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Comment by epi0Bauqu | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly the problem I am describing. They are making their own portraits, but they aren't sticking to their usernames, at least for me. A visual icon would help. It could be small, 25x25 as someone suggested.

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Maybe you could write a Greasemonkey script? You could have randomly generated avatars like Miis. Then you could also assign an image for specific posters that you feel are better indicative of their personalities.

Where would you get the images? Just generate them randomly?

Identicons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

The only problem with identicons I have seen is that the algorithm used causes a majority of them to look like swastikas. But that seems like an easy thing to fix. Most of the identicons are quite pretty (including a large number of swastikas), but most people still associate swastikas with naziism.

Swastikas aside, I don't personally feel they're a good solution. They can be useful in semi-anonymous situations to determine one person from another (or an impostor posing as someone else), but I don't find them even vaguely recognizable from one another in the most case. They're very easily confusable.

Not only did the Nazis ruin an ancient symbol, they ruined rotational symmetry.

And they ruined a bunch of debates on the Internet!

I think the human brain is optimized for recognizing faces. Those geometric variations of identicon don't look different enough in my opinion. I like the general idea, though.

If the purpose is -- as you say -- to "start associating usernames more with their set of comments", then random images should suffice. If the purpose is to have a visual item of personal expression added to each post, I suppose you'd need each person to choose one for themselves.

Well, a random image may not suffice for that purpose. I just don't know. Maybe for it to work, it has to be some sort of recognizable image. But random images would at least be worth a shot.

That's basically what Gravatar has recently adopted (http://blog.gravatar.com/2008/04/22/identicons-monsterids-an...) for non-users, and it is equal parts tacky and useful.

I'm not sold on the idea of something like this here, but even a very small icon (like 16x16 or smaller--very small) or bullet of color would would make threads easier to keep track of.

Even if you were to add pictures, the place to do it would be on the user's profile page and not next to the posts.

I disagree, but that would certainly be a good start. I disagree because then I would have to click each time to see it, and that is an extra step. With some small icon on the page, I'd develop the history in an osmosis-like manner.

I agree. I think we can all give links to our blogs, or make a community on facebook. Actually, I am just going to do that and submit a link for those who are interested.

Here is a group for facebook. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=14841858677

I won't succumb to facebook anytime, soon. Sorry.

25x25 is pretty big. I think it would be clever to make it 15x15 or 10x10...

How about just 1x1? Using the standard RGB color space there are 16,777,216. I doubt HN will have that many users so everyone gets their own color :-)

Your design is not future-proof.

Sure it is, just add another pixel :)

"Look at that 3 pixel noob..."

You could use the user's top bar preferences!

only the elite have the privilege of changing the topbar color.

Only the elite deserves their very own pixel.

(I recently joined the elite - that's why I'm smug.)

...or 10 x 1. Even with only 32 colors per pixel, that's over a quadrillion color combinations.

I think pg's "portrait" was a metaphor.

Of course it was a metaphor, and I continued it. I wasn't being literal. I'm saying if you did look at the set of comments of a person, you would see the "portrait." But that isn't happening, since at least in my mind, over time that set of comments isn't being associated with that username.

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