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Hacker News Analysis

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Re: Hacker News Analysis

#31

Post by Super_Jambo »

Joakal wrote: post #22
bermanoid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is a problem with a crystal clear cause: if you allow purely democratic voting, then you'll end up with really popular crap reaching the top of the pile fairly often. Imagine how useless Pagerank would be as an algorithm if it considered links from every drooler with a domain name to count for the same amount as those coming from the frontpage of Yahoo - that's essentially what you're doing when you tally up…

Your last suggestion seems to make things less democratic understandably, but how would it be implemented?

I've actually implemented a system like this on isdaily (a news site I'm building.)

I came to the conclusion that using Karma as a score is a rather bad idea as it assumes that people who get voted up have better judgement: "If you post well you must vote well."

But I'm sceptical that this is the case, it's easy to see someone like patio11 has both excellent judgement and a high karma score. But vote power = karma probably means you're giving a casting vote to patio11 if he turns up but mainly you're giving vote power to the people who post the most.

The implementation I have is basically: "If you made hard decisions in the past and voted well, you get more vote power."

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#32

Post by ignifero »

alanfalcon wrote: post #28
Joakal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last suggestion seems to make things less democratic understandably, but how would it be implemented?

I like the idea of upvotes and downvotes being multiplied by your avg score. tptacek's votes would be worth 8.85 at the moment, bermanoid's 3.5, and mine 2.92. Newbies would come in at 1.

That would be a violation of the democratic principle behind social news and would incentivize people to game their scores. Members have different interests and expertise, so having a high avg score doesn't mean they are experts in everything (Abuse of power - OMG this is getting more intricate than i thought)

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#34

Post by Joakal »

jamesbritt wrote: post #26
Joakal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last suggestion seems to make things less democratic understandably, but how would it be implemented?

Your last suggestion seems to make things less democratic understandably, but how would it be implemented? Weighted votes based on karma. Or restrict the number of votes a user can cast based on karma or account age. A problem with these kinds of things is determining what does or does not work and picking up on unintended side-effects, and doing so in a timely manner. For example, if "young" accounts have very limit…

I suggest similar to Reddit's anti-spam mechanism, fuzz the voting but give the impression that karma is somewhat important.

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#35

Post by JoachimSchipper »

rflrob wrote: post #27
lt wrote: post #19

I've been thinking lately about running some analysis of my own, but couldn't find a data dump and didn't feel like scraping. Why has the dump been pulled? I'm thinking of classifying entries as temporal/atemporal. Temporal are industry news, press releases, rumors and alike. Atemporal are reference materials, essays, howtos, analysis, links to libraries/frameworks/products. Essentially, I feel that while temporal en…

It's not obvious to me how to automatically classify stories as (a)temporal. My understanding of the way submissions work is that if Bob submits something that Alice also recently[1] submitted, then it just gets counted as an upvote for Alice's story. Then, of course, there are the "this happened recently, which inspired me to think about some broader trend". For example, during the AWS outage, Coding Horror had a st…

Anything that has been re-submitted is atemporal. That doesn't catch nearly everything, but...

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#36

Post by lt »

rflrob wrote: post #27
lt wrote: post #19

I've been thinking lately about running some analysis of my own, but couldn't find a data dump and didn't feel like scraping. Why has the dump been pulled? I'm thinking of classifying entries as temporal/atemporal. Temporal are industry news, press releases, rumors and alike. Atemporal are reference materials, essays, howtos, analysis, links to libraries/frameworks/products. Essentially, I feel that while temporal en…

It's not obvious to me how to automatically classify stories as (a)temporal. My understanding of the way submissions work is that if Bob submits something that Alice also recently[1] submitted, then it just gets counted as an upvote for Alice's story. Then, of course, there are the "this happened recently, which inspired me to think about some broader trend". For example, during the AWS outage, Coding Horror had a st…

I believe your understanding is right, recently being a month, provided it's the exact same URL. Popular news are usually submitted from different sources so there are actual duplicates. I agree that it's certainly not easy to automate the classification.

The Coding Horror example is a very good one. Jeff write very atemporal stories, I'm pretty sure that happens intentionally. It's not unusual to see one of his posts from several years ago pop in the front page every now and then. Same with Joel's. It may be inspired by a recent event, but the lesson is meant to stand.

I think a good heuristic would be: given a random, highly voted story from the archives, would it get upvoted if reposted today?

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#37

Post by palish »

Perfect example of how graphs can be subtly deceptive:

1) "Variance in number of comments" is visualized as a circle's radius.

2) ... But a circle's area increases as (pi)r^2. That's an exponential increase.

A fair visualization would show a linear increase, not an exponential one.

EDIT: To be more clear, the goal is "more pixels" = "more variance". Growing the visualization by a radius is inherently unfair.

It's precisely these kind of subtleties that make statistics such a fallacy minefield.

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#38

Post by [deleted] »

vtail wrote: post #24

An interesting analysis (which only pg could do) is to multiply each vote by ln(user's karma) or something similar. That could arguably deal with "noobs who don't follow the rules" problem. The above analysis will assume, though, that the problem of decreasing quality of votes (or discussions) is caused by newcomers and not by old high karma users getting nastier.

[deleted]

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#39

Post by eru »

notJim wrote: post #20
eru wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't get your comment.

I'm just pointing out that it should come as no surprise that the author of this blog post didn't come up with a good metric for judging quality. As in, if the author had come up with such a metric, he would have started a company and become fantastically wealthy applying this magical quality-quantifying algorithm, rather than writing a blog post.

Perhaps. But they are degrees of usefulness, and it's probably possible to do better. Especially if you do an analysis in hindsight, where it's no longer possible for the participants to game the system.

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#40

Post by eru »

palish wrote: post #37

Perfect example of how graphs can be subtly deceptive: 1) "Variance in number of comments" is visualized as a circle's radius. 2) ... But a circle's area increases as (pi)r^2. That's an exponential increase. A fair visualization would show a linear increase, not an exponential one. EDIT: To be more clear, the goal is "more pixels" = "more variance". Growing the visualization by a radius is inherently unfair. It's pre…

> 2) ... But a circle's area increases as (pi)r^2. That's an exponential increase.

Oh, it's an exponential increase in 2, but a linear increase in Pi.

Anyway, just pretend that the area of the circle is proportional to the variance, and the radius to the standard deviation.

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