Failing to verify hackernews account

[scarytom]

I've made two attempts to verify my hacker news account with keybase now. Whereas it seems likely that I'm doing something wrong, I'm struggling to see what, and would appreciate some assistance.

https://keybase.io/scarytom https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=scarytom

[ghost]

This is because you have only karma: 1 (see https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/911#issuecomment-52372669 by @maxtaco) This is what keybase sees through the API of hn: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/scarytom/about.json

[scarytom]

Wow, that's annoying. Are you planning on documenting this issue on the site?

[mackaaij]

I'd like to see that documented indeed. I was now giving it a lot of time and attempts because of the warning regarding cache...

[lantins]

:+1:

[malgorithms]

(tldr; Today we'll have a new CLI and site update.)

yes, we're really sorry about this and getting clarity in both the site and CLI is top priority. It's crazy that HN was our toughest integration considering how simple it seemed at the surface. Unpredictable caching problems, weird karma rules, case sensitivity in some places but not others, unhelpful errors in their API.

[maxtaco]

Ok, we did what we could. The client checks your karma/profile validity before letting you go ahead with the proof. If that check fails, at least you know about it right away.

Something else we realized. We can't distinguish between: (1) a miscapitalized username; (2) an unknown account; (3) a correctly-specified account with 1 karma. All 3 failures look the same as far as the API goes.

New stuff is live in v0.4.17.

[lantins]

Thanks for the update guys, can confirm the latest CLI is much more clear.

Now to get that kama up :)

[zanshin]

I've got a karma of 9 and my user name is spelled correctly and yet I can't verify myself on HN.

$ keybase prove hackernews zan5hin
info: Updated file: /Users/mark/.cache/keybase/session.json
warn: ATTENTION: HackerNews only publishes users to their API with karma > 1.
warn: Your account zan5hin doesn't qualify, or doesn't exist!
error: Insufficient HackerNews karma (>= 2 needed) or bad username (case sensitive!)

[mthenw]

same problem here

Your username on HackerNews (**case sensitive**): mthenw
warn: ATTENTION: HackerNews only publishes users to their API with karma > 1.
warn: Your account mthenw doesn't qualify, or doesn't exist!
error: Insufficient HackerNews karma (>= 2 needed) or bad username (case sensitive!)

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mthenw Karma: 13

[zellyn]

Appears to still be broken…

[gabipurcaru]

Still failing: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gabipurcaru

[maxtaco]

@gabipurcaru Looks like the API is broken for you. There's not much we can do about it:

https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/gabipurcaru/about.json

This API has caused countless headaches, but it's out of our control

[zellyn]

What is that? Why not scrape my profile page?

[zellyn]

I believe this is fixed now. I just verified my hn account in under five minutes.

FWIW, @maxtaco, a simple email to hn@ycombinator.com resulted in a prompt and friendly conversation, and now they believe it to be fixed.

[maxtaco]

That's great, thanks @zellyn! I sent a friendly email to my contact over there, but didn't hear back. But thanks getting through.

Related: #2031, #2040, #2041, etc!

[maxtaco]

Also @zellyn we're not allowed to scrape the HN HTML page, they don't want us to, so we're using their preferred API instead.