Twitter users most followed by readers of Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Twitter users most followed by readers of Hacker News

jmillerinc.com

86 pointsjmillerinc32 comments

It would be more interesting to take HN interest divided by follower count.

If 100 HNers follow someone with 100,000 followers, that's sort of interesting. If someone has 100 followers, and 80 of them are HNers, that's more significant.

"... One of the best ways to find interesting people to follow on Twitter is to look and see who other smart people are already following ..."

There's could be a scientific explanation for this. It's been noted in fish, crustacean populations that behaviour is influenced by the predators. [0] Random choice appears to be non-optimal making decisions.

Following other HN twitter users might seen as a more optimal way to select ideas/technology worth exploring or avoiding "dangerous" time wasters.

[0] "Behavioural response of Crayfish to a fish predator", Stein, Magnuson ~ http://www.jstor.org/pss/1936188

Gosh, I had to upvote this just for the crustacean research citation alone.

I wish every reply was like this, thanks!

There has also a lot of studies looking at this problem in Fish & Birds ~ http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mate%20choice%20copying&...

But the most interesting is how Women hunt in packs ~ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/c... and more interesting how Men adapt to this.

I've got 359 Twitter users from Hacker News profiles on this Twitter list: http://twitter.com/tlrobinson/hackernews

We should compile the union of our two lists.

Sure, I'll email it to you.

Great list! I made it into a list on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/DHS/hacker-news

Interesting. I assume you did this when you were writing the code to attach people's twitter names to the @newsyc20 tweets of their submissions. I noticed that this morning and thought it was clever.

Very interesting. The top 10 are pretty expected, but the rest are more meaty. Great to see @dcurtis at #11 and @yegg at #32.

Wouldn't have expected @garyvee to be big with the HN crowd.

Definitely some people in the bottom half of the top 100 I would have expected to rank higher.

Strange, I'm on HN and Twitter daily and still don't recognize half the list.

You should probably re-run your script to catch all the people who added their twitter handle to their HN bios today as a result of your list :). Or even run it on a cron so we can see it change over time?

I'm both amused that I follow probably more than half of the that list, and saddened by the fact there is only one woman on the list.

I am also saddened that there is only one woman in the list. If you're interested in following more women in tech on twitter, mashable published this list today: http://mashable.com/2010/07/28/developer-hacker-women-twitte...

What is so sad about it? Are you also saddened by the fact that are few blacks/hispanics/[ethnic]?

Well I suppose it's not quite as necessary evolutionarily to socialize with "blacks/hispanics/[ethnic]" as it is with women.

I agree with you - I don't get this 'not enough women in tech' thing. If something is predominantly gender specific then does it matter? I don't see anyone actively discouraging women from being involved, the plain simple fact is that most aren't interested!

I don't think 300 people is enough. I'll add my twitter handle to my profile. I wasn't following anyone in the first 20!

I just double-checked my profile page, and there is no blank for a Twitter account. How did you scrub the profile field to detect such accounts? (Mine’s the same username between HN, Twitter, and Reddit, among others.)

I just made a bunch of regular expressions that capture phrases like "http://twitter.com/foobar or "I'm @foobar on twitter", etc.

Did you include https://twitter.com?

Yes, you're in the db. :)

Hehe. You would be surprised (or maybe not) with the number of Chrome extension developers that don't consider https.

--It would be cool to track over time.

--It would be cool to list which ones are on HN and put their username on there.

--Would you list the whole set of usernames/twitter accounts?

Would be interesting to see an app that took a twitter list, sent a tweet out to those in it to authenticate with the service, and from there create 3 additional feeds based on "retweets_of_me" "retweeted_by_me" and "retweeted_to_me" -- the idea would be to concentrate the best tweets in one place regarding a set of twitter users.

edit: can also look for common favorites - like http://favstar.fm

I've got like 20 new follows by being on that list, even if near the bottom. Those at the top have probably changed even more.

So by observing this phenomena, you have changed it.

Pedantic: not by observing, but by publishing on the Internet.

Publicly observing?

Observation: There is exactly 1 woman on that entire list. #52.

I just followed several people on that list that i wasn't previously. A great list - thanks for putting it together!

So what if the functionality is the same? It's the community and the khutzba that differentiates.

@shitmydadsays is way better than anything i tweet out

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