This concerns me more

https://news.ycombinator.com/whoareyou

Interestingly, trying most *nix commands in place of "whoami" returns a page that says "Unknown.", like with seemingly any invalid URL.

However, trying https://news.ycombinator.com/ps returns a completely blank page. Implying it may be a valid URL for some reason.

I was a bit confused until I realized what account I was logged in as...

"Certified at 123.123.123.123"

Heh. Is this actually being used somewhere? I wrote something to piggyback on Google App Engine's IP geolocation a while ago http://blip.runway7.net/

Awesome! Would the source code for this be available somewhere?

Google App Engine adds the following HTTP request headers:

  X-AppEngine-Country
  X-AppEngine-Region
  X-AppEngine-City
  X-AppEngine-CityLatLong

http://rominirani.com/2012/04/25/appengine-location-detectio...

Thanks for the info, I might try this out someday.

Very cool -- would love to see the source as well if it's available

Did anyone else get a brief surge of adrenaline thinking your username was for some reason on the front page of HN?

I expected to receive an algorithmic psych profile of myself based on my HN comments.

Instead, I needed to work out if it was an IP address, or a count of how many hours I've spent on here...

I expected it to be some random user here who was revealing to be actually pg/Zuck or someone famous.

Exactly what happened to me

I wonder if this is looking at the local machine for a cookie, or the news.ycombinator.com machine for login information, or if it is a coordination between a private cookie storing an index that makes sense when combined with the database on the server.

Does anyone know the cookie format for ycombinator?

It looks the cookie format is just user={hash}, and looking at an older version of the code it matches that up to data loaded from a file called arc/cooks

https://github.com/wting/hackernews/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=...

See also https://www.google.co.uk/webhp#q=google%20what%20is%20my%20i...

Where am I? https://news.ycombinator.com/pwd

First thing I thought of was `24601!`

Now try WhoIsThat?user=