That's only users crawled, which is the amount of users that have made at least 1 comment or 1 post -- as there are no user list pages here.
Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
51–60 of 71 posts
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#52I'd be interested to see some analytics, such as how many users are there with 100+ karma because that's likely a better measure of the number of active users than the number of registered users (many of which are likely inactive). However, that doesn't account for lurkers. Or, the number of users that have logged in within the past week though this is probably something pg would have to give us because I can't think…
100+ karma won't exactly be a good parameter. I am a regular at Hacker News for around 3 months now , mostly just to read the content & up-vote the ones I really like. But my karma has been at 1 forever now, maybe because I don't comment much, not sure. Still karma does not say much.
I've been following HN for 3+ years now. I would rather read content and upvote then post meaningless responses for a karma score or +5 Funny.
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#53This doesn't account for users who have never submitted or commented, because there would be no way for their profile URLs to end up in Google's index. Or am I missing something? I know that there's the possibility for things to get into the index through the Google Toolbar, but I suspect that the fraction of HN users who use the Google Toolbar is quite low.
Or rarely submit or comment. I am logged in and on HN everyday, but do not show up. Maybe with this comment I will.
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#54Why are there so many usernames that are perscription drugs? On the first page I see Zithromax, Zoloft, Zyprexa and Abilify.
These pages rank at the top of the site: search because they have a lot of backlinks. Why? Because someone created the profile, then went out and created links to their profile page (e.g. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnews... ). Why? Because they were probably planning to drop a link on their HN profile page to a page that sells Zithromax. This is a common strategy on Youtube or really any s…
And all created 955 days ago.
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh wow. Thank you for that explanation. It's impressive how many of these profiles were made. This means the total number of real HN accounts is probably significantly less than 28k.
I'd count "real" profiles by requiring that they either post a link, have at least one non-dead comment, or upvote a non-dead comment.
We've seen people who post a link to HN, then have a dozen or so of their fake user accounts up vote that link. Given the economic incentive of being/lingering on the front page there will be folks who try to game it.
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#56a small improvement:
site:news.ycombinator.com inurl:"user?id=" -"No such user"
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#57Take a look at Page 10 of search results : http://www.google.com/#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+inurl:%22...
For those too lazy to click the link:
all search results show "no such user"
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#58It would be really nice to have dataset available for researchers with username, their posts and their comments. As an example, we could use the "SPEAR Algorithm"[1] to find expertise in specific domains per HN user. [1] http://www.michael-noll.com/projects/spear-algorithm/
If pg wouldn't mind me scraping the site, in a manner that would not impact the sites performance, I will write an app to collect this data and publish it to the public domain.
"... If pg wouldn't mind me scraping the site, in a manner that would not impact the sites performance ..."
you don't have to scape the site, RTFM. The official 'hnsearch' api will most likely yield the info you need ~ http://www.hnsearch.com/api
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#59Google was showing 27,200 results so if they are all valid user id's without repetitions, I would assume around 27,200 registered users but that seems pretty low, doesn't it?
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#60I'd be interested to see some analytics, such as how many users are there with 100+ karma because that's likely a better measure of the number of active users than the number of registered users (many of which are likely inactive). However, that doesn't account for lurkers. Or, the number of users that have logged in within the past week though this is probably something pg would have to give us because I can't think…
Rough Estimate of users with Karma > 100: http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&biw=1...
Slightly more accurate:
http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&biw=1...
Apparently there are a bunch of pages in the index that just go to "No such user" pages (looks like killed spam accounts).
Unfortunately this search also includes people with accounts created between 100 and 100000 days ago, regardless of karma level. Not sure how to filter that out; you can't use the range syntax in between double quotes, it seems.