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What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#42This is a good rundown but misses the biggest thing, random chance . Depending on time of day the your post will stay on page one of "new" for between 20-40 minutes. It needs about 4-6 upvotes in that time to drop onto the bottom of the homepage, and then with that a chance of more eyeballs. Some people skim page two and look for thing with a couple of votes for closer inspection, but the reality is you have that bri…
The second chance pool is a pretty good example of just how mercilessly random getting on the front page is. Lots of cool and interesting stuff just slips by and gets drowned out the first time it's submitted.
Case in point: TFA was submitted five days ago[0] and barely got any upvotes. Now this second submission has over 100 upvotes and made the front page
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Frandomshit.dev%2Fpos...
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#43I have a fair amount of experience getting things to the front page of Hacker News because I sometimes share work from Hack Club (https://hackclub.com), a coding nonprofit I work for.
By far, beyond any tricks or special hacks, the most effective mechanism is just posting things people on HN will genuinely find interesting. And that’s the beauty of this place!
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, while I knew about the pool, I didn't know there was a page that actually showed it.
Exactly! There is no link on the main hn page to this pool, how are we supposed to visit there? And if nobody visits, what's even the use of having this pool! Who knows what other hidden nuggets these chosen few Illuminati are hiding!
> There is no link on the main hn page to this pool
In fact, there is one! But it is somehow, hidden. In the front page scroll to the bottom and you will find some footnotes in the form of links, click the “lists” item and it will take you to another page, choose the second item “pool” and you are there!
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#45If you care about the number of votes or comments an article gets you can get it out of Firebase
https://github.com/HackerNews/API
and it is a much more certain thing. I have a (i) a model that predicts "will this headline get more than 10 votes?" and (ii) one that predicts "if this headline gets more than 10 votes does it get a ratio of comments to votes greater than the median (roughly 0.5)?"
The best model I have for (i) is still a bag of words model that doesn't try to correct for time series variations, the AuC is atrocious, maybe around 65%, but I like the model because high-scoring headlines look like a parody of high-scoring headlines, I think "Richard Stallman has died" could be the best possible headline. (It's silly to thing you could get good performance at this because it can't see if the article has a flashy picture or other attractive attributes that would raise the vote rate.) I've made other models with fancier methods but none perform better nor are more entertaining.
As for (ii) the most commented articles tend to be clickbaity so it would be irresponsible to submit a feed of high scoring articles that isn't well curated. I am getting an AuC of around 72% which is what I got with my first recommender.
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#46Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#47> ShowHN posts almost never make the front page ( Based on other details of analysis, I believe this means 2% of front pages posts are ShowHN. Not that 98% of ShowHN posts fail to reach front page. But the author doubles down on this confusion with flawed methodology: > Second, and perhaps more importantly, the dataset doesn’t record the attempts made to get to the front page, i.e. all posts on Hacker News in a given…
For curiosity's sake I wanted to estimate the probability of getting to the front page with a show hn. The easy but terrible way is to just look at a few new show hn from yesterday and look at how many got more than 50 points. The answer ~4% (3/79). Please expect gigantic error bars. Links checked: 2/30 from https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew?next=36572237&n=61 1/30 from https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew?next=36…
You just (poorly) measured the same thing the article did.
I'm still curious to know what % of Show HNs make the front page.
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#48Hi, I am collecting links from various places. Even from Hacker news. I have links since start of the year [1]. Maybe someone will find them useful. You should look at files named like [2].
[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023
[2] https.hnrss.orgfrontpage_entries.json
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#49My anecdotal experience agrees that blog posts with promotions are better than "here's my product" , on average. Though you can just do both. I've front paged Hacker News a few times and I've recently had a lot of success promoting a product on Reddit. Often times I see boostrappers hype up Twitter as a marketing channel and lament that Reddit / Hacker News is impossible since it's a lottery to get upvotes, mods take…
Or better still be a regular member of the community. Nothing raises my hackles like something posted and commented on by a group who have hardly a karma point between them.
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#50> ShowHN posts almost never make the front page ( Based on other details of analysis, I believe this means 2% of front pages posts are ShowHN. Not that 98% of ShowHN posts fail to reach front page. But the author doubles down on this confusion with flawed methodology: > Second, and perhaps more importantly, the dataset doesn’t record the attempts made to get to the front page, i.e. all posts on Hacker News in a given…
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