HN Explorer

Show HN: Prioritize Anything with Stacks (stack-ranker.com)

46 points by seanconnollydev ↗ HN
In life's journey, the quality of our decisions often determines our path. After many trips around the sun, the most impactful advice I could give the younger generation is to hone your decision quality. Life presents us with a continuous series of choices, frequently made with limited information and an abundance of unpredictable variables. By optimizing our decision-making process, we increase our chances of staying on a favorable path.

I make so many decisions in personal and professional spheres that I wanted to make it as easy as possible to get straight to the point. My goal was twofold:

1. To minimize bias as much as possible.

2. To alleviate the overwhelming anxiety that often accompanies complex choices with unclear outcomes.

I recognized that many decisions impact not just ourselves but also our friends, family, and other stakeholders. This realization led me to develop a solution that works equally well for individual use and collaborative decision-making.

While I didn't invent pairwise comparative analysis, nor am I the first to build a tool based on this concept, I've created my own implementation. I believe it offers a unique approach to decision-making, and I hope you try it.

37 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 83.8 ms ] thread
bberenberg
I was actually looking at building something like this for analyzing different AI generated voices. I ended up going down a statistics rabbit hole to understand how to reduce the total number of comparisons to be made while still getting a good result. Have you considered how your tool can work with different metadata across the comparison set to reduce total comparisons needed? Also accepting a CSV similar as an input?
rachofsunshine
I don't know how OP does it, but Elo ratings are a pretty good tool for this kind of thing. In each pairwise comparison, the selected option "wins", the other option "loses", and ratings are adjusted accordingly.

You can incorporate priors by setting initial ratings differently, or force correlations between items by treating a win against option X as something like 0.8 wins against option X and 0.2 wins against options correlated with X.

travisjungroth
This really is a deep rabbit hole and something I've played around with and considered devoting a lot of time to. Look into Expert Elicitation, Decision Theory and Order Theory.

There is no one-size fits all. This the most important thing to keep in mind from the start.

This type of ranking is really all about UX. The math is just a tool to make it easier. It's a real trap to find some theory and think this will solve things, but if it doesn't actually make it easier for people to make decisions, you really didn't solve the problem.

Sometimes it looks like stack ranking would help. But, often you don't really need a stack. Maybe you just need the top one or the top N. Maybe each item has a weight and you want to fit the most value for a given weight allocation (knapsack problem). Maybe the weights and values aren't actually known, just relatively (this one is more work and more valuable than that one). Maybe value is compounding, like u({A, B}) > u({A}) + u({B}).

Maybe the preferences are circular, like A > B > C > A. But that's not possible! Well, that's what the user says and just throwing up an error screen probably won't fix it. You'll need to handle that gracefully.

My suggestion is to really stick to one specific problem and solve for that, versus something general. Also allow the input to be rich. Rather than a win/lose, you might be better off with -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 in comparison (or words). Allow ties until they're actually a problem. Why make people struggle to choose between two options when neither of them end up being used?

It can also help to see things as probabilistically better rather than strictly better. Elo scores help with this, like the other comment said.

Decision ability is a resource. Decision fatigue is real and fast. Optimize for taking up as little as that as possible from the user, especially if that user is you.

dartos
I’d suggest changing that name. In a world where tech layoffs are super common “Stack Ranking” has an extremely negative connotation.
rachofsunshine
That was my first thought before I even clicked the link.

Maybe "bracket" or something tournament-associated.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
sverhagen
Well, to be fair, you could use it for that too?
seanconnollydev
I felt this tbh. I preferred stacks.com or something but domains like that are hard to come by.
stared
Overview and Items have the same form and style, so it is easy visually to confuse these.

Also, I am not sure what it does. First, I write to options. Then it asks me which one I prefer. I guess I am missing what added value is here.

joeyagreco
Belli is a restaurant rating app that uses a similar approach to ranking restaurants and giving them a score 0-10.

Really simplifies things.

https://beliapp.com/

qntmfred
I built a tool for myself like this a while back. For me, the most common usage pattern was making a braindump bullet list of TODOs in Obsidian, realizing there were enough items that it wasn't immediately clear where to start, and then copy/pasting the bullet points into my tool to start the ranking process and getting the prioritized list at the end.

In other words, consider making it easy to paste a bunch of items to create your items rather than one at a time with the card UX you have now

xnx
Seconded. This tool is most useful when the number of items to evaluate exceeds the amount you'd want to type in by hand.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
seanconnollydev
Love this! I like the idea of being able to add subtext to help explain to others in scenarios where you're trying to work with other participants but the copy/paste option makes a ton of sense.
2shortplanks
Whoa! STOP!

At no point did anything say when I was creating stacks that this info would be public for other users of the site! I was shocked to find what I’d been ranking (which luckily was just chip flavors) available for anyone to see. What if I’d tried putting clients to evaluate in there?

You can’t just collect personal data and share it like that!

Retr0id
Their privacy policy does say "When you create a Stack, please be aware that all content you input is public and can be viewed by anyone.", but I agree, it's super unintuitive that this is the case.

The "Create Stack" button should probably say "Publish Stack".

(and ideally also an "unlisted" checkbox, which generates you a uuid-based sharing URL)

_ZeD_
> You can’t just collect personal data and share it like that!

yeah, there should be some rule about what user data can be collected and transparency about its usage...

wait, that's the GDPR! grin

Redster
So, it took me a while to figure out what this was. This is essentially a round-robin polling tool, with ranked results. Each poll-session has only two options that you choose between, but the entire poll can have n-options. At the end, you'll see the options ranked from most-chosen to least-chosen.

A gif, or something explaining the "what" on the home page might be good. I get that the conventional wisdom is to show the problem you solve, but "make better decisions, one choice at a time" left me confused. When I actually used one of the demo stacks, I was like, "Oh! I need this!"

Congrats on building a cool tool. I like it. I hope it goes well for you.

One feature I would be interested in is to separate answers by user. (Even if it was anonymous, with no user data collected) I would love to see what packages of choices came through a stack.

seanconnollydev
Awesome. Some kind of gif/visual makes a lot of sense for people who aren't familiar with the ranking method.
megadata
Will it help with analysis paralysis? If not, is there anything that does?
seanconnollydev
It does for me, definitely. It's so much easier to think about 2 options vs 20. It works better if you really sit and think about it rather than just mindlessly clicking through though.
Telemakhos
I created a stack, but now I only get a "500 - Internal Server Error," so I can't test it.

edit: for debugging purposes, if the author reads this, the stack is https://stack-ranker.com/stacks/quis-in-historia-apollonii-r... — it consists of number of entries (less than two dozen, I think), each with the main text and sub text filled out.

seanconnollydev
Thanks for pointing this out. I'm working out a few kinks. Your stack should work again!
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
recursive
I understood "stacks" to be data structures with push and pop operations. This seems more like a sorting algorithm.
svilen_dobrev
check similar https://chooseit.sitesell.com/

When i was looking at it (years ago) it lived in browser only. No idea how it is now.

i didn't like the multi-page and remade it as all-on-one-html-page for my own usage

lifeisstillgood
You are one recommendation from Uncle Bob away from becoming part of the next SaFE (Scalable Agile FSomething something) process - good luck :-)

Make a Jira plugin and make your fortune :-)

Artoooooor
Checked it on something without any life impact - Minecraft base locations. Seems to work well. The biggest problem exists with elements on Pareto front - so I have to decide between good in one thing and good on another thing instead of good and worse. But pairwise comparison still helps to determine which tradeoff is better for me.