Another trick: You can hover over elements in chrome with F12 and the inspect tool, then right click > copy > copy selector and chrome will generate one for you that way you don't have to actually do any work.

With a selector it's easy to grab data, here's a linux command that gets every user that posted in this thread:

  lynx -base -source 'https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345693' | hxnormalize -x | \
    hxselect -c -s '\n' "td > table > tbody > tr > td.default > div:nth-child(1) > span > a.hnuser"

Here are the most frequent commenters:

     27 cookiecaper
     22 franciskim
      6 fake-name
      4 niftich
      4 flukus
      4 elmigranto
      4 downandout
      3 tedunangst
      3 siegecraft
      3 muglug
      3 minimaxir
      3 madamelic