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See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/
31•Imustaskforhelp•3d ago

Comments

mrandish•3d ago
Neat! Over 300,000, putting me in the top 1,000.
Imustaskforhelp•3d ago
Oh nice!! I am 1935. I am thinking of writing less comments haha to get once to 1984 so that I can say "literally 1984" xD. I mean it would be funny but I will still write comments haha.

man I really love this community yes its has its flaws and everything but man do I love it.

I don't write blogs or anything because I feel like many people who are really respectable can come and read my comments in here and give me suggestions and help me learn and other things, Its really just a lovely community! (with sometimes heated discussions) but although I must say that the feeling of community can be a sine wave (sometimes up or down imo) but still I just feel this bond to the community :>

> Oh nice!! I am 1935. I am thinking of writing less comments haha to get once to 1984 so that I can say "literally 1984" xD.

> man I really love this community yes its has its flaws and everything but man do I love it.

tombert•1h ago
Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I love HN but maybe I need another hobby or three.
japhyr•1h ago
Can you expand a bit on how you feel about it? :)
tombert•1h ago
Apparently I can spend many, many words expanding on things!

I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.

I've been on here for about 10.5 years, so averaging about 48,515 per year. My favorite book is The Go Between by LP Hartley, and that's 98,621 words [1], so I'm basically writing the equivalent of about half of my favorite novel every year.

So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.

[1] https://howlongtoread.com/books/779942/The-GoBetween

Imustaskforhelp•3d ago
Hey Hackernews, You can read my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827731#46828331 where I was suddenly writing until I realized that on Hackernews I have written way too many words.

I then got the idea of actually figuring out how many. Then I first wanted to try out algolia but then later, I found out about clickhouse and how it had a play and the api for playing is so simple, I am definitely gonna make more projects on top of clickhouse play for HN (seriously my mind got blown because I was assuming that the browser -> api was gonna be hard but it seriously wasn't)

Then decided to think to write a github page about it for other people as well.

Anyways, this was one of the most fun project I had. So it turns out that I personally have written 0.64 Game of thrones words in Hackernews itself.

Dang has written 11.15 Volumes equivalent to game of thrones which is actually really crazy.

When I searched dang I was shocked haha. Anyways Dang, If you are reading this, I know that we all like to talk about how moderation of HN has issues but seriously man, the amount of efforts you put in is really lovely & respectable. We all love you.

I still feel like there are some issues where people flag anything they dislike which can be frustrating and other things but that still doesn't really impact the moderation and the moderation team (dang) is pretty awesome in my opinion even if the website does have this flaw in my opinion but Hackernews is one of the best websites man!

Dang today's your day! We can discuss the issues of flagging and others some other day, Have a nice day now!

(Also a little side fact but I picked game of thrones because my name of github is SerJaimeLannister because I was watching game of thrones in my brother's dorm room once in his college room and I literally just thought one or two episodes and started watching from s4 or something and then literally the second I got home, I binge watched Game of thrones till end and then s1 s2 but I think that I haven't watched some seasons I think s3 iirc more but still I loved the show so much and I think I had lost my old github account and naming is always hard especially in programming so picked SerJaimeLannister but this is the reason why I picked the novel equivalent to be game of thrones!)

Imustaskforhelp•3d ago
So basically I was making this for myself but then searched dang (I first searched myself, then pg then dang)

So Dang once again,Thank you dang for your moderation and moderation efforts!

Hope my project can make you smile or just about anything haha. Cheers & also let me know how funny is the cat video. (wanted to prove I am human because literally people sometimes comment how I sound like AI & sometimes accuse me of such in HN which is yeahh.. beep boop)

japhyr•2h ago
Holy heck. The first person I looked up was tptacek, who happens to be #2 in the global rank. 4.3 million words!

I'm nowhere near that (~125k words), but for many of us, it's a good part of our life's corpus. :)

Insanity•1h ago
This is pretty cool! This week I was just thinking of vibe coding something with my HN profile as well (e.g, analyze how my writing has changed over the decade-ish of being on here).

Also, 95k words written on here apparently. Cool to know haha.

Sharlin•1h ago
Huh. In the top 1500, with approximately one GoT worth of text in ~17 years.

Also, I recognize four of the top five users as prolific commenters, but dragonwriter doesn’t ring a bell at all. Maybe they frequent all the threads that I don’t.

jedberg•1h ago
I think dragonwriter only comments on politics.
tombert•1h ago
Oh my.

