It would be more interesting to take HN interest divided by follower count.
If 100 HNers follow someone with 100,000 followers, that's sort of interesting. If someone has 100 followers, and 80 of them are HNers, that's more significant.
"... One of the best ways to find interesting people to follow on Twitter is to look and see who other smart people are already following ..."
There's could be a scientific explanation for this. It's been noted in fish, crustacean populations that behaviour is influenced by the predators. [0] Random choice appears to be non-optimal making decisions.
Following other HN twitter users might seen as a more optimal way to select ideas/technology worth exploring or avoiding "dangerous" time wasters.
Interesting. I assume you did this when you were writing the code to attach people's twitter names to the @newsyc20 tweets of their submissions. I noticed that this morning and thought it was clever.
You should probably re-run your script to catch all the people who added their twitter handle to their HN bios today as a result of your list :). Or even run it on a cron so we can see it change over time?
I agree with you - I don't get this 'not enough women in tech' thing. If something is predominantly gender specific then does it matter? I don't see anyone actively discouraging women from being involved, the plain simple fact is that most aren't interested!
I just double-checked my profile page, and there is no blank for a Twitter account. How did you scrub the profile field to detect such accounts? (Mine’s the same username between HN, Twitter, and Reddit, among others.)
Would be interesting to see an app that took a twitter list, sent a tweet out to those in it to authenticate with the service, and from there create 3 additional feeds based on "retweets_of_me" "retweeted_by_me" and "retweeted_to_me" -- the idea would be to concentrate the best tweets in one place regarding a set of twitter users.
If 100 HNers follow someone with 100,000 followers, that's sort of interesting. If someone has 100 followers, and 80 of them are HNers, that's more significant.