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Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

whaly.io

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Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#121

Post by capableweb »

ignoramous wrote: post #118
capableweb wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess this is because HN de-emphasises usernames. Not sure I agree, HN makes the username visible right next to the post? What I think (granted, I grew up with mailing lists and forums without images), is that we're so used to associating people online with pictures nowadays, that when there is no picture, why don't pick up the usernames anymore. Because I do recognize a lot of the usernames in the top 100, some…

> Not sure I agree, HN makes the username visible right next to the post? Yes, but grayed out, in the background, so to speak. I usually do not notice the username at all ( capableweb , hi! this is the first time I've noticed you...). Especially the usernames next to topics/stories are completely ignored by my brain's eyes.

Interesting that while your brain seems to ignore the usernames, my brain automatically parses the username when reading the comment, somehow. I'm not thinking about it, it just gets associated automatically.

As I mentioned before, I grew up back when the internet was mostly text, so maybe that's why? Are you perhaps a bit younger than that?

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#122

Post by noduerme »

jrockway wrote: post #119
noduerme wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you ever post your project on HN ... [[sucking in air]] ... just be sure you don't know of any way it can be hacked. It will be hacked, and that's what you'll learn from the experience. But HN is like putting out to sea in a canoe. You can't go back, and it's going to leak, so be more than ready.

What's amazing to me is that you can't pay someone $8 to find weaknesses in your system that let people mine crypto for free, but people are happy to do it and mine $8 in crypto before they get shut down. I don't really understand it. What surprised me about this incident was how many script kiddies are out there. The sophistication of the attacks were so low. Very poor opsec (using compromised machines as jump boxes…

Not to get into the weeds here, but were you actually funneling credit cards through your site to a card gateway like Verisign, as opposed to just hosting a Stripe form or something? I used to write shopping carts. To me it smells like disaster these days if any card transaction is hosted onsite in anyway whatsoever.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#123

Post by noduerme »

walterbell wrote: post #83
itsbits wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very difficult in HN to put comment and gain points. Atleast for me. Tried couple of times. Downvoted most of times. So I just visit and read comments. Have been doing same for more than 7 years now. I am sure there are lots of readers like me.

> Downvoted most of times. Sometimes this can be a signal about the content of your comment, other times it can be a signal about the content of the thread/topic. There's a fun HN data mining project waiting to be done on voting/flagging trends, including cross-community topic sentiment surveillance within specific time windows.

I get flagged even more often than I get downvoted. I think it's a personality issue. Theirs, specifically. I usually just go away for a few days and come back when I'm bored / done with the next job.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#124

Post by noduerme »

raxxorrax wrote: post #28
itsbits wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very difficult in HN to put comment and gain points. Atleast for me. Tried couple of times. Downvoted most of times. So I just visit and read comments. Have been doing same for more than 7 years now. I am sure there are lots of readers like me.

It really depends on the topic as well. In the vast majority of cases people are reluctant to dish out any karma and your comment stays at one point. But that changes for some topics. I guess if you want to get more upvotes, articles about new Apple releases and similar stuff is most rewarding.

It doesn't decrease your karma to upvote on this site, although that might not be the worst idea.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure why other people are so stingy with upvotes. I vote pretty much everything I like.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#125

Post by jrockway »

noduerme wrote: post #122
jrockway wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's amazing to me is that you can't pay someone $8 to find weaknesses in your system that let people mine crypto for free, but people are happy to do it and mine $8 in crypto before they get shut down. I don't really understand it. What surprised me about this incident was how many script kiddies are out there. The sophistication of the attacks were so low. Very poor opsec (using compromised machines as jump boxes…

Not to get into the weeds here, but were you actually funneling credit cards through your site to a card gateway like Verisign, as opposed to just hosting a Stripe form or something? I used to write shopping carts. To me it smells like disaster these days if any card transaction is hosted onsite in anyway whatsoever.

We used Stripe. The problem was that our product was initially pre-pay, but we changed it to post-pay at some point. However, that's a different Stripe API (SetupIntents), and so you basically don't see the risk score until invoice charge time (instead of at card entry time). Thus people can use a lot of CPU before you notice that the card is stolen. (Stripe's risk stuff is great. I love how it shows how many other Stripe properties the card or user has been declined on. I wish things like Auth0 gave you this kind of data.)

