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Hacker News Leaderboard

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Re: Hacker News Leaderboard

#21

Post by crusso »

petercooper wrote: post #4
deepakjc wrote: post #2

Just saw this today, and the "leaders" are far out of my reach...

Trivia: It used to be one of the main links at the top of the page about 2+ years ago. I set a goal several years back of getting into the top 100, then top 50, and so on, and was commenting and posting loads. I guess they didn't like that too much and it disappeared onto the Lists page ;-) I don't post as much now but that's probably a good thing for me.

I set a goal several years back of getting into the top 100, then top 50

Why? Oh, why? I look at my own HN posting as a personal weakness that does nothing to advance my career, general happiness, or sense of personal development. The really successful people I've known in my life don't get caught up in tussling in Internet forums. They stay focused like a laser on goals that are much more recognizable as "success".

And that reminds me to close my browser and think about what I really want to accomplish today!

Re: Hacker News Leaderboard

#22

Post by lotsofmangos »

yitchelle wrote: post #7
petercooper wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trivia: It used to be one of the main links at the top of the page about 2+ years ago. I set a goal several years back of getting into the top 100, then top 50, and so on, and was commenting and posting loads. I guess they didn't like that too much and it disappeared onto the Lists page ;-) I don't post as much now but that's probably a good thing for me.

Other than satisfying some curiosity, what would be the value of such a leader board for HN readers?

It defines the leadership of the Council of Terra, who will be the new global overlords after the Great Forgetting Event of 2018.

Re: Hacker News Leaderboard

#23

Post by sillysaurus3 »

3rd3 wrote: post #15
ck2 wrote: post #5

Just think what we can do with all those imaginary points. I'd like see some kind of solution where submissions don't disappear so quicky. Maybe using tags that become sub-forums of sorts and the front page is just an aggregate. Like tags for SSL, ddos, security, centos, payment-solutions etc. Tags are not hard to implement, there could even be a limited set to choose from, that only certain users can add to, if ther…

I'd like see some kind of solution where submissions don't disappear so quicky. I think it would be great if there was an "old" button next to "new" in the header, in which submissions of the past month (or so) show up, ordered by a score that allows for old stories to be bumped back to the top, like points * age * comment rate. It would probably also help if new comments would be highlighted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Not really what you describe, but it's along the lines of "give me an alternative to the frontpage or /new." I don't know precisely how it works. I think it gives more weight to votes from older accounts, but that's just a guess. It does seem to be a slightly higher quality frontpage, but that might just be confirmation bias. After all, if it were truly better, then /classic would be the actual frontpage.

There's also http://hckrnews.com/ which shows a time-ordered list of all submissions that reach the frontpage each day. I prefer it to HN's frontpage, both because you can scroll back over the past few days and because there aren't that many submissions that reach the front page each day, so it's easy to quickly scroll through a list of all of them to pick out anything of interest.

Re: Hacker News Leaderboard

#24

Post by throwaway283719 »

Interestingly, within the top 100 there is a weak positive correlation between the total karma, and the average karma per comment, implying that the people at the top of the leaderboard are actually posting quality content, and not just making up for it with quantity.

The closest power law fit is

  predicted average score = 0.27 * (total score) ^ 0.25
which has a correlation of about 20% with the actual average scores.

Re: Hacker News Leaderboard

#25

Post by chollida1 »

I really like the average points tracking in Hacker news.

Its interesting to note that some people got on the leader board via only commenting when their posts were relevant, the avg. 5+ points people and some got on their through just making sure their voice was heard, even if they didn't have anything relevant to say, the people with an avg below 3 points.

I've always treated HN's a bit differently from other message boards in that I only comment when I think I have something relevant to say, which is probably driven from the average point tracking system.

I'm actually surprised at the number of leaders with avg scores under 2. I'm guessing these people treat HN's like a regular message board and just comment on everything. The average of the top 100 seems to be 4.3 so it looks like

Re: Hacker News Leaderboard

#26

Post by ck2 »

LordIllidan wrote: post #19
ck2 wrote: post #5

Just think what we can do with all those imaginary points. I'd like see some kind of solution where submissions don't disappear so quicky. Maybe using tags that become sub-forums of sorts and the front page is just an aggregate. Like tags for SSL, ddos, security, centos, payment-solutions etc. Tags are not hard to implement, there could even be a limited set to choose from, that only certain users can add to, if ther…

Looks like you're describing reddit + subreddits :)

Not really, subreddits do not have easy cross-posts.

Tags allow a submission to exist across different pseudo-subs.

So a link may be buried under one popular tag but more prominent under another.

Re: Hacker News Leaderboard

#27

Post by mjn »

This is sort of interesting to look at, but not too reliable: it only shows users whose profiles happen to be swapped in to the in-memory Arc data structures whenever the list is regenerated. So from day to day, depending on post and caching and HN restart activity, different people are included or omitted. For example, at the moment raganwald isn't on the leaderboard, even though he has >40k karma, presumably because he hasn't posted in a bit, so his profile is swapped out of memory. I filed a bug about that but it got a WONTFIX [1].

I ran into that while putting together a profile of prolific HN posters [2]. I put it together a bit at a time over several days, and noticed that people were appearing and disappearing from the list, which seemed odd. I ended up finding a third-party list on Heroku that was more stable day-to-day [3]. However it seems not to be updating any more– the numbers are now a few months old.

[1] https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49

[2] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html

[3] http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall

Re: Hacker News Leaderboard

#29

Post by josefresco »

This reminds me of those lists middle school boys and girls would make within their social circles. "Cutest Boy" or "Nicest Clothes" ... all pointless when looked upon as an older person, but at the time it was all that mattered.
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