ob xkcd submission | Hacker News Reader

ob xkcd submission

xkcd.com

2 pointsbrk10 comments

Downvoting, oh how I long for thee.

I don't get it - posting xkcd is too "reddit". But complaining about how people are posting xkcd comics isn't?

Polluting the front page is a bigger deal than polluting the comments thread for a page that's already noise anyway.

Both of you have points. This leaves me wondering about the process by which submissions make it to the front page. Is this described/written-up somewhere?

As of a few days ago, you can just RTFS :-)

  (= gravity* 1.4 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1)

  (def frontpage-rank (s (o gravity gravity*))
    (/ (- (realscore s) 1)
       (expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity)))

pg mentioned it once but I can't find it. It's some combination of votes and comments, with an exponential decay function to lower it over time. So if gazillions of people vote it up, it can stay on the front for a while, or if several people start commenting on a new article, it can jump to the front page even with only a few points.

Incidentally, this means that all of the people who complain about xkcd comics are ensuring that it gets on the front page, where more people will look at it, vote for it, and comment on it, prolonging its time on the front page!

So what is yc material? Well, I don't know, but I do like submissions that I wouldn't otherwise see. For the submitter, that requires time, research, and perhaps thought.

I don't like stuff like this. It's the hacker version of email forwards from distant relatives.

There's also the fact that about 99% of us here probably already have xkcd bookmarked (and checked twice daily) and thus don't need every new xkcd comic submitted here too.

RSS saves lines.

yeah not yc material (Although my commenting on it probably helps it stay here) (paradox)

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