Similar Hacker News Users

http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/

by riffer • 17 years ago

175 107 17 years ago

swimwithoutgettingwet.com

riffer16• 17 years ago

People 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.

sarosh• 17 years ago

I commend you on an elegant UI. Would you mind explaining a bit how exactly you anticipate using voting relationship histories in future revisions? Also, am I correct in assuming that there is some sort of distance function involved in computing 'similarity'?

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Based on the default settings, I'm up there with PG and Patio11. I like your algorithm ;)

onewland• 17 years ago

I had the same reaction. A little flattering, but I think it has to do with brevity more than anything.

edit: just realized that by default it's only returning the rockstars of the site (e.g. people high up on the leaderboard).

CrazedGeek• 17 years ago

I checked a few people, and it seems like patio11 is in all of their results. I wonder why?

riffer16• 17 years ago

A big part of it is that the default settings reward comment karma fairly heavily. Try moving the sliders around. For example, with the defaults, patio11 is the top result for your username, but at the karma slider midpoint he's out of the top 12.

riffer16• 17 years ago

Everybody here has somewhat similar interests to pg. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. ;)

run4yourlives2• 17 years ago

I'm up there with patio11, but not pg. (I get nostradeamous)

Not sure what that means though.

mixmax5• 17 years ago

Nostra who?

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

Interestingly, nostrademons and pg are the top two for me, so I wonder what would produce one but not the other. I'd love to see if comments could be separated into [user1]-like comments and [user2]-like comments.

ax0n• 17 years ago

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!

profquail• 17 years ago

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...

riffer16• 17 years ago

This is interesting, thanks for pointing this out. The top result is actually getting filtered out from the displayed results (don't ask). spolsky is going from being the second result, to the first result, to the second result in your examples.

po2• 17 years ago

You keep mentioning filtering… are you sure we can't ask? I'm curious.

idoh• 17 years ago

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...

rms5• 17 years ago

Aww, I was hoping to get amichail.

dbz• 17 years ago

I just realized I have paid no attention at all to anyone's name. I know my brother's name when I see it, but that's it. Now I'm wondering if I am liked. Probably not >.<

chrischen2• 17 years ago

Ditto. I never pay attention to the name either. Usually it takes 30 levels of nesting before I realize that I'm conversing with the same person.

The only name I recognize is pg, and since I save my username and password, sometimes I forget my own username too.

greendestiny• 17 years ago

Ah rms right there in my list... how did I go so wrong... :)

amichail• 17 years ago

I think I was filtered out.

riffer16• 17 years ago

You're correct. I feel terrible. There is no question that you're the posterchild for controversial-interesting. I will fix this.

rinich• 17 years ago

I approve of all the people I've been grouped with, except that bizarre swombat fellow.

alanthonyc• 17 years ago

Cool. Now we can play six degrees of hn.

NathanKP• 17 years ago

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.

laktek• 17 years ago

Same story here..Is pg is added to all users by default?

pclark• 17 years ago

got swombat. lame. :)

SapphireSun• 17 years ago

Hmm, small bug(?) When I typed my name in all lowercase it didn't come up. That might be by design though. Cool tool ;-)

riffer16• 17 years ago

That's a good point. Let me see what I can do. The catch is that HN is case sensitive as well.

works: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SapphireSun

doesn't work: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sapphiresun

Vivtek2• 17 years ago

Ha, yes, that confused me, too.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

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.

riffer16• 17 years ago

If you don't mind telling me the user you're thinking of, I can take a look as well.

Zak• 17 years ago

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.

riffer16• 17 years ago

Excellent question. Middle ignores karma in the quantitative ranking. Far to the right gets lower karma users. Users who consistently get almost all 1s and/or negative points are separately filtered out since they generally don't make for interesting recommendations. Users who sometimes have negative comment scores but also make lots of 2+ comments are included (these users are rare but are arguably the most interesting).

silentbicycle7• 17 years ago

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.

dolinsky• 17 years ago

Am I missing something or does this not work for the majority of us who are casual commentators on here?

silentbicycle7• 17 years ago

It probably needs more data points.

riffer16• 17 years ago

Yeah, there's really two issues here.

