See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments
by Imustaskforhelp on 1/30/2026, 7:54:52 PM
https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/
Comments
by: macintux
I miss DoreenMichele. She always added thoughtful perspectives.<p>Looks like she’s actively writing at <a href="https://califmichele.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://califmichele.blogspot.com/</a> and <a href="https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://doreenmichele.blogspot.com/</a> but has departed HN.
2/3/2026, 6:34:52 AM
by: jader201
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.<p>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.<p>I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I definitely think it’s intentional.
2/3/2026, 4:24:01 AM
by: nickvec
Cool! Just a thought: instead of having to query the Clickhouse cluster whenever a client clicks "View Top 1000 Leaderboard" (which could cause a lot of load), it might be useful to instead fetch the top 1000 every hour (day?) and display the top 1000 as a static list.
2/3/2026, 6:17:40 AM
by: davidw
"No, I don't think I will" - I already have a sense of how much time I've spent here.
2/3/2026, 5:33:12 AM
by: userbinator
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.
2/3/2026, 5:49:41 AM
by: ChrisMarshallNY
Look on my <i>[prolix]</i> words, ye Mighty, and despair!
2/3/2026, 6:30:06 AM
by: MBCook
Ooh I cracked the top 500. I’m at about 475k words.<p>Took me a few tries to find my user since I wasn’t expecting the case sensitivity.<p>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.<p>Ooh The Stand (unabridged) is estimated at 473,000 words! I wrote The Stand in comment length. Wow.
2/3/2026, 5:09:10 AM
by: Insanity
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).<p>Also, 95k words written on here apparently. Cool to know haha.
2/3/2026, 4:01:46 AM
by: bilekas
> Top 0.41%<p>If only any of that was useful!<p>On a side note though there is (maybe intentional) case sensitivity? Can't remember how hn usernames work.
2/3/2026, 4:39:13 AM
by: keyle
So many of these names I feel I know them, but I don't know them, personally.<p>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.<p>Thanks for keeping HN 'stable/sane'!
2/3/2026, 4:49:38 AM
by: notepad0x90
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! :)
2/3/2026, 5:15:56 AM
by: bsoles
I feel like a perfect realization Goodhart's Law is about to happen to move up our rankings.
2/3/2026, 5:40:44 AM
by:
2/3/2026, 4:07:33 AM
by: jmward01
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?
2/3/2026, 4:39:17 AM
by: ggm
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?
2/3/2026, 5:14:50 AM
by: karim79
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.
2/3/2026, 4:56:39 AM
by: Imustaskforhelp
Hey Hackernews, You can read my previous comment <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827731#46828331">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827731#46828331</a> where I was suddenly writing until I realized that on Hackernews I have written way too many words.<p>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)<p>Then decided to think to write a github page about it for other people as well.<p>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.<p>Dang has written 11.15 Volumes equivalent to game of thrones which is actually really crazy.<p>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.<p>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!<p>Dang today's your day! We can discuss the issues of flagging and others some other day, Have a nice day now!<p>(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!)
1/30/2026, 8:04:08 PM
by: Sharlin
Huh. In the top 1500, with approximately one GoT worth of text in ~17 years.<p>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.
2/3/2026, 4:02:50 AM
by: Apreche
Global Rank 7089 | World Count 62,677 | Percentile Top 0.92% | Game of Thrones Volume 0.21<p>This would be pretty cool for other sites. My Reddit stats are probably way worse.
2/3/2026, 4:23:27 AM
by: tombert
Oh my.<p>> Global Rank > 385 / 774235<p>> Word Count > 509,412<p>> Top 0.05%<p>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.
2/3/2026, 4:11:06 AM
by: PaulDavisThe1st
Click [here] to train a 6B model with just your words ...
2/3/2026, 5:13:34 AM
by: verisimi
It would be fascinating to see a word to karma ratio. (Mine would be incredibly low).
2/3/2026, 4:24:18 AM
by: mrandish
Neat! Over 300,000, putting me in the top 1,000.
1/30/2026, 8:00:20 PM
by: 0xanand
It's very useful project.
2/3/2026, 5:30:32 AM
by: 6LLvveMx2koXfwn
needs a 1/(words/comment-karma) metric!
2/3/2026, 4:43:55 AM
by: mleonhard
s/Prolificacy/Verbosity/
2/3/2026, 4:42:31 AM
by: pengaru
I'm genuinely concerned not finding my handle in the leaderboard will subconsciously have me believing I don't have an HN problem.
2/3/2026, 4:38:00 AM