Ask HN: What does the percentage next to posts mean? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does the percentage next to posts mean?

166 pointsflippant68 comments

I was experimenting with collecting some stats on posts and accidentally published that version of the page.

Normally I'd say sorry, but this turned out to be so amusing that I guess I'm not sorry. Carry on!

Edit: you guys blow my mind. One of these years we should do this on purpose.

Which stats?

I remembered there being special options and information for mods from a post a while ago and was able to dig up this screenshot which contains a % score: http://imgur.com/ge3ZBgt

The mystery continues! :)

EDIT: And apparently that % score was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972234

So now you're going to leave a thousand hackers to figure out what it did without any further hints. I see how it is.

The mystery is so much better.

I have to ask, why are you even LOOKING at a production server on Friday? Do you like wrecked weekends, cause thats how you get wrecked weekends.

Yeah. I can't even imagine how much revenue YC must lose for each minute of news downtime.

Given how much of a time sink HN is for everyone including YC startups, it may well be that HN downtime is a profit for YC.

Revenue from where? I don't see any advertisements.

Good point. Read-only Fridays are thing for sysadmins ;-)

Pshaw... Push on Friday, Patch on Saturday, Pray on Sunday that no one calls me to fix anything else!

Oh man, I wish I had that luxury in flight testing. No one likes flying on Friday afternoons. Especially when things break.

Bit off-topic: At my last workplace they used to push our code for several ecommerce sites to production on fridays, every week, without tests. It somehow worked out.

Dilbert cartoons will be written about this in later years, if not already.

Totally out there option... Rain percentage from the geolocation of the ip that submitted it

The numbers of this post were 106/70% , then I upvoted it, refreshed, it became 107/69%.

So maybe percentage is how many people viewed the front page but didn't upvote it (since you can't downvote it)...

... A-a-and it's gone now...

http://i.imgur.com/nlwvHJK.png an example for those that did not see it

Now let's see if someone can pull from the API and cross-correlate to figure out what they likely meant.

Here's another: https://i.imgur.com/hsRJnPw.png

Was it an indicator of the quality of the comments section?

Looks like the percentages appeared, then HN went down briefly (server restart, sorry @dang), and now the percentages are gone.

> then HN went down

We prefer to call that "restarting the server" :)

I really admire you guys for keeping it simple. I have seen too many outages due to piss poor "high availability" design, which would have simply been avoided by not trying to be highly available! Damn, we really need a catchy term/phrase for that (besides ironic)

Thank you. Praise for simplicity is high praise.

As simple as possible. But no simpler.

That's not usually the side anyone has trouble with.

In which case I'm nobody.

I've criticised a number of projects for overcompressing the problem domain. Larry Wall's written on this eloquently.

And I'm not criticising HN's server infrastructure. Earlier discussion of style/presentation somewhat. Though for that I'm as inclined to criticise overdesign as well -- mostly on other sites, though arguably table-based layouts are a kludge.

I think it may have been sentiment analysis. The low ranked threads appeared to have a more negative tone, at least during my quick anecdotal survey, and this thread was high ranked perhaps because people hadn't had time to create really long complaints.

It can't be sentiment analysis because some items didn't have any comments but still had a percentage. Some other clues that we have is that the percentage didn't correlate with the color and that pretty much all the recently submitted links didn't have percentages.

Seems unlikely, pretty hard to attached a computer created value to something like that.

That's why you need debug output to see how it's doing :)

In this case, you'd do it based on the upvoting and downvoting ratios of comments.

50 comments, with 15 grey comments = bad sentiment, lots of negativity, non-productive conversations etc. Then come up with a scoring algorithm, with red being volatile or bad sentiment so the moderators can spot them instantly visually.

nope, there are examples of posts with a percentage that have no comments.

Some of the percentages appear related to upvoter count.

There is one with 9 upvoters and a percentage of 33.

My guess is it's a measure of clique voting. X% of people voted on another story together.

Not sure, that may be more complicated than needed, but it seems to be a percent measure of the upvoters.

This is a chance for moderators to conduct a social experiment: let people speculate in this thread for two days before revealing what it is. Just to see what crazy theories people come up with! :)

And after two days it turns out it's a random number.

A random number that goes up when you upvote..

Maybe it's the likeliness of a story to appeal to you, based on your past votes?

Of course, now the percentages are gone.

you're just lucky!

I like it. Crowdsourcing your ideas. A meta-MVP.

Maybe YC has made part of the sorting algorithm public. Perhaps by accident.

The colors are strange too. Some percents in red, some in gray, but it doesn't seem to be directly correlated with the quantity displayed or the post age.

I think the colours may relates to the way the story is trending (up or down).

All of the colors above 50 percent seemed to be red, while none below were.

And, they're gone.

I don't see them either.

Heat/trending of some sorts?

I think it is likely something along these lines. I up-voted this question and the percentage rose.

But I upvoted another submission and the percentage fell!

Did you have Javascript disabled? Upvoting with JS enabled generates an additional GET request for an image with the same href as the vote button.

Perhaps part of their security minded hacker detection system. ;)

If @0942v8653 is correct, stories can't be downvoted, then this sounds like the best guess to me. :)

It's quite distracting. There's already enough text packed closely together as it is.

"freshness"

No idea, but I'm guessing the percentage of votes that positive. Or something related to that.

Stories cannot be downvoted, no matter how much karma you have.

A TWIST! Now I have no idea what these could be.

That's what I was thinking as well. I refreshed the page repeatedly and saw the percentage fluctuate as the score only went up.

Not exactly a foolproof test though. I think you're probably still right.

I though it was %upvoted/downvoted as well.

>Posting in epic thread.

Percentage of visitors that click it?

speculation: could be the ratio of how many people upvote vs how many view the link?

Thats an interesting theory, but unless everybody votes way more often than me those numbers seem really high.

agreed, they are relatively high for that.

is there an xhr attached to opening of the link in a new tab?

Does HN even track how many people view the link? As far as I can tell, there's no JS on the home page other than the not-even-AJAX powering the upvote and downvote buttons, and they're not using <a ping>, so I'm not sure how that information would get back to the servers.

You could simulate it by recording its position on the front page for each impression. Assume that higher positions on the page are seen more. Then your metric is something like upvotes per position-discounted impression.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that dang would get much value out of this kind of metric unless he was trying to tune the ranking algorithm or something like that.

Also, why are some red & grey? Looks like it turns red at 50%.

Don't think so. Last time I looked this question was at 72 and grey, there was another which was 23 and red.

Any normal posts turn red at 51% and above. Ask HN posts never turn red. Went back through the top 500 posts, all of the reds are 51% or above. Might be some other variable that triggers a rare sub 51% red, but I can't find an example right now.

What does it mean if I can't see them while logged in?

Nothing, they've disabled them now.

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