I'm the maintainer of the Google+ Hacker News Circle (Well, the script/cron job that makes a circle from hngp.axxim.net). I increased the frequency to every five minutes to keep up with the new growth.
It's great that you're finding a use for it, but it's still irritating that the implementation of shared circles doesn't work well since you can only share a snapshot that users have to manually re-add in order to update.
I'm worried seo spammers will start adding them to this circle. Does HN support some OAuth you can use to verify that those who add themselves are actual HN users? If you could require minimum karma points that would be awesome.
I actually just got it to work. If you click on the "Add Circle" link when the circle had <1000 members it will work. Then you can update tomorrow to get the full list.
Agreed. They need to introduce a different "class" of circle that people can add/remove themselves from at will, or just subscribe to. Maybe you could call it... a group.
It's great that you're finding a use for it, but it's still irritating that the implementation of shared circles doesn't work well since you can only share a snapshot that users have to manually re-add in order to update.