Most-favorited Hacker News posts • Hacker News Board

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#101

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #80

gambiting wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on 10k+ karma and I literally didn't know it existed.

20k+ karma here and same. I haven't favorited so much as a single article. Didn't realize it was an option. So the top favorited list is probably biased in some way towards the type of people more likely to discover and use this feature. I just don't know exactly what that entails.

I've noticed these and that's probably only because I trained myself to look carefully at stuff (that was a lot of work too). Small, light grey font on a beige background, well, what did HN expect.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#102

Post by codethief » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

amai wrote: post #66

I think this list is more useful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Thanks for the link! I've been looking for such a feature that shows me the most popular posts within a given timeframe. My thought process was that, as much as I enjoy discussions on HN, I don't want to spend too much time on it and, in particular, I want to avoid browsing HN out of FOMO multiple times a day. Instead I'd rather just schedule half an hour to an hour every week to have a look at the most popular posts.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#103

Post by gabrielsroka » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

I wrote some JavaScript and Python tools to search your HN Favorites and export them to CSV or HTML.

The JavaScript runs in your browser like a browser extension. It scrapes the HTML and navigates from page to page.

Setup and usage instructions are in the files.

JavaScript: https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...

Python: https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...

Previous discussion, other tools and more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788236

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#104

Post by gabrielsroka » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #55

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm mistaken, HN exposes that data so anyone can build those features as either a browser add-on or as a separate site built on the data? One of the things I super appreciate about HN is the (almost) complete abcense of feature creep.

I don't think I've ever seen this on any third party search tools for HN. If it's an actual feature it is highly under documented. The filtering that HN does is on all comments / stories (by post title) but you don't get to filter down by what a user has upvoted since that data is private to the user, only favorited data is public. I don't think this is a feature creep, I think it's useful. Otherwise I'm going to hav…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353526

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#105

Post by wrsh07 » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

asutekku wrote: post #2

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark interesting links / posts. 96 favorites on the most favorited seems really low.

A lot of people have pointed out alternatives, but the killer feature of eg bookmarks (or maybe pocket?) is the categorization.

I have bookmarks that I've planned to review in 3 months. I'll have bookmarks for a tool I plan to try out on a future side project

I don't really care about the "how" (I take notes for various things -- books, movies, apps -- all over the place). But bookmarks are convenient and allow for the simplest of categorization, which I value

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#106

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

avree wrote: post #82

jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hidden? They're in plain sight at the top of every article page.

I've used this website since 2010 and just realized it was a feature. Maybe I'm just unobservant...

It's not the most used function because browsers already have a 'favorite' function, bookmarks. I used a scrapbook extension in FireFox for years so even though I know it existed I've never used it. But this post actually serves to shine some light on it and I'll give it a shot for a few weeks to see how well it works for me. HN has some amazing threads every now and then and it is really worth remembering those.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#107

Post by mindcrime » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

asutekku wrote: post #2

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark interesting links / posts. 96 favorites on the most favorited seems really low.

more people do not use the favorite feature to bookmark

Why would you, when upvoting achieves the same effect and is available with one less click? If you could "favorite" an itme from the front page then I expect the feature would get more use.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#108

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #101

CydeWeys wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20k+ karma here and same. I haven't favorited so much as a single article. Didn't realize it was an option. So the top favorited list is probably biased in some way towards the type of people more likely to discover and use this feature. I just don't know exactly what that entails.

I've noticed these and that's probably only because I trained myself to look carefully at stuff (that was a lot of work too). Small, light grey font on a beige background, well, what did HN expect.

Yeah, that's a separate but related issue: HN's UI is too low contrast to the point of posing an accessibility issue. It kind of tells you everything you need to know about YCombinator (and maybe SV VC in general) that its biggest watering hole doesn't make even this basic concession towards accessibility.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#109

Post by bmitc » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #60

tlarkworthy wrote: post #50

The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate. Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while. The learning r…

Hidden? They're in plain sight at the top of every article page.

To favorite a comment, you need to click on the time to be shown the favorite option.

Re: Most-favorited Hacker News posts

#110

Post by davidwparker » Wed, Sep 02, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #88

tlarkworthy wrote: post #50

The fact that favorites are a hidden feature and hard to use made me think the quality of the curation signal would be even better. Also the fact the HackerNews API, Angolia don't expose this feature made it even more interesting to aggregate. Hope you like it and as it was a pain gathering the data, I put it in an observable notebook so hopefully we don't need to gather that dataset again for a while. The learning r…

When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use 'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.) Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479

Oh I hope he doesn't remove favorite. I use it all the time.