Hacker News Reader

Comment by nothrabannosir | Hacker News Reader

Here’s another example: Y-Combinator’s Hacker News, which has a solid community and transparent ranking algorithm.

What? HN's ranking algorithm is notoriously opaque and manual. Or are other websites even more so?

I analyzed the algorithm in detail in 2013 and found multiple unexpected factors. For example, titles containing "NSA" were penalized (which is apparently no longer the case). Certain sources are penalized. Postings with more comments than upvotes are penalized by the "flame war detector". Flagging and voting ring detection also apply penalties. About 20% of front-page articles had one sort of penalty or another.

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

Like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

"How are stories ranked?

On the front page, by points divided by a power of the time since they were submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.

Stories on the new page and comments on the comments page are listed chronologically."

Now, try to find a similar answer for the websites like Facebook or Quora.

That's still only a hint. You can grab the source of HN, and it has a more precise equation, but pg said long ago that, for example, that doesn't have the anti-spam measures. And empiric observation shows that there are other factors at play, that come into and out of relevance.

(I don't necessarily think that the algorithm SHOULD be open, but it's clearly not currently.)

Can you provide a link to HNs source? Last I heard it was closed (but open for a while before that). I checked the FAQ and didn't see any info.

It comes with Arc: http://arclanguage.org/install

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