> Global Rank > 385 / 774235

> Word Count > 509,412

> Top 0.05%

I don't know if I'm too long-winded or I comment too much or both. Good to know I'm in the top 400 regardless.

jedberg•1h ago
I think the word for us is "terminally online" :)

(I'm #174)

tombert•38m ago
You've written nearly a Bible's worth of content here! [1]

I wonder how much you and I singularly contribute to the training data being used for tech-focused AI bots now; presumably they're training on software-people-websites?

https://wordcounter.net/blog/2015/12/08/10975_how-many-words...

Apreche•1h ago
Global Rank 7089 | World Count 62,677 | Percentile Top 0.92% | Game of Thrones Volume 0.21

This would be pretty cool for other sites. My Reddit stats are probably way worse.

incompatible•1h ago
Mine was similar. I thought it was pretty shocking that I was in the top 0.90%. Surely I don't really post a lot here.

Global Rank 6948 / 774235 Word Count 63,737 Percentile Top 0.90%

jader201•1h ago
It’s funny how I spend so much time on HN, yet couldn’t point out a single username (that I don’t know IRL) besides dang.

This is one reason I feel an odd disconnect (anonymity?) with HN that isn’t felt on other social platforms I’ve been a part of. Those often have avatars or some other visual form of recognition that helps put a “face” to a name.

I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I definitely think it’s intentional.

jedberg•1h ago
Reddit was originally designed this way, and HN sort of accidentally copied it. Back then, we always said, "content is first". We wanted people to get upvotes for their content, not for who they were.

I prefer it that way.

bsimpson•35m ago
Funny to see a reply from one of the ~10 usernames I recognize on here.
jedberg•32m ago
Haha right back at ya buddy.
leoc•1h ago
As an old lag there is a fairly large number of names which I recognise on sight, quite a few of them from the old days of /r/programming and even the main reddit. I'd have trouble listing many of them completely unprompted though.
add-sub-mul-div•1h ago
Another thing is that lacking the freedom to delete our own comments here, I assume many people treat their account as only a throwaway identity.
latchkey•33m ago
I've had these same opinions for years. It is an under appreciated social network of some of the top minds and quality comments.

I've been collecting a long list of ideas on what you're describing. Thanks to AI encouraging me to really dive in and use it, I've been quietly working on something for what you're describing.

First step is to improve the HN UX a tiny bit and flesh out a framework for how to code it. Next will add some interesting social features I've been brewing on. Why can't I easily follow someone?

Open source. GPLv3. It isn't perfect, but this is not AI vibe slop, and there are lots of tests from day one. I want to make this sustainable over a long period of time and become genuinely useful to a community that I've gotten a lot out of.

Note, the chrome store is really slow at getting releases out (or I'm too fast), best to install from github releases. It is also buggy and I'm fixing and improving things as fast as I can.

https://orangejuiceextension.github.io/

verisimi•1h ago
It would be fascinating to see a word to karma ratio. (Mine would be incredibly low).
pengaru•1h ago
I'm genuinely concerned not finding my handle in the leaderboard will subconsciously have me believing I don't have an HN problem.
bilekas•1h ago
> Top 0.41%

If only any of that was useful!

On a side note though there is (maybe intentional) case sensitivity? Can't remember how hn usernames work.

jmward01•1h ago
I did rally simple frequency analysis based on corpus source a while ago and the results were super clear, you can tell a corpus by its frequency fingerprint. I wonder if something similar to this could fingerprint bot accounts?
ggm•44m ago
this is basic stylometry? Can probably tell forgery against the corpus, attempts to clone.
mleonhard•1h ago
s/Prolificacy/Verbosity/
6LLvveMx2koXfwn•1h ago
needs a 1/(words/comment-karma) metric!
keyle•1h ago
So many of these names I feel I know them, but I don't know them, personally.

I know them, by tone. I read his/her take on the topic. Turns out you don't need to see any faces or body ratios of any kind to connect with people.

Thanks for keeping HN 'stable/sane'!

ggm•45m ago
Two takes:

* never meet your heroes/heroines

* when you meet f2f with people you've known for decades online, prepared to be whelmed, under or over, depending.

People IRL are very often not what you projected. I learned this from UK mailing list interactions over 40 years ago.

karim79•1h ago
Very cool. I would point out that the search is case-sensitive, and with that being said I'm not sure if HN usernames are case-sensitive.
MBCook•52m ago
Ooh I cracked the top 500. I’m at about 475k words.

Took me a few tries to find my user since I wasn’t expecting the case sensitivity.

Thanks for this. Another book you could add for comparison purposes would be James Joyce’s Ulysses. Or I guess the unabridged The Stand by Stephen King would be good too.

