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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com