50 best HackerNews posts ever (found using math) | Hacker News Reader

50 best HackerNews posts ever (found using math)

medium.com

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806982

Also posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812342

So I guess this medium post will eventually be part of his own list.

How I Explained REST to My Wife's original post taken down by the author:

"After receiving a number of reasonable complaints about the gender-oriented nature of this article from people I respect very much, I’ve decided to take it down for good. While the dialog was never intended as commentary on the role of gender in technology, I’m convinced that it could too easily be taken that way and am not at all comfortable with that possibility.

My deepest apologies to anyone that was offended by my work. There is nothing more terrifying to me than the thought of something I created acting as a deterrent to anyone following their ambitions, or from forming them in the first place." http://2ndscale.com/rtomayko/2004/rest-to-my-wife

What a shame- such an illuminating post had to be taken down by the author. I remember being asked in some interviews questions like how would you explain a hashmap to a 5 year old or your grandmother. I will be afraid to ask such questions, who knows how people see things these days.

"...to a 5 year old" should be pretty safe. "...to your grandmother" could be construed as both sexist and ageist, so I'd avoid it.

Personally, I don't really see much of a difference. Some 5 year olds are better at $x than "grandmothers". So wouldn't "to a 5 year old" be ageist as well?

Use some common sense. For how many values of $x that would be the subject of an interview question are 5 year olds going to be better than grandmothers?

Your missing the point though: There's a reason the "non-technical grandmother" is a stereotype. By using "common sense", it makes sense to use that stereotype.

Please do advertise that since there's a reason for stereotypes, your company uses them in making hiring decisions. Let me know how that goes over.

I really don't think I'm getting your point. It's OK go stereotype for one group, but not another?

This is outright scary. The Easily Offended crowd should have noted he had said "..to my wife" not "..to a female". Assuming his wife is not in the software business, how is this a commentary on the role of gender in technology (or anywhere). Instead of down-voting, please provide a rational argument how this generalization makes sense.

I love how 6 years later, "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages" is still being submitted 6 times a year, getting 1243 points, and is the top post of 2015. Just goes to show how amazingly hilarious it is. I think anyone here should reread it, even if you already have several times.

http://james-iry.blogspot.ca/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mo...

Note that with the Hacker News dataset now on BigQuery, downloading the dataset is unnecessary and the analysis in the post can be done in seconds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502 (although, parsing the domains using that particular dataset is harder since it requires a regex to extract the domain from a URL)

As a side note, I'm sorta annoyed that a data post with so few data and visualizations, but with a linkbait title and selfpromotional startup copy, was far more successful than any of my data posts. Did I miss the part where the OP explained how he used math / how he ranked the Top 50 startups?

I think what explains the difference is that the author is a writer by trade -- not a statistician.

The author successful tells a simple story with unexpected tidbits and concrete language (eg "every submission you see here is certifiably timeless") and does a good job following writing best practices like "not burying the lead".

You might be interested in reading "Make it Stick" (it's where I learned about this subject from) if you haven't already -- and/or the Priceonomics guide to content marketing.

Clickbait title probably didn't hurt either.

The point is that is it not a good thing, especially in the case I'm having difficulty reproducing the results.

I'm not qualified to comment on what's "good" or not. I'd just be willing to bet that if you wrote your own best-of with better/reproducible methodology AND borrowing some established copywriting practices you'd easily outrank this post... but only if you do both parts.

Besides the concept of "best" being "found using math"...I don't really get even the metric here. Posts that have been submitted over the years and have gotten a lot of points? Why is that by any standard a more reasonably explainable metric than just posts which have garnered the most points, period, barring things like obits (e.g. Steve Jobs)?

This is harder to compute, but I'd argue that the best posts are the ones that garner a shitton of upvotes while also not being overly political ("Drop Dropbox") or tied to a current news event ("G is for Google") or originates from or otherwise involves a major proper noun (e.g. "Why I Hated Working At Google/Facebook/Amazon").

Among recent hits, "Make a programmable mirror" comes to mind [1], as does "I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115" [2]. And hell, much of what's been submitted from idlewords.com.

I don't get how "timelessness" is measured. The Brutal Ageism of Tech [3], for example, is from 2014...being popular for 2 years is not necessarily timeless.

This is not to say any of the things on the list aren't great. But the word "best" means something relatively absolute. I didn't expect to see a list of the unquestionable "best"...but I did expect to see a bit more math. If we're talking about HN specifically, as in, things that impacted the HN community...I would expect an assessment to have some heuristic scoring of the discussions generated, including number of upvotes, number of unique participants, and number of longtime participants. Or even a metric based on unusualness of participants...for example, a story and discussion that elicits a "We're investigating this now" from Matt Cutts [4] should have some weight (though obviously, measuring the external impact of a HN discussion, such as the ban on Rapgenius, is outside the purview of an automated classifier)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10204018

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097155

[3] https://newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brut...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658

If you had a heuristic to more accurately rank links than the current time/score based algorithms, you'd have a million dollar startup idea.

Which is something that wouldn't be revealed in a blog post. Or OP's random daily email newsletter.

Well, I like to think I have lots of million dollar ideas ;)

However, in this case, a retrospective algorithm doesn't have to compete in the same category as the one that ranks and applies gravity to the submissions. Ignoring the effect of flags and manual moderation, the ranking algorithm has to work in near real time -- and it seems to, as occasionally a single upvote will send a submission straight up the front page depending on its current gravity -- while not causing the server to shit the bed.

A retrospective algorithm doesn't have to be that efficient, and can drastically reduce computation by filtering for past submissions that have received a cutoff of top votes. Running various aggregations/analysis on discussion can likewise be done in relative peace. Furthermore, you have the ability to provide external heuristics...for example, filtering for submissions that were first submitted to HN before getting strong notice on Twitter or Reddit (which can be done by comparing URL submissions and timestamps).

This is not to say that coming up with the "best" or even "better" is trivial. It's just that the computational factors are significantly different between the algorithm that has to do real-time ranking and one that performs a historical analysis.

That said, it'd be an interesting challenge to create a relatively simple bot that auto-submitted popular links in the same way that the popular Facebook "On this day" plugin works...the heuristic could be very simple: submit only URLs that haven't made the front page within the last 1.5 years and garnered 200+ upvotes...and then some filtering to avoid submitting obituaries or other current-event type posts. If the HN mods give approval to run a spam bot, I'll give it a try :)

Is there a favorite button somewhere? :)

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