Most of the techniques for this sort of thing don't work that well for sparse datasets. So given a choice between showing bad results for users with relatively few comments, and not showing any results ... especially when users can search not just for themselves but also for folks they know and enjoy ... Also, scraping the full history of HN is not cool.

mgrouchy• 17 years ago

hrm, 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.

auston• 17 years ago

http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=auston...

mixmax5• 17 years ago

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...

riffer16• 17 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, you bring up a very interesting point: reciprocity. If I am closer to you than anyone else, does it follow that you are closer to me than anybody else? I'm not sure the right answer to that is yes ...

sparky• 17 years ago

Definitely not in the general case of points in n-dimensional Cartesian space. For instance, in the 1-d case, consider points at 0, 10, and 12. 10 is the closest point to 0, but not vice-versa.

Put another way, it seems as though the algorithm considers tptacek more distinct (from all other HN users) than cperciva.

alex_c• 17 years ago

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 :)

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

I had the same result. Perhaps this is not measuring similarity after all. :)

brk• 17 years ago

I got quite a few people I respect (mixmax, edw519, mattmaroon) and one I consider a personal friend, dennykmiu.

Neat little utility, thanks.

mixmax5• 17 years ago

hey thanks!

edw519• 17 years ago

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
	                       patio11

bugs• 17 years ago

I think your leaderboard dial was set to 11.

csuper• 17 years ago

Yeah - he should just make 10 louder.

riffer16• 17 years ago

Thanks for the positive response.

If three things were to get added to this, what should they be?

adrianwaj2• 17 years ago

- explanation about what it does and how

- username has period afterward, for self-linking back to site

- various ratios next to each user name in a table, maybe linking to searchyc ie http://searchyc.com/user/riffer

ratsbane2• 17 years ago

1) If I understand correctly the first slider ranks greater similarity in commenting on the same threads the farther left you go and similar word choice the farther right you go. Why not make this two separate sliders?

2) For each of the matches could you show some of the data used to compute the matches... e.g., for semantic matches, show the top X (maybe five?) common words or phrases you matched on. For threads, show the parent or OP of the five most recent threads... something like that.

3) Really neat. I like this. It's quick too. How did you do it? Did you replicate the entire HN database? Third suggestion: post the source or just post an explanation of how it works.

ratsbane2• 17 years ago

... and 4: apply the same thing to twitter (!)

rms5• 17 years ago

Least similar users

riffer16• 17 years ago

This is fun to consider. Are you thinking of people who have completely different interests? Or folks who are interested in similar things but disagree?

blasdel• 17 years ago

Could you provide a reverse search -- who's lists do I show up on?

How about displaying the values used to order the result set, so you could compare weightings across users? reply

andrewljohnson• 17 years ago

My girlfriend and I have almost the exact same lists... smokey_the_bear and andrewljohnson.

Vivtek2• 17 years ago

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!)

llimllib2• 17 years ago

excellent choice setting the defaults to give very flattering results... there's a lesson in that.

patio112• 17 years ago

I could probably turn this into a blog post (and will later), but there are a lot of microoptimizations of default settings for B2C apps that make huge differences in conversion:

- Defaults should be almost sufficient to use the app. (i.e. if it has some workflow, you should be able to pretty much hit "Next next next" and get it to work. Bonus points for making the number of nexts as low as possible.)

- Pick something that results in visually impressive output rather than a blank page. See Balsamiq for inspiration here -- they start you with a mockup in progress that demonstrates most of the highlights of the software.

- Ever seen Firefly? I really like how they use the word "shiny". Ideally, your defaults should show the shiny in your app. In Hollywood they have a saying: make sure your budget makes it onto the screen. In B2C apps, make sure the stuff you did all the work on makes it into the user experience most of your users will see.

