Ask PG/HN: Is there something changed in the rank/sorting algorithm of HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG/HN: Is there something changed in the rank/sorting algorithm of HN?

21 pointsjrnkntl21 comments

It occurred to me that a couple of articles are hitting up the top places pretty fast with just 1 other upvote (eg 2 points total). This used to never be the case, is this a little experiment? Is it based on Karma? I happen to see some spam articles get pretty fast at the top yesterday/today.

View on HN

It's been this way for as long as I can remember. I like it. HN is the only place where you can submit something and have it hit the front page in a few minutes. It feels much more "real-time" than something like Digg or even Reddit.

Combine that with the strong spam filtering and fast moderation, and you have a winning formula. If something lame hits the front page, you can expect it will be [dead]ed quick.

I noticed it too. I'm not sure what's happening, because that code hasn't changed in a long time.

FWIW: I almost always post in the 7 to 11 AM range Pacific time, and my experience is that one upvote in the first twenty minutes is frequently sufficient for frontpaging at these times on the weekends. I've literally never seen it take more than two, if they're in the first half hour.

Edit: changed strength of above writing somewhat. My memory is bad and I don't have contemporaneous records, which should make me wary of saying things like "almost always."

Another bug report/oddity:

Loading any page when I'm logged in has started taking forever. If logged out, it doesn't take long to load.

For example:

This comments page loads in 981ms when I'm logged out. If I log in as axod, it loads in 7.5 seconds.

Maybe it's just my account :/ Hopefully it's not a 'moderation feature'. Maybe due to a reasonably high comment count for my account? idk but it makes HN pretty boring waiting for page loads.

Is anyone else seeing this behavior?

Wow.

Not here, but over the past few months, the app has been consistently fickle about loading up the userinfo page and the threads page. Sometimes it works. Sometimes not. On really high-load days, it was taking 7-15 seconds and then just stopping to show the page.

Paul said a week or two ago (I think) that he was tweaking the GC because of the load on the box. Not sure if that could be a factor or not.

I've noticed a difference since he announced the changes to GC. There is perhaps more frequently a noticable delay, but the delay is shorter and eventual page load much more reliable -- I seldom experience a timeout / blank screen, now.

Formerly, things would tend to load either almost instantaneously or not at all. E.g. comment pages. Now, there is not infrequently a second or three's delay, but then the page does indeed appear. I find this much more preferable.

Sorry for the initial duplicate posting of the parent. When I clicked the button "Reply", I was redirected to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

instead of back to this comments thread. Thinking I'd hit a glitch, I backed up and tried again.

So, I did hit a glitch in the redirection, but after my comment was processed and accepted.

Just wanted to chime in and say that I've seen behavior like this a few times. After submitting a comment, I've been redirected to someone else's threads?id page.

This is wild speculation, but... is it possible that this is related to caching?

My understanding is that the ranking of front-page items is based on [# points]/[time since submission], which is obviously very large immediately after an article is submitted; this wouldn't normally matter much, but if the high points/time value is being cached, a low-point submission could stick around on the front page until the cache entry expires.

Yeah, I noticed that sometimes two very quick upvotes can rocket an item to the front page.

On the other hand, one of my recent ASK HN posts (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1167298) got 7 or 8 votes in the first hour but never made it anywhere near the front page, which seemed a bit weird.

Since PG says the code hasn't changed, I'd assume the number of people online and submitting during the given period has a large impact on whether any particular story will hit the front page.

I think "Ask HN" articles get special treatment in the ranking system.

Positive or negative treatment?

IIRC, Ask HN and articles with titles that end in a question mark are negatively treated compared to other articles.

If that's true, that's really too bad - ASK HN posts are one of the great differentiators about this place. They are almost always valuable, and the insight and answers provided by the community always remind me why this place is great.

I also often find them interesting. I recommend you read them through http://ask.searchyc.com/ as even popular questions disappear from the front page so quickly I rarely get to see them.

I thought it would be interesting to see just these posts so I whipped up something to do it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/ask

Here's what it takes to define such an operator, in case anyone's curious:

    (newsop ask ()
      (listpage user
                (msec)
                (retrieve maxend*
                          [and (>= (realscore _) front-threshold*)
                               (cansee user _)
                               (blank _!url)]
                          ranked-stories*)
                "ask"
                "Post Without Urls"
                "ask"))

PG - this is fantastically awesome. Your support and responsiveness is truly appreciated. If we meet in person someday, I will buy you many beers.

"Posts Without Urls"

I believe I read sometime that all posts without a URL (i.e. "self" posts) get a discount of about 40%.

It happened to me before that some stories only with two votes go to the front page but I think it's based on time, the longer the article spends on new stories more difficult it goes to front page. I'm note sure if the Karma has any influence on this.

Anyway I'm pretty happy how HN sorting algorithm works, meaning even with two votes you can go to the front page if it's quality article will remain on front page otherwise you are going to the second page.

This is smart system because every article has a chance to go to the front page and on the front page the "human factor" who will decide the destiny of an article. Not like many other sites that you need "million" votes to go to the front page meaning quality stories can be lost because people visiting the front page is much greater than people visiting upcoming articles page.

Interesting.. All my recent posts that made it to the front page got two to three up votes in the first half an hour.. I must confess that i was more happy than curious about this :)

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