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Comment by b_emery | Hacker News Reader

Very cool! I could have really used this a week ago, when the wife and kids were out of town and I had some free time to catch up on movies I've missed from the last 3.5 yrs.

What's the ranking criteria?

Also, being able to exclude based on categories (comedy, no animations, no family for example) would be a great feature.

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Thanks.

The ranking criteria - basically, I combined ratings from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, with additional heuristic tweaks. The ranking method I use for is different than the popular IMDb method aka "True Bayesian estimate", which is not really a Bayesian estimate. I wrote more about how I approach ranking in my e-book http://arek-paterek.com/book/ , for people who are really interested in such technical details.

This was my first question too and I wouldn't necessarily consider myself incredibly technical.

I think the first question most people have when they see a "top _____" list, is "according to who?" Having a short description of the way the rankings are done along with a link to a more detailed description, would be great.

Nice job on shipping it!

This really doesn't seem to solve the main problem that most current ranking systems have - it doesn't compensate for recency. Newer critically-acclaimed movies like The Dark Knight rank higher than much older but just as well-liked movies like Citizen Kane.

Is that really a bug? Kane, while a technical masterpiece for it's time - shouldn't be up on some pedestal. As art it is, while powerful, also not flawless. If you had to pin me down to a black and white era drama, I much prefer, say, 12 Angry Men to Kane as _art_.

But as you can see from dundun[1]'s post, the rank is very biased towards the more recent times; according to it, 43% of the best 5000 movies were made between 2001 and now.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4555723

I'm not sure what this has to do with my point.

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