Completely unrelated to tech - photography and music I find interesting.

http://ishitbits.tumblr.com

Everyone follows PG so the first thing you see isn't empty and discouraging

This already works though it isn't mentioned anywhere yet:

http://hackerfollow.com/follow.php?add={hn-username}

We're not creating another identity for you. There aren't any profiles, it's simply a utility. I agree the messaging could be cleaner and I'll rework some of it when I have time later today, but we dont really need your email or a password for anything so there's little reason to require it other than being the norm.

I appreciate you trying to make it easier for users to remember their login/identity/site key/access code/whatever, but this may actually be making it harder.

Since we have all had years to figure out how to manage logins across many different sites that do not coordinate, we've all solved this problem in one way or another, but the solutions are based on finding efficient ways to manage userid's and passwords.

Mine for example is that I use a set of three userid/pwd pairs. Pair 1 is simple userid/simple pwd, for throwaway accounts I don't care about. Pair 2 is moderately complex userid/pwd for sites I use frequently but could afford to lose/be hacked/whatever. And Pair 3 is highly complex userid/pwd for online banking and other secure things that need the highest penetration barrier.

Since I can easily keep three in memory and apply each one based on how I categorize the website in question, I never forget my logins to any websites, no matter how frequent or infrequent I use them. Nor do I ever have to write down or otherwise record my login info, anywhere, since it's easy to remember just three. Further, if one my lower level userid/pwd pairs is cracked, it doesn't compromise the critical one.

For your site I would have simply use Pair 1 or 2, problem solved. However, your pass phrase method presents a problem - I can use one of my passwords in plain text, which I'm obviously not going to do, or I can think up some pass phrase that is unique to your site, not part of my system, and hence easily forgettable.

I have no idea what other systems people use to manage their logins across the tons of websites in use these days, but I'd suggest relying on your users (especially since they're 100% savy HN users) to have already solved this login problem. Leverage their solutions by using the norm. Or use OpenID, which is another solution to this problem.

For me (since there is no content generation) I just used my username. I agree with the creator that this method is worth trying since there really is no reason to need the security of a password. This solution eases the effort spent coding and the effort spent signing up at virtually no cost. Sure it's not perfect but for a site like this I think it was certainly worth trying.

I use exactly the same 3 tier system, except changing the top tier password about once every 4-5 months and the second tier about once every year.

It's an interesting idea, but more typically the service generates a unique key and puts that in the URL. You can then bookmark that URL to "log in." Just pointing this out as most will find it easier to save a bookmark and "come up with a login phrase" could be a real "whoa.. what?" stumbling block for some potential users.

It's part of the experiment.

More context would be great (browser, page you were on, page you were redirected to). I think I uncovered the problem so you'll need to clear your cookies. Let me know, thanks!

Database Error Message: MySQL Query fail: SELECT * FROM follow WHERE user_id = MySQL Error: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1 Date: Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 4:02:06 PM Script: / Referer: http://hackerfollow.com/

Clicked from the news item here, entered a pass phrase (it's a secret, I'm not telling you!) and clicked the sign in button.

Screen cap: http://i.imgur.com/rBx5l.png

Sorry :) It's fixed now, though. Thank you!

We'd love to do that but the data isn't readily available by scraping. We could continuously fetch the parent_id post until we reach the root story, but that would result in a lot of extra curl requests.. V2 : )

Instead of crawling by #id, crawl by new posts from the /newest page. For each post, split it into multiple pages, setting the parent id/title that way. Not that you have to, but a future suggestion.

I'm guessing the info is currently scraped from the 'threads?id=username' page, but the title to each story is already there after the word 'on'.

see: http://github.com/dkeskar/hnbot

/threads is not polite to robots.txt, so discussion.rb is deprecated.

Right next to the "Submit" button, it says that the tweet will be sent out. Also, the button itself says "Save and Tweet Your March Madness Bracket"

I don't think you're being intentionally deceptive. It just needs to be more clear that the tweet will be sent for the user.

I would agree about needing to have something to show people - what do you think would encourage people to return?

Maybe before the start of every round, display the percentage of picks (e.g. 51% picked Duke, etc.).

Do you have some sort of leader board so I can see how I am ranking Vs everyone else over time?

I built this service in about a week as a full time student. The $5k prize is guaranteed if 5,000 people fill out the 1st page of the survey.

I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on the product as a whole and if you think a Twitter-based system could do well as a generic sports betting/following platform.

Thanks!