Seems like it would be more accurate if it were based on their profile page and the "created X days ago" bit.

Once you've grouped by day you could then look at participation to provide a little more granularity over the course of the day (put everyone at 23:59 on the day and if a bit of participation can proven to have been earlier in the day move the person to that time).

Then the chronological result is your list and a better indicator of the potential userid.

Not that I think this is accurate, I run a community that does use userids and when you account for the accounts deleted because they were spammers you end up with a sparser set of users. Someone isn't the nth person on the site, they're just the nth id allocated by an autoincrement counter.

The utility is a little pointless though. Whilst a userid is one of a number of useful metrics of social status (ah, an early member! or ah, a n00b!) on their own they are pretty useless.

You do need to put these metrics in context, they're useful when you're on slashdot because they're visible as part of the comment stream so you can factor them in to your reading of the comments and easily compare the various indicators of authors visually.

If the function to get the metrics is elsewhere and not easily comparable, the usefulness as one of a collection of metrics is far lower than if it were visible.*

All that said, I prefer the equality of usernames. I like the precept that "time registered" isn't a major factor and that your words and thoughts are worth more than just having signed up early.

* Perhaps you want to make a greasemonkey script?* *

* * You could do one for tagging too so that tagging over there is transparently part of the site here.

There are roughly 20,000 HN users, and < 2000 days since it started so I think this method is more accurate.

If someone signed up very recently then they aren't in the db yet.

Anyway, it's just a gimmick but I thought it was a fun one.

The tagging feature is quite useful actually, feel free to help out by tagging stuff.

If you wanted accuracy you would have used days and then first post, so people that registered a day early would always have a lower ID.

Sorry, would should be could.

Oh, come on people, let's play along. Remember, it's not the number of your epenis that is important, it's how you use it.

I'm #140.

I'm #1910, but I have excellent Slashdot Karma, my own (four-digit) assigned port number and a three character domain name.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

I'm too new to be in the database.

But, my Slashdot UID is # 404 (though I haven't posted or even visited in years).

And I have a 2 character domain name. (3e.org)

And I'm in enterprise-numbers, but I have no idea why or how I got there.

My webcam site, which existed only to let me make sure my puppy didn't get into trouble while I'm at work, got listed in WebSense as "adult content". That makes me sorta famous, right? (It was true that my puppy was naked)

I once had the #1 Google hit for a common English word. Interestingly, I didn't do any conscious SEO to achieve this.

Yah, but how many digits is your ICQ number?

It's funny that I still remember my icq number without hesitation. I haven't used it in years, but I think it's like your first phone number or something that you just don't forget.

Edit: 19662##

I'm #45... quite a proudful number :) It's kind-of nice to compare two id numbers with the number of days ago that the accounts were created in, to see how many registered during that period.

If you had been #42 I would have had a question for you.

#77. I wonder how many before that were YCombinator founders who had early access.

#80. Was it a link from PG's essays or a link on Reddit that brought us over here?

http://www.reddit.com/comments/15gkq/startup_news_ycombinato..., but I was a few days late so I'm not sure.

#54, not a YC founder.

I must have read pg's posting/link a few hours/days after you: #195

Why would I want to know it?

In my case, it was good to know mine is #13378 :).

Does that have something to do with Star Trek? Google & Yahoo don't show anything.

I've been a member for close to 1000 days, yet the system couldn't find me. Bug?

more than likely!

I'll look in to it.

#20515

created: 1067 days ago

I guess that's what I get for lurking...

Anyone want to guess what number pg is? I'll post the answer in 24 hours.

P.S. No cheating.

Since all posts are sequentially numbered you can just go to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 and see who posted.

I can tell you that phyllis is number 2...

#2 (most people I know do it that way. #1 is the admin account, #2 is the first user account)

#1. It's based on posts, and who the hell posts from the admin account?

rtm is #0. naturally.

rtm is #40

0 should be root, not 1.

But, but.. the only number that really counts is your position on the leaders page, right? :-)

This userid was based on when the first posting or comment of this user was made on Hacker News, it is possible that the user signed up earlier but never posted or commented, so this user id may be off because of that.

  Dauntless     created: 1067 days ago   #65
  nostrademons  created: 1066 days ago   #77
  iamelgringo   created: 1066 days ago   #80 
  rms           created: 1064 days ago   #140
  davidw        created: 1067 days ago   #195
  edw519        created: 1066 days ago   #739

So I guess that I must have lurked a while before my first comment.

That makes sense because I was still bashful back then. hn helped me bust out of my shell.

Interesting. My account is 1055 days old, but #360.

I lurked for a while, my account is 1054 days old, but I'm #2685.

1008 days / #4390 -- I too was a lurker

#718 here.

#5887 FWIW

Yeah yeah, userid number, yeah. The real story:

Hell yeah tags! Duplicate stories suck!