Honestly the stolen credit cards were interesting, but overall not that big of a deal. We had free trials which were equally effective for crypto mining. Post-pay is always a drag. Lots of people that sign up with cards that have a spending limit well below what we claim the price is going to be. Other people issue chargebacks months later with excuses like "oh, I forgot I was using that" or "I didn't feel like I got the value for what you charged".

All in all it's an amusing business.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#126

Post by wly_cdgr »

bambax wrote: post #23

This only measures the number of comments; it would be interesting to know the karma difference accrued in a year. It may produce the exact same ranking, as intuitively karma is probably heavily correlated with comment frequency... but maybe not?

Karma in my experience has a lot more to do with comment tone and with reading the room well than with the quality of the comment's content. I accumulated I think about 500-600 karma in 2021, but most of that was just me saying stuff that a lot of people in the thread wanted to believe is true. On the other hand I lost a lot of karma from comments that had the same quality or higher in terms of content, but where I was contemptuous or dismissive or flippant in tone, or just went against the grain. I guess even smart nerds are bland herd normies for the most part

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#127

Post by crdrost »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #126
bambax wrote: post #23

This only measures the number of comments; it would be interesting to know the karma difference accrued in a year. It may produce the exact same ranking, as intuitively karma is probably heavily correlated with comment frequency... but maybe not?

Karma in my experience has a lot more to do with comment tone and with reading the room well than with the quality of the comment's content. I accumulated I think about 500-600 karma in 2021, but most of that was just me saying stuff that a lot of people in the thread wanted to believe is true. On the other hand I lost a lot of karma from comments that had the same quality or higher in terms of content, but where I w…

It's worse than that, karma is mostly about location location location.

You're talking about probability of upvote, but that needs to be multiplied by the number of people who read the comment, and that depends heavily on where it is on the comment page itself. When I look at my karma on my recent comments they have very little to do with how much time I spent on them or how unique my perspective is... I even wonder if that aspect is gameable sometimes, whether you could guess the probability that with your upvote a comment that has been recently posted 5 minutes ago could be boosted above the top comment posted 5 hours ago, and if the 15 minute ago one was interesting enough maybe it would be self-sustaining up there, and you could potentially produce the second comment in the page by replying to it. But that's a lot of math when probably if you're trying to optimize karma/comment there are better heuristics, “always comment on any post that is on the front page with < 20 points and < 20 comments” or so, just increasing volume of things that are probably in the right place to be upvoted.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#128

Post by glenstein »

fragmede wrote: post #72
noduerme wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one that's apolitical, anonymous, and personally moderated post by post? Some reddit subs might fit the bill, or some car enthusiast forums or something where wide-ranging conversations are banned. But this is a hard, hard thing to mod. I don't think we have anything else like it these days. That's why I'm actually here.

off the top of my head: metafilter.com, lobste.rs, something awful,

I think tildes, and the main instance of Lemmy count as well.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#129

Post by simonbarker87 »

jgilias wrote: post #21
simonbarker87 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m around the same position as you and was equally surprised - I feel like increasing that count would be more work than I’d want to put in though

Why would you want to increase the count though, right? I appreciate that HN is a kind of a community where people post when they actually have something to say. I mean, I often write a comment and then delete it before posting it if I figure it doesn't really add anything to the discussion. I actually feel like doing it for this comment too.

Oh I didn’t mean “I want to increase my count but it would be work” I was just thinking that it’s probably one of those systems where doubling what I do now would take 4 times the effort as I’d need to read many more of the articles and other peoples comments so that it would go from casual browsing and commenting to “work” or my wife saying “you have a problem”

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#130

Post by wly_cdgr »

crdrost wrote: post #127
wly_cdgr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karma in my experience has a lot more to do with comment tone and with reading the room well than with the quality of the comment's content. I accumulated I think about 500-600 karma in 2021, but most of that was just me saying stuff that a lot of people in the thread wanted to believe is true. On the other hand I lost a lot of karma from comments that had the same quality or higher in terms of content, but where I w…

It's worse than that, karma is mostly about location location location. You're talking about probability of upvote, but that needs to be multiplied by the number of people who read the comment, and that depends heavily on where it is on the comment page itself. When I look at my karma on my recent comments they have very little to do with how much time I spent on them or how unique my perspective is... I even wonder…

Which all adds up to, karma doesn't mean shit. We already knew that, but it not matter because lizard brain like see number go up
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