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Hacker News Parody Thread

bradconte.com

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161–170 of 202 posts

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#161

Post by B-Con »

rapind wrote: post #140

I know this is off-topic, but does anyone know how he put this together?

Just in case you're serious: I wrote the replies out in a simple indentation format. Then when I had convinced myself I had some legitimate humor material I saved an HN page, looked at the internal layout structure (and lost a few IQ points in the process), and found an easy way to copy blocks of markup to create comments. Then I did a ton of link replacing and modifying for each comment, to give them unique IDs for voting, make username URLs match up, etc. (Note the ID numbers are all prime.)

If you view the source, it's obvious how it's cobbled together.

Interestingly, writing the first 90% of the comment content only took about 10% of the total time. Refining it and adding the rest took the other 90%.

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#162

Post by kmfrk »

vukmir wrote: post #135
kmfrk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just sort the comments randomly, as long as their karma is >=0, and place the negative-karma comments at the bottom. Done. :P This algorithmic craze is too clever for its own good. It is particularly evident in the false-positive bans. (And I swear, it's scary how HN joke comments are indistinguishable from the real ones.)

>This algorithmic craze is too clever for its own good. It is particularly evident in the false-positive bans. Source?

Well, I've been banned on this acccount for long periods of time for one. I don't know if people keep written accounts of being banned for stupid reasons.

It's not like I'm a menace to the community.

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#166

Post by 1337p337 »

kmfrk wrote: post #68
johnernaut wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters in high performance Python.

Just sort the comments randomly, as long as their karma is >=0, and place the negative-karma comments at the bottom. Done. :P This algorithmic craze is too clever for its own good. It is particularly evident in the false-positive bans. (And I swear, it's scary how HN joke comments are indistinguishable from the real ones.)

Well, random sorting might be a bit of an annoyance due to HN's other annoyance, the "Unknown or expired link" problem, which seems to crop up more often if I do actual work and then pop over to HN when I have to wait for tests/compilation/etc. Locating the comment you were replying to with random or date-based sorting (so that you can click "reply" again, paste your previous reply, and then resubmit) would be a serious pain in combination with that.

But you're correct in that the current algorithm (or any sufficiently transparent algorithm) does lend itself to gaming. It might be harder to game if you didn't mind penalizing comments based on the quality[1] of replies they generate, then sorting based on the thread's average quality would mean that there's less incentive to post in the top thread just to get exposure, since your new, karma-less post will drag down its average and subsequently could drag down the thread. That could get prohibitively expensive to calculate for huge threads, but would be less prone to gaming, I think.

[1] If we can hand-wave "karma" to mean "quality"; I get way more upvotes when I am flippant but technically correct than I do when I try to be thoughtful.

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#168

Post by ianstallings »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #127
j_baker wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop arguing the web is dead and just SHIP something. Your customers aren't paying you for blog posts.

My customers aren't paying me for anything, we don't have a business model yet. How much you pay to read a blog post on why that isn't important?

My mind is blown.
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