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When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

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Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#51

Post by ben_jones »

minimaxir wrote: post #14
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to get onto the front page is to gratify your own curiosity, and then tell people about it. This article, for example.

To paraphrase the original article that inspired the OP, the Hacker News front page is not a meritocracy. There are optimizations that make your submission more likely to be upvoted (a simple one being a clickbait title). It is worth noting that this submission would have different behavior with the original title "You only need 3 votes to play, and other facts about the Hacker News frontpage." (and apparently it was…

Also I think there is something to be said about the comments section of the post. I rarely up vote anything, and if I do it's usually an afterthought after I've read a good discussion in the comments. I've also caught myself on multiple occasions up-voting a submission after I made a comment on it, simply so that my comment would become more visible and be up-voted.

I think there are a lot of intricacies involved in these systems, and that they can be gamed for personal gain, ala much of reddit.

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#54

Post by forrestthewoods »

ant6n wrote: post #50
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the HN front page consisted of your content alone, I would be very happy. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=forrestthewoods https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/reverse-engineering-sublime... https://gamedevdaily.io/four-ways-to-create-a-mesh-for-a-sph... https://gamedevdaily.io/advanced-behavior-tree-structures-4b... Speaking purely for myself, I hope to see them resubmitted. The post about reverse engineerin…

Can you make an rss feed that shows the content, or at least more of it, in the actual rss, rather than just linking back to medium?

I have no control over it. The whole article doesn't show up in the feed? That's annoying. I'll nag support...

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#55

Post by ashitlerferad »

jmiserez wrote: post #11
fredley wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great stuff, but please normalise to UTC in future. Everyone (reading this) knows their own offset from UTC and can probably makes sense of the data directly in that format. For anything else I have to go and lookup the offset between that timezone and mine.

(Disclaimer: I'm in Europe) For a website with a US centric audience, I think it makes perfect sense to use a US timezone: The graphs match up well with the sleep/wake patterns in the EST timezone. This makes interpreting the data a bit easier, i.e you can easily tell that there is a morning rush, a lunch rush, etc. (although interestingly, the HN audience doesn't seem to have well-defined break hours as there is jus…

HN doesn't seem US centric, there are people from all over the planet here.

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#56

Post by madeofpalk »

minimaxir wrote: post #14
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to get onto the front page is to gratify your own curiosity, and then tell people about it. This article, for example.

To paraphrase the original article that inspired the OP, the Hacker News front page is not a meritocracy. There are optimizations that make your submission more likely to be upvoted (a simple one being a clickbait title). It is worth noting that this submission would have different behavior with the original title "You only need 3 votes to play, and other facts about the Hacker News frontpage." (and apparently it was…

Also, your post will get weighted down if it contains certain words or is from a certain domain. I believe at one point 'NSA' got you penalised (due to the high number of NSA links coming in at one point in time), and Medium posts have a tougher time getting onto the front page (due to the lower signal:noise ratio I guess).

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#57

Post by sohkamyung »

Is there a breakdown based on the rough IP location of the people who submits articles?

I suspect that HN is also biased towards users in the western hemisphere; so much so that when people from East Asia (like me) post or comment, it is comparatively harder to accumulate points as our posting time is out of sync with when the majority of HN users will see them.

I suppose one way out of this is to post when my local time is past midnight but I haven't reached the point where I value my HN points that highly compared to daily life....

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#58

Post by nickpsecurity »

madeofpalk wrote: post #56
minimaxir wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase the original article that inspired the OP, the Hacker News front page is not a meritocracy. There are optimizations that make your submission more likely to be upvoted (a simple one being a clickbait title). It is worth noting that this submission would have different behavior with the original title "You only need 3 votes to play, and other facts about the Hacker News frontpage." (and apparently it was…

Also, your post will get weighted down if it contains certain words or is from a certain domain. I believe at one point 'NSA' got you penalised (due to the high number of NSA links coming in at one point in time), and Medium posts have a tougher time getting onto the front page (due to the lower signal:noise ratio I guess).

NSA got me penalized from 2013 onward if I said anything positive about them on about any security or IT forum. Evidence or accuracy didn't matter due to polarization. So, this is more true than you say. Less now but the effect is still there.

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#59

Post by lifeisstillgood »

sohkamyung wrote: post #57

Is there a breakdown based on the rough IP location of the people who submits articles? I suspect that HN is also biased towards users in the western hemisphere; so much so that when people from East Asia (like me) post or comment, it is comparatively harder to accumulate points as our posting time is out of sync with when the majority of HN users will see them. I suppose one way out of this is to post when my local…

>> I haven't reached the point where I value my HN points that highly compared to daily life....

You will. :-)

But mostly I would stop worrying about it. I am always surprised how one comment seems to find the one person able to make an interesting answer, and that's basically why I still come back. One point, one comment. And everything else is gravy.

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#60

Post by ximeng »

sohkamyung wrote: post #57

Is there a breakdown based on the rough IP location of the people who submits articles? I suspect that HN is also biased towards users in the western hemisphere; so much so that when people from East Asia (like me) post or comment, it is comparatively harder to accumulate points as our posting time is out of sync with when the majority of HN users will see them. I suppose one way out of this is to post when my local…

To a reasonable first approximation, everyone on HN is in Silicon Valley, although "Not US" is still substantial. Here is previous survey I submitted, not sure if there's any better source.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918

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