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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

Does the word "NSA" still have a 60 percent upvote penalty here? It seems to be moving pretty slowly up. I understand using that sort of penalties if during a period of time the site gets flooded with those stories, but I don't think keeping the penalty forever is such a good idea, or at least not such a big one. Maybe make it "decay" over a period of time.

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You can tell that the article has been penalized by comparing it with the articles above it. Currently this article is at #7 with 168 points and 2 hours. The #6 article is at 179 points and 6 hours. The #5 article is at 172 points and 4 hours. Because time is weighted heavily (an exponent of 1.8), the NSA article would easily rank above these ones if there are no penalties. Thus, due to penalties, the NSA article is ranking a few spots below where it should, but is still on the front page.

Source: I did the righto.com analysis of how HN ranking really works.

It's been penalized, but you don't know how. It could simply be a bunch of flags.

What is your documentation for saying that a particular word in a headline has any penalty at all?

AFTER EDIT: I guess I'm glad I asked, downvotes and all, because I see the link is to a source off HN, not to a statement from any of the HN moderators (which is what I was checking).

http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

Scratch HN moderators, here it is straight from the horse's mouth:

> "So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty applied. Or more precisly, they've been autotagged as being political, which entails a penalty."

> "When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list that admins see. They decide either to kill it, mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934950

So, at least as of 3 years ago, HN both "autotags" and has admin driving tagging. Penalties are given to posts that have received particular tags.

Strictly speaking, "words in titles" may or may not be involved in that "autotagging", but given PG's history with content classification... I suspect it is.

I'm glad you asked. I was not aware of any published documentation of HN's algorithmic workings, and had the same question.

I also appreciate an established name in HN pointing out that the linked article was not from a moderator. It points itself out quickly, but it's nice to know something is derived information before clicking.

Although these stories have a political dimension, they also have at least two other highly relevant dimensions:

1. Who can be trusted? Is it OK to have NSA employee participation in open source projects? Is it OK to mask contributor identity in open source projects that are widely used to provide security?

2. What are the technical measures US and other nations' Internet service companies can take to restore trust? Will any major provider provide auditable, buildable client software that implements end-to-end encryption?

Currently, the value of this set of issues is over $100B in lost business for US technology companies. What other $100B+ issues are on the table here where there are available technology solutions?

This story is on the front page which suggests to me that the current system, whatever it is, can't be that broken. Meanwhile these meta discussions (of which I'm now a part) get tired pretty quickly.

Derail!

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