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Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
221–230 of 248 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll be honest and blunt: I try to avoid his blog posts and comments as much as possible because I do find his contributions to be super spammy. It's about the frequency of his self-promotion (as a researcher in NLP it's tiresome to constantly see his self-promotion on nearly all posts on HN related to LLMs). Seems I'm not the only one. If he posted on the ML subreddit while I was still a mod there (left after the AP…
Where by "self promotion" you mean "sharing his thoughts"?
Why can't the thoughts be shared here, though, instead of always a link "to read more" somewhere else?
To read my full comment to you, visit my webpage.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#223I once published an opinion piece about how I thought Object Oriented Programming has problems and is overrated. I got 0 comments. Than I changed the title to the clickbaity "OOP is dead", floods of comments.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey Dang, I really appreciate all the work you guys are doing. However, I feel like there's a lot more repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN in the last few months than there has ever been. I feel like every other thread on here devolves into an unhinged rant about AI, enshittification, privacy, or crazy conspiracy theories about age restrictions on social media and the politicians passing them…
I'll give you my take on this but it's just my personal take: I think you're right and wrong—right because HN does go through these waves, but wrong because it's a fluctuation process that stays fairly steady in the long run. (At least we're determined to keep it so, if we can - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ) That's why people have been experiencing this "HN has gotten a lot more $B…
I’ve been posting here for a decade, and lurking for a few years before that, and your observation tracks with my experience. There’s a handful of ideas we’re collectively mulling over at any given time. They slowly rotate in and out, and modulate into different keys as they go. For instance, the leading edge of LLM related discourse seems to be improving now that we’re getting bored with both hype and outrage, although there’s still plenty of hype and outrage. Old topics still occasionally blip into focus, but they don’t have the same staying power. Like, you’ll see a Rails post every now and then, but it’s not the darling it was. I doubt we’ll ever see the likes of “Rails is a Ghetto” make the rounds again, because nobody’s worked up about it any more. Or take Skrillex, who must have been on the front page every week for a month. I was annoyed at the time, but I think we’re due for a retrospective on programmers and dubstep. I’m not the one to write it though; not my scene in the first place.
Anyway, thank you dang for your moderation!
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#225The algorithm was shared in the past. The scoring is pretty simple tbh - the older it is, the less score - the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score - penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator) How it works for the end-user: - People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page. - Most people see the main page Result: interesting topics go to the main page
> the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall... > In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker…
Yeah, you're correct
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#226The algorithm was shared in the past. The scoring is pretty simple tbh - the older it is, the less score - the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score - penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator) How it works for the end-user: - People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page. - Most people see the main page Result: interesting topics go to the main page
Additionally: Time of day and day of week seem to matter.
That's more about the competition and people online. Not about the scoring mechanism
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#227[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#228(I'm a mod here) It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks. But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are…
A great take, and thanks for your all hard work dang. Yesterday the top comment on two stories I went to discuss had deep and meaningful content, before the last line which was a "and I talk about this stuff all the time on my newsletter [link]", and I was conflicted. Same poster each time. The poster had done the HN thing: responded with thoughtful examination of TFA, unique and interesting insight, and I don't feel…
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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#229Investors talk about HN like it’s a growth lever, but the site mostly behaves like a long-running reading habit with spam defenses. A tiny slice of users on /new decide whether you even get a shot, gravity slowly pushes old stuff down, there’s a “second chance” queue for posts that looked promising but died early, and moderators occasionally hand-tune obvious mistakes. Beyond that, it’s just a bunch of curious people…
>If you treat it as a weird little newspaper run by nerds for their own curiosity
That's my favorite phrase of this entire thread, which I'm reading in its entirety.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#230Sounds like analysis paralysis. Read posts here, pay attention to what this audience expects, and then post your work. If you really want to find a source on this topic Michael Lynch (mtlynch) wrote a book called Hit the Front Page of Hacker News and you can find it if you search for it (I haven't actually read it), but I think spending an hour a week reading HN and asking yourself why a piece of writing did or didn'…