[padolsey]

Yikes you're right. I need to come up with a way to solve that. Maybe a param or path to lock in the username like abc.at.hn/Abc ... I'll have a go. EDIT: for now I'm tired and off to bed but if someone has a graceful/simple way to handle the non-lowercase usernames, please come forward.

[diggan]

> if someone has a graceful/simple way to handle the non-lowercase usernames, please come forward.

Graceful? No. But simple? Yes.

Scrape every single username on HN to some local storage (even a file on disk would be enough, HN is relatively tiny), then lowercase all of them into a second column in the file. Refresh this file once per day.

Now you have a map of UserName <> username that you can use for lookups :)

[tracker1]

HN seems to support using lowercased names for the /user?id=(lowercased-name) ... if you just need to translate for lookup. Not sure about things like underscores or other characters.