Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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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