Similar Hacker News Users
I love it! My results were very encouraging:
S W G W einstein newton +------------------------+ | edw519 | liebniz +------------------------+ turing ===========||============= carnegie Co-Commenting..SEMANTICS.. Word Choice tesla godel =====||=================== escher Leaderboard.....KARMA..... Diamonds in the Rough..... bach edison This site has no affiliation with Hacker galois News or Y Combinator patio11People asked for a similar users tool back in the early days of HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=701
And recently, too:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036247
How does this particular tool work? It's based on the threads a given person comments on, who else comments on those threads, and how the topics and terminology of threads and comments relate to each other. Karma on the relevant threads is used as a subtle authority metric. Incorporating voting relationship histories would almost certainly make the tool better. Particularly at finding interesting (and not merely similar) stuff.
That said, it'll be interesting to hear what folks think.
I recently changed my user name from antiismist to idoh. When I moved the karma setting to Diamonds in the Rough, it listed idoh as the #2 most similar user to antiismist. Nice!
http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=antiismis...
This is awesome. Having computed a reasonable distance function between users, you should be able to use this distance function as edge weights in a big graph. Rendering this graph with a force-directed layout algorithm like Fruchtermann-Reingold might create visually appealing results by clustering related users.
I've done this before on different datasets and would love to cooperate with you on it...
excellent choice setting the defaults to give very flattering results... there's a lesson in that.
Interestingly, there seems to be a local minimum (or maximum) in your algorithm that I found when searching for myself:
Start here: http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail...
The next two 'clicks' to the left (towards co-commenting) don't have 'spolsky' in my list: http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail...
But one more click to the left, and he reappears in the list: http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=profquail...
Quite flattering - no matter what I set the sliders to, the names I recognize are people I respect.
I think that only really says something about HN, not about my comments :)
Aww, I was hoping to get amichail.
Does moving the karma slider to the right look for people with low karma, or does it ignore karma? I want the option to ignore karma.
Based on what other people here are reporting, I wonder if there's a bias towards matches with a large number of comments (e.g., pg, patio11, edw519, etc.). Perhaps there's some normalization needed?
Based on the default settings, I'm up there with PG and Patio11. I like your algorithm ;)
A few weeks ago, I tried searching through old threads to find where PG had an archive of old comments and server stats. Does anybody have link(s)? Thanks in advance. (This post is meta enough that it's probably as good a time as any.)
I'm guessing either such a corpus was used here, or it's based on a cache of recent comments.
I got quite a few people I respect (mixmax, edw519, mattmaroon) and one I consider a personal friend, dennykmiu.
Neat little utility, thanks.
Am I missing something or does this not work for the majority of us who are casual commentators on here?
Interesting. After the obligatory vanity search I tried searching for people I know have different (more technical, less startup/strategy(marketing) taste than me. And it seems to work quite well. I have nothing in common with those guys :-)
For instance the top pick for tptacek is cperciva, which seems natural. Doesn't work the other way around though, so there's still some work to be done...
Hmm, small bug(?) When I typed my name in all lowercase it didn't come up. That might be by design though. Cool tool ;-)
I like my company. I don't know if they feel the same way about me.
One newer participant whose posts make me think "I wish I had posted that" doesn't show up on my list of associated participants. But I show up on his. Maybe that is because of the karma setting in the default operation of the search. Interesting.
Thanks for the positive response.
If three things were to get added to this, what should they be?
I think there is still a subtle bug in there somewhere.
When I set the sliders 'semantics' all the way to the right ('word choice') and leaderboard all the way to the left, then check I get this:
Shouldn't the relationships be symmetrical, so 'edw519' would get 'mahmud' as the first match and 'mahmud' would get 'edw519' ?- patio11 - mahmud - nostrademons - tptacek - mahmud - edw519 - swelljoe - davidwedit: also, your 'match' is case sensitive, so 'riderofgiraffes' won't work but 'RiderOfGiraffes' does.
Awesome! I knew SwellJoe and I seemed to end up in the same threads, and IIRC, agree on things. Even though I'm a relative neophyte. I love it!
Very cool.
My matches using the default settings: pg, swombat, mahmud, wheels, SwellJoe, edw519, mattmaroon, gojomo, davidw, mixmax, unalone, tptacek
Did you get permission to scrape the data? (I tried once without asking with mediocre results: http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/08/the-wrong-way-to-get-notice...)
Really fun app! Great for boosting one's ego.
Slight note about the page formatting: My screen resolution is 800x480, and the text by the sliders wraps in a very confusing manner.
It looks like this to me
A little confusing at first, until I realized that it was wrapping. It's the same for the other slider.===============||=================== co-commenting......SEMANTICS.....word choiceGreat app though!
Very interesting. Depending on how I adjusted it I was judged similar to pg, unalone, and a couple other people on the leaderboard. I guess that means my comments are on the right track....
Are there any other details about the algorithm or how it works. I'm curious about what exactly the different weightings mean.
Cool. Now we can play six degrees of hn.
How is "word choice" similarity calculated? If you have a high similarity with someone, does that mean your range of words is the same (perhaps because you write on the same topics) or that your word frequency is the same (because you have similar patterns of speech)?
Are quoted sections filtered out? URLs?
My girlfriend and I have almost the exact same lists... smokey_the_bear and andrewljohnson.
So, some great users are on your similarity list... but are you on their similarity list?
I approve of all the people I've been grouped with, except that bizarre swombat fellow.
How does colins_pride compare with riffer? Aren't they the same person?!?
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Interesting both of my co-founders (tolmasky and boucher) showed up on most of my lists. I guess that means it works, since we tend to talk about similar things.
Apparently tumult is most similar to me no matter what I select, so clearly I can just stop posting entirely. (Thanks, tumult - more time in the day!)
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websense doesnt like you.
Security risk blocked for your protection Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Potentially Damaging Content. URL: http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/
Interesting, similar to:
edw519 btilly patio11 pg tptacekhrm, I seem to have gotten tptacek as my top result, if the results are so ordered.
Id say thats a good thing. In general the whole list is people I would happen to be even somewhat similar to.
It didn't return any results when I tried from the iPhone
I don't show. Guess I'm not "one of us" yet :-/
I got a great list. Neat.
got swombat. lame. :)
pg was number one for me :D
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