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Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

I'd like something like this in reverse.

Downvote if you will, all the same, I find most HN discussions to be of relatively low-value, and also it's not easy to vet whether or not someone's credentials align with what they're writing. I come across interesting links on HN all the time, and I wish I could have something to tell me "Oh, there's a LtU user with hundreds of posts discussing this with links to papers and proofs."

My personal perspective is just that way, I don't see myself coming across anything and thinking "Gee, I wonder what HN thinks about this."

I love the idea though. I wish browsers didn't suck so much. I wish Opera had won more, and maybe we'd have lots of different browsers, infinitely configurable like emacs/vim, with my whole little customized universal browsing tool. Extensions are an adequate compromise, it's just that the kind of person who thinks this stuff up, could so much MORE if browsers weren't so limited.

View on HN

Just to offer my perspective, and thank you for yours - I don't feel like HN is a hive mind and a single-voiced consensus, nor that I need to check if 'HN has endorsed this project or the idea proposed by this article' as the use case for this extension. Instead, I'm instantly recognising the value in having a quick link to further information and analysis about a given page, if it exists. This is because, to me, HN comment sections can be a wealth of information in their own right, very often.

Just installed the add-on, let's see how useful it becomes. :)

I've been thinking of the same. I spend a lot of my time in forums and would like to be able to discriminate users based on certain parameters.

I envision it as some sort of extension that analyzes the users on the current discussion thread, visits their profiles, analyzes it (post history, stats, etc) and decorates the users handle on my current page.

Performance shouldn't be too bad using caching and prioritization.

What value adds were you envisioning specifically?

Sorry, I didn't see this the other day, I'm not really a power-user.

I guess if I could have any features I want, it'd be this:

* Topics, perhaps categorized by keywords.

Maybe, if someone uses the word "TensorFlow" I'd like to know if they have other posts that have scored well with that word in them.

* Similarly, I'd like to know what topics that user are more likely to post in. If a user only ever posts in threads that contain the word "SomeSmallStartupTheyAreClearlyShillingFor" then, I'd like to know that. I find that in practice. Algorithmically, I think its not too hard to separate these two categories and distinguish high-quality users, because the way posts can be scored here on HN.

Really though, I have been thinking about building something like this, maybe a service reading thousands of RSS feeds and keeping track of comment sections in blogs and forum threads, and just compiling these webs of influence for certain links. Like a search engine, except it'd be specialized for discovering high-quality conversations.

>there's a LtU user

What is LtU?

long time user

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

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