HN Explorer

Follow people on Hacker News

52 points by Trindaz ↗ HN
Ever wanted to follow specific people on Hacker News? (without having to go to their individual Submitted and Threads pages every day!)

If so, try this: http://beta.fedang.com. andymorris and I spent the last 24 hours slapping it together and we're hoping to get a few users to put it through it's paces.

It's only 24 hours old and will probably fall over if more than 20 people start using it. If we can get it working solidly for HN and a few of us seem to like it, then we plan on making it work for other sites too in the future.

EDIT: Also interested in feature suggestions. We're thinking RSS for the feed, and tracking replies to your own comments, no matter who they're from.

44 comments

[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 79.3 ms ] thread
faramarz
Very neat! I have a dozen or so people in mind I would love to add.. but I don't have the patience to go and find their exact usernames.

So far I have PG and matt_cutts (google)

Anybody would like to share their list for easy picking? :P

Trindaz
Cheer faramarz! I'm doing the same sort of searching too. Some kind of 'people search' might be nice but not sure how that would be implemented.
alanthonyc
patio11 grellas tptacek

off the top of my head...

treblig
On HackerFollow (http://hackerfollow.com), we created a leaderboard of most-followed users. There's also a bookmarklet for when you're on a user profile to add them.

This seems like a pretty similar service. Love the market validation ;)

Current leaderboard:

AndrewWarner bdittmer davemc500hats dcurtis dhh erickerr gyardley keysersosa kn0thing loganfrederick mojombo paul pg treblig

Trindaz
This hackerfollow.com interface is really good. And we felt the same about the validation!
philwelch
I always appreciate mechanical_fish's comments. He's not a celebrity like a lot of the people mentioned already (pg, dhh, paul, spolsky), he just writes good comments.
lotharbot
My list from hackerfollow:

    bearwithclaws
    CWuestefeld
    DanielBMarkham
    Dove
    danilocampos
    dctoedt
    edw519
    lionhearted
    lotharbot
    patio11
    pg
    philwelch
    potatolicious
    tptacek
    yummyfajitas
My rule is that I add someone if I read a comment by them and think "that was good" and then remember I'd had the same thought about them before. (I also follow myself so I can see when I last checked the site.)
Udo
Very cool! However, it didn't return my activity (egomaniac that I am), but worked perfectly for other users.

Just a minor nitpick: this project would profit from OpenID/Oauth/whatever sign-on. There is really no reason why I need to create a "real" user account with a username...

Trindaz
Great point Udo. I'd actually like to remove forcing people to sign up too because the whole point of Fedang is to not force people to keep track of multiple usernames all over the internet.

Also, your activity will probably come up shortly - sometimes your data gets in immediately, other times it might take 60 seconds or so.

Udo
> Also, your activity will probably come up shortly

It's visible now, thanks!

Locke1689
Do you guys have a bug reporting system available? You really need to disable Django debug mode, btw.
Trindaz
I actually let it on intentionally for now so that our (hopefully) helpful users might also send through actual error text when they get a bug. This'd be something we remove a few hours or days from now.
Locke1689
I really, really don't think this is a good idea. Even minor debugging information can help me attack a site but Django debugging can actually leak your source. If you want I can run a simple audit on your site but I already retrieved the contents of your urls.py
Trindaz
Thanks for this. Debug switched off.
erickerr
We created a similar service, http://hackerfollow.com
mikeklaas
Question: Why do you call the site a startup? Are you planning on turning it into a business?
lachyg
Unless I'm missing something, he called it a service...
bobds
There's a picture on the front page that says "Wait, what does your startup do? So basically it's like a Twitter for Hacker News.".
JoachimSchipper
The 'add' button (to follow someone) does not work for me (JoachimSchipper_hn).
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siculars
are you using http://api.ihackernews.com ? Right now, I'm using it to fetch the front page for my little hn smashup. Polling every 4min or so. Thanks to @ronnieroller, http://twitter.com/ronnieroller, for that little piece of niceness.
Trindaz
This is awesome. I had no idea it existed.
Trindaz
We may have to the next little while. Our server just got blacklisted for (we're assuming) going too many page requests. EDIT: And what's the URL for your mashup?
pbhjpbhj
Ha, that's some mighty fine trademark infringement ...

I'm usually pretty vigilant but you passed off quite well until I noticed the domain name writ large in the address bar.

paolomaffei
I'm not sure this is what we really need, considering that the HN hive mind is pretty smart and that anyway big name authors are already upvoted just because of their names often.
Trindaz
Point taken. The problem it fixes for me is to get an update from people I care about, e.g. personal friends who may not get voted up much at all, but I care about the new stuff they post or comment on.
RiderOfGiraffes
There are people who I find I trust to make smart submissions and smart comments. However, with the increasing popularity of HN it's all too easy to miss a submission or comment by them. Sometimes by fluke of timing or something an otherwise worthy submission gets missed, un-upvoted, and sinks without trace.

I'd welcome a system that finds items it thinks I'd find interesting and brings them to my attention. the occasional false positive will mean that I see things I otherwise might ignore, and I would get the chance to upvote things I think deserve it.

The fact that there are so many people doing or thinking about something similar shows that there is a need. Or at least a want.

Trindaz
'Finding' similar items would be a very cool feature to ad. We're thinking something using NLP to find posts similar to the posts by people you follow, whether it be from HN or any other sites with an RSS that you want to follow through it. OK if we ping you if/when we add this feature?
RiderOfGiraffes
Absolutely - email in my profile, including the passphrase to bypass my spam filter. You probably don't want my ideas, but you're welcome to have them.
vladocar
Great idea! But why don't we make it simple? I just made Open Google Docs List, put your HN name,link and twitter link.

Fell free to join the list everybody is welcomed, no carma points are required.

Here is the link: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApUjBkHSxmB1dHdMdlN...

Trindaz
This is awesome. I'm in the list now. The whole point of Fedang is to let us follow the same person whether it be Twitter or hackernews or anything else. I might add some more adapters to it soon too so I can get one stream with all of andymorris's Twitter and Tumblr posts.
andymorris
I just added an RSS feed to the site that contains all the posts from people you follow: beta.fedang.com/rss/<username>

This is a public feed, so anyone can see who you're following - I plan on making this an optional setting if there's too much of uproar about that.

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