- Assume your user is a novice at both your software and the problem domain until you have evidence otherwise. A lot of people ask the user "Hey, are you a novice?" That is one way to do things, but it makes your core workflow one stage longer and every stage costs you conversion. I prefer "Assume they are and give them a discrete 'skip ahead' button" or "Assume they are and watch them for evidence that they are not".

- If your app is supposed to make the user feel like they just killed an effing lion, then your default settings better have a lion bound and gagged sitting under a forty-ton weight suspended by a weak string which passes through an open pair of scissors next to a sign saying "Snip this."

- (Do this if nothing else.) Track actual usage of the app and modify your defaults based on actual usage. Bonus points if you can do it dynamically, if that makes sense for your app. For example, if you pick A as the default and 25% of your users go out of their way to change it to B, then that probably should have been B. (You can split test and see how many people would have changed it to A if it had defaulted to B.)

llimllib2• 17 years ago

While all of these are true, I find that they usually derive from a simpler rule: Have a laser focus on the users you're trying to reach, and everything you do should make their lives easier in some way.

When I find people breaking these sorts of rules, it's usually because they're thinking of themselves or some non-customer stakeholder.

edited to add a corollary: until you've done the sort of testing patio11 advocates, you don't know who that customer is.

peregrine• 17 years ago

I got a great list. Neat.

matt1• 17 years ago

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...)

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

As someone in the comments on your pages also notes, you could use the google cache. But it would still be nicer to ask first.

rdtsc• 17 years ago

Interesting, similar to:

    edw519

    btilly

    patio11

    pg

    tptacek

whalesalad• 17 years ago

pg was number one for me :D

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

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:

  - patio11
    - mahmud
    - nostrademons
    - tptacek

  - mahmud
    - edw519
    - swelljoe
    - davidw

Shouldn't the relationships be symmetrical, so 'edw519' would get 'mahmud' as the first match and 'mahmud' would get 'edw519' ?

edit: also, your 'match' is case sensitive, so 'riderofgiraffes' won't work but 'RiderOfGiraffes' does.

astine• 17 years ago

It filters on karma as well.

All of those guys showup in my default results, but I can't get any of them to pick me up. Clearly I don't post enough.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

If that were the case then I would show up, and I don't either.

I've received some email from David (the guy that built it), he's going to fix this and the lowercase issue as soon as things quiet down a bit.

apu• 17 years ago

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?

silentbicycle7• 17 years ago

There's a bias towards people on the leaderboard, though one of the knobs adjusts it.

mahmud• 17 years ago

I was happy to see you in my list, silentbicyle :-)

adrianwaj2• 17 years ago

How does colins_pride compare with riffer? Aren't they the same person?!?

riffer16• 17 years ago

This is a cool question. Two things: the first is that I stopped using the colins_pride account and subsequently started using the riffer account, so the co-commenting commonality is not particularly high. The terminology score is substantially closer. The other thing is that because the dataset is tilted towards the recent, the colins_pride user is only lightly represented.

ambition• 17 years ago

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...

ramidarigaz• 17 years ago

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

  ===============||===================
  co-commenting......SEMANTICS.....word
  choice

A little confusing at first, until I realized that it was wrapping. It's the same for the other slider.

Great app though!

10ren• 17 years ago

So, some great users are on your similarity list... but are you on their similarity list?

trunnell• 17 years ago

For exactly zero of the twelve users listed, no.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

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.

MikeTLive• 17 years ago

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/

jcl• 17 years ago

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?

Sukotto• 17 years ago

I don't show. Guess I'm not "one of us" yet :-/

PebblesRox• 17 years ago

Did you capitalize your name? It seems to be case-sensitive... http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=Sukotto&#...

tibbon• 17 years ago

It didn't return any results when I tried from the iPhone

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