Hacker News Reader

Ask HN posts probably have a higher bar as they're often lower quality or less interesting than news?

I thought the "older" published algorithm was only an algorithm with sum of upvotes on the topic (and comments) with a time decay.

Seems reasonable, but i don't think it true ( considering Ask HN: are just texts in the front of the title).

Edit: It's definatly not in the algorithm, it's a manual ban of some sort :)

Is HN open source or something? How is it that everyone knows this algorithm?

news.arc is open source, however, HN's voting ring and antispam features are not.