A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #81

shaunpersad wrote: post #7

I don't believe this is an actual feature, but I've noticed a trend that I've been calling "twos", where, at any given moment, a particular subject (present as a word or phrase in the article's title) will show up twice on the front page. Funnily enough, currently the "twos" subject is "Hacker News", with this article and "What I've Learned from Hacker News" both being present in the front page at the same time.

I call birthday paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem Number of all possible topics is N, number of news on FP is 30. For example if N is 365, you would expect 70% chance that two separate items on FP mention the same topic. Although, HN recurrence probably a bigger contributor. When a person gets reminded of some previous highly upvoted link and re-submits it. The highly upvoted link gets upvoted a…

Post by inopinatus » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 1:25 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #67

inopinatus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re. comments lingering high based on account karma, I've suggested the same but dang says not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441687 Perhaps such remarks are retaining position by their own merit. An experienced or high quality commentator may simply produce remarks that are better received.

I don't know what to say other than there is something going on behinds the scenes that can be seen in play in this thread. My comment is 1 minute newer than another comment in this thread. My comment currently hasn't been upvoted yet is several spots higher in the thread. I tried upvoting the other comment and mine was still higher. My account has almost twice the karma and is older than the author of the other comm…

Post by NeedMoreTea » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 1:27 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #73

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #63

Just one comment about vouch, which seems to have have changed behaviour fairly recently. Used to be that if a shadowbanned user posted a clearly substantive comment a vouch would always (nearly always?) restore it. Now it never does - I guess vouch is now just a vote that needs x votes. Suspect that's going to unintentionally have even more people talking to themselves, because they've not yet noticed the shadowban.

It is possible to lose vouching privileges if the mods feel the comments you're vouching for are uncivil or do more harm than good.

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 1:28 AM UTC

mises wrote: post #75

sotojuan wrote: post #58

Pretty cool report. Personally all I want is to be able to change my username, even if it means emailing and waiting a few days.

Agreed, this would be nice to add. However, it would have been easier if everyone's primary identifier was a number, and a name was just an associated field. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that it was set up this way. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Anybody known if emailing the mods will let this happen?

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 1:30 AM UTC

inopinatus wrote: post #62

slg wrote: post #59

The ranking algorithm also isn't some simple votes/time metric. The flame war detector for posts is an example that is mentioned, but there are also some undocumented complexities on the comment side too. An obvious one is brand new comments get a huge boost in the rankings compared to older comments. It is pretty common to see a few minute old comment at the top of a lot of comment threads. It also seems user reputa…

Re. comments lingering high based on account karma, I've suggested the same but dang says not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16441687 Perhaps such remarks are retaining position by their own merit. An experienced or high quality commentator may simply produce remarks that are better received.