Ooh The Stand (unabridged) is estimated at 473,000 words! I wrote The Stand in comment length. Wow.

visarga•24m ago
top 438, I had no idea
PaulDavisThe1st•47m ago
Click [here] to train a 6B model with just your words ...
visarga•23m ago
I am thinking you need the parent comment(s) as well to do that
ggm•46m ago
So if we find somebody who uses one-word posts like "interesting" on every comment, have we unmasked .. he who mus(k)t not be named?
notepad0x90•45m ago
for an account i created in june 2024, top %0.54 is a lot. I need to spend less time on HN. more than that, I need stop typing walls of text, has to be annoying to readers! :)
0xanand•31m ago
It's very useful project.
davidw•28m ago
"No, I don't think I will" - I already have a sense of how much time I've spent here.
bsoles•20m ago
I feel like a perfect realization Goodhart's Law is about to happen to move up our rankings.
userbinator•11m ago
I'm also naturally curious about the byte count --- using the accepted standard of 5 for words to characters, and since I almost never post anything but ASCII, I've been writing approximately 1.25KB per day here; or just over 5.5MB worth of text so far. Considering that English text compresses very well, and using ~20% as a rough ratio, this means that all ~1.2M words of my comments here, compressed, would still fit on one 3.5" floppy disk.

Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

https://krzysztofjankowski.com/floppinux/floppinux-2025.html
39•GalaxySnail•1h ago•16 comments

How does misalignment scale with model intelligence and task complexity?

https://alignment.anthropic.com/2026/hot-mess-of-ai/
145•salkahfi•5h ago•39 comments

The Codex App

https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-codex-app/
600•meetpateltech•11h ago•416 comments

Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/ankis-growing-up/68610
312•trms•9h ago•78 comments

Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem

https://www.bicameral-ai.com/blog/introducing-bicameral
19•jinhkuan•1h ago•1 comments

GitHub experience various partial-outages/degradations

https://www.githubstatus.com?todayis=2026-02-02
184•bhouston•8h ago•55 comments

Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

https://www.millert.dev/
366•wodniok•12h ago•194 comments

Carnegie Mellon Unversity Computer Club FTP Server

http://128.237.157.9/pub/
56•1vuio0pswjnm7•5d ago•10 comments

See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/
31•Imustaskforhelp•3d ago•43 comments

The Connection Machine CM-1 "Feynman" T-shirt

https://tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html
63•tosh•3d ago•14 comments

xAI joins SpaceX

https://www.spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spacex
598•g-mork•8h ago•1319 comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

254•whoishiring•14h ago•315 comments

The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal

https://www.frommers.com/tips/airfare/the-tsa-new-45-fee-to-fly-without-id-is-illegal-says-regula...
331•donohoe•7h ago•344 comments

Frog 'saunas' could help endangered species beat a deadly fungus (2024)

https://www.science.org/content/article/frog-saunas-could-help-endangered-species-beat-deadly-fungus
5•noleary•1h ago•1 comments

Flying Around the World in under 80 Days

https://pinchito.es/2026/avis-lxxx
4•alexfernandez•1d ago•1 comments

Hacking Moltbook

https://www.wiz.io/blog/exposed-moltbook-database-reveals-millions-of-api-keys
284•galnagli•13h ago•167 comments

Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog?

https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/
84•gyrovague-com•2d ago•36 comments

50 years ago, a young Bill Gates took on the 'software pirates'

https://thenewstack.io/50-years-ago-a-young-bill-gates-took-on-the-software-pirates/
17•MilnerRoute•1d ago•7 comments

Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/court-orders-restart-of-all-us-offshore-wind-construction/
304•ck2•7h ago•181 comments

Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

6•44Bulldog•2h ago•3 comments

4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/4x-faster-network-file-sync-rclone-vs-rsync/
283•indigodaddy•4d ago•137 comments

Phenakistoscopes (1833)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/phenakistoscopes-1833/
3•tobr•2d ago•0 comments

Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

https://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/sympa/arc/lfs-announce/2026-02/msg00000.html
127•cf100clunk•12h ago•164 comments

Joedb, the Journal-Only Embedded Database

https://www.joedb.org/index.html
60•mci•3d ago•8 comments

Julia

https://borretti.me/fiction/julia
82•ashergill•7h ago•10 comments

Zig Libc

https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-01-31
200•ingve•12h ago•83 comments

Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/02/firefox-ai-toggle/
140•stalfosknight•6h ago•55 comments

Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

https://attheu.utah.edu/health-medicine/banning-lead-in-gas-worked-the-proof-is-in-our-hair/
78•geox•4h ago•9 comments

Nano-vLLM: How a vLLM-style inference engine works

https://neutree.ai/blog/nano-vllm-part-1
231•yz-yu•17h ago•24 comments

On being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]

https://www.weber.edu/wsuimages/psychology/FacultySites/Horvat/OnBeingSaneInInsanePlaces.PDF
77•dbgrman•12h ago•47 comments