It favors hn links that have a low squabble index.
> This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according to this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative ones. In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes.
I haven’t heard the term “squabble index” before, and google returned zilch, but I like it. That being said, I tend to use the comments on HN as a filter for whether or not the article itself will be worth my time. Perhaps this is a flawed heuristic.
> Like a lot of folks here, I always appreciate things that are minimal and quick.
One of the appealing aspects of this (and hckrnews's) implementation, for me, is that it works, at least minimally, without javascript turned on. This is in contrast to other alternatives presented here.
This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according to this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative ones. In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes.
Interesting thesis. The current listing didn't convince me there's any merit to it.
I might check this site out more often if it included the HN front page ranking and a green/red up/down arrow showing the relative diff.
I've wondered about making the opposite, that is, a view that sorts by controversy.
There are quite a few things that get posted here that quickly get votes, quite a few comments, but are soon killed/massively down-ranked by flags. Sometimes it would be interesting to be able to see what these are if you don't see them in the hour or two that they're visible. I know they're often controversial social or political topics and that HN doesn't really want them, but they can still be interesting to look at.
You might want to have a look at https://hckrnews.com - it shows all stories that ever were on the frontpage, ordered by time of first appearance on the frontpage.
Imho it's the other way around. Threads with a lot of discussion is interesting because... there is a lot of discussion meaning there are multiple views and rational arguments. I think I like HN's algorithm better than this one, but it's a very interesting idea, so it's definitely good that we have both (for algorithmic variety).
I should note that while this site is how I weaned myself off Hacker News, it’s no longer as useful as it was in the past (hnconf has existed for 6 years). I’ve a feeling dang has taken this observation into account (that upvote to comment ratio is a signal of quality) and they’ve adjusted HN’s ranking algo accordingly.
I still use the site, but for a different reason: a site that updates once every 30 minutes is far less addictive than a site that updates all the time.
Shameless plug: if you’re interested in little career optimisations like these, you might want to check out my writing at https://commoncog.com/blog
For example, you post something about PostgreSQL on HN it'll have a ton of discussion. That's not just because there is squabbling, it's because people are interested. Often it is a disagreement, but it could be providing additional context. Take this comment thread on PostgeSQL 11:
The comments are significantly more interesting and helpful than the article (not that the article is bad, just the collective knowledge of HN provides more value). I often upvote items because I think they are interesting, but I comment asking questions, adding context, or providing feedback. That's the value of hacker news, IMO.
If you filter that out, I might as well just go to my feedly.
Yes. In many cases, comments help with understanding posts, and seeing value vs bullshit. Also, I sometimes find myself on HN, when researching problems, and it's comments and cited resources that are most useful.
Exactly, it's often super clear there are voting rings. I've seen some posts shoot up to the top, that make absolutely no sense (often they drop out relatively quickly, once they hit the front page).
211 upvote with only 54 comments seems like a thread with a very high votes-to-comments ratio as well as a high absolute number of upvotes, so I would expect the algorithm to rate it highly.
Perhaps, enough readers looking at the thread and enjoying the article or the discussion would leave an upvote, even if they don't leave a comment. However, in the "squabbly" threads, commenters seem to overrun upvoters, and quickly at that.
I've seen some where someone was creating new HN accounts to circumvent HN's comment rate-limiting, due to wanting to respond on so many sub-threads. It's difficult to imagine that kind of fervor resulting in thoughtful discourse or even conforming to HN's guideline regarding being more substantive when more divisive. As such, a high comment-count velocity would be a good "negative" measure, but, absent that, just comment count is a good enough heuristic.
> If you filter that out, I might as well just go to my feedly.
Personally, I don't think I'd use it as an exclusive filter, but, perhaps, as a next step after the HN front page (but before the HN page 2).
I think this post itself is a great example. At the moment, there's a post about vaccines above this post. It has had very little discussions, isn't really about "hacking".
Literally the first comment is complaining how it's lacking:
That can be viewed as a very good thing, considering the word "vaccine" can be a lightning-rod fod flamewars, even on HN.
> isn't really about "hacking"
It's about science and how it's funded, which is routinely a topic of interest here, and is well within the guidelines: "That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
> In the OP's link, the vaccine article appears above this post by a wide margin. It shouldn't.
Ah, but I disagree. The discussion in this thread is very "meta" and could easily be characterized as annoying, even though I don't (yet) personally find it to be.
HN itself already pushes down articles that get more comments than votes. Maybe not as aggressively as this site does it, but threads definitely drop down the rankings very quickly if the number of comments starts outpacing the score much.
