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Comment by wkoszek | Hacker News Reader

Read Maciej's http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

BTW: What causes this 11 points + 4 comments thing to hit the front-page of HN? Just wondering, as I believed it's the number of comments + popularity that pushes the link to the front.

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https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc#L26...

O, that's nice. I didn't know the whole HN is open-source.

Everything except the mechanisms to detect voting rings and such.

Actually, I think the code that's on github is quite old. This repo hasn't been updated in 2 years, and I know they've made changes to functionality beyond just the admin/detection features you describe above. I don't know how much different the code is now, but I'm pretty sure what's publicly available is not up to date.

Also the rate at which it accumulates points. For example, if a submission was submitted an hour ago, and in the last 5 minutes it got 4 more points, it will probably hit the front page.

In the past comments actually counted against submissions, in order to avoid flame wars. It seemed actually impossible for a submission with more comments than points to hit the front page, no matter how many points it had. Conspiracy theorists claimed this was a common way to bury a submission. This has been relaxed somewhat, but I still wouldn't expect comments to help a submission.

I think the reputation of who clicked it also matters even though it isn't publicly said. If a few people with a lot of upvoted got to it, it could hit the front page fast

Age is also a factor, optimizing for younger submissions.

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