▲ 459 points

Show HN: Markdown HN profiles at {user}.at.hn

at.hn

by padolsey·2y ago·154 comments·view on hn ↗

Very opportunistic toy project as I saw the domain was up for grabs: 'at.hn' is a little site where people can have their own subdomains for whatever their HN username is (opt-in only by adding a slug to your bio). It doesn't really do much. Just shows your HN bio rendered as markdown plus meta stuff. I'm thinking of adding an aggregated user listing on the homepage so people can explore profiles. There's a bunch of interesting people on HN but discoverability is a bit longwinded. I'm wondering what other features people want. Otherwise shall likely leave it as-is. I remember hnbadges was a thing for a while, but can't remember what happened to it. Did people like that? Anyway, at.hn's on github if people want to contribute. - https://github.com/padolsey/at.hn

154 comments

Just be a little careful, or the OnlyFans people might hear there's a new "social" where they can promote.

(For example: LLM-assisted forum presence, combined with profiles with oh, hey there, I have an OF, lol, combined with tech industry disposable incomes... I'd guess would pick up a couple new whales worth the effort. Now that Reddit presumably has been picked clean.)

Any OF models would be met with HN users over-explaining their own economics to them and how it's a terrible business that'll never work. These models will also learn they don't even have a moat to differentiate themselves from other offerings and should keep their development jobs. :)

Around here I think you’d have better luck selling tiny cute looking computers with tiny screens and open source hardware.

Aella already has a stranglehold on the HN demographic.

Nothing stops people from doing that in their profiles now... and it's not like this is even an official hn feature, so either way they're linking to an external site.

HN has better moderation than any other site I'm aware of, I trust it to be robust against that kind of spam.

I think the median HN user is a lot healthier than you suggest.

It looks like dang has a page despite having no slug on his profile page:

https://dang.at.hn/

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang

Unless of course he added it, and later removed it?

The wording of:

> To opt-in, paste "{your username}.at.hn" anywhere in your profile's 'about' section.

Is slightly incorrect, I think.

Everyone seems to visible by default, opted-in or not.

However, the ?refresh thing is locked down so you need to opt-in before. But by default, every user page is accessible on at.hn, even if you don't have the link in your profile.

I assume his profile was used by @padolsey as a test and manually opted-in

i think the dev of at.hn just added him for testing reasons.

How hard is it to export all of the comments someone has written on HN? I have been thinking about converting my HN comment history into something like a blog. Each entry would show the title of the submission, link if applicable, and the comment and link to comment thread.

Maybe you could provide that service for a small fee.

https://github.com/runvnc/hncomments

Using the algolia api

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=author_ilaksh,comm...

You'll need to paginate it, as it's limited to 50 results per page, like so:

  https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=author_ilaksh,comment&hitsPerPage=50&page=1

The Hacker News BigQuery data makes this quite easy:

select * from `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` where `by` = 'ilaksh' and type = 'comment' order by timestamp desc

EDIT: seems this is out of date

So often I see people sharing something that seems driven mostly by the availability of some domain, instead of being idea first, then domain. I find that an interesting niche of human history.

I'd love to do something similar that uses your HN favorites (I.E.: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=padolsey) and publishes it as a linkblog. Should expose an RSS feed as well. If you made a top-comment on a favorite it should use that as a description.

Linkblogs are back in vogue: https://stormgrass.com/the-rebirth-of-the-linkblog/

There seems to be some weird encoding issues and failure to convert URLs to links properly, for my profile - https://mike-cardwell.at.hn/ - Also, some of the indenting and white space is broken making the PGP signature invalid

[click with mouse wheel](javascript:alert(2))

I'm getting Internal server error 34. Which is one I'd never seen before. ;)

> opt-in only by adding a slug to your bio

I really like this. It’s respectful of people’s wishes to not be added to any random site, and at the same time the way to give consent advertises the service.

Ethical and effective business practice? Yes, please. If only all things posted to HN were like this.

PS: It says something about my disillusionment with most software projects these days that I have nothing but praise to give to this one, yet all the while I can’t shake the feeling of “I hope I don’t regret those words”. Anyway, that’s a “me” problem. Congratulations on the launch, and best of luck.

My username has an underscore, _

so it doesn't show up.

Oooops ....

Does this not work with upper case letters? I only get "Internal Server Error 34".

Man, that is a costly domain TLD to be playing around with. Nice 2-character domain you got. Best of luck and have fun.

so perhaps some kind of collaborative filtering or cohort graph or AI summary can be added on top of this? What other users often comment on the same kinds of stories? Who often replies etc? What kind of stories do they engage with? Etc.

Kinda minor thing, but the generated HTML isn't technically valid. The meta and style tags are supposed be inside the head tag (as supported by the MDN docs on the tags and the errors shown when you view source in Firefox).

Nice project, just wanted to mention that Ducky looks like he has quite a personality!

Btw what do you mean by > Note: Outgoing links are rel=nofollow unless you're >200 karma (anti spam)?

I guess the links aren't hyperlinked or something?

This is awesome! How are you handling the addition of subdomains?

That's a cool idea, I like it. Will check it out when it's up and running again.

If this slips of the first page, I hope you get to resub when things are a little more stable.

I enabled it as well but I have no clue how to gain Karma. Any feedback would help.

Usernames in domains means, in many cases, the ISP learns peoples usernames.

Lovely project! Unfortunately, I no longer seem to be able to update my bio on at.hn as I am yet to acquire even 5 karma. Maybe I'll check back in a few weeks/months :)

Really nice! For a moment I thought it was official. Anyway I've edited my bio and have been waiting like 20 minutes for it to be updated in the site.

When I refresh I get

> Internal Server Error 34

Cool idea though, will try again later.

Fun idea!

- The first bullet point does not seem to be recognised (on your profile and mine). - webp images do not work?

I updated my profile but I don't see any change on my at.hn page - how long does it cache for?

The 2 letter domain must have been a premium.

Cool project.

Great idea! Love the simplicity.

Internal Server Error 34

Love it, great work!

Nice implementation!

And are you prepared to respond to GDPR and other jurisdiction requirements of data collection and management?