I prefer the chronological order of hckrnews. Also this is more annoying to me because I cannot access it without a proxy (from Russia, probably because it's hosted on AWS).
As I'm more interested in reading about Technology News and announcements instead of the more political and non-technology content that's frequently appearing on HN.
It's a mix of HN/Reddit where anyone can create and become an "owner of a Technology" where they can moderate content posted to their own section and enlist other Moderators to help.
It's optimized for fast navigation and posting with a number of keyboard shortcuts to access most pages of the site. The benefit over HN / Reddit is richer metadata so you can drill into just the news you're interested in. You can "Subscribe" to different technology content and you can post full markdown so content is richer and more visually appealing (if that's what you prefer). In a way I like to think of it as a "hosted RSS" as you can customize your own news feed (in addition to the global feed) in just the content you're interested in.
The sites other primary purpose is to learn about the different "Technology Stacks" that popular Startups and Apps use, which is primarily where all the external contributions are going towards.
It's an OSS/BSD project which you can read more about its features and how it was built at:
Previously I was posting all the interesting Tech News/Posts I've found on HN/Reddit but haven't been able to keep up in the last 3 months due to work time constraints, I'll pick it back up when everything settles back down again, but would obviously love if others could contribute Tech News/Announcements they find interesting.
Ultimately I'd really like to frequent a better "Tech Only News" feed of HN's expert comment quality as I feel that a lot of good Tech Content is being lost and hidden by clickbaity and political news.
It’s kind of ironic that if there is a lot of interest (comments) in this project that it will fall off the front page. But not on Hacker News itself. Only on the project page itself.
To be honest I follow HN via feed (Rss2Email), have tried hackernews Emacs interface but it's simply too limited. WebUI is horrible and IMVHO can't be really improved with web-tech.
For me the best thing is resurrect usenet and create an hn group, eventually prox-ed to the site. It's not a matter of coding but means, websites are great if they are hypertext, if they are applications (like support comment etc) they are bad. newsgroups or mailing-lists work pretty for discussion.
It's also less annoying because the layout makes better use of the screen space and the hotspots are larger which makes it even better for mobile and touchscreen devices.
I find this page a little hard to scan. I see that you're going for a minimal look by keeping all post info on a single line, but the varying line length means that the number of upvotes, for example, is in a very different place each time. On the HN homepage, I can glance down in a few seconds and see which posts have the most upvotes, but here I need to concentrate quite hard to do the same since my eye has to do a bit of searching.
By-passes most soft paywalls. No Javascript. No Tracking. No 'social' media buttons. No modal dialogs. Just text you can read in a terminal based rss reader like canto.
For those that are interested, I took a slightly different approach by making a “Hacker News Cleanser service that will periodically hide articles based on title keywords, site, and user.
52 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadHowever, I’d like to ask:
1) what, to you, makes HN annoying? In my experience it is already a very minimal, light, and quick site. What problem did you aim to solve?
2) does this offer any advantage of the many minimal HN sites? E.g. hckrnews?
> This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according to this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative ones. In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes.
I haven’t heard the term “squabble index” before, and google returned zilch, but I like it. That being said, I tend to use the comments on HN as a filter for whether or not the article itself will be worth my time. Perhaps this is a flawed heuristic.
One of the appealing aspects of this (and hckrnews's) implementation, for me, is that it works, at least minimally, without javascript turned on. This is in contrast to other alternatives presented here.
Interesting thesis. The current listing didn't convince me there's any merit to it.
I might check this site out more often if it included the HN front page ranking and a green/red up/down arrow showing the relative diff.
There are quite a few things that get posted here that quickly get votes, quite a few comments, but are soon killed/massively down-ranked by flags. Sometimes it would be interesting to be able to see what these are if you don't see them in the hour or two that they're visible. I know they're often controversial social or political topics and that HN doesn't really want them, but they can still be interesting to look at.
More political and "bikeshed-dy" an article is, the more comments it has. This seems great to eliminate that type of fluff.
https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio
It has both sorting orders and also past archives, with the other way round sorting as default.
I should note that while this site is how I weaned myself off Hacker News, it’s no longer as useful as it was in the past (hnconf has existed for 6 years). I’ve a feeling dang has taken this observation into account (that upvote to comment ratio is a signal of quality) and they’ve adjusted HN’s ranking algo accordingly.
I still use the site, but for a different reason: a site that updates once every 30 minutes is far less addictive than a site that updates all the time.
