.<p>Well I can&#x27;t help it if my writing trained the AIs in the first place! We all did. That&#x27;s why we all sound like AI!
  • PaulDavisThe1st2 hours ago
    Click [here] to train a 6B model with just your words ...
    • visarga2 hours ago
      I am thinking you need the parent comment(s) as well to do that
  • mrandish3 days ago
    Neat! Over 300,000, putting me in the top 1,000.
    • Imustaskforhelp3 days ago
      Oh nice!! I am 1935. I am thinking of writing less comments haha to get once to 1984 so that I can say &quot;literally 1984&quot; xD. I mean it would be funny but I will still write comments haha.<p>man I really love this community yes its has its flaws and everything but man do I love it.<p>I don&#x27;t write blogs or anything because I feel like many people who are really respectable can come and read my comments in here and give me suggestions and help me learn and other things, Its really just a lovely community! (with sometimes heated discussions) but although I must say that the feeling of community can be a sine wave (sometimes up or down imo) but still I just feel this bond to the community :&gt;<p>&gt; Oh nice!! I am 1935. I am thinking of writing less comments haha to get once to 1984 so that I can say &quot;literally 1984&quot; xD.<p>&gt; man I really love this community yes its has its flaws and everything but man do I love it.
    • tombert3 hours ago
      Yeah, I&#x27;m not sure how I feel about it. I love HN but maybe I need another hobby or three.
      • onion2k1 hour ago
        I regret not actually writing several books.
        • tombert1 hour ago
          It&#x27;s not too late! At least that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m telling myself.<p>Maybe my novel about a hyper-intelligent software engineer in New York who no one appreciates and then he saves the world because he&#x27;s so smart and everyone loves him and finally listens to him is something I can finally write.
      • japhyr3 hours ago
        Can you expand a bit on how you feel about it? :)
        • tombert3 hours ago
          Apparently I can spend many, many words expanding on things!<p>I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90&#x27;s cartoon as something &quot;really heavy to drop on someone&#x27;s head&quot;, and apparently I&#x27;ve written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s 98,621 words [1], so I&#x27;m basically writing the equivalent of about half of my favorite novel every year.<p>So it&#x27;s a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;howlongtoread.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;779942&#x2F;The-GoBetween" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;howlongtoread.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;779942&#x2F;The-GoBetween</a>
  • verisimi3 hours ago
    It would be fascinating to see a word to karma ratio. (Mine would be incredibly low).
    • tzs1 hour ago
      You can see the karma of the people with the 11th-100th highest karma at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;leaders">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;leaders</a> . 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.<p>Columns are words&#x2F;karma, words, karma, name.<p><pre><code> 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</code></pre>
  • Imustaskforhelp3 days ago
    Hey Hackernews, You can read my previous comment <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46827731#46828331">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46827731#46828331</a> where I was suddenly writing until I realized that on Hackernews I have written way too many words.<p>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 -&gt; api was gonna be hard but it seriously wasn&#x27;t)<p>Then decided to think to write a github page about it for other people as well.<p>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.<p>Dang has written 11.15 Volumes equivalent to game of thrones which is actually really crazy.<p>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 &amp; respectable. We all love you.<p>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&#x27;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!<p>Dang today&#x27;s your day! We can discuss the issues of flagging and others some other day, Have a nice day now!<p>(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&#x27;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&#x27;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!)
    • japhyr4 hours ago
      Holy heck. The first person I looked up was tptacek, who happens to be #2 in the global rank. 4.3 million words!<p>I&#x27;m nowhere near that (~125k words), but for many of us, it&#x27;s a good part of our life&#x27;s corpus. :)
    • Imustaskforhelp3 days ago
      So basically I was making this for myself but then searched dang (I first searched myself, then pg then dang)<p>So Dang once again,Thank you dang for your moderation and moderation efforts!<p>Hope my project can make you smile or just about anything haha. Cheers &amp; also let me know how funny is the cat video. (wanted to prove I am human because literally people sometimes comment how I sound like AI &amp; sometimes accuse me of such in HN which is yeahh.. beep boop)
  • russellbeattie1 hour ago
    Heh. Here&#x27;s a thread where the most verbose commenters come and write even more. I haven&#x27;t written nearly as much as I thought: 2,410th out of 774,235 users, 159,634 words, Top 0.31%.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;ve been meaning to do the same thing to train an LLM, but I&#x27;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.<p>In theory, it&#x27;d be the best book I have ever read.
  • 6LLvveMx2koXfwn3 hours ago
    needs a 1&#x2F;(words&#x2F;comment-karma) metric!
  • 0xanand2 hours ago
    It&#x27;s very useful project.
  • mleonhard3 hours ago
    s&#x2F;Prolificacy&#x2F;Verbosity&#x2F;
  • pengaru3 hours ago
    I&#x27;m genuinely concerned not finding my handle in the leaderboard will subconsciously have me believing I don&#x27;t have an HN problem.