Shameless plug: if you’re interested in little career optimisations like these, you might want to check out my writing at https://commoncog.com/blog
As the author of https://hnprofile.com - I've spent a long time analyzing this...
For example, you post something about PostgreSQL on HN it'll have a ton of discussion. That's not just because there is squabbling, it's because people are interested. Often it is a disagreement, but it could be providing additional context. Take this comment thread on PostgeSQL 11:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17962821
The comments are significantly more interesting and helpful than the article (not that the article is bad, just the collective knowledge of HN provides more value). I often upvote items because I think they are interesting, but I comment asking questions, adding context, or providing feedback. That's the value of hacker news, IMO.
If you filter that out, I might as well just go to my feedly.
Edit: Prior discussion about hnprofile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981
IMO, high upvote count without comments is a smell. Something is probably a little off.
That example doesn't seem to support your point.
211 upvote with only 54 comments seems like a thread with a very high votes-to-comments ratio as well as a high absolute number of upvotes, so I would expect the algorithm to rate it highly.
Perhaps, enough readers looking at the thread and enjoying the article or the discussion would leave an upvote, even if they don't leave a comment. However, in the "squabbly" threads, commenters seem to overrun upvoters, and quickly at that.
I've seen some where someone was creating new HN accounts to circumvent HN's comment rate-limiting, due to wanting to respond on so many sub-threads. It's difficult to imagine that kind of fervor resulting in thoughtful discourse or even conforming to HN's guideline regarding being more substantive when more divisive. As such, a high comment-count velocity would be a good "negative" measure, but, absent that, just comment count is a good enough heuristic.
> If you filter that out, I might as well just go to my feedly.
Personally, I don't think I'd use it as an exclusive filter, but, perhaps, as a next step after the HN front page (but before the HN page 2).
Literally the first comment is complaining how it's lacking:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17997400
In the OP's link, the vaccine article appears above this post by a wide margin. It shouldn't.
That can be viewed as a very good thing, considering the word "vaccine" can be a lightning-rod fod flamewars, even on HN.
> isn't really about "hacking"
It's about science and how it's funded, which is routinely a topic of interest here, and is well within the guidelines: "That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
> In the OP's link, the vaccine article appears above this post by a wide margin. It shouldn't.
Ah, but I disagree. The discussion in this thread is very "meta" and could easily be characterized as annoying, even though I don't (yet) personally find it to be.
However, in my web app, I sort by reverse order by default to show the most heated submissions first, with the option to reverse the order.
As a bonus, it also has past archives. Feel free to check it out:
https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio
https://techstacks.io
As I'm more interested in reading about Technology News and announcements instead of the more political and non-technology content that's frequently appearing on HN.
It's a mix of HN/Reddit where anyone can create and become an "owner of a Technology" where they can moderate content posted to their own section and enlist other Moderators to help.
It's optimized for fast navigation and posting with a number of keyboard shortcuts to access most pages of the site. The benefit over HN / Reddit is richer metadata so you can drill into just the news you're interested in. You can "Subscribe" to different technology content and you can post full markdown so content is richer and more visually appealing (if that's what you prefer). In a way I like to think of it as a "hosted RSS" as you can customize your own news feed (in addition to the global feed) in just the content you're interested in.
The sites other primary purpose is to learn about the different "Technology Stacks" that popular Startups and Apps use, which is primarily where all the external contributions are going towards.
It's an OSS/BSD project which you can read more about its features and how it was built at:
https://github.com/NetCoreApps/TechStacks
Previously I was posting all the interesting Tech News/Posts I've found on HN/Reddit but haven't been able to keep up in the last 3 months due to work time constraints, I'll pick it back up when everything settles back down again, but would obviously love if others could contribute Tech News/Announcements they find interesting.
Ultimately I'd really like to frequent a better "Tech Only News" feed of HN's expert comment quality as I feel that a lot of good Tech Content is being lost and hidden by clickbaity and political news.
For me the best thing is resurrect usenet and create an hn group, eventually prox-ed to the site. It's not a matter of coding but means, websites are great if they are hypertext, if they are applications (like support comment etc) they are bad. newsgroups or mailing-lists work pretty for discussion.
See here:
https://github.com/HackerNews/API
https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content
This generates an RSS feed with the contents of the articles inlined and available at https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...
By-passes most soft paywalls. No Javascript. No Tracking. No 'social' media buttons. No modal dialogs. Just text you can read in a terminal based rss reader like canto.
https://github.com/barrowclift/hacker-news-cleanser